Websnark

January 5, 2010

Eric: The Curse of Webcomics.com

You would think the name alone would have made it a slam dunk.

Seriously. "Webcomics.com." If there is such a thing as webcomics, surely webcomics.com would be the immediate one-stop location of choice for them. It would by definition be one of the top sites on webcomics or one of the top sites of webcomics or both.

And yet... it's never really been successful. Not really. Not outside of a niche.

It has been, in its time, a webcomics host, a webcomics collective, a webcomics portal, a webcomics commentary site, and a 'how to make comics for the web' site. It experimented with push technology and with podcast technology when they were hot. Doctor Fun had a home there. T Campbell and Alexander Danner had a home there. Most recently, Brad Guigar and the Halfpixel fighting force four had a home there.

Through it all -- through every iteration -- even if the content was good, it just never really broke out into the mainstream. It never became self-sustaining. It never became a must-go site. And that just seems weird to me.

The latest iteration of the site has now had the latest iteration of the curse hit it. Brad Guigar, the Editor in Chief of Webcomics.com (currently a site supporting the Halfpixel model of webcomics creation as popularized in their book How to Make Webcomics) has announced that effective immediately the site is going behind a paywall.

A paywall.

In a startling move from 2004, Guigar has locked his content behind a login you have to shell out thirty bucks a year to unlock, in an effort to make the site profitable -- or at least profitable enough to justify the time and energy Guigar's putting into it.

Now, all by itself this would not be a major deal. Websites do this sort of thing all the time. Admittedly, after they do this sort of thing their readerships drop precipitously, but still. It's a common enough reaction. However, this is Halfpixel -- the home not only of Guigar but the familiar names Straub and Kurtz. (And Dave Kellett, but he's not specifically a part of this comment.) And two of the loudest voices decrying the very existence of paywalls and subscription models and pay-to-view on the web have been Straub and Kurtz.

Do I think they're hypocrites? No. They see a distinction and they're pretty firm about it. But a lot of people are reacting as though they were -- and fair or not, the whole thing puts the very model that they espouse in their book and on webcomics.com itself -- the idea that free content can pay rich dividends -- into doubt. "If these guys know what they're talking about," goes the thinking, "why do I have to pay to get on their website?"

Now, Guigar has been quick to point out an essential difference between putting a webcomic like Evil Inc. behind a paywall versus a site like webcomics.com: the former is entertainment. The latter is reference. It's the difference between a momentary distraction on the way to the grave and information. People who are serious about becoming webcartoonists will shell the money out because of all the valuable information the site has to give (or so they hope). And someone who won't spend thirty dollars -- just thirty dollars -- to get solid advice and have a place to turn as they try to build their business clearly isn't serious about being a professional.

It is a compelling argument.

It's also wrong.

To be blunt -- if a website isn't a store or providing a service, it's entertainment. People went back to webcomics.com day after day because they wanted the information that was there, yes, but mostly because they were entertained by the articles. People listen to NPR to be informed, but also because they find it entertaining. People read CNN to be informed but also because they find it entertaining. All of these things fall into the "momentary distraction" category. The exceptions, like I said, are sites like Amazon.com where you buy shit, or sites like eBay or eTrade or your bank, where you perform services. Even a site like WebMD -- which built its reputation on pure information -- has "health news and features" to bring people back and add new vectors for Google to come in. Certainly, a site like Webcomics.com -- which is, after all, a daily blog at its heart -- is running as much on its style as on its substance. Brad Guigar doesn't just provide how-tos, he does it in a well written and concise style, and people come back day after day for the community that forms as a result.

And at its core, that means Webcomics.com is not a service. Not in its current iteration, anyway. You don't go there to upload your comic and have it publish. You go there to get information from knowledgeable people whose writing is fun and engaging. Is it a much, much smaller niche audience than, say, Evil Inc. or PvP? Absolutely. But it is an audience all the same, and so the distinction between it and a webcomic isn't nearly as clear cut as they're claiming.

Further, in what seems just the tiniest bit skeevy, a good amount of the content on the site (especially recently) came from third party writers. Long time friend of Websnark Abby L. was one of them. They apparently got no warning this was happening. There is no word on whether or not they will be compensated for their work. I do know that Abby was absolutely thrilled to have been published there, was shocked that suddenly her work would be locked behind a paywall (making it significantly harder to use either for her resume or to point people to it in general), and disheartened at what felt like a a slight. She posted comments in the announcement to that effect. Guigar, to his credit, was willing to take her content off the site, and since has marked all the third party essays as hidden until the individual writers can decide if they want them to remain, but that's something that should have been dealt with well in advance of making this move.

But then, part of what's upset folks is the utter lack of notice given for this move. Now, Guigar and Kurtz have explained their thinking on this -- they made their decision, they knew people were going to react this way regardless, and in Guigar's own words:

[It's] the difference between pulling a Band-Aid off slowly or quickly. This decision was made with the respect for my readers at the front of my mind.

However, shocking people who've grown accustomed to visiting your site isn't a good way to foster goodwill for a new project that opens with a thirty dollar payout -- especially on a site like this, whose bread and butter is information. At least one person (who called himself "Guy") had this reaction:

Um. I literally just stumbled on this website yesterday. There was a tutorial on setting up Wordpress.

Came back today to check it again only there was this login... only I couldn't log in. And there was a threat saying that if I continued to try and log in, I'd be locked out forever.

I checked the front page only to find that it was a subscription site now. Ok. Well thank god Google saves the entire internet and I could get the tutorial anyway.

Remember the Google thing. It'll come up again momentarily.

Further again, the potential influence this site can have on the industry has just dropped precipitously. When major posts went up, they could be linked to easily on everything from blogs to Facebook to Twitter. Now, those links will lead to a request for $30 -- and no one who follows the link is going to think "hey, $30 for a year of webcomics.com seems fair! That's just two-fifty a month! I spend more than that on lattes!" They're going to think "oh the Hell I'm going to pay thirty bucks to read some essay on distribution" and close the site.

Or, someone who is deeply inspired by something he reads on Webcomics.com will take it and copy/paste it onto his own blog (or some anonymous blogger site he makes for the purpose) so he can point people to it there. And other folks will copy/paste articles sheerly because they find paywalls offensive and figure Guigar won't have the money to sue over it. Or they will do it because they've always thought Scott Kurtz was a blowhard and now that he's not "practicing what he preaches" he's fair game. Or they will do it because they're dicks.

Am I exaggerating? Hey, we've already had one example (quoted above) of someone who hit the Google cache to get the information he wanted rather than pay the entrance fee. This is how this stuff works sometimes. Please note, however: I am not advocating piracy here. If Guigar and the gang want to put their content behind a paywall, that is their right and I support their decision even if I do not agree with it. I just think that stuff's going to get out, either innocently or maliciously.

Since I'm making predictions, here's another one. Inside of two weeks, someone will have put up a site that breaks down all the steps one needs to take to put their webcomic online, under cheerful banners like "the best FREE resource for the aspiring webcartoonist" and "common sense doesn't have a subscription fee."

So, the question becomes -- what will webcomics.com need to be successful at this? Especially since very few content based websites that use subscription models have been successful, and this is more of a niche market than most.

In a word? Testimonials.

Webcomics.com needs to start gathering the names of people who went from 0 to supporting themselves off their webcomic largely if not entirely using the advice from webcomics.com and How to Make Webcomics. Especially if they're going to go down the dubious route of equating paying for webcomics.com as the difference between the serious professional and the amateur hobbyist -- a claim that is ridiculous when one considers that most if not all of the webcartoonists who make their living off their work right now (and there are many) have done so without their book or website. Certainly, no one's going to claim Jeph Jacques, Randy Milholland, Ryan Sohmer, Gabe and Tycho (admittedly two of the money-men behind Webcomics.com in the first place) or all the rest needed the site to be professionals. If Guigar et al are going to convince people that they're a resource indispensable enough to justify dropping thirty bucks, all in one go, they're going to have to prove that what they're selling works, and the only proof can come from webcartoonists who aren't affiliated with Halfpixel saying "seriously, dude, these guys know their stuff. Drop the change in the till right now."

And... well, let's be honest. Positioning yourselves as the acid test for how 'serious' someone is about producing their webcomic and being successful has a chilling effect. Do I think Guigar meant to offend when he said:

Why $30 per year? It's an inexpensive buy-in that almost any webcartoonist can afford. It has an added benefit of keeping out people who may not be as serious about webcomics. It naturally weeds out comments from people who may be passing through, and results in distilling comments to those from people who are committed to improving their comics.

Absolutely not. Guigar doesn't have a mean bone in his body. But Scott Story of Johnny Saturn took it differently (from the comments):

Well, it's interesting to find out I "may not be as serious about webcomics." After endless hours of producing my comic, after all the advertisement, after making it available on Wowio, Drivethru, ComicXP, iTunes, and in print from Amazon.com and Indyplanet/Comics Monkey, I'm stunned! I spent all those hours of my life working toward a goal that apparently I am not really committed to. Later this year, when my comic will also be available on numerous handheld devices besides the iPhone, I realize again that I've put all this work into something that I didn't care about.

I'm sure the above statement about the seriousness of webcartoonists based on their willingness to part with 30.00 was not intended to offend or alienate. But, this definitely bruises my feelings and makes me feel different about the whole thing.

Is this a common reaction? Well, it's worth noting that when Wednesday -- a person who really likes Straub and Kurtz and respects Guigar and Kellett, though she hasn't had as much contact with them -- read the announcement and the comments and looked at the site, her immediate response was "oh great. A site on the internet where a bunch of bearded men give themselves the authority to declare an artist professional or amateur, with no possible alternatives. Because we've never seen that."

(Full disclosure. Scott Kurtz does not have a beard. Second full disclosure, I do. In fact, it's currently past "Grizzly Adams" and is threatening a move straight into "Ted Kaczynski." But I digress.)

Also, why are they charging $30 a year instead of $2.50 a month. $2.50 a month seems like nothing. $30 a year doesn't feel like a cheap yearly payment, it feels like thirty freaking dollars to be allowed onto your damn website. In fact, I'd think they'd want to do a "$3 a month recurring subscription, or you can get a year for $30 -- a savings of 17%!" kind of deal.

Look, does Brad Guigar deserve compensation for all his hard work? Abso-freaking-lutely. Is, in fact, webcomics.com worth $30 a year? Probably. Will they get enough subscribers to give Guigar the compensation he needs to continue? Maybe. Will Webcomics.com continue to grow and develop the cross-fertilization and dedicated audience a site like this needs to remain fresh and useful?

It seems doubtful.

Right now, if I were asked by aspiring webcartoonists as to the best way to get started in making and promoting their webcomic, I would suggest they buy How to Make Webcomics. It really is a good book, full of good information. But would I suggest they subscribe to webcomics.com? Probably not. I'd think after they read the book, if they still had questions or wanted advice, that would be one potential route. But it's hardly the only potential route -- ComicSpace is loaded with helpful folks with advice, for example. And successful webcartoonists like Howard Tayler are generally not stingy with advice for aspiring new blood.

Regardless, I wish them well, and we will just have to see how well this works.

Still, given their respective histories and many, many hours of arguments behind them, I have to wonder just how long it will be before Joey Manley stops laughing about all this.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:02 AM | Comments (28)

January 4, 2010

Eric: The Fall of the House of Keen

If someone had walked up to me on January 1, 2005 and said "hey, in five years Keenspot's going to stop accepting new submissions and start to effectively leave the webcomics collective business after firing one of their artists," I would have stared at him for a long moment. "Do I know you?" I'd ask, at that point. He would not answer, but would instead say "yeah, and they'll have fired John Troutman too, a few months before." "Seriously," I'd say. "You need to leave my apartment before I call the police."

And yet, here we are, just five years later, and things have officially gone crazy at the Crosby compound. Keenspot -- a site originally founded by a small cabal of like minded folks to replace Big Panda while simultaneously reforming the 'webcomics collective' concept of its sins -- has begun the inexorable process of getting out of general webcomics.

Most of the foofarah over these developments has already been hashed out. The action news team at Fleen both had some of the biggest story-breaks involved in the process. They also had a comments-wide flamewar largely between Bobby Crosby and Scott Kurtz, which honestly I could have predicted back in 2005, but I digress.

In short, however: a Keenspot cartoonist was let go. I will not make comment on her situation, as I honestly don't know enough about it to comment. I will link to her comic because that seems like the right thing to do -- not that I expect she'll get much of a rise in traffic from me, but it still seems like the appropriate thing to do. In the wake of this, Keenspot made an official announcement that they were closed to new submissions, and did not plan to add any new members going forward. Then, an internal e-mail was leaked and published by Fleen, detailing a new contract that current Keenspotters would have to sign that would radically restructure the rules under which they operated. This was confirmed by Chris Crosby. Further, it made it clear that Crosby didn't expect many if any Keenspotters to accept the terms -- and that they really shouldn't. In his own words:

The facts are, you do not need Keenspot. For members on the "New System" contract, everything you're doing on Keenspot can be done on your own. You should go independent.

For those still on the original contract, you should strongly consider leaving Keenspot if you are not extremely happy with it. If we aren't doing something for you that you can't do on your own, there is no reason for you to stay.

What Keenspot is doing, it seems, is reworking themselves into a traditional publisher. They're trying to prune a decade's worth of old growth, deadwood and errant branches which may be healthy but don't fit, take what's left, and then heavily focus on that remaining content not only in terms of webcomics but in merchandising, branding and revenue-generating. And most of the projects they're going to be focusing on are going to be 'Crosby' projects -- comics from Chris and/or Bobby Crosby, flash animation gigs like their Doritos contest submission (itself one of the better things they've done of late -- if they don't win a Superbowl spot, I still hope it turns into some television ad work for them), and pushing stuff towards Hollywood.

On the whole, I think this is a good move for Keenspot, handled absolutely terribly. For years now, I've maintained that what Keenspot needs more than anything else is a solid business manager -- someone to be the bad guy in their operation, who makes firm decisions based on the bottom line, and who brings a financial acumen to the proceedings that the Crosbys -- and I love Chris Crosby -- simply don't have. While this isn't that step (and they should still be doing it), it is a step towards reworking what they do with an eye to generating revenue and growing, and that's all to the good. Further, the conditions that created Keenspot and made it such a seminal part of the evolution of webcomics simply don't exist any longer. Bandwidth is no longer crushingly expensive. The technology to make a site with archives and content navigation is largely standardized. Someone who wants a turnkey for webcomics can have it easily enough. Someone who wants revenue generation tools like advertisements can grab them easily. And the unifying factors of successful collectives like Dumbrella, Dayfree, Blank Label or Half-Pixel (to name just a few) doesn't exist at Keenspot -- when Keenspot was founded, the unifying factor was "we have comics on the web," and that was enough, because it was still such a new and novel concept. Today, collectives unite around shared goals, or shared aesthetics, or shared sense of humor, or shared business models, or shared whatever. Keenspot hasn't had that for a long time.

However, the problem with implementing their plan remains the same problem they've had all along: they desperately need a business manager. Desperately. In this case, they need someone willing to generate that same internal e-mail Chris Crosby did, only instead of giving the Keenspotters the opportunity to sign onto a contract that's designed to weed 95% of them out, they should have sent the following:

Friends, Keenspotters and Creators -- for over ten years we have tried to make Keenspot the most artist friendly and exciting place for webcartoonists on the internet. Sometimes we've succeeded, and sometimes we've failed, but through it all it's been a grand and exciting adventure.

However, economic realities and the changing face of internet publishing means that the company we have always been needs to change, and that means taking some radical steps. As of July 1, 2010, Keenspot will no longer be a webcomics collective. Instead of being a large conglomerate of webcomics new and old, updating and archived, we are going to be a content developer and publisher. Where in the past we have largely remained passive in regards to the creation and updating process, in the future we are going to work actively with the writers, artists and animators of Keenspot, aggressively developing and promoting properties for both the web and beyond. Many of these properties are going to be things we own outright, like Last Blood. When working with others, we will be increasing the stake -- and control -- we have over those properties, and will be negotiating with those creators directly.

What this means for you, the incredibly talented creators who make up the current version of Keenspot, is simple: between now and July 1, you will need to make other arrangements for your webcomic.

Starting immediately, Keenspot will be moving into a transitional mode, helping current Keenspot members migrate their current and archived projects elsewhere on the web. We will be setting up special Keenspot-members-only forums where we will be giving technical support and giving you the opportunity to make plans. Over the past several years, many of you have naturally formed cliques, friendships and even informal partnerships -- part of our transition will be to help you formalize those partnerships so those of you who want to can make your own collectives, so that you can begin to support each other in ways Keenspot has supported you in the past. We will also be purchasing and sending every Keenspot member a copy of How to Make Webcomics by Guigar, Kellett, Kurtz and Straub. While we haven't always had the best relationship with some of those folks (and have had excellent relationships with some others), their book is one of the best primers on running your webcomic as a business, and while much of the information in the book is something you already know -- and you may not need anything at all from it -- it will be a resource you can use as you move your comic into the next stage of its life.

Any webcomic still hosted by Keenspot on July 1 will automatically be moved onto Comic Genesis, where you can continue to enjoy many of the same tools and hassle free operations you have come to expect. At that time, you will not be considered part of Keenspot, and all formal contracts between Keenspot and you will expire.

This may seem sudden and shocking, but I invite you to see this as an opportunity. For many of you, Keenspot has been a comfortable place to make comics -- and sometimes it's easy to stay where you are comfortable instead of taking the steps that are best for you and your comic. To be blunt, you don't need Keenspot. There is no reason you cannot be as or more successful on your own or in small collectives than you were with us. You have the talent to make great, engaging comics -- you wouldn't have been on Keenspot in the first place if you didn't -- and that means you have the potential to succeed brilliantly without us.

This is a hard day for us. We have loved being "the Spot for Comics," but we have to take the steps we thing will be best for ourselves and -- ultimately -- for all of you.

Thank you for everything you have done for the past decade. It has been an honor and a pleasure.

Sincerely,

Bob KeenManager

Then, have anyone who will continue to work with Keenspot after July first sign an agreement stating that Keenspot's official designated representatives (designated as this manager, Chris Crosby and Teri Crosby, period) will be the only ones to discuss this or other Keenspot related issues publicly. This would obviously not bind the Keenspotters who themselves are being moved out of the company, but that's okay. However, any and all discussion of Keenspot's business decisions would be filtered through professionals who would have professional dealings, with Fleen, Scott Kurtz, ex- and soon-to-be-ex Keenspotters and all the rest.

Why is this better than the e-mail Chris Crosby actually sent? Because it is active, instead of passive-aggressive. In trying to be a good guy -- and trying to be as fair as possible to the Keenspotters -- Crosby's equivocated far too much. He isn't telling them that it's time they leave, he's making it as uncomfortable as possible so they will choose to leave and spare him the pain of effectively firing everyone. The move is somewhere between a landlord who's turning off the heat and water to try and drive out rent-controlled renters so he can bulldoze the place and a boyfriend who figures if he makes his girlfriend uncomfortable enough, she'll dump him so he won't have to be the bad guy who's dumping her.

And, under this system, Bobby Crosby wouldn't be allowed to comment on the situation. In fact, said manager would have to make that a component of his contract -- all creators who will be working with the new Keenspot will have to agree not to comment publicly about Keenspot while they are under contract, period, and Bobby Crosby would have to be under that contract.

Look, I actually have a lot of respect for Bobby Crosby. I think he's an excellent writer. I read more than one of the comics he writes, and they're good. He has a lot of gifts and he has a lot of potential. But he is absolutely incapable of comporting himself well in public when it comes to these things, and -- for better or worse -- his last name is the same as the owners of the company. Even if he is purely an employee, when he sets fire to the surroundings, claims people all around him are "liars," and calls for the death of one of his company's critics publicly, he is doing damage to the Keenspot brand. It doesn't matter if he's in the right or not. Companies that Keenspot will want to work with in the future will be doing research on Keenspot, and they will see Bobby Crosby's vitriol and it will prejudice them against the company. Creators that Keenspot wants to recruit will think twice. Keenspot's options will be reduced the more one of its public faces rails against his enemies in public. And that's very bad for Keenspot, as they work to remake the kind of company they are.

But, things have unfolded the way they have unfolded, and so it's no longer a question of what they should have done but what they will do.

The Keenspotters who are leaving (most if not all of them) will be fine. Crosby was right about one thing -- there's nothing Keenspot has been doing for them recently that they can't do for themselves. I'm a little surprised someone like Joey Manley, Josh Roberts or Nate Piekos hasn't offered a ComicSpace/alternate home for Keenspotters who want to have as simple a transition as possible -- it would be great goodwill PR and help redefine the ComicSpace LLC Network as the natural successor (and winner) of the ancient Wars. Certainly, I have to imagine they or other folks will be making some kind of announcement giving ex-Spotters a place to go. Further, I fully expect to hear about some new collectives springing up made up of ex-Spotters in the wake of all this. All will be fine. This is just one last mighty gasp of KeenDrama.

However, at the end of the day I'll admit I'm wistful. Keenspot has been such a part of the Webcomics landscape for so long that seeing them relinquish that role so thoroughly (and so flame-warishly) is a sad day for me. I called this essay "The Fall of the House of Keen" and really that's what this is -- the Keenspot that rose up out of the Big Panda debacle, the Keenspot that helped redefine what it meant to be a comic on the web, the Keenspot that was for many years a great and accepting (if often dysfunctional) family is falling. The Spot for Comics is closing up shop. Something new will follow, with the Keenspot name and possibly the Keenspot logo, but it won't be Keenspot the way we have always known it. The once-home of many of the most successful comics on the web -- Schlock Mercenary, It's Walky, Bobbins, Sinfest, Nukees, Real Life Comics, Greystone Inn, Basil Flint, Avalon, Exploitation Now, Queen of Wands, Life in Greytown, Count Your Sheep, College Roomies from Hell, Bruno the Bandit, Candi, The Devil's Panties, Fans, Penny and Aggie, No Need for Bushido, Two Lumps, Road Waffles, Men in Hats, Ozy and Millie, Elf Life, Elf Only In, Alice! and many more I don't mention out of a need to wrap this up but which remain a huge part of the foundation of webcomics past, current and future -- is being imploded to make room for a new building. And that should be remarked upon.

Good luck, to everyone involved on all sides of the equation.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:54 AM | Comments (8)

November 30, 2009

Eric: When confronted with these facts, the old guard almost always makes an "ADHD culture" crack. Because obviously the entire world must be disabled instead of Rupert Murdoch being wrong.

One of the most cogent folks I know, particularly in discussions of publishing and the internet, is Adam Tinworth. I've known Adam through a number of settings, but the one most germane to the discussion is as a business journalist. He's a very, very good one. He's also a fine hand with a fencing iron, I'm given to understand, and as someone who once upon a time stumbled through his share of sabre matches I can respect that, but it's not really a factor in the discussion at hand.

Well, Adam recently blogged about content and paywalls -- touching on the current issues with his usual skill and wisdom. Certainly, the topics he addresses in terms of journalism will resonate with anyone following the somewhat tragic conflict between newspaper cartoonists and web cartoonists. It's a good read.

However, it's not Adam's post, but a comment someone made to him about it that really gets to the heart of the matter. He posted a followup that included that comment, and I've never seen the core disconnect highlighted so well. With Adam's permission, I reproduce it here:

The model you have of your consumer's behaviour is wrong, they aren't using the internet as a way of reading a newspaper, they are using the internet, some of which consists of newspaper content, its a different thing. It was bad enough having to explain this in 1999, I find it a bit surprising it still needs saying in 2009.

That's it. That's the whole shooting match in a nutshell. That's why newspapers that are coming up with new paywall schemes will lose. That's why the internet will win. In the end, the process is inexorable, because the battle is not over content. It is over convenience.

Look at the Encyclopedia Britannica versus Wikipedia. I have had harsh words for Wikipedia in the past, and I stand by them, but I'll also be honest: I use Wikipedia every day. The Britannica, on the other hand, was the encyclopedia of record for much much longer than not only I've been alive but my father's been alive. When the Britannica went CD-ROM, I bought it, and bought a copy for my sister's children. It thrilled me that for a tiny amount of money I had access to this seminal resource.

I wouldn't dream of shelling that money out today, even though I (mostly) trust the Britannica's content above Wikipedia's. The Britannica isn't convenient. I can't just link to it when I'm making references to it. I can't just search it casually from any machine without having to fumble with passwords. It takes effort.

Wikipedia is just there. It is always at hand. It is always easy to reach. And it's far more comprehensive on the kinds of minutia and trivia I really need an encyclopedia for than the Britannica could ever be. Is it a trusted source? No, not really. But it's a great launching point for an investigation if I need a trusted source, and for quick "at-hand" information it's simply unparalleled.

And as a result, several orders of magnitude more people check Wikipedia every hour than check the Britannica website every day. It's not that it's better. It's that it's convenient, when all you want to do is look something up quickly and then get back to the websurfing you were already doing.

I don't know very many people who read a newspaper cover to cover, whether online or on paper. But a lot of people read articles that are germane to them right at that moment. Articles get linked on twitter or Livejournal. Google gathers these things together and points people at them when they're interested. And news sources that accept that they're a brief stopover on one's daily web journey get far more traffic than news sources that make a person jump through hoops to get the news. Bring money into the equation, and suddenly that readership drops by another order of magnitude or two. Robert Murdoch and those like him may assert the value of their goods, and equally assert that content must be paid for, but the only thing they can possibly do is make their content irrelevant to the broader world that's coming.

Let me repeat that.

The only thing paywalls or other direct monetization can do for newspapers or any other topical content is make it irrelevant to the world of the internet age.

Let us say that Murdoch succeeds at making his newspapers secure against Google aggregation and other such things. What happens in that scenario? What does basic capitalism tell us happens in a situation like that? Simply put, someone else develops a product that fills the niche no longer being filled. Some other journalistic organization will step up, develop a model around online advertising or some other thing we haven't even heard of yet, and happily reap the benefits. And let us be crystal clear: that organization might have demonstrably inferior news coverage, and it will not matter. Just like Wikipedia and the Britannica, the convenient Internet stop will trump the more prestigious but less convenient news source.

Let me repeat that.

An inferior news source that is easy to reach and consume on the internet will trump superior news sources that are even slightly harder to reach. Every time.

This is true whether we're talking about the Wall Street Journal or Hi and Lois comic strips -- people are going to gravitate to those things that fit the activities they're already doing. If two newspaper articles -- or comic strips -- are equally available to the online reading public, then the relative merits of one versus the other will determine ultimate popularity. If one article -- or comic -- is freely accessible and the other one requires cumbersome registration or, worse yet, a paid subscription, then the freely accessible one will have monumentally more readers than the other, regardless of their relative quality.

People don't go to the Internet to read The New York Times (with rare exceptions). People go to the Internet, see a reference to a breaking news story, and hit The New York Times for the straight story about it. If the Times isn't available to be read, they won't pay a subscription to read it -- they'll go to the Washington Post, or the Chicago Tribune, or the Miami Herald, or wherever is most convenient. And they will go to news.google.com to get the pointer in question. All that putting a given paper behind a paywall will accomplish is a rerouting of that traffic to the free content available.

Until the day Publishers understand this basic principle, said so well above and expanded upon so clumsily by me, we will continue to have ridiculous wars between print and Internet journalists, cartoonists and all the rest. Those institutions that can innovate, monetize and produce will do okay in the emerging era. Those who can't will become smaller, niche organizations that ultimately will disappear or be consumed by their more successful brethren. If you don't believe me, ask the folks at the Britannica, which has been sold, split apart, rebranded, and retooled any number of times in an increasingly desperate attempt to remain in profit.

Or, if that's not enough, ask the folks at Microsoft Encarta. If, that is, you can get anyone to answer the phone -- which is unlikely, since they closed down entirely in October of this year -- all except the Japanese version, which closes on the last day of December this year.

I know this, for the record, because I read it on Wikipedia.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:40 PM | Comments (18)

September 11, 2009

Eric: Things Change, after all.

(From Scary Go Round.)

Oddly, given that it is the harvest time, September has become a time for beginnings rather than endings. It is the beginning of the school year. It is the traditional start of the 'new fall season' on television. It is the start of the Halloween buildup and therefore the start of the broader Christmas and Holiday buildup. It is when the new car lineups start to emerge from their showrooms.

But beginnings and endings are inexorably tied together. The new school year is paired to the end of summer. New fall television shows also mean cancelled shows disappear once and for all (this year into the giant sucking vortex generated by Jay Leno's ego chin). Before Halloween and 2010 model cars can take over store shelves and showrooms, there must be clearance sales for beach bric-a-brac and the 2009 Honda Fit. Ends must be tied or intentionally left swinging in the breeze.

Things change.

Which brings us around to Scary Go Round, which has wrapped up its seven year run today.

Scary Go Round began as the sequel to Bobbins, a strip that itself was a sequel to various other projects (most notably a non-'web' comic called Cat Flap) meant less as a direct sequel and more as an evolution of the comic's style and substance alike. New sensibilities accompanied the strip, and while old friends showed back up (and in some cases came to dominance), they were seen through a new lens. This was ostensibly a horror strip, but one as done by John Allison, which is to say with amazingly good dialogue, a wry sense of humor, and 'pluck.' Indeed, though I am not an Anglophile by nature (I have nothing against Great Britain, mind, but I do not have a reverence for it the way some I know do), I find myself enjoying the strip like I would a cracking boy's yarn from the 50's. "We will do our best because we are British and British is best" Shelly Winters said in the penultimate chapter, and that may be as good a description of Scary Go Round's philosophy as any.

And in many ways, Scary Go Round was indeed the best. It had some of if not the best dialogue on the planet -- Allison's command of banter is not unlike an expert jazz guitarist's command of a twelve-string: you might not entirely know how he'll get to the coda, but my God you're going to enjoy the trip. His style -- both of art and of language -- has been influential. (There was a time when people accused Jeph Jacques of 'stealing' John Allison's mojo for Questionable Content, most notably, and to be certain there was a clear path of influence. However, Questionable Content's evolution went in a very different direction. Still, one can see echoes of Allison's work in QC if you look for them, and QC is itself one of the seminal webcomics of the current era.) It never became complacent -- Allison constantly reinvented his style and his toolbox, unafraid to bring even popular characters to horrible ends and to launch new ones in their stead. None of the characters (not even dear old Len Pickering) from the first few strips made even cameo appearances in the last few strips. Grade school students became high school students and now are off to University. Every so often, someone ended up condemned to Hell.

And now it is done. As with Bobbins before, Allison is ready for a fresh start free of monumental and dense backstory and intimidating if beautiful archive pages. After fifty one chapters, Scary Go Round ended today.

So long live beginnings. On Monday, September 21st, a new comic strip will begin -- starting at least at Scary Go Round's site (which itself is undergoing change) before no-doubt migrating to its own domain. The early twentiesomethings of Bobbins and the melange of children, adults, elders, fish-men and the deceased that were Scary Go Round will give way to something new -- something that perhaps reflects Allison's current state of mind better. We know that the next strip will grow out of this one, though in what way and to what degree we do not currently know (we don't even have a title as yet). "Things are going to change," we've heard for some time now, and this is when it starts.

He has stated that Shelly Winters -- she of Doctor Ladysounds and the Ginger Ninja -- will not be a part of this new strip. And indeed, the strip ends with her driving out of Tackleford once and for all. Perhaps Ryan and Amy will be the centerpiece of the next step. Or perhaps Lottie and her chums will take the whole town over. Or perhaps it will be someone entirely new, with only hints here and there of who came before. I don't know.

What I do know is this. Change isn't bad. Like conflict, change can be scary but in the end it's what makes these things worth pursuing. Scary Go Round has been a good web destination, but it's time for something new. The New Fall Season is upon us, and new beginnings are in the air.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work. I have changes of my own which must be wrought, after all, and September waits for no man.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:25 AM | Comments (4)

August 20, 2009

Eric: On Being Super

One of the epic tales of Closed Beta, over at Champions Online, was an ongoing discussion on the game's challenge level. And by ongoing discussion, I mean "impassioned argument."

Put simply -- there were certain closed beta testers who didn't like that lower level enemies were still a threat to their character... and they weren't too happy about same-level enemies being a threat either. If they got two or three levels ahead of a pack of NPC bad guys, they felt that they should essentially be invulnerable to them. If they left the keyboard for a drink, leaving their L15 character in a hazardous area, and nine L11 or L12 bad guys spawned while they were away and proceeded to beat their character into a pulp... well, they found this to be suboptimal.

And, whenever this argument raised its ugly head, the same argument came up. "I just don't feel super" they said. Each and every time.

It's a familiar complaint. I heard this dozens of times over the past five years connected with City of Heroes. "I just don't feel super" inevitably meant "I don't have the opportunity to bust out equal doses of Cool and Kickass often enough." And, there was something to be said for it -- the early opposition in the game, even though you were told they were enhancing themselves one way or another, just didn't seem like they should be that hard for a super hero -- even a young and inexperienced one -- to take down. Further, you got powers slowly, and some powers were arbitrarily spaced out (why someone needed to hit L14 to fly in a Superhero game has always been a mystery). It was showing some of its MMO roots: cool things came at higher levels. Want to ride a horse or war ram or pink elephant? You need to hit 30th level first, Toby Nightelf, and even then don't expect the horse salesman to sell you a horse if you're not in good with his race: economics be damned, horses are human technology and not just any Elf can be trusted with one!

(As a total side note, both World of Warcraft and City of Heroes have been drastically reducing the level requirements for travel options or powers -- it took quite a few years, but they finally figured out no one's that excited by jogging. But I digress.)

The problem is, and always has been, that 'Super,' the way these people mean the term, means 'Unchallenged.' For a lot of people, 'superhero' means 'unstoppable badass,' and anything that makes their character seem like less than an unstoppable badass means by definition their character is not being a superhero. From there, it's simple to see the formula reduced down to its component level:

character + defeat = nonsuper

That's what their argument really boils down to. "I lost the fight, and Wolverine never loses fights, so I'm not a superhero." "I got knocked out, and Batman never gets knocked out, so ergo I'm not being super."

Oh, in debating this point the people in question will make allowances. Sure, the archvillain at the end of the scenario can take you down -- at least every now and again -- and that's okay. Batman is sometimes knocked out by the Joker, after all. But in everyday life, there shouldn't be anything -- but anything -- that leads to you being beaten. It was perhaps made worse in early City of Heroes levels by the type of opposition you were facing, of course -- even if the Hellions use magic to beef themselves up, it's rough to be a mighty hero and have a bunch of street punks who think orange is a good color choice take you down because you bit off more than you can chew -- but the principle still applied. Superheroes didn't lose, they kicked ass.

The problem with this argument, in the end, is that it's wrong. On every level. And that's true in City of Heroes, it's true in Champions Online, and it's true in Marvel Comics. And it underscores something that every writer, developer, artist, or gamer needs to understand: Challenge is Good. There needs to be real stakes involved. Accomplishing things should take effort.

We've talked about such things before. Conflict is good, as I was wont to say in the days when I was wont to say things. When bad things happen to characters in fiction (sequential-art based or not), that set up interesting and engaging situations that became fodder for drama, comedy or both. Well, when reading about super heroes, there has to be a sense of challenge. You have to believe that Spider-Man could get shot in the head and die even if it was desperately unlikely he would. You need a sense that your heroes have to work at their goals, and that there would be consequences if they fail.

The seminal example of this, of course, was the difference between Superman and Spider-Man in the sixties. In the end, the Mort Weisinger era Superman is exactly what those guys who "just don't feel super" are gunning for -- a character who is so powerful, so indestructible that his enemies are less threats than annoyances. Sure, there was Kryptonite, and sometimes there was magic or "the rays of a red sun," but for the most part Superman was amused by the silly gangsters with their silly guns. An MMO that centered on a Lois Lane type character breaking two hundred pairs of scissors on your invulnerable hair as a requirement to level up wouldn't be fun -- it would be excruciating.

(Actually, if someone wants to create a game where you play an all powerful godlike superhero who spends all his time tricking his friends, teaching them humiliating 'lessons,' and being amused when accidents turn them into monkeys or insect people, a la Superman in the sixties... well I'd buy a copy. But the challenge of that game wouldn't be physical danger -- it'd be setting up the perfect humiliation of the pathetic love interest whose major crime is wanting to marry you. But I stray from my thesis.)

Now, Champions Online is good at giving you challenges. In particular, it doesn't reward stupidity. If you stop paying attention because everything around you is two or three levels below you, you will in fact be defeated. If you engage 30 lower level enemies and lack a decent Area of Effect attack, you will in fact lose. And sometimes, this pissed people off. "These guys are mooks! I shouldn't lose to them! Sure, I was stupid, but still -- I'm supposed to be a hero! Batman wouldn't lose to them! I just don't feel super!"

In one of these exchanges, where Batman was in fact brought up, I chimed in. For me, one of the joys of Batman -- when he was written well, at least -- was that he was constantly having to outthink his opponents. Oh sure, he was a great fighter -- but his strength came from using every advantage. He had gear in his belt designed to confuse, surprise and subdue his enemies. He used fear (and the dark) to panic them, forcing them to make mistakes. He was patient, and quiet, and took them down two or three at a time in ways that made the remaining crooks increasingly jumpy and paranoid. And yes, if he were to drop all that and charge into the middle of the room, he'd probably get beaten. Lord knows he'd been knocked out by lucky saps to the head any number of times. It's why he kept waking up in dark rooms tied to a chair with dynamite underneath it (or chained in giant hourglasses that would slowly pour sand on him until he suffocated -- Batman's enemies spend way more money on death traps then they ever take in from bank robberies. But then, Batman's enemies treat crime like performance art.)

"No way," my debate partner responded. "Batman doesn't need to do all that. He's the greatest martial artist who ever lived! He could take them all down!"

What can you do?

Amusingly, I'm reminded of The Dark Knight Returns. In one of the most famous scenes (which I'm about to entirely Spoil, so, you know. Spoiler Alert on a 1986 comic book that 97.6% of the people reading this have read dozens of times) Batman -- now old, of course -- sees the young, vicious warlord ruler of the Mutant street gang, who challenges him to one on one combat. Batman has enough pride to be pulled out of the safety of his Bat-tank and goes at him hand to hand. And the mutant leader -- younger, stronger, in better condition, and much faster -- proceeds to beat him nearly to death. He would have died right there had a fangirl not spontaneously become the new Robin and pulled him out. He had let himself be coaxed into acting stupidly, and that nearly killed him. When he had a rematch with the mutant leader, it was on his own terms, using psychological effects to prod the leader into a rage, then dropping him into a mud pit. That takes away his speed advantage, and while he's still younger, stronger and in better condition, Batman is smarter and more experienced, and utterly in command of the environment. He proceeds to take the leader apart, brutally beating him down in front of his gang, and completely breaking their morale (and leading to a number of them aping his style and eventually becoming his army).

Batman wasn't super the first time. He was stupid, and he got pounded into mush for it. Batman was super the second time, when he used strategy and tactics to accomplish his goals. And that led inexorably to Batman fighting Superman -- the last hurrah of that Pre-Crisis, all powerful, Mort Weisinger super Superman -- and beating him.

That last scene, by the way? That scene where Batman takes down Superman? That completely redefined Batman and Superman in popular culture. That took the World's Finest team of best friends and made them barely tolerate each other. And that cemented in the minds of comic fans everywhere that of course Batman would beat Superman in a fight. Duh. Before that scene, Batman was just that guy with the ropes, the car, the sidekick and the Bat Shark Repellant. We made fun of Batman in the Super Friends.

But Batman was the character who had challenge in his stories and overcame them, and in the end the indestructible man couldn't compete.

I have always liked the challenge of City of Heroes. I like that I have to pick and choose my fights and be intelligent about them. One of the key complaints about City of Heroes these days is that because the underlying A.I. is five years old and so many of us are so experienced in its nature, we've become too good at it. The challenge is less. And NCSoft is responding by allowing us to alter our difficulty with incredible granularity. If you want to solo a mission as though you had a full 8 man team on Unyielding, you can.

And I like -- I really like -- that if I run through Maniacs territory in Champions Online, even if they're a few levels below me, and I don't have my head in the game, they'll wrap chains around me, haul me off my feet, and beat me into paste. If I'm going to be a hero -- if I'm going to win -- I'm going to have to use my brain and my skills in the game to overcome the odds.

And there's nothing that makes me feel more super than that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:04 PM | Comments (19)

May 11, 2009

Eric: On Treks into Heroism and Reclaiming Ashes: Star Trek and the Heroic Journey

Let me open with the non-Spoilery part of this here essay -- and I do indeed plan to spoil heavily in this here first post in a billion years. I really, really liked the new Star Trek movie.

Let me elaborate with an anecdote on one of the few times I've seen a movie more than once in a theater, and just about the only time I've seen a movie in a theater twice in a short amount of time.

It was early 1987, and I was a young tyro at Boston University. I was still new to post-high school life and a bit drunk with the power of a T Pass. I got a stipend from the United States Government as part of an early -- and unfortunate -- flirtation with the United States Navy. And I had a piece of plastic that let me ride the Boston T wherever and whenever I wanted.

And so in January of 1987, I took a ride on the T on an unseasonably warm day to the Government Center stop, just to tool around and see the sights. And I noticed that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was still playing in a theater. I hadn't yet seen this movie, because... well, I have no idea why I hadn't seen it yet. My friends had, and they liked it. Still, I didn't have much to do and hey, the theater was almost empty -- it was the middle of the day and Trek had been out for weeks at that point. So I went. Why not.

Two hours later, I marched out of the theater on an absolute high. I was charged -- no, I was supercharged. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to my room. So I turned around, and walked right back in, and proceeded to watch the film for a second time.

I'd never done that before. I haven't done that specific thing since. I've seen movies more than once in the theater since then -- but that was always because I had seen it with one group of friends and then a different group of friends wanted to see it too. It was group activity, in other words, not "oh my God I need to see that movie again." And certainly in recent years I've felt no need to be a repeat film watcher. The DVD will be out soon enough, after all. And there's always way more to watch.

On Thursday at 7 pm, Wednesday, a mutual friend and I all went to see Star Trek, at the first possible showing.

On Sunday, Wednesday and I saw it again. I couldn't imagine waiting for the DVD release -- I had to see this movie again.

So, taking it for what it's worth, I liked the movie.

We're about to move into the main part of this essay, so I'm going to bring back the ancient art of the Cut For Spoilers. Don't continue unless you're okay with them

Seriously, I'm going to reveal everything and its brother about this film.

Up to and including stuff that was misleading in the trailer.

Okay, not a lot of that, but a bit.

Okay, a bit involving hot chicks and underwear.

Right. Last chance.

(RSS readers -- click the link to the main entry on the site, or just click here to continue.

Still here? Then let's spoil ho.

Looking around the blogosphereic mass, I notice that-- wait, what?

Oh, I mentioned hot chicks in their underwear and spoilers? Well, that's true enough. Right. Let me get through that really quickly before we move on. See, in the trailer, we see Uhura stripping out of her uniform, cross-cut with a fast shot of Kirk sliding atop a chick in her underwear in shadows. There is more than a little implication that Kirk was nailing Uhura. Only Weds didn't believe it, because she noticed the hot chick had curlier hair. And she was also certain she was green. So we went frame by frame, and while I was willing to accept that the jury was still out on whether or not that was Uhura (we had only seen her with her hair pulled back, so it was possible they'd go with a glamour shot when it was down), I proved conclusively to her that no, the woman was dark skinned and not green.

So, yeah. The woman was green. Kirk was nailing an Orion chick. A red haired Orion chick. In her underwear. Frankly, I'm surprised that wasn't the tagline of the movie. Star Trek: Red Haired Orion Chick in her Underwear.

But that's not why I'm telling the story. I'm telling it because Weds was happy A) to be right about the Orion chick, but B) because of a detail she thought was amazing. "That Orion chick's red hair is a dye job," she said as we left the film. "That's fantastic. I can totally accept that an Orion chick joining starfleet would dye her hair red. They did that really well."

Well, it was a dye job, but it wasn't a detail the producers threw in. It's just that actress playing the Orion chick had to get ready for her day job. Say what you want -- that actress (Ms. Rachel Nichols of my home state of Maine) has her Geek Movie Cred sewn up for the next decade or so.

But enough exploitation. (Especially since Uhura was a pretty great character this time out). I want to talk about storytelling.

See, there's a popular blog out there that's really impressed with Star Trek, in part because they were so happy to see stock scriptwriting thrown out the window. In particular, they were glad to see the myth theory of the Hero's Journey tossed, and a different story style employed instead.

For those who aren't familiar, the Hero's Journey (technically called the monomyth) was detailed by Joseph Campbell in the 1949 book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It suggests that, as predicted by mythopoeic critical theory, that the structure of almost all heroic myths -- myths about heroes, in other words -- is generally the same and predictable. From this, we derived the concept of the heroic archetype (as well as the concept of the failed hero, or ectype). In the '80's, Bill Moyers had a surprisingly well received and popular PBS series The Power of Myth, which brought the heroic journey and Campbell to the forefront of thought. Screenweiter Christopher Vogler adapted this into the now-nigh-ubiquitous The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, highlighting many popular movies and showing how they fit the structure. As a result, Hollywood is lousy with heroic journey based screenplays.

Well, as I said, the popular Kung Fu Monkey blog had a post raving about Star Trek, and more to the point complimenting it on entirely eschewing the heroic journey and indeed the concept of the character arc. It was well thought out, supported its thesis, and had tons of comments by intelligent people debating elements of the discussion and only occasionally being marred by mouth breathing moronic trolls. On the whole, a successful essay.

And now, as a card carrying critic well trained in the theories in question and understanding perfectly that the beauty of criticism is we can all be right, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on Rogers and his thesis. Because Star Trek and in particular James T. Kirk perfectly follows the archetype of the Heroic Journey.

Stepping around the incredibly emotional (and stunningly well done) prologue, where heroic ectype George Kirk sacrifices himself so his son -- and wife and 800 other people -- can live, we open the journey with James T. Kirk, who we see established in the Norm as a troublemaking kid without respect for authority or other peoples' stuff. He is on a dead end path -- the path of, in Pike's words, becoming the only Genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest.

Kirk receives the Call to Adventure -- he encounters Uhura in a bar, and has a rather unfortunate encounter with a pile of Academy recruits. But, he Refuses the Call initially. Christopher Pike is the first elder figure on Kirk's path, and he provides both the motivation to answer the Call of Adventure and the initial Challenge of the Paternal. Kirk is the way he is because he didn't have his father to look up to. Pike takes the theory of his father and makes it actual -- an example of a Hero (in this case, the truest form of Hero in this world, a Starship Captain). But he doesn't challenge Kirk to live up to his father's example. He challenges Kirk to exceed it. "Your father had command of a starship for twelve minutes," he says, more or less. "In that time, he saved 800 lives. Including your mother's. Including yours. I dare you to do better."

Kirk accepts the Call, giving up his old life (as symbolized by his giving away his motorcycle) and crossing the threshold into the shuttle -- and meets the next significant elder figure on his journey. In this case, the neurotic but loyal Leonard McCoy, older and more grizzled, and ready to accept Kirk immediately. The pair move on together. McCoy's role in the myth will become apparent when we reach the Crossing of the First Threshold, in the very next paragraph.

Kirk has embraced his path, but he cannot truly step into the new world. He is held by his own ego -- he has failed the Kobayashi Maru and indeed taken it twice. That everyone fails this test is not enough for Kirk. Kirk's ego can't permit him to continue until he conquers the test. He does so on the third try, but there meets with the real Threshold Guardian he must overcome -- Commander Spock, the officer who programmed the test. Kirk is brought up on charges and grounded -- right when an emergency forces the immediate commissioning of his graduating class so they can step out into adventure. But Kirk is grounded and unable to continue.

This is where McCoy steps into his place on the Mythic Structure, providing the Supernatural Aid to allow Kirk to pass beyond the first threshold. The weapon or amulet he gives Kirk is a vaccination that will make Kirk seem sick, and give the Doctor an excuse to bring him with him to the Enterprise. Once there, Kirk realizes the true nature of their mission (and its dangers), using what he had already heard from Uhura. He goes to the bridge, confronting his threshold guardian directly -- Commander Spock continuing to act as his obstacle and indeed his antagonist -- and is triumphant, convincing all (including Pike and Spock himself) that he is correct, and allowing them to arm against the coming storm. After the ship has its first encounter with the Narada, Captain Pike is forced to leave. Spock -- the obstacle -- becomes Acting Captain. But before he goes, Pike makes Kirk Acting First Officer. He has made Kirk a real part of the crew, letting him pass the threshold and enter the Belly of the Whale -- represented here by his plunge onto Vulcan to disable the drill to restore the ship's magical powers (in this case communication and transportation). He does so, taking two leaps of faith in the process -- one to the battle, and one to save Sulu.

He emerges, but is torn apart, as one must be on the Heroic path. He is still headstrong and ego driven, and he confronts his recurring obstacle, Spock, once more. He is certain he is right, but is being blocked. He tries to argue, to yell, and ultimately to fight, but fails and is ejected. He has not yet conquered his essential ego, and not yet gained the inner mastery he needs to truly achieve his destiny.

This moves him into Initiation. In this case, he is thrown to a world of ice. The underworld, as it were, where he encounters monsters and the Road of Trials. There too, he encounters the next important guidepost. In the land of the dead, he finds Spock Prime, who saves him, and then enlightens him. Spock Prime affirms his destiny, and speaks also of Kirk's father. In Spock Prime's version of history, Kirk did know his father, and his father was proud of him. Indeed, his father lived to see Kirk achieve his destiny -- to become the Captain of the Enterprise -- that brings Kirk's need for atonement with his father into relief. Spock Prime also brings Kirk into Apotheosis, giving him the mythical expansion of his consciousness by agency of an emotional mind-meld. Kirk sees the face of the menace they face, and learns the nature of the threat. He also learns that it is not his ego but the destiny of the world that he must serve -- and to do so, he must defeat Spock and assume his heroic place as Captain, not for himself but for the sake of all.

There is now the Magical Flight that allows our proto-hero to return to the regular world from the underworld, embodied by an outside agency -- in this case, the Trickster figure of Montgomery Scott. Scotty can return Kirk to the Enterprise (with the help of Spock Prime) and complete Kirk's arsenal all at the same time. Spock Prime gives Kirk the necessary weapons to fight his enemy -- embodied in Spock -- and become the Captain he must be. They fly out, and must cross the Return Threshold, blocked once more by Spock. This time, Kirk is able to confront Spock directly and defeat him, finally removing him as an obstacle and allowing Kirk to assume command. He is now Master of Two Worlds -- the mundane world of commanding the ship, and the divine world of his destiny as a hero -- and can act to stop the threat to Earth. Though the final battle is exciting, it is also a foregone conclusion. James T. Kirk is Captain of the Enterprise, and the Narada -- which was always a MacGuffin -- is no match for that.

Spock, in this interpretation, is relegated to a story-specific role as Antagonist. And indeed, Nero and the Narada are decried as a cypher, because that is what they are. Spock is the enemy Kirk must continually overcome, until he can finally be defeated and made part of Kirk's loyal crew -- only then can Spock take his own place on board the Enterprise and in Kirk's life.

Of course, one can also build a heroic journey for Spock, and indeed the movie does so. But that doesn't deny the Heroic journey Kirk has had to make in order to become the hero he must be.

In conclusion? There was a hot red haired Orion chick in her underwear. Who gives a crap about Kirk?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:35 PM | Comments (15)

April 1, 2009

Eric: On the Cusp of the Fool

As near as I can tell, at least looking at social networking sites, absolutely no one likes April Fool's Day.

This seems odd to me, especially in the era of GenX hitting their forties, because if there's one thing my Generation and those that followed us love? It's shit for kids.

Seriously, man. We're the ones who made Spider-Man a monumentally successful movie franchise. We're the ones who moved Cartoon Network out of the business of making cartoons for children and into the business of manufacturing pop culture. We're the ones who keep Boomerang in business, especially after 7 pm. We're the ones who were rabid about collecting plastic toys that changed from robot to car and back until it hit the point that it too became a successful movie franchise. (And on the heels of it, we have ourselves a G.I. Joe movie coming out too. And it's not starring the Joes from the Baby Boom and it's not starring the poor Sigma Sixers who came after us.)

Oh, we call it "irony," or we demand that "comics aren't just for kids," or we tell people that Superman S's in sparkle-pink (I'm sorry, Supergirl S's, as if Supergirl ever wore sparkle-pink in her four-color life) is a fashion statement. But part of the reason Easter and Halloween are growing in our culture is that Gen-Xers and those who follow don't stop celebrating them when they graduate from college. We want our Christmas Stockings. We eat Count Chocula and watch Scooby Doo on Saturdays. We love shit that's for kids, and we're (officially) not ashamed of it.

But we fucking hate April Fool's Day. Which is so weird to me because it's the absolute pinnacle of "shit for kids." April Fool's Day is the last refuge of 9 year olds, because the 19-49 year olds don't want it. Because they fucking hate April Fool's Day.

We talk for days leading up to April Fool's Day about how much we fucking hate April Fool's Day. We talk about how annoyed we are that when we get up and stumble over to our computers on 1-April that "it's international don't believe anything you see on the Internet day." On April Fool's Day, Gen-X and the Internet Age put on their crotchety old man pants and declare themselves to be entirely too grown up to enjoy people making fun of themselves and of us.

Which is the cusp of it. No matter how ridiculous we get in our love of things from our youth (seriously -- the chief complaint about Watchmen wasn't that it took liberties with the source material, it's that it didn't take enough liberties with the source material and one of the most revered comic book series of the last six years was All-Star Superman, which seemed pretty pedestrian to me, particularly after Moore did it eight times better in Supreme, but because Morrison aped the more ridiculous -- and cool -- elements of the Silver Age Superman instead of declaring Superman too cool to have enemies with a square planet it's being held up as seminal and groundbreaking) we have absolutely no sense of humor about ourselves. None. No matter how good a prank is, "you got me" is never said cheerfully. It's said behind clenched teeth as we fake being a good sport and secretly plan how to kill the fucker with a car.

So, we're buzz-kills about this one, because we don't like to be made fun of. We're okay with other people looking stupid -- Jon Stewart, Matt Groening, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Steven Colbert, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Green and put near everything else we do like comes from mocking other people -- but we don't like to look stupid. We laugh at the depiction of a hopeless nerd on Robot Chicken so long as that depiction is so broad and so unrealistic that we can pretend we're not the ones being laughed at. We laugh when someone looks like a fucking moron, so long as that someone isn't us.

And the heart of April Fool's Day -- the absolute point of it -- is that it makes fun of us. It says "hah! You bought this hoax! HAH HAH!" And we have to grit our teeth and mutter "yeah, you got me." And as stated above, we then plan vehicular murder. No one likes April Fool's Day.

Except, of course, for kids. Kids love it, because they're just young enough to not give a shit about looking stupid.

And the thing that gets me, beyond everything else, is that's exactly what we're looking for. We're looking for that essence, that moment in time, that part of ourselves who didn't give a shit about looking stupid, they just wanted to have a good time. When we read a comic book on the bus, we do so ironically or we do so defiantly, or we change the entire comic book industry to be more mature all in an effort to legitimize the act of reading a comic book on the bus, because deep down we just want to read comic books but we don't want to look stupid while we're doing it. We go to things like BotCon or Anime conventions or SF Cons or one of the various ComiCons in part because they're a good time, and in part because once we walk through those doors we don't look stupid liking what we like. It's safe. And the one thing that pisses us off is the television crew that shows up and films us, because we know we're going to have Stormtroopers, chicks in slave Leia costumes and unshaven fat guys dressed as Sailor Moon on the evening news, and the one thing we can't stand is that makes us look stupid.

Fuck that noise. Fuck it in the ear. I like silver age comics. I don't like them ironically. I don't like them nostalgically. I don't like recontextualizing them for my adult sensibilities. I don't like them because "they're not just for kids." I like them for what they are, on their own merits, because I enjoy super heroes fighting supervillains. I like them. I enjoy reading about the Levitz era Legion, or the Wolfeman/Perez Teen Titans, or the Claremont/Austin X-Men. I enjoy reading about Steve Rogers dressing up as Captain America and fighting Nazis while defending the rights of minorities and challenging us to be better people. I enjoy reading about Billy Batson saying his magic word and becoming the quintessential good guy without feeling like we have to make him, his sister and his disabled best friend suffer unimaginable torments to make them 'edgy.' I like it.

When I watch Super Friends on TV, I watch it because I fucking like Super Friends. I don't need to redress it or dismiss it or make jokes about it to enjoy watching Superman get shaken by Solomon Grundy or Sinestro trick Green Lantern into moving the planet Earth closer to the sun and then forgetting to fix it. Yeah, I know it's dopy if I pretend to be an adult when I watch it. But I like it on its own merits.

Yeah, I enjoyed Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, but I also enjoy Birdman and the Galaxy Trio. I like this shit because I like this shit.

And I like April Fool's Day.

Let me say that more obnoxiously.

I like April Fool's Day!

I like it when people are clever. I like it when they take the time and effort to build something well, even if the purpose is to make me look credulous. I like when David Willis ends Shortpacked, launches 'Ultimate Roomies,' and redesigns his entire website based on the new strip. And works really hard to sell that fact. I think it's hysterical and I think it shows a great sense of self deprecation on his part and I think it shows a lot of time and effort to, in the end, celebrate a day where the world is whatever the fuck we want to make of it, and if we buy the hoax, even for a second, that's okay because god damn it, it's April Fool's Day. And it depresses me that in the Webcomics World, what was once a day of joy and anarchy (and for many years a day when artists would trade strips and try to do each others' jobs) has become a day when people solemnly declare that they're not going to be having any pranks or shenanigans, because they know that people hate that.

One of the comments to Willis's tour de force performance on his blog? "And so the worst fucking day of the year begins."

Jesus fuck, man. Get over it. It's April Fool's Day. Enjoy it for what it is. Read the epic saga of Cadie. Try to buy some Squeeze Bacon or just wince at the thought of it. Get excited for the Groundhog Day musical. Have some fun with it.

And if you can't, stop being a fucking buzzkill because you're terrified of looking stupid. If you just can't get in touch with your inner seven year old enough to just enjoy what this is, don't actively try to ruin it for everyone else. If nothing else? Because the only way to really look stupid on April Fool's Day is to preemptively try not to look stupid on April Fool's Day.

Seriously. Your declarations and your bubble-bursting? Is the ultimate victory of anyone who ever fooled you. They managed to take a thirty-second joke no one will ever remember and change your fucking life with it. You not only were 'gotten?' You never stopped being gotten, and everyone knows it because you keep telling them.

Now that's comedy.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:03 AM | Comments (34)

January 18, 2009

Eric: A truism from the grave.

Here is a thing you should know, if you intend to produce webcomics.

If I can read five of your strips and, after reading five of your strips still have no sense of what your webcomic's premise is? You have done it wrong.

Seriously. This is not decompression. This is "failing to convey a sense of your webcomic."

Thank you. I look forward to speaking to you again. Perhaps in April.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:20 AM | Comments (16)

November 11, 2008

Eric: We call it Veteran's Day in this country, but around the world it is Remembrance Day.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we will remember.

We will remember rows and rows of brave men and boys who charged into a new kind of war, over trenches, facing machine guns that spat out lead faster and with less discrimination than ever before. War was thought of as a noble pastime before they began this fight. Its nobility died on French fields with so many others.

We will remember armies that hated one another by tradition and temperament coming together and forming alliances. The French and the English. The Democratic and the Communist. Always the human.

We will remember the men and women, girls and boys who took up arms when their country called, in every country around the world. Who went and fought and died for causes they could believe in and for no reason at all except that their leaders told them to go. We will remember their courage. We will remember their loyalty.

One day a year, let us take one moment of one day and just remember them.

Whether we name it for those we remember and call it Veterans or commemorate the act itself and call it Remembrance, this is the day we stop and remember.

It is eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November.

We remember.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:00 AM | Comments (3)

November 5, 2008

Eric: A moment of reality.

In 1992, I watched the election returns at my Parents', as I almost always do. I stayed up late, long after they went to bed. I watch George Herbert Walker Bush concede. And I watched William Jefferson Clinton, after twelve years of Reagan, of Bush, of Republican rule, of jingoism and centralism and scandal and Iran-Contra and any number of things that were of vital importance to my twentysomething self that I can't really remember now, make his acceptance speech.

And it inspired me. My heart soared with his words. Clinton and Gore, the dream team, the redeemers, the bringers of light and life and rationality and whatever else. I clearly remember the two of them and their wives standing on stage afterward, ubiquitous campaign theme "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" playing in the background. I remember Tipper and Hillary doing a little song-dance thing, the kind of thing college kids do when they hear that bit of a song they really like, and I just felt good. I knew, I knew it was all going to get better now.

And here's the thing. It did get better. But it also got worse. Good things happened. Bad things happened. There were outrages and triumphs for Clinton, for Gore and for the nation. But the overpowering sense that we had won, that Yesterday Was Gone and Tomorrow Was Here, that this was the theme music for happily ever after? That didn't last.

Because you know something? Yesterday was gone. But tomorrow is still tomorrow. It's today. It's always today.

It is 2008, and last night I went to my parents' house once again. We drank some wine and we watched the election results. I love election night. Win, lose or three month Florida recount, I love election night. I love the drama, the pagentry, the returns, the graphics, the commentary, the excuses, the smug retorts, the concessions and the acceptances. I love it. To me, this is the cultural defining moment of the United States of America, the single most significant act to our national character. In 1776, we declared that from this point forward, we were going to govern ourselves, and Election Day is the culmination and ritual act that makes that happen, and election night is the celebration of that ritual.

And last night was a good one. There was excitement and energy and a good narrative storyline. The various news agencies were on their A game. Dumbass holograms were employed. MSNBC and NBC News froze the red and blue state maps under the skating ice at Rockafeller Center.

And yeah, it ended. The eternal campaigning that took two years ended. The pain ended. And yes, for all those who hated George W. Bush with a passion -- and they are legion now -- that too has had its last trump played. The eight years of Bush are over.

And, what is more, a black man is now the President-Elect of the United States of America. Inauguration Day of next year, I swear to God, is scheduled such that on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP, a non-white man will for the first time take the oath of office and be our President.

I loved McCain's concession. The word that keeps coming up is 'gracious,' and it was. It reaffirmed what John Wayne said a long time ago about John F. Kennedy -- what we all should remember when our candidate loses and the other guy wins. Wayne said "I didn't vote for him but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." Last night, McCain essentially said the same thing, and pledged his support, and called upon those who supported him to do the same. I hope that comes to pass.

I loved Obama's speech. It had just the right balance of humility in the face of history coupled with the exultant, soaring culmination of achievement. His daughters were aggressively adorable, and he told them they were going to get a puppy.

I loved Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan, two men I often disagree with, but whose insights and viewpoints were razor sharp last night.

And yes, at the end there was a tremendous feeling of relief. It was over. There was a temptation to feel the way I had felt when I was twenty-four years old and Bill Clinton had just given his acceptance speech. To feel like this was a victory, that we had been ushered into Happily Ever After.

But I'm not twenty-four. I'm forty. And I know the truth. We haven't won.

If you were desperately pulling for Obama, relish the victory. But we haven't won.

If you were desperately pulling for McCain, spare all the time you need for regret. But you haven't lost.

We're not at happily ever after. We're not living in Tomorrow. It's not over.

It never, ever will be.

Today, President-Elect Obama is beginning the process of assembling his administration. In the meantime, we are in financial meltdown. We are in two wars. We have social strife. We have the strangest situation where South Dakota strongly repudiated the politics of the culture war even as California embraced them. We have desperate social inequalities. We have people trapped in foreclosure. We have soldiers in harm's way. We have people who want to kill us just because we exist.

Barak Obama, whether you like him or not, is going to do some things very well. He is going to do okay on other things. He is going to make some minor mistakes elsewhere. And he is going to completely blow it at other times. The Democrats in Congress are going to push their agenda forward in some ways, fall into fracture and divisiveness in others. Sometimes they will cooperate with the Republicans, and sometimes they'll shaft them. The Republicans will sometimes come together with the Democrats to get things done and sometimes will fight tooth and nail to beat them and make them look bad at the same time. And don't kid yourselves -- no one is better than the Republicans at playing defense.

This is where the hard work starts, not ends. This is where we all have to cope with the financial, social and military world that this new Administration and Congress are going to inherit. There is no happily ever after. There is only today, and today there's a Hell of a lot of work to be done.

And Barak Obama's not going to do it. He can't. No one man could. And in two years, we will not have solved all our problems. We might not have solved most of them. And two years after that we'll still be working on it.

Both McCain and Obama made reference to this last night. There is an impossible amount of work before us all, and as Obama said, it won't be done in a year or even in a Presidential term. What he did not say is it will never be done. Even if we fix all the troubles we currently have, new troubles will arise. New challenges will need to be met.

I have hope. Pure, wonderful hope. Hope that Obama will be a good President. Hope that Congress will do a good job. Hope that the nation will indeed pull together and fix things. But hope is not faith, and it certainly isn't blind faith. This is going to be hard. This is often going to suck on toast. And a whole lot of people are going to be desperately disappointed. Hell, a whole lot of people -- an estimated fifty six million as of the current count -- are disappointed today. And the sixty three million who are thrilled and elated will be disappointed sometime in the next four years. It is inevitable. We must be prepared for that.

In the end, it all comes back to the same thing. If you are an American, whether or not you voted for him, he will be your President. Even as he is my President, and, in John McCain's words, his President.

All we can do is hope he does a good job. He and the Congress we the people of the United States of America sent along with him.

History was made yesterday. Soaring, hopeful history, changing the course of this Nation. It was made by millions upon millions of people, and that's amazing. But that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone. It's today now. It's always today. And today, there's a hell of a lot of work to be done. And if a black man was named President-Elect yesterday, it's worth remembering that today homosexuals in California have been told that their relationships and commitments don't count, and that they are second class citizens. Told by their neighbors. The people that they meet each day.

Today's here, and there's a lot of work to be done.

My hope to Obama, to the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, to the elected officials I voted for and the ones I didn't vote for. May they do a good job. May we all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:44 PM | Comments (27)

September 4, 2008

Eric: Also on the list of real life mad scientists I know: the coworker who once rebuilt his laptop into a destructive heat ray.

We're getting ready to launch a brand new school year! So I've been, y'know, extra busy this week. Not that anyone's terribly surprised when I disappear for a little while here on the blog. At least this time it wasn't six weeks.

One thing I did take the time to do -- said time taking, oh, nine seconds -- was buy the just released Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog Soundtrack off of iTunes. I haven't felt any huge need to talk up the good Doctor -- most of you should already know about the internet sensation that swept geekdom like a giant... sweeping... thing over the course of the summer. (If you're totally clueless, be enlightened.) I really loved the videos, and it was a fait accompli that I'd get the album when it came out.

I won't promise there won't be minor spoilers below, for the record.

While listening to the studio recordings, I found my mind wandering to mad science. More to the point, I found my mind wandering to writing mad science. I have a project or two under the cone of silence that touch on the few, the proud, the psychotically curious, and like a lot of writers i sometimes use the power of music to get my brain in the right state of mind for whatever I'm working on. We are programmed by television and movies to respond to musical cues, almost subconsciously -- the right music can underscore pain or joy, make us happy or sad, get us into the mindset of who we're watching or drive us away, depending on what they're going for. And a writer can use that when they're writing in the first place.

And honestly, writing mad science takes some brain work.

You see, it's easy to assume that mad science is just cute and fluffy and geek positive. Lots of real life geeks of giant brain identify themselves as "mad scientists." Some (I'm looking at you, Van Domelan) even qualify. (Actually, Superguy alumnus Bill Paul still wins the prize for maddest scientist I've met, though it's worth noting i've never actually met Andy Weir. Apparently, when he took an undergraduate apartment near school, he discovered there was a 220 volt tap for a dryer that didn't currently exist. His immediate reaction was "Cool! Now I can make plasma!" But I digress. And yes -- we're going to be talking about Casey and Andy soon.)

The thing is? Mad scientists, as a trope? They're not cute and fluffy and geek positive. They're insane. They're arrogant and deeply broken -- their pain and insanity driving their science beyond all rational measure. It's a powerful image -- one that laymen are willing to accept almost at face value. Scientists seem like magicians to us, after all -- they make nuclear power plants and electrical grids and bridges and chemicals that do everything from regulate brain imbalances to endanger us with four hour erections. Science is huge and can be scary, and these men and women get it using math most of us don't even recognize as symbols. We can believe that one of these intensely intelligent people might go too far -- push too hard... learn too much, delve into things best left undelved, and lose their mind in an arrogant belief that they can force the world to yield its secrets and bend to his whim. As with Faust in an earlier incarnation, we're willing to accept that something supremely dangerous and horrifying lies just beyond the pale, and those who seek after knowledge with too great a fervor will be consumed by it.

And, of course, when you gain the knowledge of the gods, you become a god -- or so you believe. It is natural for the superior to rule over the inferior. World domination isn't an end, it's a byproduct.

The trick is finding the right music to push your brain into that mindset -- to drive that combination of brilliance and hubris, often with a side order of a pain that can't ever be alleviated. Sure, real life scientists might enjoy "Particle Man," but that's not going to combine the hunger for knowledge and the driving need to change/recreate/rule/destroy the world.

On all the Dr. Horrible soundtrack, the only truly mad science fueled song is the intense (and wonderful) "Brand New Day," as our... er... hero goes from a moderately nice and schlubish supervillain poseur to the real psychotic deal. You can feel the brilliance and evil burn out of Neil Patrick Harris, wiping out the "dork and failure" as he says and leaving behind a being who can (and does) terrorize. None of the other songs on the album have this sheer mad science quality. "My Freeze Ray" is cheerful and pleasant and very human, regardless of the advanced technology. "Slipping" and "Everything You Ever" yield confrontation and consequence, but not that pure expression of manic belief.

And that got me thinking. Clearly, I needed a song list. One song isn't enough, after all. I needed songs that had that quality, whether or not they actually dealt with science or mad science or anything of the sort. And I have a music collection, so why not pare through it.

So I did. I found the songs that seem to trigger the right neurochemical response in my brain -- the frantic energy, the certainty, the terrible surety of their quest or cause. There had to be an edge to these songs -- a sense that something isn't quite right in the world. And even if the songs are enthusiastic, they shouldn't be happy. And in many cases, there should be a sense of defiance. Most Doctor Demento songs get let out because they're not staring you in the eye demanding you kneel before them.

I also kind of decided to avoid the cliche and the twee with my picks. "She Blinded Me With Science" isn't on here -- Thomas Dolby might be a mad scientist but his lament is a victim's lament, not a victor's. And "Weird Science?" Please. There's an Oingo Boingo song here, but it lacks goofiness, thank you. "Weird Science" is what mad science groupies play while waiting outside the laboratory in hopes of getting an autograph or a transmutation into some kind of shark-pumpkin person. Finally, I tried to keep it to one song per artist.

Naturally, these are the songs that work for me. They may not work for you. And yes, I'd be happy to hear more suggestions in the comments. In alphabetical order by title, I give you my Mad Scientist Mix.

"American Jesus," Bad Religion: Right off the bat, you see there's no science here. What there is a hard edged beat and a song about entitlement, about superiority, about damning the consequences and damning the world and not caring because you're a special snowflake 'cause preacher told you so. From the driving core of the song:

He's the farmers' barren fields, (In God)
He's the force the army wields, (We trust)
He's the expression on the faces of the starving millions, (Because he's one of us)
The power of the man. (Break down)
He's the fuel that drives the Klan, (Cave in)
He's the motive and the conscience of the murderer (He can redeem your sin)
He's the preacher on TV, (Strong heart)
He's the false sincerity, (Clear mind)
He's the form letter that's written by the big computer, (And infinitely kind)
He's the nuclear bombs, (You lose)
He's the kids with no moms (We win)
And I'm fearful that he's inside ME (He is our champion)

This concept of the spirit -- the demiurge that wreaks its will upon the countryside while still being a part of you? That could as easily describe "madness" in Narbonic or "the spark" in Girl Genius.

"As I Sat Sadly By Her Side," Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Atypical on this list -- most of these songs emphasize the savage joy (or savage motion) of rhythm. This, on the other hand, is a beautifully orchestrated, piano heavy ballad with a sense of melancholy. It jabs my Mad Science hindbrain because of a combination of unsettling music -- it is beautiful, but there is a sense that somehow it denotes a world that's wrong -- and dark imagery. It describes the figure who has hope for the world, and the figure who sees the suffering of individuals. Either one could be a mad scientist -- the woman who sees a shining future or the man who sees the cost and finds it unacceptable. Telling, though, are two stanzas near the end:

Then she drew the curtains down
And said, "When will you ever learn
That what happens there beyond the glass
Is simply none of your concern?
God has given you but one heart
You are not a home for the hearts of your brothers

And God does not care for your benevolence
Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others
Nor does he care for you to sit
At windows in judgement of the world He created
While sorrows pile up around you
Ugly, useless and over-inflated"

He has seen the world's flaws. She obscures them and dismisses them. He feels responsible for making the whole world well. She feels no responsibility for the world at all. Polar extremes, and both mad.

"Big O!," Tosihiko Sahasi: The theme song from the cartoon. This is the polar opposite of the last entry -- this one's entirely about the savage joy of rhythm. The lyrics not only don't denote some moral dilemma, they mostly consist of "BIG O!" shouted over and over again. The song has a similarity in feel to the old Queen "Flash Gordon" theme, though, and the hammering beat makes your heart beat faster too. Musically, you can entirely accept that madmen build a world from the musical structures within, and then a giant robot blows shit up.

"Brand New Day," Neil Patrick Harris: What started the article. It doesn't get madder than this. This is the moment of epiphany for the bad Doctor -- the moment when he bursts through the nice, shy guy he was before to become the true, future ruler of the world. This is where he stops wanting to look out for kids in the park, and starts wanting to rampage through the streets:

All the time that you beat me unconscious I forgive
All the crimes incomplete - listen, honestly I'll live
Mr. Cool, Mr. Right, Mr. Know-It-All is through
Now the future's so bright and I owe it all to you
Who showed me the light

It's a brand new me
I got no remorse
Now the water's rising
But I know the course
I'm gonna shock the world
Gonna show Bad Horse
It's a brand new day

The distinction between the driven man of scientist and the madman who uses techniques "no reputable scientist would employ" while tearing into fields of study forbidden, for man was not meant to know them... is a moment of epiphany like this.

"Chicks Dig Giant Robots," Deathwish IX: Mad science as surf rock. This was the MEGAS XLR, and as suits that work it is enthusiastic and bright, counterpointing the banality of New Jersey with the epic of saving the world from alien invasion in a giant robot car. It might not immediately seem like Mad Science so much as mecha combat, but the core of the cartoon is an automobile nut who loves video games finds a prototype giant robot that's missing its head in a junkyard, and then rebuilds it using his classic car as the head, rerigging all the controls to a melange of video game controllers. That the thing works at all -- much less that it's superior to anything the designers could have hoped, is pure mad science at its best Plus he added flaming eightball paint jobs. And, as the song claims:

You dig giant robots!
I dig giant robots!
We dig giant robots!
Chicks dig giant robots!
Nice!

As justifications go for your rampage that decimates half of Trenton, it'll do just fine.

"Eli's Coming," Three Dog Night: I'll admit, some of my Sorkin love fuels this pick. In one of the best episodes of Sports Night, Dan (the cool host) sees a convergence of bad signs and declares that Eli's coming. When it becomes clear that he's reffing the Three Dog Night song, and that said song is about an inveterate womanizer, he agrees but said when he first heard it, it sounded like it meant trouble was coming. And, as he says, those things stick with you. And in that way, this has stuck with me. What makes it mad science? Well, it fits musically -- musical and frenetic but with a sense of dread coupled with terrible inevitability:

Walk but you'll never get away
No, you'll never get away from the burnin' a-heartache
I walked to Apollo by the bay
Everywhere I go though, Eli's a-comin' (she walked but she never got away)
Eli's a-comin' (she walked but she never got away)
Eli's a-comin' and he's comin' to git ya (she walked but... she walked but...)
Get down on your knees (she walked but she never got away)

Obsession, fear, flight, conquest. The fools at the Pier 1 down on pier nineteen will pay for defying the will of ELI! Look, it works for my brain. I don't promise it will for yours.

"Genius," Warren Zevon: It was nigh inconceivable a Zevon song wouldn't make the list, but this was iffy. I considered this one, "Piano Fighter" (for it's energy) and others. But in the end, this song has a sense of simmering, respectful resentment masked in a relatively peppy beat. It's the dark face of "Brand New Day" in its own way -- the loss that forms the maniac resolve. "You'll pay," the song seems to say. "When I have taken over the world then you'll pay!"

When you dropped me and you staked your claim
On a V.I.P. who could make your name
You latched on to him and I became
A minor inconvenience
Your protege don't care about art
I'm the one who always told you you were smart
You broke my heart into smithereens
And that took genius

You and the barber make a handsome pair
Guess what--I never liked the way he cut your hair
I didn't like the way he turned your head
But there's nothing I can do or say I haven't done or said

Everybody needs a place to stand
And a method for their schemes and scams
If I could only get my record clean
I'd be a genius

"I Wanna Be a Boss," Stan Ridgway: There are dedicated, passionate, even obsessed scientists who want nothing more than to make the discovery, to find the truth. While some of them might be Mad Scientists, they don't have to be. Mad Science requires something beyond the drive to know. There also has to be ambition -- ambition that can't ever truly be satisfied. This is where the drive to rule comes from -- the certainty that you could do it better, coupled with the sense that finally your genius will be given its unmitigated due. He starts off wanting a nice office, expensive clothes, a lear jet, the respect of his peers... but as the song progresses, his dreams get progressively grander, wilder, not just unlikely but impossible. And then he goes farther:

Now if I find a product I like
I'll buy up the whole company
Shave my face, and grin and smile
And then I'll sell it on TV
And everyone will know me
I'll be more famous than Howard Hughes
I'll grow a long beard and watch
Ice Station Zebra in the nude

And grow my nails like Fu-Manchu
Keep a row of specimen jars
Get other people to work for me--well
Maybe I'll buy the planet Mars, and
Build an amusement park up there
Better than old Walt's place
You'll have to be a millionaire to go
We'll smoke cigars and lounge in lace
Talk the talk of businessmen
And bosses that we are
So here's to me--the drinks are free--
'Cause I just bought this bar!

Within the heart of the Mad Scientist beats the heart of a man who knows that when he rules the world, it will be an absolute paradise. For him, anyway, and who else could possibly matter as much?

"The Math Song," The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets: from the movie Spaceship Zero. It opens with someone shouting "Your facts! Your figures! What are they worth now? Huh? Are they worth the lives of seven billion people?!" So, you know it starts out well. And then the song starts with a good drum beat and high guitar and cheer and a singer who sounds a touch strung up singing a song that makes it clear that yes. Yes these facts and figures are worth the lives of seven billion people. Don't be ridiculous:

X
X by the tangent of N
N minus pi over 10
That equals negative 9
Negative 9 is so fine

You've got a brain
And nobody really needs another love song

This is the song that underscores the joy and beauty in math, the power of the brain... and honestly, haven't we heard all the ridiculousness about love and adoration and other people before? No one needs another love song! You've got a brain! Read a book!

"The Needle Lies," Queensryche: Another song that sets the tone with a voiceover before it begins. "I've had enough -- and I want out!" [sound of crash] "You can't walk away now," comes the answer, followed by the all-important mad scientist laugh -- a laugh that trails up at the end instead of down. Operation: Mindcrime is a concept album that plunges the horrible depths of mad science. One of its characters is actually called Doctor X for God's sake!

I looked back once
And all I saw was his face
Smiling, the needle crying
Walking out of his room
With mirrors, afraid I heard him scream
Youll never get away

Cold and shaking
I crawled down alleys to try
And scrape away the tracks that marked me
Slammed my face into walls of concrete
I stared, amazed at the words written on the wall

Dont ever trust
Dont ever trust the needle, it lies
Dont ever trust
Dont ever trust the needle when it cries...
Cries your name

In a way, this suffers from the same thing as "She Blinded Me With Science." Nikki is a victim, not a mad scientist. But where "She Blinded Me With Science" is a romp, about the seductive powers of the modern woman with her perfume and her wicked ways... this is about a man crawling away desperately from the madman who has taken over his existence and threatens to destroy it, and there is no escape.

Now that's Mad Science, baby. Dr. X could take Dolby's chick out with one jab.

"No One Lives Forever," Oingo Boingo: This pick was a tossup between it and "Insanity" -- both the version from Farewell -- Live, the last concert Boingo played as Boingo. Both have that burning energy, that intensity that separates the sane from the not-sane, and they both kick the ass of "Weird Science" in pretty much every way. I go with this one because it's less about true full on non mad-sciency psychosis and more about the inevitability of death and the need to therefore go for absolute broke in life, without concern for laws or what is possible:

No one beats him at his game
For very long but just the same
Who cares, there's no place safe to hide
Nowhere to run--no time to cry
So celebrate while you still can
'Cause any second it may end.
And when it's all been said and done . . .
Better that you had some fun
Instead of hiding in a shell-Why make your life a living hell?
So have a toast, and down the cup
And drink to bones that turn to dust ('cause) . . .
No one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one
No one lives forever!! (Hey!)

The song is a party, a celebration. What it celebrates is that we're alive and someday we won't be so don't hold back! Don't let yourself have regrets! Take this life for all it's worth. Doctor Madblood would certainly agree. Not that he won't prove them wrong. Oh yes. Yes he will.

"The Sidewalk Song (v 1.1)," The Tenmen: For a while, Radio Achewood had a couple of tracks up from 'the Tenmen,' the black clad trio of rickenbacher playing cats who Roast Beef, Emeril and Spongebath all love. They're gone now, which I can understand -- how can one hope to put to music a group defined in a silent medium as the best post-wave musicians of their age. Still, this track has a beat and a funk that's infectious, and feels like distilled productivity. There are no lyrics -- it is, if anything, aureal wallpaper, but I could see it as the closest representation to the music a mad scientist hears in his mind, and that's good enough for me.

"Skullcrusher Mountain," Jonathan Coulton: Yeah yeah, I know. All these songs I've been avoiding all the geek-adored obvious picks. I don't have "They're Coming to Take Me Away." Hell, I don't have any They Might Be Giants on the list. These are songs about the crush and the pain, and here I have geek icon Jonathon Coulton with his parody of romantic light rock songs, all about the mad scientist who woos a pretty young thing. Look, the difference here is the absolute sense of rightness in the protagonist's voice, and the continued failure of his methods to have any positive effect:

I'm so into you
But I'm way too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I'm crazy
I'm not surprised that you agree
If you could find some way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You'd see the voices that control me from inside my head
Say I shouldn't kill you yet

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

It's all here -- the lack of ability to see the real world. The absolute certainty that his master plans cannot fail -- be they destroying the planet or hooking with his girlfriend. And, as he said above -- the chick likes ponies and likes monkeys, so why wouldn't a monkey-pony monster be the perfect gift! It's convenient, and no one else one! Honestly, Can't you show a little gratitude?

"Straw Hat and Old Dirty Hank," Bare Naked Ladies: This song's subversive. It's very bright and perky and cheerful and you can listen to it a dozen times before it hits you that this guy's a crazy celebrity stalker who thinks Anne Murray's talking to him in her songs. (Or Rae Don Chong. Or others. I've heard several women named.) He is a farmer, he works in the field, and he has come to see himself as the man who feeds the world -- and especially the love of his life -- with his labors. There's no science here but there is the right kind of delusion -- as well as the sullen resentment that can creep in when his letters to the celebrity stop fulfilling his worldview:

All of this corn I grow I grow it all for you
I took a hatchet to the radio I did it all for you
You could have written back,
You could have said "Thank you"
I guess you've got better things,
better things to do.

You say you love me, is that the truth?
Although they've heard the songs, my friends want living proof.
I know your address, I ring the bell
I bring you flowers and a .22 with shells.

He knows what the world is. He knows that he gets it -- he knows the truth. And his friends -- his friends -- won't believe them, and you won't write back so he could prove it. You have to understand, he's got to prove how you feel. He's got to prove it to the world. And then, when he has you and his life is so great... well, his so called friends will change their tune, won't they, but it will be too late. Too late!

Replace the psycho stalking with 'building an Oo-ray,' and Bob's your Uncle. And it's so upbeat in its psychosis.

"What We Need More Of is Science," MC Hawking: I'll admit, I'm not the biggest MC Hawking fan on Earth. It just seemed... I dunno. Cute, to me. A little twee. I didn't hate the Hawk, I just didn't buy in. But "What We Need More of is Science," the first of the Achewood songfights (the second was the fantastic "Corner of Dude and Catastrophe" by MC Frontalot with Brad Sucks) is just a wonderful rant against the people of the world who follow ridiculous cults (from crystals to fundamentalist Christianity in his view) and don't spend enough time listening to their god damn science teachers. This is the sort of rant that leads, fundamentally, to a giant steam powered robot with vortex rays mounted on the shoulders and an unbreakable glass dome on the head where the inventor sits in an easy chair, holding a martini that foams slightly, smiling and saying "where's this God then? Why doesn't He stop me? Mm? Here's my creation -- it's the one beating up His creation." And then he would laugh, and laugh and laugh.

The list is incomplete. The list can't be complete, because there could be something on it tomorrow that serves the same purpose. And the list that works for me might not work for you. If we could find the music playlist that elicited the same brain chemical responses in every listener, we could (of course) rule the world, but so far that goal is elusive. Still, we can get closer. Go ahead and chime in, down in the comments. What's music rocks your Mad Science hindbrain? What do you listen to when you're dreaming of unleashing your unstoppable Pneumatic Steel Legion upon the fools at Tompkins-Cortland Community College? And in what way am I wrong? Which of these songs denotes my clear inferiority, which shall lead to your song list crushing mine like so many grapes held in the hydraulically driven hand of your fabrication robot?

Go on. Prove me wrong, Silent Bob. For if you do not... then soon... I... will... rule... the world.

Of mad scientist mix tape creation.

Look, start small.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:18 PM | Comments (80)

August 28, 2008

Eric: The sad thing is, I generally preferred Siskel to Ebert.

Oh joy. It's another Zen and the Art of Criticism post. I'm sure you're all excited.

Like most people, I look at my various statistics. I like to know how many people come to the site, and how many of them have things to say, and how many of those things are good versus... well, not so kind. It's this thing one does. And most of us in fact do it.

Well, I saw an incoming link from Tad Williams's online forum, so I followed it to this discussion, which had been prompted by the Kurtz/Carlson thing, but (as with so many of these discussions) it had morphed into something else. The link in question described me as the "Roger Ebert" of Webcomics Criticism, which isn't the worst thing I've been called (one aspires to be the Pauline Kael of Webcomics Criticism, and fears becoming the Anthony Lane of Webcomics Criticism, but Ebert's a cool guy. I'm not nearly that good at what I do, mind, but still).

The question was raised, however -- well, let me quote "Rook," who was the guy kind enough to link me in the first place:

One of the things that kinda gets me is that works of art can be critiqued. But can critiques be critiqued? I suppose so, but that creates a weird feedback loop where there seems to be no end. Another thing is when you call a critic out on something, a typical response is, "Well, it's just a matter of opinion after all." Whereas an artwork, whether visual, written, or musical, has to stand for something.

Can critiques be critiqued? Can criticism be criticized?

Unquestionably, undoubtedly, and unreservedly yes. But we should discuss what we mean by criticism.

I've beaten this drum before, but there are really three definitions of criticism in use today, which have had the unfortunate effect of muddying the waters for everyone involved. In no particular order:

1. Criticism is the interpretation or analysis of creative work, attempting to discern both technique and meaning within one of many potential contexts. This is the one Kris Straub will make fun of me over -- criticism in this definition refers to working out what an artist has done and how he has done it. While the analysis is necessarily subjective, this definition is less about judgement and more about interpretation. There are lots of "critical theories" that critics of this stripe subscribe to, ranging from traditional analysis through political filters like Marxism or Feminism (or any other -isms you care to apply) up to modern and post-modern theories like the (quite old) "New criticism" through the esoterica of Deconstructionism. When you read literary journals, this is ostensibly the kind of criticism you'll find.
2. Criticism is the judgement rendered by (theoretically) qualified, (hopefully) impartial analyst over the effectiveness of given creative work at meeting its intentions and the suitability of the work to popular enjoyment. This is an overly highfalutin' way of saying "Critics review shit." This is the Roger Ebert side of Criticism -- it may touch on aesthetics or artistic merit or the like, but generally it says "this work is good and you should consume it" or "this work sucks and you should shun it," or some value in between the extremes. When we make references to film critics, book critics, theater critics, the old television cartoon The Critic or the like, almost always we're referring to Reviewers like this. Any time you've seen stars or thumbs as part of a criticial essay, you're reading a review.
3. Criticism means pointing out the flaws in someone or someone's work. This is unquestionably the most popular day-to-day usage. "Do you mind some constructive criticism?" "To be critical for a moment...." "If you can't take criticism maybe you shouldn't ask my opinion." And so on and so forth. Criticism is innately negative, in this definition -- it isn't about what people do right, or how well a given work (or given person) accomplishes its goals, it's about they've done it wrong. Criticism is innately negative under this definition, and the only good that can come from it is reform.

You can see the problem, I trust. Someone can work diligently under the first definition of criticism and be conflated with the third by virtue of terminology. Reviewers and analysts becomes one thing, and the people who read their essays will expect elements of both somewhere in the work. It's not enough to describe how something is done -- the majority of the audience wants to hear whether or not the work's any damn good.

The relationship that each type of critic has with the artists they're referring to is different as well. The first type -- the analyst -- needs little and probably should have no direct connection to or influence on the critic they're analyzing. Seriously. Little to none. In literary criticism, for well over a hundred years, critics have asserted that "the author is dead," meaning that authorial intent -- what the author "meant to do" in his work -- was irrelevant to the interpretation of that work. Ray Bradbury can insist -- as he recently has -- that he never meant for Fahrenheit 451 to be about censorship. He meant for it to warn how television was and would destroy interest in reading. However, all the thousands of people who interpreted Fahrenheit 451 to be about censorship still saw it that way, whether Bradbury intended it or not, and the essays written supporting that contention aren't made wrong by authorial fiat.

But at the same time, if Bradbury decided to write a sequel tomorrow, he is under absolutely no obligation to write that sequel with the popular interpretation in mind, no matter how popular it may be. He may and should proceed from his own contentions and create the work he wants to read. And no one -- absolutely no one -- can tell him he's wrong when it comes out. No matter how brilliant and well supported the analysis and interpretation of a given critic, the author does not and never will answer to that critic. And that's entirely as it should be.

The second type of critic -- the reviewer -- is certainly important to artists, especially if they have some traction among the audience the artist is trying to attract. Certainly, every artist hopes for "good reviews," even if the artist has no intention of reading them. Good reviews mean more audience. Good reviews mean more money to buy food to keep the artist alive while he writes the next work that goes down the line. And whether or not artists should be influenced by their reviews, for the most part they are influenced by their reviews. It's coldly cynical, but it's true. If ten people review a book written by an author, and eight of them pan it and say he spends too much time on strawman arguments between characters and not enough on plot, the author's way more likely to make the next book plot heavy. He wants to sell copies, and reviewers are a means to that end. This can lead down bad directions, as an author who just writes to the reviewers' expectations can become artistically bankrupt -- possibly getting good notices and making some good sales, but producing forgettable works that have no long term staying power. And never forget -- some very popular works have been trashed by reviewers (which is how Rob Schneider still has a career) and creative works that were critically panned upon their release have sometimes absolutely stood the test of time and been acclaimed as masterpieces.

The third type of critic -- the so-called constructive (or destructive) critic is a very weird case. There are times their observations are spot on, and an artist would be well advised to consider them as they move forward. At other times, they lead to the destruction of the creative process -- the artist becomes paralyzed, unable to proceed because of the harsh words of a few, and all too often destructive critics aren't representative of popular opinion. An artist's best course of action is to find those readers whose opinions they trust and filter negative criticism through them.

I mention the artists above essentially to dispose of them. The question at the top of the essay remains. Can criticism be criticized?

I was unequivocal in saying 'yes.' Of course criticism can be criticized. More to the point, all criticism is subject to all three definitions of criticism given above, just like any other produced work, regardless if the criticism itself falls under the first, second or third definition.

Let's take them in order, shall we? We'll take an example of each definition of criticism at work, and we'll describe how each interacts with the three types of criticism being levied towards them:

Case 1: A scholarly essay analyzing a webcomic for both technique and interpretation.

A first definition (Scholarly) Critic would analyze the essay's techniques, interpreting language and showing appropriate context either within the essay or surrounding the essay to describe how the essayist analyzed the webcomic and intuit the philosophy behind the essay. The essentially philosophical field of Critical Theory is entirely devoted to the analysis of analysis. This is one reason Critical Theory gets mocked -- it seems self-referential and masturbatory. However, what the field is doing is less about literature (or other forms of artistic expression) and more about how we see literature or art as a whole. What is being analyzed is our eye, not what it sees. It is specialist work, often only of interest to specialists. Some truly great work has come out of these impulses (Coleridge's Biographia Literaria springs to mind), as well as many many thousands of pages of sheer, unmitigated bullshit. As always, the truth lies in the eye of the beholder.

A second definition (Reviewer) Critic would look at the essay's effectiveness. Consider the professor of literature, receiving a paper that compares Clive Cussler to Geoffrey Chaucer. That professor isn't looking at the paper's startling insights, typically -- the professor is trying to figure out if the student effectively stated his thesis and then supported it in the body of the work. If he did, even if the professor disagrees with the student's thesis, he should grade it well. The student has done his work effectively. If he didn't, even if the professor agrees with the student's thesis, he should grade it poorly. The student has failed to write a good essay. Applying this logic to a critic writing about the Case 1 essay -- a critic will review the essay based on the usual criteria. Was the essay well written? Did it make its point? Was its point well supported? And -- and I can't emphasize this enough -- was it entertaining to read? Essays of all stripes written for the public arena are themselves meant to be entertaining as well as educational. If your essay is boring (I know, you're thinking I might be calling the kettle black with this one) then even if you're right you've failed, because no one will stick around. He might not grade the paper (though, y'know, star reviews and other silly devices come into play), but his subjective impression will still inform others. And the essayist's credibility as a critic may well come into play.

A third definition (Negative) Critic would go into what the essayist did wrong. This is less about the technique of the essay or the effectiveness of the essay, and more about the flaws of the essay. This is the first area where the actual subject matter of the essay comes into play -- if a negative critic disagrees with the essay's point, he is going to judge it harshly. Even if he does agree with the essay, he's the fellow who'll gladly poke holes in the essay's points or evidence -- all the better to force the essayist to write a tighter piece next time, or so he thinks.

Case 2: A generally positive review of a webcomic's latest story arc.

The Scholarly critic would analyze the criteria a reviewer brought to his review -- examining the elements the reviewer found to be important and assessing the technique the reviewer used to develop his overall opinion. The scholar would likely take a scholarly interpretation of the webcomic itself -- as well as other reviews written about that webcomic -- and use it to illustrate the reviewer's philosophy.

A Reviewer might review the review (man, this is getting funky to type) both as entertainment -- was the review worth reading on its own merits? -- and as a statement about the webcomic. If the (second) reviewer disagreed with the first review's contentions, he may well review the webcomic himself as a means of highlighting the areas where the first review was weak, and use that as evidence to demonstrate the review's effectiveness (or lack thereof). These kinds of things can get heated.

A Negative critic will attack the review's weak points, obviously. Much of the time, this will be fueled by a disagreement with the review's result. Perhaps the negative critic hates the comic the review spoke positively of, and therefore the negative criticism will lash into those points the review makes to support its positive impression. Or, perhaps the negative critic thinks the areas that the review found to be weak were in fact not weak, and so the negative critic punches holes in those arguments. Or perhaps the negative critic will just think the reviewer had his head up his ass and make fun of perceived sexual preferences. It's been known to happen.

Case 3: A snark filled rending of a webcomic's failings.

The Scholarly critic might well analyze the snarker's underlying intentions -- perhaps looking at more than one rant to find commonality. Or the critic might examine the use of humor as a means of blunting (or sharpening) the hostile intent of the negative criticisms.

The Reviewer, as always, will look at the effectiveness of the rant. Many of the most vitriolic negative essays on the internet are meant primarily as entertainment. Television Without Pity doesn't lay into its subjects because they really hope the producers of America's Got Talent will reform their ways. They're trying to entertain their readers. A reviewer will look to see if they manage it -- and will try to tell the difference between a hate filled genius with words and a subliterate monkey hurling feces against the wall.

The negative critic, naturally enough, is there to tear into the snark filled rending with choice criticism of their own. All too often, negative criticism fails to be convincing -- in part because often a negative critic thinks his criticisms are self-evident (The E. Burns-White Principle of Discourse: any time you think something is self-evident? It isn't.) and therefore are unsupported. Or sometimes the snarker's points are (to the negative critic) just plain wrong. And of course, sometimes the techniques they're using detract from their point instead of make it, and the negative critic helpfully points those problems out.

For the record? I have written criticisms of all three varieties for Websnark. No one is superior to any other. I'll admit I usually strive to be a first definition (scholarly) critic, in part because that's what I enjoy. I certainly do indulge in review now and again (the "State of the Webcartoonist series" is nothing but review, really). And every so often, my essay is just there to point out something I think is wrong. Also for the record? Everything I write is meant to at least entertain. Maybe some essays are meant to entertain smaller audiences (I doubt the audience for this particular essay is as broad as, say, my essay on Garfield without speech balloons), but they're meant to entertain someone. And when I put something up, I'm opening it to the scholarly discourse, presenting it for others to judge, and inviting folks to tell me just how wrong I am. Just like every other website on the world wide web. It's the nature of the beast -- when you produce, even if what you're producing is criticism, you become grist for all kinds of critical mills.

2,700 words on critical theory. Jesus, we really are back in 2005 on here.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:40 PM | Comments (26)

August 20, 2008

Eric: Man. Internet drama. It really *does* feel like 2004 again.

So, despite my near total collapse of posting, I do still get e-mail every now and again. And some of it asks about current webcomics doings or controversies or the like. In a lot of ways, it's like people poking at an old wasp's nest with a stick. Maybe the nest is empty and long abandoned, but maybe, just maybe a big ass swarm will sweep out and start stinging everything in sight! And that'll be fun to watch, right?

Anyway.

The hootenannie I'm currently being poked about involves Scott Kurtz. Which, to be honest, is not an unusual situation. See, ultra cool fun person Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed How To Make Webcomics, the book Kurtz and his fellow Halfpixelites (Halfpixies?) put out. It was a mostly positive review, definitely recommending the work, but it did point out some things Carlson thought were weaknesses, including the section on dealing with online critics.

Kurtz -- ironically, given that it goes against most of what the section writes on the subject -- responded to those criticisms on his site.

More stuff happened after that. Apparently the Webcomics Weekly podcast this week got into it too, though I haven't listened to it.

Why do I get pinged about this? I'm a critic. Obviously, I must have an opinion on this issue. And it's true, I do. I have several, as it works out. But I'm not going to write about them, save how they potentially illustrate a point about Scott Kurtz.

A quick aside. Kurtz gave me an early shout-out that absolutely made the site, as far readership goes. I have always been and continue to be grateful. As a second aside, Kurtz and I have gone through periods of high contact -- and periods of no contact at all -- and I consider him a friend. He's good people. That's the kind of thing you need to stick in as a disclaimer when you write something like this.

Whenever -- whenever -- I see Kurtz go off on someone, regardless of the situation and regardless of the justification, my heart just sinks into my stomach. Not because I think he's necessarily wrong, but because there's almost never a need for him to get involved in the first place. And every time I see it, I think the same thing:

God, I wish Scott Kurtz could just let his work speak for itself.

PvP is a good god damned strip. Ding is funny. How to Make Webcomics has become a must-read for budding cartoonists. PvP: The Animated Series was really well done. Essentially everything Kurtz has done in the last several years has been successful on an artistic and generally on a commercial level. If he's had issues, they've been more update related than anything else, and he's been seriously knuckling down on that.

But when someone posts a negative comment about his work, justified or not, it's like Kurtz is drawn to it. It's moth to the flame action, kids. He wants to defend his work. He wants to defend his opinions. He wants to defend himself. He wants to wade in with two fists of justice and make people see, God Damn it.

The problem is, that's almost always a mistake.

When we produce something -- be that a comic strip, a story, an essay, a painting, a building or whatever -- we are putting it out to the world. We make it as strong as we can. And when people see it, they're going to have opinions about it. Sometimes, those opinions will be harsh. Sometimes, they'll be glowing. Sometimes, as with the review I linked above, it will be a glowing recommendation that points out what the reviewer saw as minor weaknesses that don't diminish the overall recommendation. Sometimes, those opinions will be wrong-headed, full of obvious mistakes not only about the artist's intent, but the artist's execution. And sometimes, those opinions come from someone who doesn't like you and lets their dislike or disdain color their opinion of the work.

If the work we have created doesn't in fact suck, those opinions don't ultimately matter. The work is still there. The work endures opinion. The work can and does speak for itself. And if the creator has to respond to the opinions of others, his strongest response is always going to be "obviously, we can't please everyone. However, I'm proud of what I've done and I stand by it." Most of the time, he shouldn't even do that. By responding to criticism -- especially by responding with force or vehemence -- all you end up doing is A) making yourself look thin-skinned, B) drawing way more attention to the critic/jerk/whatever than they deserve and C) making yourself look insecure about your work.

C is often the key. There's a voice in the back of every creator's head that says "wow, this sucks. I don't know why you're inflicting it on the public." When someone criticizes the work, that voice gets incredibly loud. "See?" it shouts. "You suck! They know you suck! You're not fooling anyone! The jig is up! You can't fight city hall!" The voice likes a good cliche, you see. And if you listen to it, it paralyzes you. You lose your ability to produce. I've seen it happen.

And for some people, it's amazingly hard to just shrug and say "welp, that's life," and move on with their business. The voice just screams at them, and plays on all their insecurities, and makes it seem like any mitigation or negative comment is monumentally huge.

So you shout the voice down sometimes. You go to war to defend yourself and your work, because the voice is wrong and you know it's wrong, and you want to shut down the people who are feeding it. Only it doesn't shut them down. It makes the problem worse, and increases the number of people critical about your work.

Ironically, the advice that How To Make Webcomics gives here -- the very section that Carlson tripped on and Kurtz defended in the above mess -- essentially deals with that very voice. The approach the book takes, simply put, is to deflect these criticisms before they incapacitate you and prevent you from working on your strip.

Now, I'm one of those selfsame critics, though I (mostly) use the term's original meaning -- I'm less interested in what an artist does wrong and more interested in what the artist does. While I do indulge in review and opinion, I generally feel like I should wash my hands afterwards. Obviously, like most people who put their opinions online for the world to see, I'd like to pretend my wisdom rains down upon the world and changes all it touches. But, to be blunt, it doesn't and I shouldn't expect it to. The safest thing for any blogger to do is assume the subject of his essay will never actually read what he has to say. If the subject does read it, it's sheer hubris to think your words would make him change his ways. And as Kurtz himself said in his response, it probably shouldn't change his ways. It felt really, really good to have Kurtz say nice things about one of my short essays, but Kurtz didn't owe me that response. And Kurtz doesn't owe this essay any response, either. The only thing a critic has a right to do is publish his criticism. He has no right to expect readers, change or impact from his words. If he does have impact, that's very cool, but it should be the exception and not the rule.

And watching these various controversies over the years, I keep just yearning, over and over again, for Kurtz to just stop taking the bait. It doesn't matter what other people say about his work -- his work is successful. When someone has the wrong impression about his work, he should trust that the right impression will come with time and that his readers can tell the difference. When someone is sniping him or taking personal grudges out on him, he shouldn't lower himself to engage with them -- that just gives the other side credence. And eventually, he gets so used to going nuclear that he does it at any provocation -- like with this review. This was a good fucking review of his book. The only thing he should have said was "wow, Johanna Draper Carlson wrote a nice review of our book at" and been done with it. If he couldn't do that, he should have just ignored the god damned review. His book is selling like hotcakes, and it has their thesis right in the chapter Kellert wrote. Let the book speak for itself. It'll do that. It's a good book. Trust that it's a good book.

By going to war over this, Kurtz has given some potential readers a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the book. That doesn't do How to Make Webcomics any favors. It doesn't matter if Kurtz was right if people walk away conflating the book and an overreaction to a criticism, especially when the criticism was buried near the bottom of a good review.

More to the point, by getting out his loudspeaker and shouting about this, Kurtz managed to take a good review of his book that only a chunk of his potential audience would have read and turn it alchemically into a negative review of his work by virtue of his reaction which a much larger audience has now been exposed to. Blogs have talked about the issue, word of mouth has spread, it's good Internet Drama. Lots of people are freaking out over Kurtz's attitude towards critics. Others are going and yelling at Carlson for... well, for writing a review that recommended the book to her readers. The sheer feeling of stupidity surrounding this non-issue is palpable, and it was entirely Kurtz's doing. And it was entirely unnecessary.

Like I said above, I just wish he'd let his work speak for itself. It can do that. It's good work.

He just has to trust it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:27 AM | Comments (27)

Eric: Also, as far as I know I get to have sugar free lemon pound cake today. It's better than it sounds

On August 20, 2004, in the midst of a contentious political season, I got it in the back of my head that I should take another run at online journaling, which was now called blogging, which is a word that seems very strange given how entirely normal it sounds now.

The idea was simple. I would continue to use my Livejournal to stay in contact with the twenty or thirty people who had an interest, but I'd cut out the quarter-ton of dross I found on the internet. Instead, I'd do up a silly little Movable Type blog where I'd throw quizzes and funny pictures of dogs and webcomics that I found funny and other silly water cooler type shit.

My thought had been to call it stripping-the-web.com, because all the good comics names were taken, and I used to like Bloom County. (I've been rereading it for quite some time now, in various places, and to be honest it doesn't age as well as I'd expect. Not that there aren't still gems in amongst the not... so... gems. Um... I lost my metaphor. Sue me.) As a pure lark, however, I thought to check if 'Websnark.com' had been taken. It had struck me while I was in the process of filling out the registration form, and seemed like a good idea.

I was a little stunned to learn it hadn't been taken. It seemed purely obvious to me, after all. So, with a bit of a mental shrug (and recognizing 'Stripping-the-Web' would have been a terrible name) I went with that instead.

Now it's four years later. There is another contentious political season going on. There have been literally millions of words written on this blog, by myself, Wednesday and well over a thousand discrete commenters. I have had a moderate amount of Internet fame. For a while, we had sixty thousand readers a day. At least one of the posts on this blog incurred one point two million pageviews, all by itself. I have made friends, had arguments, caused and fueled drama, hopefully helped settle some, been called a dick, been called a genius, started a couple of webcomics of my own, worked with talented people, had people I deeply respect say they liked my shit, received the occasional death threat, and gotten myself the best damn wife on the planet.

And, you know, I also managed to lose most of that reader base thanks to a combination of my own burnout and the natural life cycle of internet attraction, but that I have no qualms about. That's how these things work, most of the time.

I can't tell you what the future will hold. I go through waves. Someone (Morgan Wick, really) made mention in my last post that the structure of it "took him back to 2004 or 2005," and that's about right, really. Somewhere along the way I stopped doing six minute "Jesus, look at the cool Achewood strip" posts, and right now I can't say why. Probably I lost sight of who I came to the dance with in the first place and decided that everything I wrote had to be meaningful. It's a damnable trap, it is.

On the other side of the equation, I think I've written some damn good things on this site... but part of the problem is repetition. How many times can I say Shaenon Garrity is fucking brilliant and not sound like a broken record? How many times can I throw out terms like Cerebus Syndrome or Bringing the Funny and not just sound like self-satire. You reach a point where you're writing what you think people want you to write and you're aping yourself. And honestly, who the fuck wants that? Not me, and I'm sure not any of you.

So things slowed down, but they never really stopped. And God, I hope they never do.

There's still something like a thousand plus pageviews a day, even at the end of the six and a half weeks I didn't write on here. And yeah, that's not sixty thousand, but it's also not six. I've said before that it didn't matter if you had three readers, thirty readers or thirty thousand readers -- you have readers, and for a writer there's no better thing in the world.

I'm four years older now. I'm a married man. I am, to be blunt, middle aged now. And while there are ways I feel like I've just started Websnark and I'm exactly the same person now as I was then, the truth is I'm not. In so many ways I'm not. The big ways, like the beautiful woman who's in the kitchen as I type this (I'm writing it well ahead of its post time) making bread from scratch. The small ways, like the strands of grey in my beard. My attitudes on a lot of things have changed along with all of that. And the attitudes of the world have shifted a bit too -- there's damn little "gorsh, there's comics on the web now! Bang zap boom!" going on these days. Fewer and fewer of the people just starting out in comics even intend to try to get in the newspaper -- there's just so little reason. More and more webcartoonists make their living off their cartoons, and there's reproducible models for success now. You don't have to be Scott Kurtz or the Penny Arcade folks to quit your day job.

And Jesus. Look at what some folks have done in the past four years. Penny Arcade's got a multi-million dollar charity that gets yearly national television coverage. They also have two yearly gaming conventions, and more and more game companies are treating their Expo as the must-attend con of the year. E3-Shmee3. Phil and Kaja Foglio dropped out of pamphlet style comics, focusing instead on graphic novels and the web, and from all appearances are prospering. Rich Stevens inked a sweetheart deal where he got to do Diesel Sweeties on the web and have it appear in newspapers, while retaining his merchandising rights and his ownership of the strip... and decided after a while that it was too much work, so he dropped the newspaper strip in lieu of devoting more time to the real moneymaker. The Revolution is over, kids. We won. Everything else is sour grapes (on either side and sometimes both).

When I started Websnark, I was lucky as shit. I got some high profile links early on, and while I wasn't the first person online talking about webcomics, it was still a novel concept. That helped me get traction and establish a voice at a time where you didn't need a megaphone to be heard over the din. Today, there are... [does some quick calculations] ...a fuck-ton of blogs about webcomics. Blogs that make fun of them. Blogs that tear into them. Blogs that kiss webcartoonist ass. Blogs that report webcomics news as straight as they can. Dude, there are at least two blogs entirely devoted to Superosity right now.

Oh, which reminds me. Not only has the Keenspot Gang of Four become a full on family run business, with Gav Bleuel completely separated from the online syndicate... but Chris and Bobby Crosby have done hit the jackpot, with one of their joint webcomics projects being adapted for a full length live action movie -- from all accounts, really being adapted instead. Across the border into Canada, where the winters are could and french fries are covered in gravy and cheese curds, Ryan Sohmer's apparently got a full Teletoon-sponsored version of his comic heading to Canadian television. Webcomics are rapidly becoming just another breeding ground for the ravenous beast that is the Entertainment Industry.

So what does that mean?

Well, for one thing, it means we can all stop taking things so fucking seriously all the time. I gave up drama a while back, and I've mostly stuck to that, and I've found I enjoy things a lot more than I used to. It means that the chances that Websnark -- or any largely webcomics related blog -- can claw up to almost six figures of readership again are pretty damn low. There's too much out there, which means there's too little need to congregate at one writer's doorstep. It means that there's no need to do this kind of thing... except of course if you enjoy doing this kind of thing.

Which amusingly enough means that Websnark's best case for moving forward... is exactly the same as when it was started. There's always a place for a writer to write about shit he finds interesting or amusing on the web. No pressure, no expectations, just "look at the funny picture of a dog! It's funny." At the time, I was hopeful thirty people would read it. Right now, on a good day there's still a few thousand who do. Either way, it's heartening, and I hope people still have fun.

How long will this phase go? I dunno. Maybe two days, maybe another full year. And then what will the next look like? I still don't know.

I just know this -- I still like to write, and I still like to find amusing things, and I still have a lot of opinions about shit, and I'm still not shy about combining all of those things into a delicious paste.

Here's to four years. Here's hoping there's four more.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:00 AM | Comments (19)

August 19, 2008

Eric: Visit #3, Drilling #2

It was, in the end, a cheerful appointment.

"This is looking great," the dentist had said. "Your teeth are in great shape. There's a little bit of softness in a couple places, but you should feel good. You're going to have these teeth all your life, and not in your hand, either."

"Well, that's good," I had said. "Right?"

"That's very good," he had answered. "Very, very good. Okay -- wait here, and the office manager will pick you up in a couple and do followup planning with you."

"Good enough."

And she did indeed come and get me. And she did indeed do followup planning.

"Wait... I need five followup appointments?"

"Yup! Three sets of fillings and a two-stage cleaning."

"But... the dentist had said my teeth were in great shape."

"I'm sure they are," she said. "That doesn't mean we don't get to drill them."

That was two weeks ago. Last week I'd had the first set of drilling done, and stage one of the cleaning was yesterday.

Today was the second set of filling stuff. It's all 'soft spots.' Places between teeth, especially out back where flossing ain't so easy. I sat in the chair that put me upside down, they put vacuums in my mouth, gave me a cherry based swabbing that started numbing me and filled my face with Novocain.

In the end, it's the sound that's unpleasant. The sound, and your tongue dries out because you're holding your mouth open for so long. Every one of the dental chairs also has Dish Network, and while they worked, they discussed the episode of Oprah that was on.

I am sitting at the nearby Starbucks, where Weds was waiting while they worked on me. My face is mostly numb. I have seen Oprah. There is a bad taste in the part of my mouth I can actually feel. And there is crap on my teeth waiting for me to get home so ironically I can brush it off. It seems like it must be part of their plan.

We endure. We endure drilling and cleaning and Oprah, and get things dealt with before they hurt and before they're a problem or an emergency. We endure, because we are grown up, and grown up people get their oil changed, buy food for its fiber content, know our insurance agent on a first name basis, and get their teeth taken care of before it's a problem.

And yet, when we get home, we're going to watch Power Rangers: Jungle Fury on the TiVo. We may be grown up, but we're also Generation X. And adulthood is best done in small doses. Besides, R.J. rocks.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:26 PM | Comments (3)

August 18, 2008

Eric: A brief note, referring to a New Englander of note.

Many people, too numerous to count, have quoted "The Road Not Taken," written in 1916 by Robert Frost. When they do so, almost inevitably they quote from sections of the final stanza, which I shall reprint here:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I?
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

When people make reference to this poem, it generally reflects upon a choice they or someone else has made -- often though not exclusively the decision to be a writer or artist instead of some kind of... I don't know. Non-writer or artist. They see this as romantic -- the celebration of the non-conformist and non-traditional. They even refer to the poem as "The Road Less Traveled." Seriously. It's remembered as "The Road Less Traveled" way more often than it's remembered as "The Road Not Taken," and with good reason. The incorrect title celebrates the choice that is made. "The Road Not Taken" harkens back to the choice that didn't get taken.

And that would imply... doubt... as to the glories of the choice that has been made.

Let us go then, you and I (when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, but I digress), and examine the poem as Frost himself wrote it, not as we remember it. Let us start at the very beginning, and consider what is said:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

If we go with the allegory of choice, the voice has come to a point of decision, and takes the time to consider where he would go, because he can only choose one path. Become a stockbroker? Or a poet? What to do? Which will take me where in life? What will bring me happiness?

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

He elects to do the unusual -- to go a direction most don't. In the allegory, his choice is not the easy one, but one perhaps less simple, less expected. He goes the way most don't. Though as he goes, he notices that his choice seems more mundane than expected. Perhaps this wasn't quite so bold and individualist as it seems....

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

He lies to himself, and says he can always go back and be a stockbroker later. He's young. There's time! He can do what he wants! At the same time, as the autumn has come and spread leaves upon the trails, both routes are somehow made new. No one has seen either path the way they currently lie. If we indulge in metaphor... in the end, it doesn't matter which choice you take: the expected choice will still have unexpected twists, and the nonconformist path in the end isn't all that unusual. There is no innate moral, ethical or artistic superiority in making the less common choice. The stockbroker can be just as happy and just as creative as the artist, in the end.

And that brings us to that same last stanza we quoted above. I repeat it here, to be seen with the perspective of the rest of the fucking poem it's part of added to it:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I?
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The voice doesn't sound triumphant or resolute now; it sounds resigned, and cynical. He will be retelling the story of his life one day -- and as you'll note, he's retelling it right now, making the future the present. The immediate. But he is not cheering, and not shouting. He is sighing. He had a choice to make, and he took the so-called rare and non-conformist route. He has learned it's just about the same path, through the wood and through life, as the normal path would have been. His bold move was an illusion -- his final clause ("I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference") ironic instead of literal. There was no real difference. None at all.

It is an ironic poem, and a cynical one, and one that puts the lie to all those who assert themselves all Walt-Whitmanesquely. Get over yourself, this poem says. Everyone is a special snowflake. And as we have learned from that modern tale of artistic merit, The Incredibles, when everyone is special, then no one is special.

Which means that Robert Frost's cynical observation on a life "less traveled" and his wistful thoughts of what life could have been have been transformed, alchemically, into a rallying cry for the very self-aggrandizing self-editing that Frost was mocking. The transformation is so complete that the very title of the poem is misremembered, no longer calling back what might have been, but instead asserting the superiority of the choice made.

Right here? This is poetry in the modern world for you.

Also, that bit about "Good fences make good neighbors" from Frost's poem "Mending Wall?" Yeah, he was decrying the use of isolation and division and the glib use of homily to excuse away the stultifying artificiality of the barriers we put between us, even in the face of the world trying to tear those barriers down. When you quote it without irony you're getting the fucking thing wrong. Just so you know. Kisses.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:58 PM | Comments (35)

August 15, 2008

Eric: As a matter of fact, I *am* colicky today and I *would* like a pacifier, thank you.

One of the various things Wednesday and I intended to do this summer was go to the San Diego Comic Convention.

We had all the stars lining up to make that a go. We were newlyweds, whose marriage was bound up with comics in ways few can claim or hope. We had industry friends in the CGI and compositing industry offer to make us their guests, which meant we could get in through the front door without having to pay a cent. One of my coolest friends from my salad days in Upstate New York lives in the San Diego area and likely could have been hit up for couch space for us to crash. Essentially, we could have done San Diego, seen lots of folks and things we had always wanted to, and in general enjoy the convention for the cost of plane tickets and food.

And we just couldn't do it.

Which is not a complaint or a cry for help. We're doing just fine. But between a number of expenses ranging from immigration (including another $1,010 going to the federal government for the right to let them consider letting us stay married now that they've let us become married), medical (I have recurrent medical expenses and needed some high end testing done), dental (stupid teeth), automotive (apparently, brakes are important) and mundane (oddly, marriage doesn't change the fact that you have to eat on a regular basis, and we're short-sighted enough to still want Satellite Television), we just couldn't justify spending the money to fly to the West Coast just a few weeks after going to Las Vegas and actually having... you know, a wedding. We would have to see about next year.

As it works out, we missed... well, from all the various accounts I read, the absolute Apex of San Diego Comic Cons -- the Ur-Con, which forever shall be held up as an exemplar of the type. People had monumentally good times, across the spectrum. Just about everyone was there, and there is video evidence in various places that Jonathan Frakes and Avery Brooks serenaded and sang songs with some of the very cool people all over the freakin' place. Regrets? Oh yeah, I've got a few.

And, it meant I missed out on the Con Exclusive Giveaway for City of Heroes.

I've missed out on CoH swag before. I live on the East Coast, which means that I don't have opportunities to swing by the conventions they typically show at. And that's never bothered me -- whether or not I got one of the capes they were giving out one year had zero impact on... well, anything in my life. I don't begrudge swag.

But, well... this year's swag was different. This year, the swag was an add-on for your account. This year, the exclusive was a chance to actually alter your gameplay experience. This year the swag was a code that let you add a Freakshow Tank "temporary costume" to your characters, similar to the temporary costumes that we were given at Halloween. Only this time, it wasn't temporary. It was permanent.

This has led, as so many of these things do, to people losing their shit. The two positions are, essentially, "there should be a way for people who didn't get to go to San Diego to get this ability" and "this was an exclusive perk for SDCC attendees and there's no reason anyone else should get access to it."

The latter crowd has a darn good point. The Freakshow Tank Costume ability doesn't grant any benefits in gameplay terms. Freakshow don't mistake you for an ally when you're wearing it. You don't get a massive superstrength attack or the ability to hurl balls of electricity when you're wearing it. This doesn't even look like your character with Freakshow Components added to him or her. This is just the ability to look like a stock Freak Tank on command. This isn't even custom costume parts -- you can't add the giant sledgehammer hand Freak Tanks sport to your character's hand, for example. This is a purely cosmetic, extremely minor ability. Getting upset because you can't look like a Freak Tank is just silly.

The problem is, there is more to this than a question of gameplay benefit. There is also gameplay experience -- and that is a more complicated issue.

Gameplay Experience refers to exactly what it sounds like -- the experience someone who sits down to play City of Heroes has. It covers everything -- it covers the tactical game and attendant gameplay. It covers dancing in Pocket D. It covers the invention system and the auction houses and the storylines. It covers the interactions players have with each other in the game. It covers Supergroups and chat channels. And yes, it covers Role Playing.

This giveaway power in fact changes the gameplay experience for the person who gets it, in potentially the most significant way for any RPG -- the person with the power has more options than the person without it.

Not sure how? Well, consider the various character concepts:

• A Renegade Freakshow Tank who becomes a hero (or a freelancer)
• A person changed by a hostile Meat Doctor into a reluctant Freakshow Tank, looking for the chance to become human again.
• A knockoff/stolen Tank design being used by a freelancer.
• A member of a splinter faction of Freakshow who, as with lots of the factions, mostly beat up other Freaks when they see them.
• A person temporarily or permanently mind-switched into a Tank's body.

And many others, of course.

For those who play City of Heroes in part to work on character concept or character design, for those who actually role-play instead of just treating the game tactically, for those who like the chance to practice subversion, the ability to put on a Freak's skin opens up a lot of opportunities and options that don't otherwise exist in the game. Sure, you might be able to put together a reasonable knockoff for at least generic Freakshow, but that isn't the same thing.

That's the real crux of the debate, if you get right down to it. For most people who didn't (or couldn't) attend San Diego Comic Con, this was simply something they couldn't choose to have, either out of money or timing. For every other perk available for City of Heroes, you could either get the perk regardless of location through something like preordering (jn the case of the prestige sprints or the Arachnos helmets), being patient (both the sprints and the helmets become available through Veterans' Rewards, as do other custom powers), or money (people who bought the Good v. Evil edition, for example, get some bonus powers. Other players had the option of paying a nominal fee and getting those same powers. Similarly, the Wedding Costume Pack is available for cash). In the case of the Tank costume power, players could either attend San Diego Comic Con, know someone who attended and ask them to get them one of the cards, or do without.

Is there really a demand, you may ask? Well, if one looks at the central resource for checking on Geek demand -- eBay, naturally -- one sees that all of the SDCC code cards that have shown up there have sold or are selling for more than two hundred dollars apiece. Compare that with the swag from other years -- like the exclusive SDCC posters from earlier years going for a whopping nine bucks -- you can see the distinction. Whether for roleplay reasons, the sense of completion, the coolness factor or pure geek I MUST HAVE IT, people out there are willing to pay big bucks for the chance to make their characters look just like a Freakshow Tank.

On my side, I admit it. I would really really really like to have one of these cards. And I'm kicking myself -- not just because we could have gone to San Diego and then I would have one, and not just because Weds could have gotten one too and turned that into a $200 reduction in our trip expenses, but because I conservatively knew twenty non-CoH players going to SDCC and I think any one of them would have gladly hit up the NCSoft booth on my behalf, but I didn't pay close enough attention to the City of Heroes site to learn about all of this until after it was too late. So in every way I blew it. I do not deserve Freakshow.

At the same time, it seems weird to me. If people are willing to drop $200 on one of these codes, it seems very strange that NCSoft isn't letting those people buy one for $10 or $15 in their store, a la the Wedding Pack. If they charged ten bucks a hit, that becomes free money for them. If 500 people are nuts enough to pay that, then they have a sudden $5,000 surge in revenue. Not too shabby. If 5,000 did it, that's, like, a coworker's yearly salary paid for. And giving out swag in San Diego that other players would have to spend $10 to get still seems pretty old cool to me.

But, it's unlikely they'll do that. At this point, putting Freakshow Tank powers up for sale would be interpreted by the folks who *got* the SDCC codes as reducing the exclusivity of their swag. And they'd be right. too. It wouldn't be exclusive any more, by definition.

So. I entered the sweepstakes to get one of 10 codes from Massively.com along with thirteen hundred other folks. And while they haven't announced the names of the winners as yet, the fact that I don't have e-mail sitting in my mailbox declaring me a winner makes me suspect I haven't, in fact, won. Simply put, there ain't no Tank for me and, barring the Tanks appearing as a Vet Reward down the line there's not going to be one. Like listening to a live rendition of "Ain't Misbehavin'" sung by Jonathan Frakes and the chance to buy Avery Brooks a drink, the Freakshow Tank code is just another thing that happened at this year's SDCC that I missed out on.

I am hopeful, though, that this will turn into the ability to pay for some 'costume power' packs for various CoH NPC factions down the line. That could be really cool.

And then... there's this announcement on the homepage. There's another exclusive costume power up for grabs. This time, it's a Paragon Police Department hardsuit power, and it'll be available to attendees of both the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany and the Penny Arcade Expo. Exclusively.

Now, I used to live in Seattle. I have friends there. I could crash on someone's floor there. I'd love to show Weds the city.

But A) there's still that silly thing about plane tickets (and having seen $200 SDCC codes on eBay, the chances are very very low that the PAX codes will bring that kind of cash in. People know that trick), B) that's the weekend right before the start of school, and so we're killer busy down here and I don't have any chance of going away then, and C) going to a con that costs $30 a day on top of travel and food entirely to get a costume code is at best nuts. I'm not nearly enough of a gamer to make that trek.

And unlike San Diego, I don't have a pile of friends going to PAX. I don't know (as far as I know) anyone who's going to PAX. (Well, okay, I've had some brief contact with Gabe and Tycho in the past, and I understand they're probably going to go for a day or two, but I don't exactly know them and besides, I suspect they'd have other folks interested in their PAX codes) so I can't get a friend to score a code for me. My chance to get the Hardsuit costume power is essentially nil.

And that's frustrating, because it would be cool, it would open up options, it would improve my gameplay experience, and I would totally drop ten or twenty bucks to get one if I could.

But, wanting something doesn't mean getting it, now or ever. I just wish NCSoft were thinking a little more broadly than "how can we generate buzz at our booth this year."

(It's also frustrating that I did have friends going to Gencon this year, but unlike their competitors NCSoft didn't decide to hit that con this year. DAMN YOU MAX POWERS!)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:23 PM | Comments (14)

July 1, 2008

Eric: Sing a Song of Boing Boing: A Cautionary Tale

In March of 2006, I wrote an essay for this very site called Channel Markers. We were seeing an uptick in webcomics related blogging around then, and I wanted to give what benefit of experience I could to new folks leaping into the fray. I'm actually pretty happy with that essay even today -- I think it has some basic truths that can be the difference between having a moderately stressful blogging experience and having your head explode. I do not have any hints that lead to a stress-free blogging experience, at least if you're actually going to expound on things instead of simply discuss the disposition of your pets.

Not that there's anything wrong with discussing the disposition of your pets, mind. My cat Sarah is currently standing on the stove, eating some of her food, which she took carefully out of her bowl, moved to the stove, set down on the stove and started eating. This can't possibly end well, and I'm relatively certain she's insane. But I digress.

Anyway, "Channel Markers" was well received, and even today I hear from folks who say they liked it or got some value out of it. That's very cool. And they often cite the points they felt were most valuable to them -- points about etiquette, or not arguing on other peoples' fora, or being prepared for no one to comment.

There's one point, however, that almost never gets mentioned when people contact me, and that's sad because I think it's one of the most important ones. I reprint it here for purposes of convenience, bit by bit.

And while we're at it, we're going to talk about Boing Boing.

Don't try to rewrite history. Look, we make mistakes. We all do. Sometimes we post an essay and we get stuff wrong in it. Sometimes that stuff makes the whole essay wrong. Sometimes, we put up an essay innocently and it turns into a firestorm of controversy we never meant. Sometimes, we find ourselves in a crucible on all sides.

The temptation is to go back. Revise. Reword what we said. Take the essay down entirely.

It is never a good idea. Ever.

Boing Boing is one of the largest of blogs on the Internet. It is startlingly good at what it does -- which is point out things that they find "wonderful" (or as often terrible). Some very bright people write about some very cool things, from copyright and intellectual property issues to comic books to sex. It has iconoclasts like Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin. One of the best editors in Science Fiction (and best bloggers out there in her own right), Teresa Nielsen Hayden, is their moderator. The likelihood that you're reading this pissant thing and don't know about Boing Boing is trivial.

Well, Boing Boing wrote a few posts about a specific subject. What the subject is doesn't really matter to my post, so let's call it Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner. Which is not what it was about, but that's sitting on the sink next to the stove where the cat has moved some of her food so she can eat it, so it'll do for these purposes. These posts on Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner were done over time, and reflected interesting or controversial things that Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner were involved with, and Boing Boing wanted to write about it at the time.

Well. Over time, the good people at Boing Boing started to see Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner differently. They didn't like it as much, and they felt that some of its media tie-ins and statements made in its name weren't things they wanted a tangential connection to. They were afraid, among other things, that their posts about Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner in the past would be seen as tacit endorsement of Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner now, and that was something they didn't want to happen.

So, about a year ago, they quietly decided to "unpublish" their Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner related posts.

In other words, they took them down.

For better or for worse, we live in an ephemeral medium. It's dirt simple to pull down posts, delete comments, go through and re-edit after the fact. One of the truisms of creative writing is "writing is rewriting," and it's so simple to go ahead and edit edit edit.

The problem is, people have responded to what you wrote. If you go and change what they responded to, they're going to remember that fact. Even if you have the best of intentions, any editing or rewriting you do is going to come across as self-serving -- an unwillingness to admit to your mistakes. An attempt to make the record show you made no mistakes, so your critics must be wrong.

Have you ever seen the glee someone takes in posting a Google Cache copy of an original post you've since changed? It's particularly savage glee. And boom -- you have no credibility left. At all. In anything. Congratulations. You have just been demoted to punkass bitch.

Let's make one thing clear right now. Boing Boing did not commit censorship. Not in any way, shape or form. And those folks who claim they did are wrong, and look a little stupid. If the government (federal, state, county, local, shire or other) didn't force Boing Boing to delete all references to Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner, it's not censorship. Those posts were made by Boing Boing writers and published on Boing Boing servers using Boing Boing content management systems that distributed them via Boing Boing HTML, RSS and ATOM feeds. Boing Boing owns the hardware and the software that's on their machines. Boing Boing has the right to publish or not publish anything they darn well feel like on their servers. They released their content long ago, using a Creative Commons license (link is to Boing Boing's CC license and should not be construed as the CC license Websnark itself releases its content under -- my own CC license information can be found on the main page in the sidebar) so they can't stop others from republishing it on their own blogs so long as the license terms are followed, but that license doesn't force Boing Boing to leave that content where it can be seen. They have the right to take down any essay they like. Period.

Everyone got that?

Good. Let's move on.

The problem is not that Boing Boing did something wrong. It's not that Boing Boing has tacitly or explicitly rebuked Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner. It's not that Boing Boing has done anything actionable.

The problem is one of credibility.

Credibility is coin of the realm in blog terms. There is nothing more important to a blog. Blogs can have or lose popularity and they'll weather it, whether 30 people read it or 3 million people read it. But that blog is only as good as people think it is, and when you take down posts -- regardless of the reasons why -- you end up losing credibility when you get caught at it.

When a significant portion of your blog is devoted to questions of intellectual property, actual censorship on the web, ways to circumvent filters or other blocks on the material and in general being a passionate warrior in the fight for online rights and free access to information, the loss of credibility you suffer for deleting posts (especially without warning) is significant, because you can be seen as blocking access to information -- of trying to change history and the record. It doesn't matter if that's not what you meant. It doesn't matter if (as Nielson Hayden indicated in her post on this fracas) the information is buried somewhere in the Internet Wayback Machine on archive.org. You now come across as one of the people blocking the free flow of information.

In other words, you come across as a hypocrite.

And that's not ever a good thing.

And then, there's the deleted post. Or comment. Or whatever. You know the one. You made a mistake. You took a ton of heat for it. A controversy has brewed. It's not what you meant, at all. So you pull the post down. Maybe you post an apology as well, but you get the mistake out of the record.

Well. The people who hated your post don't forget it because you deleted it. They remember it. Only now, they remember their version of it. And their version of it is vastly worse than what you actually wrote. And they're more than happy to tell the world about this horrible version of what you wrote, and here you are completely unable to refute them, because you took down the evidence. Even if you put it back up, it's trivial for your critics to say "hey, they rewrote that while it was down!" You have absolutely no way to win if you do this. And all too often, you seem like a coward when you do it.

It's not right. It's not fair. But that's how it is.

There is a deeper level issue, of course. The ephemeral nature of the internet is liberating and free and wonderful in so many, many ways. However, that freedom comes with a price. The record can be changed, now. The dialogue can be edited by any participant, on the fly. It's easy to change the record.

And that is a very, very bad thing for scholarship.

I believe in the scholastic method. I believe in the dialogue. I believe that when we put our opinions and our theses and, yes, our mistakes out for the world to see, those words matter. I believe that even if I wish I could unsay something, I have said it, and people have heard it. People have read it. It has mattered to them. And people will remember it.

And I feel I have a moral responsibility to leave that record intact, because even if my opinions change -- even if I'm wrong in the first place -- the record forms part of the foundation for the discussion, and when you knock pieces out of the record, you weaken the foundation. You make it harder to do legitimate research. You obfuscate and confuse things.

And I believe, firmly, that I don't have the right to do that.

When people hit the web and research Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner, the things Boing Boing have said about Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner are going to be relevant to that discussion. And, what is more, people are going to remember that Boing Boing wrote about Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner. When they're reminded of citrusy ginger cleanser in other contexts, they're going to remember they saw something about it on Boing Boing, and they're going to go back to Boing Boing to see what they had to say about it. And they're going to do a search, and when they can't find Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner they're going to be confused. They're sure it was on Boing Boing. Where else could it have been? What else were they reading? They're going to hit search engines and try to find that tidbit.

They're not going to think "I'd better hit the Wayback Machine," because it wouldn't occur to them that Boing Boing would delete stuff. Not Boing Boing. They trust Boing Boing. They're just going to ultimately decide they're wrong, that they didn't see it on Boing Boing. And maybe they never saw it in the first place.

Yeah, when they learn they were right but Boing Boing changed their archive when they weren't looking? They're going to be pissed, because they felt stupid for a while there. Stupid because they were sure they were right but the evidence said they were wrong... and stupid because they trusted Boing Boing.

Like I said. Credibility.

The best thing -- the only thing -- you can do is post a correction. "I said this in my last essay. I was wrong. I didn't mean for it to go where it went. I'm sorry." If you want to absolutely make certain you acknowledge the areas you were wrong, add html strikethroughs to highlight the areas you were mistaken in. If you need to add a correction to the essay itself, put it at the bottom next to a clearly marked edit marker.

There's nothing wrong with Boing Boing's opinions changing. Hey, sometimes Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner becomes the devil. The lemony, lemony devil. And it's natural that Boing Boing would want to eschew the devil when discussing floor cleansers. The problem for Boing Boing comes when they change the record without acknowledgement. There are ways they could have made their changes without damaging their credibility. Changing the posts on Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner to a boilerplate post saying "this was a post on the subject of Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner. Our opinions on this cleaning product have changed over time, and we are no longer comfortable having this post on our site. If you want to see it, check the Wayback Machine." In a better world, they'd link to the Wayback Machine article in question.

In the best of worlds, they'd just append their changed opinion to the bottom of the original post, mind. But hey -- my idealism isn't everyone's idealism, and this post isn't about taking Boing Boing to task. It's about avoiding the nastiness. And there's a lot of blogs out there right now that are going nuclear over this, and a lot of folks on Boing Boing itself are. There are accusations (I don't know the truth of them, I admit freely) that comments about the Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner issue are being deleted off Boing Boing. There's anger and resentment.

And, most of all, there's that overriding sense of lost credibility. There are two excellent comments on Making Light (Patrick and Theresa Nielson Hayden's own personal blog) that summarize the consternation people are feeling. The first comment comes from user tim and I quote here:

I don't have a horse in this race (aside from being a visitor of ML, Boing Boing, and Metafilter)but from an outsider's perspective, all I see is that this discussion is getting bogged down in semantics when the following facts appear to be true:

1. Boing Boing has often commented negatively on obfuscation and "spin" against government, and corporations large and small.

2. Boing Boing is not a "personal website," by any definition I can think of, to wit: each of the 4 main editors have their own personal websites which are largely if not totally unencumbered by advertisements, where Boing Boing has a large number, and from a brief perusal, none of their personal websites claim to be copyright "Happy Mutants, LLC" -- which by definition is a corporation.

3. Retroactive deleting of (nearly) all entries and comments which even make reference to [Method® brand Lemon Ginger All-Floor Cleaner], and going on 48 hours without so much as a "our lawyers tell us to shut up" smacks strongly of the very types of evasion and obfuscation that Boing Boing has clearly, and regularly, taken a stand against.

4. This behavior by Happy Mutants, LLC is plainly counter to Boing Boing's long-standing opposition, and people have taken notice of this.

Now, whatever argument you may want to make of it, I think these 4 points of fact are accurate.

Obviously, the substitution of cleanser for the topic was mine, not tim's. The second comment comes from Andrew Wheeler and has some crunchy supporting links:

In the interest of determining what may be considered a fair view of Boing Boing's opinion on similar matters, here's one possible parallel:

Cory Doctorow, at Boing Boing, posts, approvingly but without commenting himself, a message from "JFarber" complaining about The New York Times, a privately owned media company, changing their web archives without notice or explanation.

Boing Boing is a privately owned media company which has just changed its web archives without notice or explanation.

To quote "JFarber" from that post: "Is it common journalistic practice to change old articles like that?"

The way I'd frame this is to say: if Boing Boing wants to operate as a media watchdog, they need to be careful about not doing the same things that they complain about when other media outlets do it. They are a company that puts out a regular media product: yes, it is free (but so is The Village Voice), and yes, it is on the web (but so is Slate). A lot of people, Boing Boing's principals among them, have been arguing for a decade that "blogs" can be just as serious and just as professional as any other media outlet, so hiding under the skirts of "it's just a blog" at this point is, at best, disingenuous.

Credibility. Perceived hypocrisy. And, just maybe, a sense of disappointment. And these weren't very vitriolic comments. You can find some unbelievably nasty ones out there if you go looking.

If it can happen to Boing Boing, it can happen to you. And it's why this particular channel marker is so important to a blogger -- the rocks it warns you off of are jagged indeed, and bigger boats then yours have taken damage from them.

When I wrote "Channel Markers," I finished this point up like this:

We all make mistakes. Sometimes, you have to own your mistakes, in order to keep your credibility.

Two years later, I have nothing I can add to that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:41 PM | Comments (44)

June 17, 2008

Eric: I roll to disbelieve.

If there is a book I have bought more often than the Player's Handbook, I'm not sure what it is.

Understand, it's not that I've bought the same book multiple times. Mostly. The original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook I did, of course. I wore two of them out, and later I got a PDF of the thing. And I think I bought a couple of Second Edition over time. But stepping away from that, I've gotten pretty much every new edition that they've thrown in my direction.

Which has sometimes been a joy, mind, but as often -- especially recently -- it's been an obligation. I'll admit it. I never really cottoned to either Third Edition or "3.5." And it's made me wonder sometimes if somewhere along the way I actually grew old.

And that's something of a digression.

Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of my life for essentially all of my life. Some of the things I bought when I first got into the game -- in the seventies, mind, with the Dragon Box Dungeons and Dragons that was simultaneously a precursor to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Basic Dungeons and Dragons -- were for the original three book set that Gygax and Arneson put out long, long ago. I've read that original set (I own facsimiles of that too) along the way, and locked well away I have myself Gods, Demigods and Heroes -- one of the cool Original D&D supplements, bought back when that kind of thing could be found on hobby store shelves, over by the Judges' Guild supplements, near the Traveller, two shelves down from the Avalon Hill wargames and across the aisle from Boy Scout supplies, model rocketry kits and balsa wood. My earliest dice wore down into marbles. I have dozens of RPGs I've never come close to playing. I own some of the least useful AD&D products ever developed -- I own both the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. New books for the ol' D&D -- especially when they were hardcover instead of perfect bound -- were a happy find for literally decades of my life. Softcover could be cool, but a D&D hardcover book was an event.

Third Edition wasn't like that for me.

It had been some years since my last Second Edition campaign had ended as all campaigns do -- by people gradually finding other ways to spend their weekends. Oh, I still had an interest -- but GURPS and Hero and White Wolf products had long since filled the casual "devour the book and distill the concepts into my understanding of the roleplay omniverse" gap that once had puzzled out Nonweapon Proficiences and Weapon speed factors. When I moved out to Seattle, I moved in with a hardcore GURPS fiend. And Seattle in the 90's wasn't exactly a mecca for the old school. The cool kids didn't make graph paper maps and wield +4 halberds. The cool kids made Ventrue and Malkavians and dressed in vintage clothes and tried to score with Goth chicks, and while I liked White Wolf that wasn't really my scene, and over time I fell out of some of the old habits.

And then I came back to this side of the country, and the cool kids stopped being so cool and there was a resurgence of the old school aesthetic and then there was third edition -- one for the new millennium. And like everyone else who once rolled twenty sided dice for twenty six hours in a row, I snapped it up.

And... my brain just didn't glean it. It seemed like a mass of numbers to me. Part of the problem was the graphic design -- some moron at Wizards of the Coast thought it would be a good idea to print black text on brown backgrounds, reducing contrast to the point where reading these things invited headaches. And there were feats and prestige classes and THAC0 was gone only there was something else and....

...well, I got used to it. I had to. By now, I was actually writing stuff, and d20 was the order of the day in a lot of ways. And that was monumental too -- Wizards had opened (most of) their rules up, so anyone could develop for them, and a lot of people did. And I got the hang of d20, and d20 Modern, and d20 Future, and Superlink, and True20, and lots of other variations that sprouted from the giant oak of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. When the v3.5 Players Handbook came out, I was a little disgruntled -- hadn't I just bought one of these? -- but I sucked it up and bought the thing. And when I read through the rules -- even the ones that were hard to pick through or that broke my brain -- I could still see the game that had formed part of the foundation of my life, all those years before. I could still figure out exactly how I'd adapt my game world (ah Arthe. How I miss you) for this new setting. And when the good folks hammering out OSRIC and other open source versions of first edition AD&D started doing things, I felt old stirrings in the back of my brain. Sure, I was old now and I couldn't get excited for these things any more and there seemed like way more bookkeeping now and man, really, 3.5 but at the very least, I could be nostalgic.

And like a lot of people, I looked at the prospects of a fourth edition warily at best. The developers proudly talked (in at least one case) of how much they hated the old 1st and 2nd edition rules, and it wasn't until 3rd edition that they really began to like this thing. We heard the rumors -- this was going to be a backport of World of Warcraft. They were going to abandon the foundations that have made the game! Magic users would be remade from scratch! Gnomes were being consigned to the Abyss! All was chaos! All was chaos!

Hell, look at the masthead. I changed it to "Protected Gnomish Habitat since 2008" some months ago, after I heard about the Gnomish exile. That's the kind of thing an old man does, when he finds out what those damn kids were up to.

And that... well, that's sort of what it all felt like, to me. Punk kids -- most of whom weren't alive when I was running extensive campaigns -- had taken the reins of Dungeons and Dragons, and clearly didn't care about folks like me. And why should they? Galavanting around the Flanaess is a game for the young, Doctor. Leaving us relics behind was just part of the cost of doing business.

Most galling of all, however, was this sense that this was going to be a new game -- not an update or a new edition, but something entirely new, seeking to tap into those millions of people playing World of Warcraft. They talked about how the new game would follow MMORPG conventions, all the better to make the tabletop experience a seamless transition from their computers. And no one seemed to care about what was being lost, not when there were new markets to tap.

But, I kept mostly quiet about these fears. I wanted to see what would come of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. Would it be D&D in name only?

And now I've seen it. I have read the books. I know the new edition. I now know who was right -- the fans rabidly anticipating the new books, and the fans dreading and castigating it as a false pretender to the throne.

And interestingly enough... they're both right.

I am reminded, in a way, of White Wolf in 2003 and 2004. Having gotten themselves so choked with continuity cruft that one couldn't throw a stone on a street without hitting three or four supernatural monsters with dark intent and angst-ridden hearts, they decided to take their various Worlds of Darkness and end them once and for all, publishing both sourcebooks for individual storytellers to run Ragnarok and novels detailing the "official" end of the world for each of their game lines. And, once this was done, they released a new World of Darkness, with entirely new rules and a new setting and new basic tenets and emphases. White Wolf hoped their players would come along for the ride, but they had little intention of bringing the characters into this new world.

So it is, in the end, with the new Dungeons and Dragons.

The core of the game is simplicity. The rules are at the least familiar, but character progression is now standardized -- almost cookie cutter. Classes all progress in abilities at exactly the same rate. Level one character from 1 to 20, and you can level any character from 1 to 20. Powers are broken down by the rate you can use them. At Will powers can be used every time it's your character's turn. Encounter powers can be used once an 'encounter.' (Essentially, once in any given battle against a specific set of foes.) Daily powers can be used -- you guessed it -- once per game day, like spells used to be. So, while a fighter's at will powers involve specific maneuvers where they hit people with metal things, a ranger's at will powers involve shooting arrows into their enemies and a wizard's at-will powers involve things like magic missiles. As promised (or warned), the roles of the different classes are far better defined -- and do indeed follow MMORPG standards. Fighters and paladins are defenders, who draw the attention of their foes and have the fortitude to withstand the most deadly of blows. In other words, they're tanks/tankers, and their job is aggro management while other people kill things. Clerics and Warlords are leaders, who "inspire, heal, and aid the other characters in an adventuring group." In other words, they're the buffers. Rangers, Rogues and Warlocks are the strikers. They do the damage to single targets, hitting them with massive blows. (Warlocks at range, Rogues up close, and Rangers one or the other depending on what they specialize in.) By any other name? They're DPS. And Wizards are controllers, locking down enemies and laying down damage over groups instead of individuals -- so, area effect damage plus debuffs plus holds. The press materials promised that all party members would have something to do every time play comes to them, and that much is true -- the balance of at-will, daily and encounter powers inside the above roles means there's always something to do. And it feels like nothing so much as click powers in a tray in an interface.

A lot of the names are the same, but that doesn't mean the characters are. For example, Paladins can be any alignment now, and any race now. In a game where once it was insisted (by Gary Gygax himself) that there was never a reason to champion chaotic evil and so there would never be an official anti-paladin NPC, we now have chaotic evil paladins. Rangers are, as mentioned, strikers. They can lay down immense damage and all their abilities center around that fact. Which is good, because there's no real wilderness powers at all. They don't even need to take wilderness skills if they don't want to. (Amusingly, Belkar from Order of the Stick is now a perfect ranger -- he can be evil, he doesn't really have any of those tracking or wilderness skills, and man can he lay down hit points of damage.) Warlocks and wizards, far from having to manage their daily spells and utilize them when they'd best be appropriate, can fire off eldrich bolts and rays of enfeeblement every time their turn comes around if they want. Heck, it's going to take some folks some time to adjust to the idea that the fighter doesn't do the most damage in melee combat.

And let's not kid ourselves. This is a game of combat -- as much as the original D&D was, if not more so. This is not a game of out-of-combat nuanced roleplay and complicated social mores. This is a game where your character is an optimized killing machine. Yeah, you can take intimidate or bluff if you really want to, but honestly, you have a charisma score, do you really need more than that? Especially when most of the time, your intimidate skill will take a back seat to your Riposte Strike at-will power or a well timed Shadow Wasp Strike. Your characters will feel most at home in a darkened corridor, decimating all around them.

And honestly? That part right there seems like perfectly good Dungeons and Dragons to me. Yeah, not every DM did the dungeon crawl thing, but the dungeon crawl is the essence of the original game. Purple worms and beholders and kobolds alike existed to be slaughtered for their treasure and their bellies full of sweet experience points.

At the same time, one fear raised up is unquestionably true. This is not an update to Dungeons and Dragons. This is an entirely new game that happens to be called Dungeons and Dragons, and the sooner you get your head wrapped around that idea, the happier you will be. You may have played the same character since 1979, moving from Basic to Advanced D&D, then doing 2nd, 3rd and version 3.5 with him, painstakingly converting him each time. Shake his hand and put him in a drawer and wait for the next time someone wants to play one of those earlier games, because if you try to 'upgrade' him to the new game, you're going to find yourself with an entirely different character with entirely new powers and abilities that don't work the same way, and it can only frustrate you.

And, of course, if you play one of the classes that's absent from this version of the game, you're out of luck. Thieves are now rogues and are way better at killing than thieving (there's nothing that even says you need to take thief skills). Bards? Gone, with no real sense of whether or not they're going to return. There are 'power sources' in this game -- Martial for 'natural' heroes, Divine for Paladins and Clerics, and Arcane for Wizards and Warlocks -- with more coming, but none of them's going to be music. In fact, the ones we know about are psionic, elemental, ki, primal, nature and shadow. There will come a day that monks will be kicking ass again, barbarians and druids will return to the game and do that voodoo they do so well, and we'll even get fire types if we want them.

But... it makes sense, now, that the gnomes are absent from the game right now. In the older game, their best trick was being illusionists... and there is no illusionist, and unless 'shadow' will be an illusionist power source, there's not going to be. Illusions don't really fit the structure of the new game -- they're not used much as it is, and they don't fall into the same role structure as the others.

That's one of the hardest things to work out in this new game with the old name, really. It's not the changes to the rules -- it's the necessity of letting go of the past, as completely as possible, if you're going to embrace this game. Really, the two sides of this little dichotomy are best shown in something Scott Kurtz said over in the blog attached to PVP:

Guess what? Your 3.5 edition stuff did not disintegrate into a pile of black dust today. Get over yourselves. Nobody gives a shit that you committed all the old books to memory and figured out the math of the rules to totally max out your character. Nobody wants you at the table. We only invited you because you got all the books and so many goddamn miniatures.

As happens with Scott Kurtz, I was amazed at how many sides he managed to evoke all at once. On the one side, I completely understood why he said that -- he was taking a lot of crap from people because he was enjoying the game he had been playing, and he wanted to throw some cold reality on them. He's right. There's no reason anyone who wants to play an earlier edition can't go ahead and play an earlier edition. Hell, thanks to the Open Gaming License, development on the old edition proceeds apace in a number of places -- perhaps most successfully at Paizo, where the Pathfinder Role Playing Game is cheerfully revising the 3.5 rules into the next edition of the older game concept. And there's no excuse for trashing someone because he happened to like a game in practice that you despise in theory. None of our opinions are natural laws, after all.

On the other side... honestly, not everyone's ready to be philosophical about this stuff. Telling someone that his ten, or twenty, or thirty year old campaign world can't be effectively upgraded to the new edition of a game he's been playing for most of his post-pubescent life and he should "get over himself" is... well, cold. Callous. And only adds more misery. And misery begets misery.

As for me... I'm on both sides of it. Arthe as it has always been simply doesn't fit this new game. I couldn't revise it into the new rules if I wanted to. My old books haven't disappeared -- I could run an Arthe campaign tomorrow, but I can't do it in Dungeons and Dragons. I can only do it in Pathfinder, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (first or second edition). Dungeons and Dragons has left that world behind.

But on the other side... 3rd edition (and 3.5) did nothing for me. They were masses of badly contrasted text that I had to force my brain to follow. The things I really loved (Savage Species is a downright great book, for example) were rare. The game didn't excite me. I was old.

But this new Dungeons and Dragons is cool. I loved reading the books. I wanted to dive in and make characters and generate dungeons and get a group together. I want to play this game.

Reading these rules, I want to dream. I want to imagine. I want to build. And I want to fucking massacre me some kobolds.

Reading these rules, I am young.

And that makes me think that maybe... just maybe... it was D&D that was old. And like the phoenix, it could only rebirth itself in fire.

I don't know, man. All I know is, I can't wait for the next hardcover to get published. These three books just aren't enough.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:06 AM | Comments (31)

May 22, 2008

Eric: Life can be wonderful sometimes.

So, a week ago tomorrow I went to Canada for the last time in a long while, and while I was there I had surprisingly good mall Korean barbeque and saw the always astounding Frank "Damonk" Cormier and Meaghan "No Nickname" Quinn. It also seemed like we found a number of cool things to do in Ottawa for the first time, including finding a great restaurant that was actually open at midnight on a Friday, which would have been useful to know eighteen months ago and for the remainder of my visits.

At one in the morning Sunday Night to Monday Morning, I pulled back into my apartment parking lot with a vehicle crammed full of stuff and a woman. And finally, after years, she can just stay. She can. Just. Stay.

We are now aiming for the June elopement, and we are working on setting up the household. To that end, we're going to be starting some monumental eBaying in the next day or two to A) defray expenses both for this stuff and for the next month's... thing... and B) make some much needed room in the now-joint apartment.

When I wake up in the morning, she is there. And for the first time, I don't have to have that momentary bittersweet knowledge that within the next day, or week, or month she's going away again. She isn't. She's never going away again.

Life is good.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:17 AM | Comments (6)

April 21, 2008

Eric: I know, the thought I may have written more than is required will *shock* you all....

On Friday of last week, Wednesday and I had our interview at the United States Consulate in Montreal -- the last step in the long, long, ever so long process of getting our K-1 Visa approved so Wednesday can move to this country and the two of us can be married.

A friend of mine asked me if they asked us weird questions at the interview. You know, "what color is her kitchen" or "what side of the bed do you sleep on," with a view to proving whether or not we're a real couple or if this was a year long, expensive fraud we were perpetuating on the government.

To answer: no, they did not. This may be because when they asked us the first question, "how did you two meet," we talked and giggled for about ten minutes as we went through the long process, explaining Websnark along the way, with a diversion here or there -- I think it was safe to say we were able to establish ourselves early on as 'actually a couple.'

However, the interviewer seemed to know that when we walked in, as he grinned and said "I'm feeling jaunty today. What say we go from the end and work our way back?" In my time, I have never known a civil servant to feel jaunty whilst rejecting someone, so we had some hope at that point.

On reflection, it may have been my statement of intent to marry.

You see, I had to provide a letter, stating definitively that I intended to marry Wednesday. This is a very specific requirement.

So... I did.

But you have to remember... this is me.

I reproduce the letter here.

To Whom it May Concern:

On January 13, 2007, at approximately 3:00 in the afternoon, I proposed to Wednesday White at the 2007 Arisia convention in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States of America. At the same time as I presented my formal proposal to Ms. White, it was also automatically posted to Websnark, a popular commentary blog I created and which we both have written for. The online version, and the movie of the cartoon I had friends put together for me to formally propose to Ms. White, can be found at http://www.websnark.com/archives/2007/01/submitted_witho_1.html, and a copy of the post and the (literally) hundreds of comments wishing us well are included.

After the post, we retained legal counsel and began the process of bringing Ms. White to America so that we can be married. A process which is finally (hopefully) close to complete, which has both of us excited and happy.

Please let me be clear. Assuming that our Visa is approved, it is both my intent and my honor to marry Wednesday White. Our tentative plan, assuming all goes well, is to be married in June of 2008, well within the 90 day window required by the K-1 Visa. I am gainfully employed (the day I wrote this letter was my tenth anniversary at this workplace, in fact) at [my workplace], with full benefits including paid room and board to live on campus. Ms. White will be provided for while we find her work in America, and then we plan to spend the next several decades providing for each other jointly.

I am marrying Ms. White because I love her, because I want to spend my life with her, and because I want her to live with me, in the United States of America, the land of my birth. I look forward to your assistance in facilitating this process to the best of your ability.

Thank you for your consideration. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me at the above address, e-mail address or telephone number.

Sincerely,

Eric Alfred Burns
Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

The first person we saw -- the one who collected our paperwork and took Weds's fingerprints -- looked at me and said "I still intend to marry Ms. White" would have been sufficient.

Oh.

They also said "yes."

Within the month, Wednesday will live with me, and then we elope.

We won.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:55 PM | Comments (47)

April 9, 2008

Eric: Moments in Time: two two-day blocks. So, four days, more or less.

February 8, 2008

I was out of place.

Work had sent me to a week long training course, so for eight hours a day, I was in a small room typing on computers, learning ways of tweaking server configurations and remote setup. My trainers were good, the lessons were useful, the work was challenging enough to get my brain pumping.

Which left sixteen hours of the day when I wasn't in training. This included sleeping, mind, but even that was suspect, because the training was in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This, by the way, makes eminent sense for my employer. So long as I had the diligence to actually... you know, do my job when I was supposed to, Las Vegas is the least expensive city that the school could send me to be trained, outside of something I could drive to. And a week work of gasoline reimbursement might not be any cheaper, to be honest. I did a package deal of hotel, flight and rental car, and it was by far the least expensive package deal I'd ever gotten to go anywhere. Food, which was covered under expenses (or chargeable to my room -- which is backdoor expenses) was way less expensive for good quality food in Las Vegas than anywhere else. I was at the Excalibur, for example, and they had a strip steak meal available from seven o'clock at night until seven o'clock in the morning for seven dollars. And it was a good strip steak, I would add, with the appropriate good strip steak sides. The Excalibur buffet, which was well stocked (and actually featured on the Food Network as one of the best deals in town) wasn't materially more, and that was All You Can Eat. All told, I was saving my employers significant coin by flying to Sin City.

The Excalibur was... well, quaint. Opened in 1990 as a show and theme casino, it was a curious mixture of old school aesthetic and slick new Vegas theme fun. Its casino floor is expansive, and relatively bright and quiet. The mazes of slot machines chirped happily, of course. There were a couple of bars with live music every night, of course. But for the most part the Excalibur wasn't chaos and it wasn't decadent. It was almost homey. The Excalibur was more or less my speed.

This night, I wasn't at the Excalibur. A series of sky bridges connects the casinos at this end of the strip together -- the Excalibur, New York New York, the MGM Grand, the Tropicana, the Mandalay Bay, the Luxor and the like. And to be blunt, almost none of these casinos feel like the Las Vegas you see in the movies. They're grand, they're expansive, they're triumphs of Civil Engineering. New York New York is meant to be loud, like plunging into the streets of the Bronx during a party. The MGM Grand is, as the name implies, grand and expansive, and eerily quiet. (Not a bonus, to my mind, to a casino floor). It also has lions. It's interesting to look up as you're walking into a gift shop and realize that three feet above your head, through what at the time looks like a thin piece of lucite there's a black maned lion looking back down at you.

Lions are very large, by the by.

(Old school Vegas, by the by, did exist on our block, at the Tropicana. The Tropicana casino floor is mirrored and glitzy and cramped and looks like every movie you've ever seen about Las Vegas. It is exactly what one expects a Las Vegas casino to be. It was worth the trip, at least for one day.)

This night, I was at the Luxor. The Luxor is the famous black glass pyramid -- the theme is Ancient Egypt (technically ancient Thebes, but there were no pyramids in Thebes. On the other hand, it's frigging Vegas. Don't overthink it). The place is huge, and if the Excalibur is homey and almost friendly, the Luxor is sheer bacchanalia. Scantily clad dancers writhed on the top of gambling tables. Noise and lights and music were everywhere. The main bar was in the center of the room, and water cascaded down all around it. The casino floor was as loud as the MGM Grand was silent.

I was, to be blunt, overwhelmed. It was huge fun, but it was also out of my league and I knew it. But I was determined to enjoy myself.

April 7, 2008

"So, what's the matter?"

I shrugged to Chris, one of my coworkers. "I have a chest ache."

He arched an eyebrow. "You going to the doctor?"

"Yeah. It's really, really mild but with my heart problems even a really mild ache--"

"Absolutely. You don't take chances. Not with your heart. When do you go?"

"1:30."

"You sure you shouldn't go sooner?"

I shrugged. "It's really mild, and that's when they could fit me in. I'm staying next to a phone and I'll stay near people. If there's a problem--"

Chris half-smiled. "Sure. But you know. Don't take stupid chances, okay?"

"Since when do I take stupid chances, Chris?"

February 8, 2008

Now, I have a good gambling system. I go to a gambling floor with a crisp twenty dollar bill. I put it in my left pocket. This is my bank. At some point, I get it changed for ones, because ones are useful. When I go and gamble at the Casino de Lac Leamy in Quebec, it's way more satisfying because they give you the money as quarters and you can feed the coins into the machines. Las Vegas left quarters behind a long time ago, and even the penny, nickel, dime and quarter slots only take dollar bills. They figured out this meant they got more money.

I then put that twenty into different slot machines, one dollar at a time. I take my time. It's more fun with Wednesday because then it's about the banter, not about the gambling. The gambling is secondary. Gambling all on my own is, to be honest, a little bit dull.

Now, whenever you win in a current slot machine, you don't get cascades of coins (though the machines have the digitally sampled sounds of coins falling into their coin trays). Instead, you get that many credits added to your total. So, if you're playing quarter slots (which I prefer, on the whole), you have four credits for your original dollar, and however many credits after you play four times is what you have won off that machine. You then hit "Cash Out," and it prints a barcoded ticket with your winnings encoded onto it, which you can redeem at the bankers or at an number of machines spread throughout the floor. Or, of course, you can feed the ticket into a slot machine and keep playing.

That, by the way, is what they want you to do. They want you to "see how long you can go." If you do that, they're guaranteed to get your full twenty dollars from you, no matter how much you 'win' along the way. You're renting entertainment, and the longer you can go the better off they'll be -- especially if you're having so much fun that you decide to get another twenty dollars out, and then another twenty, and then maybe a hundred.....

I am their worst case scenario customer. I expect, going into the gambling, that said twenty bucks is going to go away. I expect not to win a thin dime. Whatever the machines return to me goes into my right pocket. Remember that my bankroll is in my left.

When I'm out of money in my left pocket, I go and redeem the tickets in my right pocket. Whatever comes out of the redemption machine is mine to keep, and I'm done gambling for the night. I never have to worry about selling my car to pay off my gambling debts. I enjoy lots of spinning wheels and noises. I can play everyone's favorite casino game "do you think that girl in the minidress is a prostitute," so popular in Vegas, where the answer is very often 'yes.' And then I hit the bar and have a couple, using my 'winnings' to fund that.

Because slot machines are designed to hook you in, you're going to get some return on investment from them if you hold yourself to a specific amount. At the Casino de Lac Leamy, up in Canada (run, I would add, by the Quebec provincial government. Now that's a lottery system), the slots are 'loose.' They pay out relatively often. In fact, when Weds and I have played twenty dollars worth of slots together, we've never failed to leave the casino floor with more money than we had entering the floor. That twenty dollars has been anything from thirty to sixty-five dollars, the three or four times we've done this.

I assume the Casino de Lac Leamy hates us.

Vegas slots ain't that loose. I was averaging $4-6 dollar losses each night, with one night I left with $26. Not a big deal. It was decent enough entertainment, though lonely without Wednesday. There's something vaguely pathetic about being forty years old and wandering casino floors by yourself in Las Vegas, feeding dollar bills into slot machines. And "is she a prostitute" becomes downright creepy as a game. Especially if they catch you looking, because if they are a prostitute, then that means they come over and solicit you. And honestly, that's an uncomfortable moment.

This night, I was in the Luxor, and "is she a prostitute" was unplayable, because essentially everyone was young and -- if women -- largely naked. The men were mostly in sportcoats and open collars. It was enjoyable, but a little over the top. If Weds had been with me, it would have been a blast. As it was, I felt displaced.

But, I was determined to have a good time.

Now, one of the things I had done was reserve little bits of my twenty dollar bankroll, each night, to "do the Vegas thing." That meant that one night (at New York New York) I played some Blackjack, to say I'd played Blackjack in Vegas. (I pissed off one of the other players for not betting smart enough. "We don't hit on fifteen when they show a five," he said, stabbing at the table. "We do not do that." I accepted his word for it. As it was, I broke even after five one dollar bets and moved on.) And I decided, while at the Luxor, that this would be my night to play a round of Roulette.

Now Roulette is a sucker's game. The odds are astronomically in favor of the house. You play Roulette because you don't mind losing. I found an electronic version -- people put X amount of money in the bank, they entered their bets on a touchscreen, and then a real, physical roulette wheel was spun by real, physical girls who paid winners in real, physical chips when they cashed out. It was 21st century, and old school, all at once. So I figured play five bucks spread out over various bets for a few minutes, take my losses and spend the other fifteen bucks at the slots, then retreat back across the bridge to Excalibur for some liquor and sleep. I was in over my head.

I did this for about three spins before I realized (there were no posted minimums) that I was at a five dollar minimum table. The system had essentially rejected all my bets, which were 'intelligently' done on things like 'even' and 'red.'

"Fine," I muttered, annoyed, and I slapped a bet. And it was the stupidest bet you could make in Roulette. I just wanted to lose my five bucks and get on with my evening, tired of this thing. So I bet a number. 23, to be exact.

Betting a number in Roulette is moronic, by the by. It's essentially the worst bet you can make in Vegas outside of betting on the Washington Generals to beat the Harlem Globetrotters. Idiots bet numbers in Roulette. If you look at the hardcore Roulette players, they play the safer bets I mentioned above, and they play corners or sides of numbers, in effect putting their bet on 2-4 numbers at once. If they bet numbers, it's out of superstition and never, ever the only bet they play on a given turn of the wheel. Only the kind of hayseed yokel who hits on fifteen in blackjack when the dealer's showing a five would play a number in Roulette as his only bet. Please, please, please. If you learn anything from my tale, learn this -- do not play numbers in Roulette. It's stupid.

So I finished, and I hit 'cash out.' A mere formality in my case, since I bet five and my bank was five, but this would close me out of the system and stop my Player's Club card from recording my activity there. (Yes, I have a Player's Club card. Telly Savalas would be proud of me, right up until he learned I played a number in Roulette. Then he'd be pissed and leave.)

There was a flurry of activity, and the attractive woman carried over a small tray of chips of various colors.

I blinked, and looked more closely at the screen.

I had cleared $295.

I looked at the number of the last bet.

23.

I had just hit on Roulette.

I was a winner.

April 7, 2008

My usual doctor was booked, and his partner had recently left the practice, so I was seeing a temp. Which was fine -- it was Doctor Fleet's handpicked temp, and I have a lot of faith in Doctor Fleet.

"It's a very, very mild pain," I said. "If it weren't in my chest--"

"We're going to run an EKG," he said. "We want to make sure everything is all right."

I nodded. "Makes sense. We don't take chances, right?"

"Absolutely."

So they taped electrodes all over my body, and I lay back, and then ran an EKG. And then they left the room for a while (after taking the electrodes off me) and I waited.

About fifteen minutes later, they came back in. "We'd like you to go over to the ER," the doctor said.

I blinked. "Is there a problem?"

"Probably not," he said. "But... well, we want to run a blood test for Troponin levels. That's an enzyme your body releases when there's damage to the heart. It's probably nothing, but we want to see -- we want to just make sure everything's okay -- and if you go to the ER you'll get the test results back more quickly."

"Oh. But it's probably nothing?"

"Probably. But we want to make sure."

So I took a copy of the EKG over, after they called ahead. I went into the outpatient ER queue.

And I was moved to the front of the queue. Which surprised me a touch. I told each new tech or nurse the symptoms ("On a scale of 1 to 10? The pain's probably just a 1 or a 2. Really, if it had been anywhere else on my body--")

They put me on a telemetry monitor. They took blood, and started an IV. They took another EKG. Everyone was very nice and pleasant, and no one seemed to be annoyed that this dumb hypochondriac was taking up time and resources.

I began to get concerned.

February 9, 2008

I was a little bit delicate, going to class the next day. Hitting in Roulette meant having more of a good time than I normally had been, including introducing myself to a couple of scotches with names I couldn't pronounce. This was the closest I was ever going to come to being a high roller, and I had fun with it.

I called Weds a number of times. She was amused, and excited over the win. I was missing her a lot but trying hard not to let that affect the good vibe. I'd god damned hit in Roulette.

That morning, though as I said delicate, I'd done some recalculation of budget. I'd paid off all my gambling for the week. I'd paid off some other personal expenses (the kind of thing that work wouldn't cover, like the Star Trek teddy bears I'd picked up for Weds. Don't judge me for my sappiness, damn it, they were cute bears). And at the end of everything, I had a hundred dollar bill in my pocket that was entirely outside of my budget. It was, in effect, free money.

I had not expected free money. And somehow, it seemed wrong to not do something with it. Something wild, and nuts. I was in Vegas and I was way ahead. And it was on a dumbass bet. Being an agnostic who enjoys superstition now and again, I tend to ascribe good luck in gambling to Fand, Celtic sea goddess, wife of Manannán mac Lir, Queen of the Faeries, and she who teaches ninjas to disguise themselves as pigeons. A decent amount of the Scotch the night before had been dedicated to her, which must have amused my bartender. Who, a couple of days later, I learned made an outstanding hot toddy, using Benedictine of all things, but I digress.

Weds, being smarter than I am, counseled keeping the hundred bucks. Or at most adding some of it to nightly revels. Bump my last few nights' gambling to thirty bucks instead of twenty. Or go see a show, maybe. Or hold onto the money and be glad for it in the weeks to come.

But that didn't seem right to me. For dumb reasons, but validly dumb. I had a hundred bucks above and beyond my budget... and I was in Las Vegas. No, I had an idea. A thing on the big list of things one wanted to do in Vegas but wasn't dumb enough to do, most of the time.

I wanted to play a hundred dollar slot machine.

Every casino had them, mind. One section cordoned off for "High Stakes Players." And I had budgeted for one moonshot slot pull -- a twenty dollar moonshot played in a high stakes slot machine, probably on my last night. If Fand or blind luck or what had you wanted to give me a big ass payout, I reasoned, I might as well give them one chance to do so. (The major jackpot on a quarter slot, generally speaking, is not materially more than I make in two weeks at work. I had not been playing with the Lottery dream of being rich in mind.)

Well, I had a hundred bucks in my pocket. Why not take the moonshot with that? I mean, when would I ever have a chance to put a hundred bucks on one pull of the machine again? I don't play in those leagues, and I wasn't going to.

So why not? Why not take this money I never expected to have and take one grand shot at the moon?

Slots, for the record, are about as safe as any Vegas bet you can play, which means most of the time they don't return very much. Obviously, most spins of the tumblers you lose. Welcome to gambling. But reasonably often, you do win. The machines work in "credits," which count as one of whatever amount is printed on the machine. On a quarter slot machine, each credit is twenty five cents. On a dollar slot, it's a dollar. On a nickel slot, it's a five cents. Most of the machines let you play more than one credit at a time, it's worth mentioning. Vegas likes money, and this was a way for people to spend it faster. I'm a one credit per play kind of guy.

So, it's not hard to hit a one credit payout on the slots, so that you get back what you put in. It doesn't cost the house anything for that, after all, and most slots players will just play again. It's not uncommon to hit 2, 3, 5 or 10 credits for one. I've hit 35 credits for a spin lots of times, which when you're playing quarter slots means an $8.75 payout. Nothing to write home about, but exciting at that one moment. I've even hit 100 credit payouts or more. Weds and I hit a forty dollar payout on a quarter slot once, which meant we hit 160 credits on the spin.

On the hundred dollar slots, one credit was a hundred bucks. Hitting a 5 to 1 would turn my $100 into $500. Hitting 35 to 1 would be $3,500. Hitting 160 to 1 would be $160,000 -- and no doubt a comped room and many opportunities to be a VIP. The casino would want that money back.

It was astronomically unlikely I would go home with hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was nigh impossible I would go home with more. (Many machines topped out with a 3000 to 1 payout on a 1 credit play. That's a cool $750 on quarter slots. On a hundred dollar slot shot, that's three million dollars. Seductive sounding, but it wouldn't happen.) But the chances weren't bad that I would get my hundred dollars back, or even turn it into two or three or five hundred dollars.

And it wasn't money I had expected.

And I would never have this chance again.

By the end of the work day, it was clear to me I was going to do this. In the land of suckers, the hayseed sucker who hit on fifteen when the dealer was showing five and was stupid enough to bet on a single number in Roulette was going to take a hundred dollar bill -- five hundred meals, if one bought Ramen noodles -- drop it into a slot machine, and take a shot at the moon.

April 7, 2008

"Here's the thing," Doctor Boucher said. He was the ER doctor on duty. He'd consulted with Dr. Fleet directly, mind. "If you look at this EKG from your doctor's office -- see this peak that recurs every little bit? Well, right here..." he pointed to the line in question "it doesn't. It stays smooth. Now, that might have been the placement of the electrodes. That might also just be normal for you. But it might -- might -- speak to something that's wrong."

"Okay," I said, lying in an ER bed. There were electrode pads all over me, now, and I was in a hospital gown, and there were tubes in my nose feeding me oxygen. Probably with absolutely nothing wrong with me, mind. But you don't take chances. Not with your heart. Not when I have so much to live for. The final visa appointment for Wednesday and I to cross the border and get married has finally been set, for the 18th of this month. We're that close to being done with this process (assuming they approve the paperwork, of course). Then we have her move in May, and then we get married, at least on paper, in June. (We have to be married within 90 days of the border crossing or they make her go back. And as it turns out, I have a conference I and my supervisor are going to be flying to in Las Vegas within that period. Since we're going to elope no matter what happens, and since paying for Weds's ticket to fly out as well is dirt cheap, why wouldn't we do the elopement in the elopement capital of the world?) So I have to be healthy. I need to be healthy. I need to live, God Damn it.

For the record? The good package deal in June was for the Luxor. I can show Weds the roulette table. I expect the casino floor to be more fun when I have Weds with me.

"Now, we got your Troponin test back," he continued. "And a normal Troponin level should be 0.01 to 0.05. More than that is an indicator for cardiac damage."

"And?"

"You're at 0.05. Which is in the normal range and may be normal for you. But it's borderline."

"Which means I've now had two tests showing anomalies?"

"And a history of Cardiomyopathy." The Doctor nodded. "We want to keep you overnight for observation. We'll take several more blood tests, keep you on telemetry and monitoring -- we want to see if your Troponin levels rise or fall. If you have actual heart damage, they should rise, and we can track that."

"Sure, of course," I said. "Whatever you think is best." I don't take stupid chances, I reminded myself. I have too much to live for.

They brought to the observation room in a wheelchair. I told them I really felt okay to walk, but they laughed and said "hey, it's a free ride, right?" It wasn't until later that I realized they had to bring me in a wheelchair. If I walked and that pushed me into a catastrophic heart attack, they'd have been liable because I was in with chest pain -- no matter how mild -- and they were having me walk. As with Casinos, hospitals want to keep as much money as possible -- they sure don't want to lose it in malpractice suits.

I was not, I was told, admitted to the hospital. I was in an observation room, because I was under observation. The major difference is the beds aren't nearly as comfortable as when you're admitted. They're essentially gurneys with a Craftmatic adjustable bed welded to them, narrower than a twin bed. If I had a heart attack, they'd easily be able to get people and defibrillators around it. If I had to be wheeled into emergency surgery or otherwise, it was just a matter of taking the brakes off and hauling my ass where it needed to go. It made sense in every way.

But it wasn't comfortable. Essentially every tech or nurse who came in mentioned that. I told them not to worry about it -- I was simply glad they were there. And I was glad.

I made sure Weds and my parents knew. I gave a friend my emergency contact list -- representatives of everyone I knew would need to get the word if something happened. (Something, you know, meaning 'massive heart attack and dying.' Weds, of course, who would also get the word out here on Websnark and on my Livejournal, if need be. My parents, of course. My big friend Frank, who would let the Ithaca/Syracuse contingent know.

I kept a copy of the contact list with me, just in case. It had been some years since I had made plans for these contingencies. I hadn't missed them. And I got both Dad and Wednesday on the "give information to these people if they call with questions" list.

And I settled in. They got my meds list, to make sure I got my pills. And I waited, under observation.

Feburary 9, 2008

I got back to the Excalibur. This was not a night to go scoping out other casinos, I'd decided. The Excalibur, for no real reason, was home for me. It was comfortable. The bartender knew me. The prostitutes knew I wasn't in the market.

I hit my wallet and got out twenty dollars. The hundred dollar bill sat looking at me, Ben Franklin's eyes looked amused. I left it where it was for now. First, we hit the night. Same as always. Exactly as expected. A twenty dollar bill became twenty one dollar bills. I got out my Player's Club card, and I began to walk the floor, finding games to play.

Always, I thought about the end of the night. The moon shot. The single pull. Should I wait? Should that be my last bet in Vegas before I headed out to the airplane and my normal life? Should I do it at all?

I played a game based on Wheel of Fortune. I played one based on The Munsters. I played Double Diamond. A dollar in. Four credits. Four pulls. Cash out. Pick up the ticket, and move on. Taking my time. Getting some decaf coffee -- complimentary, from a trolley circling the floor. Lots of things were complimentary when you were playing the games. Hell, if you play video poker at the Jesters' Club, and put at least ten dollars in, they'll comp you single malt scotch. They want your brain mushy, your judgement relaxed. That's why I was sticking to decaf right then. My judgement was questionable enough without liquor being involved, thank you.

A dollar into a machine. Hit the "one credit" button. Ignore all the things extolling the virtues of playing two or three or five credits. Watch the tumblers spin. Feel good when they line up in a way that makes your credits go up. Not worry when the credits just go down. Cash out. Ticket in the right hand pocket.

Look over the shoulder. High Stakes, the neon sign gleams. The home of the five dollar slots, the ten dollar slots, the twenty dollar slots and the hundred dollar slots.

And then I was done. My left pocket was empty. I went and redeemed the money in my right hand pocket.

Twenty dollars when into the machines. Seventeen dollars and twenty five cents came out. An hour and a half's wanderings and occasional playing, and it had cost me two dollars and seventy-five cents.

My wallet felt heavy. I took it out. Took out Ben Franklin. I put him in my left hand pocket, the return on the night to date going into my right.

I went for another walk, downstairs, to the arcade -- where kids were allowed. There were a lot of kids in town tonight -- some sort of cheerleading competition here in the city -- and it was disconcerting to see fourteen year old cheerleaders in the center of sin. But they weren't allowed on the casino floor. Smoking was allowed on the floor, and gambling and drinking. This is one of the rarities of rarities in today's world -- a place unreservedly for adults, where you went in knowing that if you saw something offensive, it was your own damn fault for going there in the first place. The presumption was you were making your own decisions, and no one but no one was to blame if you gawked at showgirls or prostitutes, lost your Mortgage payment playing craps or betting on the Knicks, and drank yourself half-blind on single malt scotch you were comped because you spent a hundred dollars losing at video poker.

The arcade was literally a carnival arcade. No video games here. Just token drop games, guess your weight games, throw the ball and knock over the pins games. It was, I realized, entirely devoted to teaching kids to spend their money on taking a chance -- shooting for the moon. Heck, you might get a prize if you were good enough or lucky enough! Gambling, legal almost everywhere for children of all ages. Preparing cheerleaders for that day, five or six years later, when they could come to town as adults and spend their time at tables with green felt on them.

I went upstairs, and got one more bit of coffee. I felt conflicted for a moment, and then I walked to where I saw the High Stakes sign.

April 8, 2008

It was early in the morning. My back hurt, and so did my leg. Sciatica wasn't happy with the accomodations, it seemed. Doctor Fleet was there.

"Your blood pressure and pulse are excellent," he said, grinning. "And it looks like your Troponin levels have gone down to 0.01."

"So I'm okay?"

"We think so. Do you still have the ache?"

"Well, yeah."

He nodded. "We should try Mylanta. And I want you to have a stress test, just to be sure. Schedule it with my office on your way out. We'll do a nuclear resonance test at the same time -- see your ejection fraction, make sure everything is good."

"Good. Yeah, we don't want to take chances."

"Exactly. I'm going to write this up, and we'll check your last set of test results.. Give us a few hours, and you can get out of here. Sound good?"

"You bet." I grinned.

"Thought it might." He went out the door.

And he's right. Things seem to be okay -- the ache wasn't likely my lungs or heart. It might be muscular, or my back (nerve endings do funny things in the body) or any of a number of things. We test. We rule them out. We don't take chances.

After a couple of hours, they did indeed spring me. I called Weds, and called my folks, and called work. I discussed the need for second opinions and other tests that should be done and the like. "You need to be careful," my boss said, worried about me. "You don't want to take any chances."

And I went home -- my boss insisted -- and I relaxed and let the stress out a bit, playing with the cat a little. She was right. I didn't want to take any chances.

But then, I never took stupid chances, right?

February 9, 2008

I walked into the area. It was oddly quiet -- very few people play the high stakes slots. I looked at the machines that were there. The five dollar machines, the twenty dollar machines... they all looked essentially the same as the quarter or dollar slots.

And, for that matter, like the small bank of hundred dollar machines.

This is nuts, I thought. Play the twenty dollar slots. You'll get five spins on that one, not just one. Play the quarter slots all night. Keep the damn money and consider yourself lucky.

I closed my eyes, and thought about the following week. Back home, in the middle of one of the more miserable New Hampshire winters we'd had in the past ten years. What would I feel if I played this and lost? What would I feel if I didn't play it? Was it better to have your stupidity confirmed or to wonder for the rest of your life what might have been.

I thought of that paean to gambler's enabling, "If–". I have to believe this poem has been responsible for more bad decisions than almost any other poem in literature -- not counting The Bible, anyhow. For those who don't recall, the passage in question goes like this:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds–worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And–which is more–you'll be a Man, my son!

It's a hideous thing, that poem. A Man done throw all his money into the pot and shrug when he loses. A man does everything right and nothing wrong. A man keeps going. A man does it well or doesn't do it at all.

And that poem or not, I realized that the recrimination I would feel for not taking this dumbass chance would be way worse than the shrug when this money -- that I had never counted on in the first place -- was gone.

I walked to the machine. It promised up to 10,000 to 1 payouts, which wouldn't happen, though in that moment you do stop and consider what ten million dollars would give to you. It had lots of payout options of at least 1 to 1. I'd already decided that if it returned 1 to 1 it would be a sign from Fand to keep the damn hundred, and I would, gladly.

I fed in the hundred dollar bill. But for Franklin, it was just like feeding in one dollar, except instead of four credits, it gave me 1. One credit.

I closed my eyes, feeling silly for feeling nervous.

I opened them. I hit the right button to put one credit on the line. I made sure my Player's Club card was in place, and I pulled the lever, watching the tumblers spin and the electronic sounds and lights as they played their cheerful tune for me, one last time that night.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:53 PM | Comments (36)

March 5, 2008

Eric: Lower the flags and ring the bells, across the Flanaess from the Sea of Dust to the old Great Kingdom: The Free City of Greyhawk knows mourning tonight

There's freezing rain outside, covering the landscape with little hard pellets. The weekend was spent in Ottawa, where the weather wasn't so hot most of the time but the company was good. Our valentine's day, to make up for a day of gifts exchanged and well wishes and expressions of love made four hundred or so miles away from each other with a national border between us. She is well, thank you for asking, and I'm fine as well, though I'm tired today.

Yesterday, I sat down to write my next State of, which should appear later today and was scheduled to appear yesterday, having been back (though I had scheduled that day off as well -- I'm old now, and an Ottawa trip usually takes me a day or so in recovery before I'm back in the saddle), but before I could do that I followed up on some e-mail, and that's how I learned that Ernest Gary Gygax had passed away at the age of sixty nine. On Gamemaster's Day, no less.

Well, all apologies to Brad Guigar and Evil Inc,, but at that moment I didn't really feel like writing about his webcomic. I didn't feel like writing anything. I was stunned. Honestly stunned. I couldn't get my brain around the idea. Gary Gygax was dead?

Gary Gygax was dead?

For those who came in late, Gary Gygax was one of the seminal figures in adventure gaming and fantasy role playing games. He was arguably the seminal figure. The patriarch. The single most important man to a hobby which has led to literally billions of dollars of revenue in international business over the course of decades. He was one of the core bridge figures carrying old style wargaming rules into new style tabletop roleplaying. He was the founder of Gencon, the man who took The Strategic Review, a magazine devoted to wargaming with some minor RPG roots, and made it Dragon, which for years was the single unifying connector between roleplayers. He created Gencon out of a yearly gathering of wargamers ("Gencon 0," in the history, was a 1966 gathering of about 12 to 20 (reports vary) wargamers that Gygax put together in Lake Geneva in Gygax's own home. (For reference, Gen Con Indy 2007, the fortieth anniversary of the Con, had twenty seven thousand attendees last year. They're now in the midst of a huge scandal and just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but I digress.) Gygax was the most visible public figure, the prominent personality, the ambassador and advocate for an entire hobby which became an industry in many forms.

Oh, yeah. He also cocreated Dungeons and Dragons. You might have heard of it.

Dungeons and Dragons grew out of homebrew rules that both Gygax and Dave Arneson put together in the early seventies. Gygax's homebrew system centered on his City of Greyhawk. Arneson's system centered on his legendary Blackmoor setting. The original Dungeons and Dragons three book set was, for all intents and purposes, a synthesis of these two systems refined for ease of play, and Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the first two supplements. They put together a small company (Tactical Studies Rules) to support some cottage industry support for their role playing game and their various wargames, and printed a thousand copies of the original Dungeons and Dragons (named, they later claimed, from an offhanded quip from Gygax's wife).

Those thousand copies sold out in less than nine months. In the early 1970s. With no budget for things like advertising.

Over the next several years, Gygax took center stage. Arneson's role diminished (and later there would be legal wrangling followed by at least an official reconciliation), but if the creation of Dungeons and Dragons had been a joint affair, the explosion of Dungeons and Dragons and role playing games in general was a product of Gygax's industry, vision, and sometimes pigheaded stubbornness. Revisions to the rules came out. New supplements emerged (including one of my most prized possessions -- a copy of Gods, Demigods and Heroes, meant for the original game and found in a hobby shop for cover price during my initial 'buy in' to the game, alongside a book on traps, a 'solo adventure,' and The City State of the Invincible Overlord produced by Judges Guild). And a new plan emerged -- a major revision, known as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which would codify and evolve the rules into a true open ended campaign experience.

Leading up to the release of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons hardbacks, Gygax and company released the original ("blue dragon booklet") Basic Dungeons and Dragons set boxed set in 1977.

Which is where I entered the story.

I had first heard about Dungeons and Dragons through the best advertising medium the hobby had in 1977 -- the evening news. My first exposure to the game was listening to shrill, mostly ignorant parents and psychologists who'd never read the game talking about its dangers. Stories of people crawling into steam tunnels and losing all sense of reality when they went there were in their infancy back then, but they were still present before they could be codified and given a voice in the sad 1979 story of James Dallas Egbert III (a story which later turned out to have no connection to his roleplaying hobby). The danger, they told us, was real.

And I? Was enthralled. The very idea of that game thrilled me. A game where you could be a wizard or warrior, so real and evocative some people went nuts? Sign me up!

To this day, when I hear alarmist talk about gaming of any sort, I consider it advertising and figure the game in question is worth a look. Jack Thompson has probably sold as many or more copies of Grand Theft Auto as anything Rockstar's paid for, but I digress.

I got my blue dragon booklet, inside a lovely full color box. My edition had chits inside that you cut out and put into a bag to represent "1-20" or the like, though I also bought a set of the original dice that sometimes came in the box itself. Those dice were prized possessions until 1985, when my dice bag was lost at school. In part, they were so prized because they were such terrible dice. The plastic was cheap and they were uninked, You actually took a black crayon and rubbed it on the numbers to 'fill them in,' and because the plastic was so bad within a few years they were worn absolutely smooth. My twenty sided was a slightly irregular marble at the end. But by then I had lots of dice from the good people at Gamescience or Zocchi. Gemstone dice. Purple plastic dice. Tons and tons and tons of six siders. Dice of all kinds.

And I also had the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.

Those came out over time. First we got the Monster Manual, a compendium of beasts and creatures that included such horrors as the Mind Flayer, the Rust Monster, and the Beholder -- a monster so core to fantasy today that people forget it was created by and is owned by the good people at Dungeons and Dragons.

It also had the pictures of the Succubus, the Dryad, the Erinyes and the Type V Demon. For a huge number of D&D players, the "D" chapter of that book was the most popular by far. But give us a break, lots of us were just entering puberty and we didn't have Suicidegirls.com at the time.

This was followed by the Player's Handbook, a glorious compendium of character classes and reams and reams of spells. Fighters and Magic Users and Clerics Thieves abounded, alongside Paladins and Druids and Illusionists and Assassins. Half-orcs stood angrily alongside half-elves, halflings shrilly demanded that you pretend they weren't in any way repackaged (and legally trademarked) hobbits, and "Armor Class" and "Speed Factor" were determined for things like Ranseurs and the deadly but slow Bec de Corbin (+2 against Plate Mail and Shield, Plate Mail, splint or Banded Mail and Shield, Splint and Banded Mail, or Chainmail and Shield -- Chainmail, at AC 5, was not included in the bonus, 1d8 damage vs. small to man sized, 1d6 against large size, six feet required to wield, speed factor 9, 6 gold pieces in cost, approximately 100 gold pieces in weight. It would be years before anyone involved in the game would bother to include a description of just what a bec de corbin was, other than six feet long and as heavy as a bag of gold, and we didn't have Wikipedia in those days. For the record, it's a hammer and spike mounted on a pole, designed to tear armor off and rip shields out of your hand. It's related to the lucerne hammer and sometimes identified as a 'warhammer,' though that can be anything from a kind of pole arm to a hammer shaped mace. Popularly, we think of a warhammer as the sort of thing Thor carried, which doesn't describe a bec de corbin at all. And if this seems out of place in the Gygax remembrance, you're wrong. He ate this stuff up with a spoon.)

After that we got, in relatively short order, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the end of the trifecta, later joined by Deities and Demigods (the update to my beloved Gods, Demigods and Heroes and still a great supplement years later -- especially if you're cool like me and have a copy from before the folks at Chaosium realized there were unlicensed sections on the Cthulhu and Elric mythos which necessitated a rerelease without those chapters. And by cool, I mean "a dork in his 40's.") This was the foundation. Later, there would be tons more books -- Unearthed Arcana, the Wilderness Survival Guide, the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, the Manual of the Planes, and so many more, along with adventures adventures adventures. My group ran through B1 and B2. They did the Giants and the Drow. They knew the Village of Hommlet and later learned the pain that was The Temple of Elemental Evil. I had the World of Greyhawk Gazetteer, back in the days where world maps were naturally Hex Maps, even as dungeon maps were out of necessity on graph paper.

God, so many memories.

We're not discussing an idle thing here. Not for me. This is a huge part of my early life. These books -- First Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were a foundational part of my social network. And if that sounds dorky to you, and I sound like a loser to you, then fuck you. I had better times with these people than you've had with anyone you know, God damn it.

Gods, what people.... it started at once with my friends at school. George Carpenter, Tim Freeman, Richard Grindle, Chad King.... then I started to get involved with a group over at the college. Don Cody, Cody Stober, Rick Littlefield. Anyway, Herbie Oxten and his girlfriend/later wife Lucy. And then it merged with my high school group -- Rich Grindle, still (and I still miss him), Andrew Paradis, J.P. Marin from the high school, Gary 'Chip' Hanson, Kevin Pelletier, Eric Clements, Michelle Kane and others from the college. I was usually the Dungeon Master, running them through Arthe, my home campaign. Arthe came with me to college (as did Andrew), and there added Andy Alexander, Robin Whelton, Ernestine Lillya (later Gardner), Matt DeForrest, the late Charlie Barlow, Abbe Dalton, this guy named Mike I can't remember the last name of right now... all blending into real life, with my big friend Frank Orzechowicz, Karen Godfrey, Kevin back from before, John Bankert, Rebecca Tants, Lee "Auntie Nin" Radigan, Christie Russell (now Bell)....

So many names. I've no doubt forgotten some. Time will do that to you.

And you don't quite understand what this has to do with Gary Gygax.

The short answer is "everything." Because Gary Gygax created the framework that led to all of that. And understand, those are all folks I specifically played first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with. Those thirty names, including some of my oldest friends, my dearest friends, a former girlfriend, people I shared apartments with, people I shared experiences with, people I shared my life with found format and purchase specifically from the words that Gary Gygax had written and popularized with his books. And that doesn't even get into all the other Role Playing Games, which derived from and grew out of the seed of Dungeons and Dragons and flourished throughout the world. At the very beginning there was Tunnels and Trolls (George Carpenter's favorite) and Traveller. Later came Villains and Vigilantes which led inexorably to Champions in my life. Trips to the hobby store in Presque Isle for more D&D swag also gave us Car Wars, which in turn gave us GURPS. And then there were all the others -- Aftermath, GhostBusters (surprisingly good), Paranoia, Marvel Super Heroes, D.C. Heroes, Star Frontiers, Timemaster, Star Ace, Gamma World -- motherfucking Gamma World -- Top Secret, Espionage, the James Bond game (I remember a great run of James Bond with Andrew Paradis and his brothers....)

And none of it -- none of it -- would have existed if Gary Gygax hadn't cocreated Dungeons and Dragons and then pushed, republished, spearheaded, cheerleaded, advocated and otherwise turned a niche product into an industry. None of it.

You know what else wouldn't exist now? World of Warcraft. In fact, the entire computer RPG, MMORPG, Action RPG and a Hell of a lot of Platforming games wouldn't have existed without Gary Gygax -- certainly not in the form they do now. Any time you level a character, it's because of Gary Gygax. Hell, Knights of the Old Republic used actual mechanics derived from his writing.

So, take out Gygax, and take out Final Fantasy at the same time. Take out Dragon Warrior. Take out Adventure and Zork and that Atari game with the bats. Take out WarHammer and City of Heroes and absolutely core and seminal elements of essentially all modern video gaming. Without Gary Gygax, that whole industry would look radically different today, if it existed at all.

You want to know what else disappears? All three Lord of the Rings movies from the 90's and the turn of the century.

Oh, you don't believe me? Look, right when Dungeons and Dragons was coming out -- and before it became well known or popular -- there were adaptations of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was a Ruby/Spears Rankin/Bass cartoon for children most known now for the cloying song "The Greatest Adventure" (which is a bad rap -- The Hobbit wasn't bad for what it was -- a 70's childrens cartoon special meant for the family hour). The Lord of the Rings was a Ralph Bakshi trip and a half that was a commercial failure at the box office, leading to the story being finished by Ruby/Spears Rankin/Bass once more. The Lord of the Rings was a failure in the mainstream.

And Fantasy? Fantasy was a subsection of Science Fiction. A small subsection of Science Fiction. Most of the great fantasists were also Science Fiction writers, or were so crossover that it made no never mind (Michael Moorcock was at heart a true Fantasist, but somehow you could buy his work as New Wave SF too, for example.) Even The Dragonriders of Pern was a science fiction novel at heart (seriously. They're colonists on an alien world who lost their culture thanks to DEATH SPORES FROM ANOTHER WORLD).

But going into the late 70's and early 80's, even as Star Wars was redefining Science Fiction and making it truly mainstream, the old guard of Science Fiction fans, none too happy with the new people coming into the lodge, were reconnecting over tables and rolling dice, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. And seeking out source material and exciting fantasy all at the same time, I would add. Sales started going up. Fritz Leiber's books began selling better. By the middle of the decade, fantasy was booming. By the 90's, it was outselling Science Fiction significantly. And a whole generation of fantasy fans were being born.

Flash forward to the turn of the century. Most "Science Fiction" sections in bookstores are primarily Fantasy, along with a whole rack of licensed tie in books that sometimes is as big as the entire section. And alongside the (fantasy/horror) Buffy books, Star Trek and Star Wars books and the like are the books based on Role Playing Games.

The biggest chunk of that section? Dungeons and Dragons.

And those huge fantasy fans remade the marketplace. Fantasy movies started doing better. Ultimately, The Lord of the Rings was done again, this time (mostly) live action and epic, and it made more money than Ecuador.

I submit that without both Dungeons and Dragons and Gary Gygax's push into the mainstream, Tolkien would have diehard adherents, and maybe -- maybe -- the Mind's Eye Theater and BBC radio productions, but that any adaptation for the screen would have been a minor affair, possibly running in the U.S. on PBS, watched by few. And the one or two racks of Science Fiction/Fantasy books in the bookstores would have been mostly Science Fiction, hard to soft depending on the author.

And Gygax did push things into the mainstream. In 1982, just about the biggest movie out there (in fact, one of the biggest movies of all time) was E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. And in the first scene where we meet Elliot, his older brother -- his older cool brother -- was playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. (Later, when being taunted by a fellow schoolkid, Elliot's shouted return insult was "zero charisma!" High dudgeon indeed. The year before that, the Golden Globe nominated Taps, starring Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and George C. Scott told the story of the siege of a military academy that the students had seized. In an earlier scene, one kid shouted up the stairwell to another, asking if they were playing Dungeons and Dragons that night. This wasn't product placement -- this was verisimilitude. Dungeons and Dragons and roleplaying were simply a part of life at most high schools at that point.

If you're wondering why Gary Gygax, ahead of so many other people, was known to the populace and so well known by gamers, you have to remember what bound us together. In those days, only a few people had the internet or any means of rapid community building or communication. On the other hand, the burgeoning RPG community had a lifeline -- one that connected them, gave them insight into the hobby, announcements and reviews of new games and products, and in short created an actual community of gamers.

That lifeline was named Dragon Magazine, and its most prominent resident was E. Gary Gygax.

Yes, Dragon was published by TSR, which had been Tactical Studies Rules and which published Dungeons and Dragons. But at the time, while there were other publications out there, none had the scope of Dragon and Dragon worked hard (in the early days at least) to give other role playing games and related hobby games their due. It had grown out of The Strategic Review, which had been a system agnostic wargaming magazine, and that practice continued for some time. Traveller articles appeared in Dragon, as did Runequest articles and many, many other game articles. In a world where gamers were separated by distance and only got glimpses of the world of games in between the Avalon Hill wargame sets and the balsa wood at hobby stores, Dragon Magazine put roleplaying front and center.

And, where most articles about games, regardless of the game, focused on mechanics or setting or characters or what have you? Gary Gygax was a personality. His column -- From the Sorcerer's Scroll -- was somewhere between Stan's Soapbox, a house organ advertising tool, a philosophy of gaming column, a chance to goob about things Gygax was doing or excited about, and a gossip column about the gaming industry. Gygax's personality drove the impressions people got about gaming, about TSR, about Dungeons and Dragons -- in short, about the hobby as a whole. There were tons of dynamic and stubborn voices in RPGs back then, as there are now, but Rick Loomis, Steve Jackson, Kevin Siembieda and all the rest, as opinionated and passionate as they were, lacked the sheer market exposure that Gary Gygax got.

This was Gygax's blessing. This was also Gygax's curse. Gary Gygax, both in print and (according to second and third hand accounts) in person was creative, passionate, generous, friendly, engaging and charismatic. However, he was also egotistical, opinionated, arrogant, clearly had way more regard for his ability as a writer and developer than he should, and oft times he was an asshole.

We're not supposed to talk about these things right now. The man just died, and people are feeling horrible. I know. I'm one of them. But pretending Gary Gygax was a saint doesn't do Gary Gygax's memory any good, and Gary Gygax was sometimes his own worst enemy.

One of the early manifestations of this arrogance was his attitude towards "optional" or "unofficial" rules for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Gygax loathed them. This was not how the game was supposed to be played. Understand, this is what Dragon Magazine specialized in -- it was its bread and butter. For every installation of Bazaar of the Bizarre including new magic items, there was also an article on variant ways to play the game, and that just wasn't right. In fact, throughout the First Edition years, Dragon was enjoined from publishing character classes. The character classes were expertly balanced and perfectly developed to mesh together, and any new classes would just be a monkey wrench in the works. So for over a decade, whenever a new profession was described in Dragon, it was listed as a new Non-Player Character Class. Anti-Paladins, Dualists, and all the rest? NPCs.

And Gygax meant it. Hell, have a look at this, from the preface to the first edition Player's Handbook:

This latter part of the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS project I approached with no small amount of trepidation. After all, the game's major appeal is to those persons with unusually active imagination and superior, active intellect - a very demanding audience indeed. Furthermore, a great majority of readers master their own dungeons and are necessarily creative - the most critical audience of all! Authoring these works means that, in a way, I have set myself up as final arbiter of fantasy role playing in the minds of the majority of D&D adventurers. Well, so be it, I rationalized. Who better than the individual responsible for it all as creator of the "Fantasy Supplement" in CHAINMAIL, the progenitor of D&D; and as the first proponent of fantasy gaming and a principal in TSR, the company one thinks of when fantasy games are mentioned, the credit and blame rests ultimately here. Some last authority must be established for a very good reason.

This became a letter column fight back in the early days of Dragon, and led to at least one of Gygax's confidents (I can't list who, as I don't have the issue in front of me, and my at last purchased copy of the Dragon Archive won't arrive until later in the week, so my apologies for lack of attribution and paraphrasing) demanding that players stop bastardizing their games and play them the way Gary set down. And sure, when Gygax himself played, he used house rules, but he's unimaginably creative and no system -- not even his own -- could constrain him. And if you were so arrogant to believe yourself in his league, ask yourself how many RPGs, novels, cartoons and movie treatments you had written? Huh?

It got to the point that actual official rules additions and optional rules were so labeled -- and they meant, at their core, that Gary Gygax had signed off on them. Which actually reminds me of an anecdote.

There was a guy who we knew, over at the local college where I played (and generally ran) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. His name, as I recall, was Louis. (Not the Louis, for those few from my past reading this, who I went to grade school with. He was never much into Dungeons and Dragons.) Louis was a blowhard and a munchkin of the worst order, and he had his notebook full of his favorite characters, full of the most game breaking statistics and magical items you can imagine.

And, I swear to God, he insisted he could play them in my campaign, and everything in them had to be exactly as they were written, because Gary Gygax had given them to him. He claimed to have played with Gygax in campaigns and at cons, and that Gygax had given him these sweet, unique items, and as a result his character had a stamp of authenticity that no human being could contravene. The Lich King had spoken. He also used to tell stories of how when a character died in Gygax's game, he'd take their character sheet and light it on fire before the traumatized person's eyes, so it was a big deal that he still had this character, because everyone died in Gary's games.

Needless to say, we didn't believe a word of it. But it's interesting. If anyone claimed that Ken St. Andre had given him perks in a Tunnels and Trolls character, or Steve Jackson had given him a really sweet Car Wars car build, illegal in the rules set, people would have stared at him like he was clinically insane.

But Gygax? Yeah, clearly Louis was lying (and a terrible gamer, to boot), but you paused and listened, first.) Because dude -- who knew? Maybe there was something to it. And Gygax certainly seemed to believe he had editorial control and supervisory capacity over our campaigns, even though in those days the people who bought settings were the exceptions. If you got a module, you fit it into your own world.

This culminated, if that's the word, in a series of "open letters" that Gygax published in Dragon, castigating his enemies, attacking others -- very, very unprofessional things and conduct. And absolutely the sort of thing that would be familiar today, in these days of personal and developer blogs. We expect to see some dirt fly on official internet sites, and we have unprecedented access to the movers and shakers in game development (video or tabletop). These are not mysterious figures to us, these are people we can have arguments with on forums and who we sort of expect to answer our e-mail when we send it. Steve Jackson to Joss Whedon to Kevin Smith, there is an egalitarian presumption that borders on the ridiculous in our electronic world.

But back then, only a very few got to have a conversation with Gary Gygax. A rant seemed wildly inappropriate.

In the mid 80's, Sixty Minutes did a story on Dungeons and Dragons. This was at the height of the wildly inaccurate (and later wholly debunked) claims of Satanic influence and rampant suicide associated with role playing games. The RPG fans of the United States had a certain fear when that report came out -- this could be trouble. Sixty Minutes was serious. It all depended on who they got to represent the other side of the story.

And then we saw who they got. They got Gary Gygax. And we collectively groaned, as we watched, because this wasn't the kind, visionary, creative, genius Gary Gygax. They got the arrogant one. On tape.

I remember Andrew Paradis and I having a serious discussing with his father after the report aired, addressing the concerns he had about the game, and making certain he understood that Andrew and I weren't about to kill ourselves, go run around steam tunnels, or swear fealty to Satan. And no, Gary Gygax didn't speak for all gamers.

Ultimately, Gygax and his partners had friction. Gygax had friction with a lot of people. There were behind the scenes issues, and then he very publicly left TSR and started writing his own games. Only the state of the art of RPGs had passed Gygax by, and Danjerous Journeys never caught on.

And when TSR released Second Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Gygax's name was relegated to a legal notice acknowledging this was a derivative work published by the rightsholders and a note in the "Special Thanks To." And in the second edition Dungeon Masters Guide, Dave "Zeb" Cook wrote in the foreward:

Let's assume that since you're reading this, you are, or plan to be, a DUNGEON MASTER™, By now, you should be familiar with the rules in the Player's Handbook. You've probably already noticed things you like or things you would have done differently. If you have, congratulations. You've got the spirit every Dungeon Master needs. Curiosity and the desire to make changes, to do things differently because your idea is better than the other guy's-these are the most important things a Dungeon Master needs. As you go through this rule book, I encourage you to continue to make these choices.

Quite a bit different than Gygax's claim to be the final authority, isn't it? At the same time, notice that trademark next to Dungeon Master. The advent of the Post-Gygax Dungeons and Dragons heralded many changes, and a far more corporate environment and understanding of the legal marketplace was just one of them.

One thing we noticed, in fact, was that... there was a whole lot less variety, in ways. The game had been reoriented to really push the Lawful Good side of things. Demons and devils were gone (which seemed weird to me -- they weren't held up as objects of worship in the original -- they were sacks of Experience Points you wanted to kill and rob), only to be returned (after outcry) with new, innocuous names. The demonesses got clothes. Heck, the females got clothes. This was a game no one would blink twice about handing to their fourteen year old kid.

And then Vampire: The Masquerade came out and proceeded to eat Second Edition's lunch for a good long while -- at least among the hardcore. They had cool and chic and LARPing and darkness and better music and way more hot goth chicks into it.

And in the background, there was Gary Gygax. He still surfaced now and again. He returned, after a while, as a columnist for Dragon Magazine. He continued to release products. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and announced Third Edition, they very carefully got the old guard, including Dave Arneson, out to be a part of the announcement. But the rock star in the room was Gary Gygax, endorsing Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition and once more at the top of the heap, in residence at Gen Con -- the convention he had started in his own house -- and shaking the hands.

And Third Edition was good to Gygax. With the advent of the Open Gaming License and d20, Gygax could start releasing products for the system he had cocreated and shepherded once more. The old Castle Greyhawk became Castle Zagyg, and products were released for it. Gygax was the elder statesman of role playing at this point -- still passionate, but calmer. The friendly, generous Gary Gygax took center stage during this time -- a voice of reason, if of firm opinion. And always, the one that everyone knew was mainstream in a way Mark Rein•Hagen never would be.

This was the Gary Gygax I actually had contact with.

Oh yeah. When I was in the flush and joy of actually being a published game author, I spent a lot of time on different mailing lists. Mailing lists for the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Sciences, Freelancer mailing lists -- all kinds of stuff. And like everyone else who is first let in the door, I was feeling my oats and trying to make my mark. I'd been doing this since the 70's, after all, and these people couldn't intimidate me!

And then I got a response, with "Greetings!" at the very top. And "Gary" at the bottom.

I will admit to blowing my system shock roll.

I had a very informal correspondence with the man, mind. We did trade some private mail, though I suspect I was one of hundreds of informal correspondents that Gygax had over electronic mail. And the substance of those e-mails are not of interest here. What is of interest is this: Gary Gygax was unfailingly polite and supportive. His kindness was clear and apparent. And he had a way of making a punkass kid (regardless of his age) in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire feel like a peer whose opinions were worthy of respect even if they were ill informed and wrong.

And here we are, years later, and Gary Gygax is dead. The arrogant, egotistical Gary Gygax is dead. The kind, supportive Gary Gygax is dead. The passionate, creative Gary Gygax is dead. Gary Gygax is dead.

And some folks I've seen don't get why so many people seem so torn up over it. A fellow whose opinion I usually respect even said, in effect, that he hadn't done anything of significance for 30 years, so what's the big deal?

I swear, I could have punched him.

For all his contradictions, for all his faults, for all his strengths and for all his weaknesses, this complicated, opinionated, genius man has had an impact on society as a whole that is literally immeasurable. I'm not misusing the word 'literally' there, either -- there is no way to measure how much influence Gary Gygax has had on the world. Certainly, the world of literature, of movies, of video games, of television (children's and adult) have all been profoundly affected by the things Gary Gygax did. Billions of dollars have changed hands based directly or indirectly on Gary Gygax's work. Take Gary Gygax out of the equation, and our entire culture becomes radically different. And Christ only knows what the internet culture would look like.

But beyond that, a man who was a monumental part of my childhood, my past, and a huge number of my friendships is gone. I listed out that long list of friends above -- but understand that's a tiny fraction of my friends from roleplaying. And a large number of my other friends are ones I haven't gamed with but who are themselves gamers. Gary Gygax gave me a social group. He gave me peers.

And he regarded me as a peer, all too briefly.

And I'm going to miss him. Terribly.

But he'll continue to be a part of my life, of course. His influence doesn't vanish. Hell, he's still a huge part of Dungeons and Dragons -- beyond the mechanics and the structure, when you cast Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, you're casting a spell that one of Gygax's characters came up with. Bigby, Tenser, Otiluke -- the names attached to the spells in the Player's Handbook are names of characters people (in particular, Gygax himself and his two sons, Ernie and Luke) played.

And when I'm watching reruns of Futurama, there's every chance I'll see the episode where Gygax announced to Fry that he was [diceroll] pleased to meet him, on an episode where Fry met the nerds responsible for protecting the Space/Time continuum -- the Vice President of the United States (as voiced by Al Gore himself), Professor Stephen Hawking ('voiced' by Hawking himself), Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols (voiced by herself)... and Gary Gygax. And no one ever questioned Gygax's inclusion in a list with a Star Trek icon, the most prominent theoretical physicist of our age, and the former Vice President of the United States.

I love Champions and GURPS alike, but Steve Perrin or Steve Jackson wouldn't have worked there. But Gary Gygax did.

Rest well, sir.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:21 PM | Comments (35)

February 27, 2008

Eric: Requiescat In Pace: William F. Buckley

As I have often mentioned, sometimes defiantly, sometimes less so, I am a Liberal.

I didn't used to be a Liberal -- not a capital-L one, anyway. I was proud of my being a moderate. I was proud of my addressing the issues and examining all sides of political thought. I was proud of my open-mindedness and my capacity to embrace all sides.

That's changed over the past seven years, which to me is the great tragedy of the Bush administration. Or one of them, anyhow. Bush made it difficult for people to remain open to discussions and debate. He was the great polarizer. The great "you're with us or with them" of our generation. In the months after September 11, I felt I had to make it clear and unequivocal. At a time when Liberals were being accused (even by the Vice President) of treason, I chose to align myself squarely on their side, and I had no interest in being open to a side willing to cast the Left as a scourge. I'm still there today, and I don't see any chance of it changing in the future.

And that's tragic. For me as a person, for our nation as a whole. Because the only way it works -- the only way it works -- is for Liberal and Conservative ideas to come into conflict and ultimate compromise. We need both principles in good measure to make a nation great. We need to help and protect those in need with the spirit of largess, and we need to stand firm against corruption and evil. When the principles are in balance, the nation flourishes.

Which is why I feel so badly today. William F. Buckley is dead.

William F. Buckley has, for well over fifty years, been the seminal definition of literate conservatism. A man of conviction but also of thought and reason, Buckley has championed the conservative cause and ideal through times of great support for his positions and times of great disgust over them. In the 60's he was for Goldwater. In the 80's he was for Reagan. Through both, he was for conservative ideology and educated discussion. In the aftermath of the television program The Day After, in the famous discussion and debate where Carl Sagan is so remembered (and revered) for saying that the United States and the Soviet Union were both standing in gasoline, with one side holding three lit matches and the other five, it was William F. Buckley who sat on the other side and discussed the needs for Nuclear deterrence. It didn't matter if he was the only person in the building who believed it -- he did believe it, and he could rationally and intelligently lay out the reasons for it.

William F. Buckley was a conservative thinker, with the emphasis on thought. He examined positions and cast them in his own philosophical views. Take, for example, marijuana. Obviously, the hard Republican line (and let's be honest -- the hard Democratic line) is to pursue the War on Drugs, to stop this dangerous gateway drug, to pursue, restrict, arrest and incarcerate those involved with it.

But Buckley was a Conservative. A true Conservative. And to him, the fight against marijuana failed on conservative grounds. It failed to account for essential individual rights, and the necessary individual taking responsibility for his own actions. It failed to restrain the growth of government and government's intrusion into our lives. And it failed the fiscal test -- true conservatism rigorously examined its resources and its expenses, and eliminated those expenses made for specious reasons or specious results. As he wrote in the National Review in 2004:

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating. General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or ? exulting in life in the paradigm ? committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening, in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these ? 87 percent ? involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone. Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren't packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they'll lock you up for 15 years to life. Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.

Buckley's record isn't spotless, as he himself would say. He and the National Review he founded opposed the Civil Rights Act in the 50's and 60's, for example. But unlike many in public life, on either side of the aisle, he didn't simply recant this position later on -- he said that they had been out and out wrong, and that the Civil Rights Act had been a watershed moment not just in American life, but conservative life as well.

And that is one of the things that made Buckley so remarkable. He could hold an opinion, have new information come in, and acknowledge that his opinion was wrong and revise it. He supported the Iraq War in the beginning. However, when it became clear that the intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction was wrong, he acknowledged that it had been wrong and he has described Iraq as failed essentially on every level. He did not defer responsibility from himself -- he flat out said he had been wrong.

Though, of course, he said it more eloquently than I could write. William F. Buckley was a master of language -- brilliant in writing, entertaining and engaging in dialogue. And it is worth remembering in this modern era where "intellectualism' is considered innately Liberal, education is distrusted as 'elitist' and discourse is best rendered shouted, that Buckley came to his greatest national fame on PBS. He was a PBS star through the 70's into the 80's, on his program Firing Line. This was a show of discussion and debate, which would bring on prominent figures and thinkers and Buckley and that group would dissect and deliberate over the issues of the day. It was often lively but always erudite, and anyone who appeared had best have brought their A game, because Buckley was intelligent, logical, reasonable and most of all focused, and any fallacies brought to the table would be skewered. Some of Buckley's best debates were with intelligent, reasonable men of the Left. Sagan, as mentioned above. Noam Chomsky. And most (in)famously Gore Vidal.

Vidal and Buckley had a series of debates during the 1968 Democratic Party convention -- the convention infamous for protestors, the Chicago 7, and out and out riots. The contentiousness of the conventions extended to the two debaters, with the final debate featuring Vidal calling Buckley a 'crypto-Nazi,' and Buckley calling Vidal a 'queer' (on national television, I would add), and threatening Vidal to "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered." This then extended into a battle of words in Esquire, followed by various lawsuits.

Which honestly is about as vehement as Buckley ever got. It might have been the most eloquent blood feud, gay-slurs and nazism claims aside, ever committed in American letters. Certainly, the educated and above all civil debates Buckley was known for was as antithetical to today's punditry as can be imagined.

There's lots more to say -- Buckley's denouncing of the John Birch Society, his lack of patience with certain branches of Objectivism (he would amusingly recount the grand and dramatic exit Ayn Rand would make from any room he entered), and many others -- but the point is this: Buckley was good for America.

Not good for American conservatism (which he was often called the Father of), not good for the Republican party. Not good for snobby white intellectual Skull and Bonesmen from Yale. William F. Buckley was good for America. And I am certain that he would argue that the reasoned and intellectually rigorous Liberal thinkers were equally so -- because Buckley did not enter into debate without also entering into discourse, and Buckley undertstood that the resultant compromise of what was, after all, two very American positions made for a better nation than any singular could. Buckley also understood that opinions within one of those positions could vary (drugs were not the only area Buckley stood in reasoned opposition to the conventional wisdom of his side). Buckley, as a very educated man, bemoaned the casting of public education by many conservatives as statist -- and bemoaned the same for health care, as two examples. To Buckley, it was always a question of resources and management, and a healthy and educated populace was a more productive one which would lead to greater prosperity.

Buckley was good for America, even in all the areas I disagreed with him, because he forced Liberals like me to defend their positions -- not with our hearts and our compassion but with our brains and rationality. He argued that a position that could not be defended rationally simply could not be defended, and in this I think he was correct.

I long for a world where Buckley and those like him sally forth in rhetorical but intellectual confict with their Liberal opposite numbers, and where a moderate center could result from the alloy, taking on the strengths of both sides. In this world of jingoism, where more people listen to Rush Limbaugh or read Ann Coulter than were reading Bill Buckley or George Will, where Michael Moore supercedes Noam Chomsky and debate is something between shouting pundits on MSNBC, CNN or Fox, I yearn for a world where intelligent men and women, respectful of the other side but considered in their moral, philosophical and intellectual stances can debate and try to find common course together.

But one might as well yearn for Narnia or the United Federation of Planets. Educated discourse isn't fun to watch, and 'news' is something that happens on channels that aren't showing CSI: Newark.

And William F. Buckley is dead.

Sleep well, sir. Well fought. Well played. Well done.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:21 PM | Comments (7)

January 10, 2008

Eric: In My World: Superheroes

Here's an audience participation opportunity for you all. I don't do enough of these, really. Pass this around to your friends.

Down in the comments or where have you, complete the following phrase however you like:

"In my world, superheroes...."

with no ellipses afterward.

There are no wrong answers. You don't have to agree with other people. If you argue with someone about their entries, you're missing the point. See, superheroes aren't real, except in our imaginations. So in your world, this is how they are.

You can have as many entries as you like.

Here's some for me, just to get the ball rolling.

• In my world, superheroes put the emphasis on 'heroes' instead of 'super.'
• In my world, superheroes try to do the right thing just because it's the right thing.
• In my world, superheroes don't kill unless there's no other choice, and if there is no other choice they're bothered about it for a while afterward.
• In my world, superheroes are as often women as men.
• In my world, superheroes are considered good things.
• In my world, superheroes sweat the small stuff.
• In my world, superheroes belong to both liberals and conservatives, and a liberal superhero and a conservative superhero might disagree about who they'd vote for in an election but they agree on fighting evil.
• In my world, superheroes feel badly if they accidentally fight another superhero.
• In my world, superheroes are often flawed, but they work to correct their flaws.
• In my world, superheroes respect the law and authority, even if they have to work outside them.
• In my world, superheroes consider corruption abhorrent.
• In my world, superheroes keep their word.
• In my world, superheroes spend as much time helping people as they do fighting crime.
• In my world, superheroes get their powers from silly little accidents and no one worries too much about how ridiculous it sounds.
• In my world, superheroes might annoy the occasional (often jealous or corrupt) cop or city councilman, but on the whole the police and government are glad to have their help.
• In my world, superheroes worry about innocents.
• In my world, superheroes sometimes die, and that's never a small or insignificant thing.
• In my world, superheroes are people, too.

That's my world. What's yours?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:05 AM | Comments (58)

January 9, 2008

Eric: I swear to God, I'll stop talking about this. I mean, I don't even *buy* these comics any more. Ah well, here's one more.

In certain kinds of entertainment, there is an implicit covenant between the entertainer and the entertained. A certain set of expectations that the consumer of the entertainment can reasonably expect will be followed. Breaking that implicit covenant can sometimes lead to powerful stories and powerful subversions of expectation, but it's a very, very risky endeavor, because breaking that covenant can also piss your audience off, and the latter is way more likely than the former.

Which means yeah, we're talking about comic books again. Specifically Marvel, though DC and others aren't immune.

Let's be clear at the outset, however: this is discussing the Super Hero. The guys and girls in spandex, fighting for what's good and right. Yadda yadda yadda. You know the drill. We're not discussing Vertigo here, or EC, or even deconstructions like Watchman. We're discussing what has been described as mainstream superheroes. The 'real' continuities. Not the dreams, not the imaginary stories (for whatever value of "imaginary" Mort Weisinger actually meant compared to the 'unimaginary' stories of men in blue suits who could lift the Chrysler Building), not What If, not Elseworlds. We're talking "the DC universe" and "the Marvel Universe," and we can hammer the latter down to "Marvel-616" if we want.

But let's go back to that implicit covenant.

If I go to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets, I have a reasonable expectation of what kind of entertainment I'm going to be given. There's going to be some allegedly clever puzzles. There's going to be some quasi-Mission Impossible action. (The National Treasure movies do Mission Impossible style team missions vastly better than the Mission Impossible movies, possibly because Nicholas Cage is willing to portray a hero that needs a team supporting him). There's going to be a cute girl in clothing that might not be revealing, per se, but it's likely to be tight and she's going to be an intellectual peer to the hero. There's going to be baggage about family and fetishizing about what America's ideals mean. There's going to be conspiracies and at least one car chase. And at the end of the movie, there's going to be a significant success -- our heroes will be vindicated, their crackpot theories will be proven correct, and they will be given rewards that are significantly disproportionate to what they actually did in the movie.

Which is not a spoiler, by the by, because like I said -- this is the expectation you walk through the door with. If you go to see a Rocky movie, there is no spoiler in saying there's going to be some boxing.

And, in the process of the above, I will be entertained. You may or may not be -- depends on if you like that kind of thing. But as for me, that's just good popcorn fun in a way The Da Vinci Code entirely failed to me.

If I go to see the next National Treasure movie and in the process of doing all of the above it all goes pear shaped, the cute blond gets crushed by giant rocks in a lurid and graphic way, Nicholas Cage turns out to be entirely wrong and an idiot to boot and the movie ends with all hope destroyed and complete failure? I'm going to be pissed off when I leave the theater even if it was a good movie, because I don't go to National Treasure for that. My expectations being subverted won't mean I'm happy and enlightened and transformed, it'll mean I'm going to feel ripped off.

Jerry Bruckheimer understands this. There is no chance in Hell National Treasure is going to break with its formula, because there is no chance in Hell Jerry Bruckheimer is going to risk losing his millions of dollars per picture featuring Nicholas Cage muttering about Masons and implausibly complicated mysteries by apparently omniscient historical figures. He understands that while some movies enlighten and others enthrall and still others expand our understanding of the universe, the National Treasure movies entertain by a given formula, and that's why people go to see them.

These covenants extend through all of culture. When Shakespeare was writing his tragedies, there was an implicit covenant with his audience -- the lead will be sympathetic but deeply flawed, there must be several opportunities for the lead to escape his fate, and the lead must inevitably and inexorably march to his doom, his own flaws blinding him to the chance for redemption and even joy. It doesn't hurt if someone gets stabbed along the way. Especially inappropriately. And a chick or two should go batshit insane after horrific trauma for good measure. Shakespeare wrote some of the most powerful and significant work to ever be published and performed, but he wrote it with his audience in mind, and even when he pushed the boundaries he avoided breaking that covenant he had established with his audience.

And somewhere between Bruckheimer and the Bard of Strattford Upon Avon, we find Marvel Comics.

The expectations for mainstream comics really aren't that hard. We expect there to be attractive people with exaggerated physiques. We expect them to generally have bad fashion choices. We expect there to be a significant conflict, and we hope that will highlight an inner conflict. Some punching generally goes on. Our hero is put on the ropes. Terrible things happen to him. And then at the last possible moment he rallies, he finds a way, he pushes through and he wins. Good takes the gold. evil gets the silver at the most.

Seem overly simplistic? It is. But it's also implicit. Read any DC or Marvel Comic from the thirties through to the nineties, and you'll see those mechanisms in play. Even into the nineties, these were the guiding principles of the form. Horrible things happened, but ultimately, the hero wins and the villain loses. Luthor might become the President of the United States, but at the very end of the day he's wearing a Kryptonian Battlesuit and trading punches with the Man of Steel, with Superman taking him down and breaking all his evil plots. At the end of the day, we expect the X-Men to leave the field with their heads held high. We expect the Green Goblin to go to prison (or worse). We expect the Red Skull to fail.

And when it doesn't happen... when our heroes do their level best and fail... we feel cheated. We feel hollow, if we cared about them. It can be a powerful story, but it's one that breaks our expectations and we cast around, thinking that's it? Evil wins? Jesus, I can read a fucking newspaper to read about evil winning! Eventually, you think well shit. I guess I'll put my money elsewhere, and you find some other fix for what you used to turn to comic books for.

As a complete side note, when I was in Ottawa over the holidays, we were in a Chapters, which is their Barnes and Noble equivalent. And we went by the teen section. And I saw a group of about six boys, all in the twelve year old range -- the range that Isaac Asimov used to describe as "the Golden Age of Science Fiction" and which continued to be the Golden Age of Superhero Comics. And they were piled around a bookshelf, sprawled and reading.

Manga.

Not ten feet away, Marvel and DC compilations sat, holding no interest for them.

But, as I so often do, I digress.

Marvel has always been the company of Heroes With Bad Lives. Ever since Spider-Man first made his living by providing photographs for his worst critic, Marvel's heroes have had to endure a hostile public and -- as David Willis so adroitly put it -- flying butts pooping on them most of the time.

But they hung with the covenant. The good guys in the end would win. Sometimes that victory would come at a terrible cost, but it would happen. Evil would go down. Through the most horrific of X-Men crossovers or the most vicious of John Byrne retcons, the heroes would eventually come out on top.

And now, that's not true any more.

Let's look at Spider-Man's arc. He outed himself in Civil War. He had terrible things happen to him as a result. He went on the run, he got sued by the Bugle, he had his illusions about heroism broken down into tiny little pieces, and then his beloved Aunt ate a bullet.

This is the kind of thing that happens to Spider-Man. It always has been. He has a horrible life and bad guys do terrible things.

But he comes out of them. He pushes through. He has some kind of victory. And we have that moment of visceral relief. That sense that yes, he was a hero, that in the end, he does win. And if tomorrow's going to be crap, today's still... well, okay.

Only this time, they pushed the reset button. The Devil came, forced him to sacrifice his happiness and life, left his (now never-was) wife to suffer for it, restored his secret identity and wiped clean all the stuff that happened, and then oh hey, it's a Brand New Day!

The covenant was broken. Terrible things happened, over and over and over, and finally the ultimate villain showed up, and he won. And because this was all out of editorial edict to erase something... well, something wildly popular. (Okay, I admit it, I don't get that at all), Spider-Man loses. He loses everything. And all the crap that had become his life got washed away in the least satisfying way possible.

And, if you look at Marvel in general, this is becoming the trend. Captain America loses the Civil War and dies, and... well, that's that. Super Heroes become draftees and militias and... well, that's what it is. Iron Man--

Oh, let's not even go there.

Not too many years ago, Marvel dropped their use of the Comics Code Authority and the seal, and went to their own rating system. I understood that at the time -- rather than restrain themselves by an outside arbitrary force, why shouldn't they let loose the last shackles of the fifties and, with appropriate use of Mature Readers warnings, tell the stories they want to tell?

Only something happened. Something tipped. And I have to wonder if one of the things they didn't want to be hamstrung by any more was the implicit requirement that Crime ultimately Not Pay. The Good Guys have to eventually win, in the CCA's universe.

But not in the Marvel universe.

And, when the whole point is to hold onto their aging fanbase, do they honestly think breaking that most core assumption -- that most core covenant to mainstream superhero comics -- is going to be a good long term strategy for them?

Sooner or later, after the popped-ratings fade, and people figure out that these heroes do a whole lot of losing, doesn't that inexorably lead to losing them? I mean, if I want to see things get steadily worse? I have an internet and Google News. I sure as Hell don't need to spend money for it.

In a fantasy medium, who's fantasy are we reading about now? And when people give up, who's going to replace them?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:27 PM | Comments (38)

January 3, 2008

Eric: Retconning: Just Another Day Like All The Others

This is talking around a subject, rather than directly about it. I apologize for that. Let me spend a few moments discussing the nub of the matter before diving into the meat of the essay, which lives out on the periphery where a man and a dog might have a gun and a shack, but there's not much likelihood of there being a WalMart nearby.

I am given to understand that Marvel Comics -- in an eighteen month block of time which could charitably be described as "the stupidest thing ever," has managed to actually do the stupidest thing ever.

How stupid was it? Beloved internet icon and Babylon 5 Great Maker J. Michael Straczynski, the current writer of Spider-Man, was told to do this thing by Marvel Editorial. He was so against the idea that he decided to leave his name off the story. There was a long discussion with various folks at Marvel Editorial, culminating in the Editor in Chief's having a long discussion with him and convincing him not to remove his name from the stories.

Of course, Mr. Straczynski then proceeded to post about this event on usenet. Seriously, I'm not kidding. He decided not to take his name off the story, then loudly posted about the conflict and decision, thus magnifying the story beyond what leaving his name off in the first place would have done. Which is worse for Marvel, because it really screams out just how unhappy folks were about this, and is a little bad for Straczynski, since it makes him look like he didn't have the courage for doing the hard thing but wanted the credit for doing the hard thing. If you're going to be a part of a travesty, don't even bother trying to half-distance yourself from it.

The event, which I suppose needs a spoiler warning except anyone reading these words probably already knows it, is essentially Spider-Man and Mary Jane making a deal with the devil, in his Mephisto guise, to save the life of dying Aunt May, retconning their marriage out of existence so that it never happened. Oh, and Harry didn't die. And I guess they wanted Gwen never to die but the writers demanded otherwise.

As I said, the stupidest thing ever.

That's only tangentially what we're here to talk about.

We're here to talk about retconning;

Retconning comes from "retroactive continuity," meaning "taking the continuity of your storyline and retroactively changing part of it so things didn't happen the way they happened," and there are many ways to do it. Let's talk about them together, shall we?

First off, let's talk about what all these things have in common. All of these changes underscore some Alteration Of What The Fans Know. And the fans are the only relevant part of retconning -- casual or first time readers don't care. You could just start your series over completely wiping out everything that happened (see below) in issue one of your new series, and a completely new reader won't give a damn about it when he reads issue two. The only people who give a damn about the history of your story are the people who have already emotionally invested in your story. They're the ones who bring baggage with them. They're the ones who have followed the story for some time -- maybe even years or decades -- and they're the ones you have to convince when you go ahead and make changes to "what they thought they knew."

That phrase, by the by, which is a lie. Retconning doesn't change 'what they thought they knew.' Retconning intentionally takes what they knew and made it wrong. It is a contradiction of your fans' expectations and a complete alteration of the context your stories are told in.

It is a tool, in other words, but it is one that should be used very, very, very rarely, because it deliberately breaks the emotional investment your fans have in your core product: your story. You take a significant risk that your fans will not then reinvest every time you do it. Which means you'll lose some of your fans every time you do it.

It's also a tool to be used sparingly because the retcon will always feel like fiat, whereas the continuity it replaced was organic. It grew and built over the course of months or years or decades. The resulting patches will be weaker, and won't take the strain the original would.

And it is a tool to be used sparingly because once you start to retcon, you start wanting to do more. It's a rare writer or editor who does what he feels is a necessary retcon who won't then throw in a bunch of flourishes just because they thought it would be cool. And even if the retcon could have worked all right, the flourishes inevitably cause destruction and lay waste to all they touch.

The major problem is, the major comic book publishers don't treat retcons like rare tools to be used sparingly. Since the mid to late eighties, they use them like chainsaws, and they're reaping that which they've sown ever since.

So let's look at the different ways to retcon. Let's look at the advantages of them. And let's look at the potential pitfalls of each type:

Category One: Now Revealed! A Lost Tale of the Hero!

The most basic form of the retcon is also the least problematic. History isn't rewritten -- it just turns out there was more to the story than we saw the first time around. Back in the late sixties and early seventies (and even into the eighties) the Legion of Super-Heroes did this sort of thing a lot. We saw stories set during earlier Legion eras, often with a "now it can be told!!!" caveat, meant to add a certain richness to the Legion's history without really changing anything.

In fact, the most pervasive version of the "secret history of X" form of retconning would have to be the existence of Superboy himself. Superboy -- the original, once tagged as 'the adventures of Superman when he was a boy -- had a whole mess of adventures, up to and including a ton of adventures with the far-future Legion of Super-Heroes long before he ever went to Metropolis! And every time a new one was published, we had a tiny bit of retconning of Superman's history -- after all, in the 'present' day, Superman would have had all of those adventures. When we learned that Superman's 'first' meeting with some of his foes (including bafflement at their powers until he worked out the kinks of fighting them) wasn't really his first meeting, what since he fought the teenaged version of Lex Luthor back in the day, it made that original story a little weaker (man, did Superman forget the bit about the imp saying his name backwards? I thought he had super-memory!) but it could be ignored, for the most part.

The advantages of the lost tale are many: financially it makes sense because it means mining earlier versions of your intellectual property. There were folks who tired of the Legion who'd still buy something with the old Adventure era costumes, for example. Superboy's adventures meant using Pete Ross and Lana Lang -- something that always seemed troubling when they showed up in the modern day and interacted with Superman. The old X-Men are still darn lucrative no matter how many weirdass variations of the new X-Men we get. And so on and so forth.

The disadvantages, on the other hand, are minor but present. One was touched on up above -- if you take elements introduced in your series and reintroduce them in a lost tale of your hero's past, you weaken the original story. Further, a new writer on a given series might be tempted to write "lost" tales from before he took over so his own beloved and precious characters can be made a part of the history of the popular character. (A plethora of Batman supporting cast and villains turn up in Bruce Wayne's years of training, for example, which makes us think that they're all essentially stupid for forgetting that billionaire they met back in Tibet, but I digress.) Perhaps most subtle but definitely there is that sense that with all those pastward adventures, Our Hero never had time to actually grow up. This is most true of Superboy, who Kryptonian or not didn't have nearly enough time to do everything he did in the past, and he must have spent a good eight years in the future with the Legion (making him in his twenties before he graduated high school, and why didn't Lana ever notice that, hmmmm?) Granted, comic book time is always weird, but there are ways to push it.

Finally, the greatest danger comes from your biggest fans. They're the ones who will notice all the inconsistencies your "lost tale" introduces to the history they've been tracking, and they're the ones who'll happily tell everyone about them. Marvel used to hand out nonexistent "no-prizes" to folks like that, and back then there were only letter columns and APAs for the fans to make trouble in. In today's forum/website/LJ community/wikipedia world, inconsistencies introduced into history become way bigger than the stories they appear in.

Category Two: The Story You Thought You Knew!

The next level up of retconning is the first true retconning -- taking familiar stories and adding new twists to them. Where lost tales get shoehorned into the quiet moments between comic books from a few years ago, these revisions get added into the actual stories. Generally, these take relatively simple stories (even origin stories) and give them more depth, or set up some future plotline. The evolution of Superboy meeting Lex Luthor is an example. Their meeting as young teens was itself a retcon, of course -- of the lost tale variety. Superboy recognized the signs of genius in young Lex, and built him a state of the art laboratory to let the genius flourish. Lex helped him out here and there, and ultimately worked on developing... well, they called it a Kryptonite cure but it was clearly a vaccine. Whatever. It blew up, Superboy flew in and blew out the fire, Lex breathed fumes or some such and lost all his hair, and then blamed Superboy for it, and his hatred for the Boy/Man of Steel rained down from his bald pate forevermore.

All fine and dandy.

Well, then a retcon came in -- Lex didn't just develop a cure for Kryptonite, as it turned out. He actually created life itself in the laboratory, as part of the process of curing Kryptonite. And when Superboy flew in and blew out the fire and saved Lex, he of course didn't know that there was an artificially created living organism in there -- so he either didn't save it or actually killed it depending on the version of the story you're reading.

And suddenly, that makes way more sense. Lex Luthor isn't pissed off that he lost his beautiful shit-brown locks. He's had a life he created, Godlike, destroyed. His baldness just reinforces what he lost -- what Superboy took from him.

See, you thought you knew the story, but now you really know the story.

The advantages are clear -- simple stories that are at most sufficient to their need become more complex stories that really flesh out the situation. The classic stories take on a fresher, more relevant vibe. An anonymous gunman becomes Joe Chill (or a proto-Joker). Uncle Ben's killer turns out to be a penitent Sandman. Iron Man's origin is taken out of war-torn Vietnam/Cambodia and put someplace a little more timeless so that Tony Stark isn't pushing sixty. R. J. Brande turns out to be a thousand year old frozen in shape Durlan who hopes to reconcile with his son by creating a team of superheroes in the thirtieth century that somehow he just knows his son will hear about in the backward and xenophobic society he lives in and join up--

Okay, sometimes 'relevant vibe' is pushing it.

The disadvantage and potential pitfall is twofold. First off, there's the old canard -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sometimes in taking a story and recasting it to make it more relevant to the current audience, you take something timeless and make it either significantly weaker or... well, make it easily dated. A lot of the 'relevant elements' you can add to a story are in fact flavors of the week, and adding them will look at best ridiculous five years down the line.

The second potential pitfall is that you'll take a good story and make it a bad one. Honestly, if something seems timeless, even if it seems hokey, then the chances you'll write it better than the original writer did isn't all that great. And if you can, for example, explain someone's origin story in ten words or less, this is a good thing. It means you don't need a lot of backstory to get someone up to speed. Making that three or four paragraphs just weakens the whole thing, because that's time it takes a reader to get familiar with the story before they can jump in.

Category Three: The Real Story You Thought You Knew!

Hot on the heels of the last retconning, we have this little gem. It's not that there's more to the story you read that other time -- that story was wrong! Oh sure, everyone knows that Dirk Morgna was a young genius engineer locked in a reactor by the jealous Doctor Regulus, but that's all wrong! What really happened was Dirk Morgna was the plant manager's son and he got promoted and then he screwed up and Doctor Regulus who was innocent and the real genius got blamed and fired and he snapped and locked Dirk in that reactor, but no one really knows it except Regulus and Dirk! Honest! That's how it really happened.

This is where we get into the heavy minefield territory, as you can see from my somewhat biased accounting of one of Sun Boy's retcons, because this is where we're getting into actual story surgery. We're outside of value-adding into stories and into actual full on changing of stories, and like any plastic surgery it can leave some nasty looking scars and ultimately prevent Joan Rivers from ever changing her facial expression again. Some of the worst examples of this retcon style were found in the Keith Giffen/Tom and Mary Bierbaum version of the Legion (they're the ones who decided that Sun Boy needed to have an angst-filled origin, in the same issue his lover shot him in the head, I would add, so it's not like it did anything for him), and a good number of these retcons were designed to fit pet theories the Bierbaums had in their APA-participating days. For example, they'd believed Element Lad was gay, only Paul Levitz had him get involved with a hot redhead female science police officer named Shvaughn Erin. So Shvaughn Erin, was made a male-to-female transsexual specifically because Sean Erin had loved Element Lad from afar and wanted to appeal to him so that Element Lad could really have been involved with a man who later reverted to being male but they stayed together... sort of. Similarly, looking back at one of the seminal Legion moments -- where Proty sacrificed his life and life-force to allow a resurrection of Lightning Lad -- the Bierbaums became enamored of the notion that Lightning Lad really was Proty in Lightning Lad's body, with all Proty's memories and personality, and that his best friends and lover who was telepathic never noticed it.

These, as you can guess, didn't go over very well, because they came across exactly as they sound -- as ham-handed attempts to shoehorn in pet theories and fanfiction into 'real' continuity. We get away from trying to add depth to or invigorate the story with this style of retcon, and get more into the areas of 'putting one's mark on the series mythology,' which rarely goes well.

As a side note, Frank Miller did this about as well as anyone ever has, when he reworked a lot of Daredevil's origin (not to mention all kinds of stuff with Elektra). He combined the "lost tale," "thought you knew" and "what you know is wrong" retcons into a story that took a fairly average superhero and made him downright epic. So it's not that it can't work.

It's just that it almost never does work.

The major pitfall goes back to the core pitfalls of retconning in general. This is the territory where you're seriously fucking with established history -- which is to say you're fucking with the specific affections of your fanbase. Frank Miller got away with it in Daredevil for two reasons: almost no one gave a shit about Daredevil before the reworking, and he rolled a natural twenty in the execution of it. In the case of the Bierbaums, Legion history was revered by a gigantic pack of fans, and they alienated way more than they pleased with the changes -- leading to a full on reset button later on (though there were other problems with that, which we'll get to in a few minutes). People don't want to find out that they're wrong about the continuity they've been following.

It gets worse, of course, because they have all these issues of the comic that show a very natural and organic growth of the story they love, often handled by a plethora of creators. The retcon, on the other hand, is very artificially grafted over the top of it, and as a result there's a lot of scar tissue around it. It is nigh impossible to bring the same level of nuance that the originals had, and so even retcons that do make sense and improve the story end up sounding way weaker as a result.

And it's possible to go so far with a retcon of this kind that you out and out alienate people -- you can do serious damage to your fanbase if you're not careful, especially when you're trying to recast your comic (originally written for kids and teenagers) for an adult fanbase. Identity Crisis is the most egregious recent example of this -- the retcons put into place weren't simply to make Doctor Light more malevolent than he'd been for a while, it was to take the silver age Justice League -- a group of true heroes in the heroic mold of the time -- and make them "edgy." This largely had the effect of pissing people off, because no one wants the JLA of their childhoods screwed with. Having some punk tell us that the heroes we grew up revering weren't all that heroic just makes us set our jaw.

Like I said before -- messing with the affections of the reader base. Sometimes you can get away with it. A lot of the time you can't.

Category Four: The Story You Thought You Knew Was Right, But Now There's Been A Change!

While the last category was indeed a full on surgical retcon, there was generally no in-continuity reason for the retcon. Now we're into story-changing with a degree of awareness on the part of (at least some of) our heroes, and the trouble is really starting now.

In this case, the retcon is a full on in-story change, retroactively applied, for better or (generally) for worse. Often mandated editorially, this is the point where large chunks of your history get torn out and new bits get grafted in in their place, and you have to 'edit on the fly' to make it all work.

I've been pulling from Legion history for a lot of this, because... well, because they're kind of the perfect example. Moving from the Levitz version of the classic Legion to the Giffen/Bierbaum version of the retconned Legion and then the Post-Zero Hour Rebooted Legion gave us a chance to see almost all of these retcons in practice, and in the long run they were almost all disastrous.

Anyway, the In-Story Change happened because, ta-da, of editorial mandate. You see, Superman's history had had a Restart and Reboot (see below), which meant that there was no period of time where Superman was Superboy. At least at that point. Levitz had done a simple Category Three retcon to fix the issue -- Superboy, it turned out, came from a pocket universe that the Time Trapper had created, and this was the place the Legion had been traveling to all these years. That universe went pear-shaped and Superboy sacrificed his life to save his fellow Legionnaires.

Well, it was decided by editorial that this was insufficient. Superboy (and Supergirl) were too prominent and confusion could result. (Remember, kids. The reason for everything that followed was to avoid confusion. I swear I'm not making this up.) The decision was made to introduce a major retcon -- Superboy, the inspiration for the Legion itself, would be replaced by Mon-El -- now rechristened Valor -- in the history of the Legion. A major in-story event then took place where the revised history was written in and made 'real,' and everything we the readers knew had changed.

Only... remember way up above, when I said the urge to retcon more than is needed becomes overpowering in these situations? Yeah. Giffen and the Bierbaums went to town. Superboy became Valor, as we said. Then Supergirl became Laurel Gand, a Daxamite cousin/descendent/something of Valor. Then they replaced major villain the Time Trapper retroactively with Glorioth, a flunky and functionary of a single story -- and a very different character than the Time Trapper. Then they changed who the first Legionnaire to die was, and why he died. (This was Kid Quantum, who they wanted to do other things with). They added "Kent Shakespeare," the first 'Impulse,' to the Legion's history.

Then, things got worse, because see the Superman editorial team? They had used the pocket universe in Superman's history, including a point where he killed the pocket universe Phantom Zone criminals, an act that led to years of somewhat bad stories that culminated in Superman taking his solemn oath against killing. (I guess because the era where a hero would take an oath against killing as a matter of course was seen as hokey. See above RE timelessness vs. Flavor of the Week).

So, Editorial mandated that there had to be a pocket universe, which meant there had to be a Superboy who came from it. Supergirl (the Matrix version) also came from it, though she had nothing to do with the Legion. So, the Legion did travel back and Superboy joined 'briefly' to set up... um... yeah.

Then Dev-Em had his history retconned twice and then he blew up the moon. Because time had to... Superman could have stopped it but he couldn't be allowed to because... look, at this stage they were clearly huffing paint, okay?

Anyway. As it turns out, this amazing new take on the Legion didn't make people happy. Sales suffered. There were complaints. The Bierbaums insisted a lot of the fan mail was positive, which is interesting given how... sporadic letter columns became. And then they decided to try something to bring back the fans -- they actually created "Batch SW6" which was a whole recreation of the Adventure Era Legion. The idea was to give the fans back a recognizable Legion, while having the heroes we'd been following all these years continue to have their grown up adventures.

(The first thing they did after reestablishing the Adventure Era Legion, meant to fire our imaginations and return us to the days of heroism we pined for? They changed all their codenames and costumes. Interestingly, this was not a successful move.)

Category Four retcons seem to go this way. People just get annoyed at them, and it's nigh impossible -- no matter how good your storytelling might be -- to convince people they like the taste of your sandwich.

The Spider-Man retcon we mentioned at the start is a Category Four. History has been changed. And, like all these situations, they claim the changes are minimal, and that he had all the same adventures as he had before. Why, he's just not married! And he lives with Aunt May! And Harry Osborne is still alive. And he lost his organic webshooters. Oh, and he never revealed his identity to the world, which means the entire Spider-Man arc in Civil War was just dicking with us! And apparently this means Mary Jane conceived a child out of wedlock with Peter. And there are new characters!

But... it's back to the good old days where Peter has girl trouble and is single, and that'll be better, right?

Right?

Moving On.

Category Five: Meet the New Hero, Not The Same As The Old Hero Because That Never Happened

Finally, we have the major event. The big one. The big block of cheese in the White House lobby. The retcon that completely starts everything over. This retcon is often called a "reboot," because that's what it does. It starts from the very beginning, wiping clean all continuity so new readers can jump right in. Everything's up in the air because nothing's happened yet.

John Byrne loves these things. And the most famous Category Five was Superman, post-Crisis on Infinite Earths. They let Alan Moore write an "imaginary" story that tied up the Silver Age Superman, and then they started over, completely from scratch. Gone was the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superboy, Lex Luthor in Smallville and most of Superman's power. When he met the Toyman, it was for the first time. Lois's hair color changed. Jimmy became even stupider. And Lex Luthor stopped being a scientist and started being Donald Trump without hair.

It could have worked... had they had the balls to do the same thing to every other comic book in their stable. Unfortunately, they didn't. And that meant stress fractures began forming around the Man of Steel from the beginning. The Legion debacle above was just one of them -- also sacrificed was Superman's history in the Justice League. Which meant the whole "Superman was the first superhero" concept had to be junked too -- now there had been tons of heroes, stretching back to World War II. Add a complete reboot/Category Five of Wonder Woman into the mix, and... well, among other things, it became difficult to reconcile Batman's history (which was largely unchanged at first) with anyone else's.

The clusterfuck that was the Giffen/Bierbaum Category Four retcon led them to wipe the slate clean on that with a Category Five retcon. That in turn caused other problems so we've had another complete reboot of the series. Of course, we've had another Crisis come and go screwing with timelines and dimensions and Christ knows what else anyway. Honestly, the idea that there is any continuity between the current version of DC comics and previous ones is silly. If you're a current fan, let the past go and enjoy the ride. Here and there, there's some good stuff.

The major problem with reboots besides the above is it's a complete break with the past. Which means it's the ultimate break with the fan's investment. Take me -- I was a big-ass Legion fan. I held on through all the monumental pain that was the Giffen/Bierbaum era because... well, I loved the Legion. Even all the retcons wasn't enough to break me the rest of the way.

Tossing out the continuity and starting over? Was enough. I never got into the 'new' Legion. I can't cotton to the new new Legion. I was drawn into the current flirtation with variations of the original Legion that ran through JLA and JSA and now Superman, but they're clearly not really the Legion I knew.

Does that make them bad? No, not really. But I have no reason to reinvest in them. And every time we have retcons of any category some readers will be lost along the way -- and the Category Five shakes loose the largest numbers, because it's a full on starting over.

Interestingly, there is an entirely successful Category Five retcon on record. I'm serious. It absolutely worked, even though it was essentially unplanned and uncontrolled. That retcon is today called the Silver Age of Comics. They started over all the comics and continuities -- largely just ignoring the old stories and later giving them their own universe. And the essential proof of concept happened again in the nineties, when Batman: The Animated Series gave birth to the DC Animated Universe -- which held to a completely separate tight continuity over the course of a decade. In many ways, the DCAU has been the most successful superhero continuity artistically since it first appeared, and financially there's almost no contest. Certainly the DCAU brought in more direct cash to Warner Brothers than the DC Comics line has for quite some time.

One thing that highlights the problems that indiscriminate retconning breeds is complexity. A simple retcon turns into a series of more elaborate retcons to patch over broken pieces. Superman's reboot was at core simple -- it was an entirely new thing. But then all the other DC comics began showing problems and so they had to apply fixes and patches and retcon other things that bred new fissures and patches and retcons, until... well, until they had to take four odd years of "monumental events" to lead up to what sounds like one more complete reboot. And maybe this time it'll take.

Marvel's no better off -- Lost Tales and stories, especially around cash-cow X-Men have made it increasingly hard to know what's going on. And now they've introduced a monumental Category Four retcon into their flagship title, leading to problems the likes of which we won't know for five or six years, long after they've reverted back to the marriage because they're sick of this shit.

And they will. Just like Captain America will come back. Just like Supergirl came back all those times, and Earth-2 came back, and Power Girl's history came back, and a version of the original Legion came back. Because when you fuck with your fanbase's affections, you fuck with your livelihood, and eventually you pay a price for it. Check out the Retcon-fest that has been Green Lantern since Crisis on Infinite Earths, and notice that as of this point, pretty much all the dead Lanterns have come back to life, Hal Jordan never really went crackerdog and even Sinestro's doing just fine these days. Hey look -- Hal and Ollie and Kyle and Guy and John and Ice and everyone? They're all fine! Really! And they're having epic adventures! Please! Come back!

Please come back!

Please?

When Jesus makes Mary Jane and Peter married again (seriously. They're teasing Jesus as their cosmic parachute for this storyline), there will be great hopes that everything will be made all better. Only what will happen is people who invested in the post-infernal annulment will be pissed off by the restoration, and no one will be very happy, and eventually everyone will agree to stop talking about it. Sort of like the Clone War. And within a few years, Civil War. Which was all the fault of invading Skrulls anyway. No really. You thought you knew the real Civil War Story, but you were wrong.

The question is, what will the numbers be for a top selling book at that point?

And on DC's side... just what kind of Legion will be the new one then?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:54 PM | Comments (49)

December 6, 2007

Eric: A moment of history, a remembrance of heroism

Ninety years ago today, a man with a wife and children, a life and a future had a realization. A moment of clarity.

Ninety years ago today, the world was at war -- this was 1917, and the Central Powers were marching across Europe and the Allies were fighting them. U-Boats were trawling the shipping lanes sinking freighters to keep ammunition and munitions and arms out of the hands of the men they were fighting. The ships therefore took to running incognito, lacking the ensigns and markings that warned other ships that their cargos were volatile.

Ninety years ago today, the French civilian cargo ship S.S. Mont-Blanc was steaming from New York City to form up with a convey carrying munitions to the front. They were unmarked to avoid the U-Boats. The ship carried two hundred and fifty tons of TNT, two hundred and forty six tons of benzol, sixty two tons of guncotton, one thousand, seven hundred and sixty six tons of wet picric acid, six hundred tons of dry picric acid, forty-one sailors and one captain. They had been forced to spend the night before outside of Halifax Harbor, where they were going to form up with the rest of their convy, because the antisubmarine nets had already been raised. So they were late as they steamed into the harbor.

Ninety years ago today, the Norwegian supply ship the S.S. Ivo was steaming out of Halifax Harbor. It was going to be loading up with livestock as a part of a relief effort for Belgium, which was suffering the privations of War. At this time, it was running empty, and it was running behind as well. It had a crew of forty, including their own Captain.

A combination of events and other ships put the Imo and the Mont-Blanc on a collision course, both running at speed.

Both stayed their course, and both sent signals by whistle that they intended to stay the course. It was, perhaps, a grand game of Chicken, only with some sixty four hundred tons displacement worth of ships, one of which was carrying almost three thousand tons of explosives.

The problem with Chicken is it's only won when one side blinks. Someone has to decide that their lives are worth more than their right of way, even when they're convinced that they're right. It's reasonable to assume that the Captains of both ships knew they were right in this. It's also reasonable to assume neither captain wanted a collision.

The problem was, both the Imo and the Mont-Blanc blinked at the same time. They both simultaneously evaded, and they both evaded in the same direction. Which led, inexorably, to a collision.

A collision which set the Mont-Blanc on fire.

The French crew abandoned ship -- there was little else to be done. There wasn't enough time to try and put out the fire, and the Frenchmen knew the explosives would go up. They shouted to all that would hear that the ship was laden heavy with destructive power and was on fire, but being French they shouted in French, and as it turns out very few understood them.

The harbor responded as they normally would -- they sent assistance in, to rescue people and put the fire out.

The people of Halifax, having heard the collision, turned out in force on what was an unusually warm, almost Indian Summer like day, going out onto the docks to watch the show. Crowding down. Not understanding the crew that was fleeing for their lives. Not having any of the proper flags or warnings to tell everyone the ship was a munitions ship.

Ninety years ago today, the Mont Blanc exploded in Halifax Harbor.

The force was unimaginable at the time. No manmade explosion had ever come close to the magnitude of this blast. Indeed, until Hiroshima no explosion would come close. The blockbuster bombs and shelling of European targets throughout World War II didn't come close to the monumental explosion of the Mont-Blanc decades before. The shock wave devestated Halifax, slaughtering the crowds on the docks, shattering and damaging structures throughout, blowing in windows for miles around. The fireball from the Mont Blanc rose over a mile in the air, creating a full on mushroom cloud that could be seen for miles. They heard the explosion and felt tremors from it as far away as Cape Breton, over two hundred miles to the east.

All those people, crowded down by the docks. Caught in a wave of pure decimation. The power was so great it blew the harbor dry, creating a tsunami that washed through Halifax. As stated, it was a warm day -- but this was still December, which meant there were lamps and stoves going, fueled by fuel that burnt, with reserves stocked high against the winter. Which meant that in the aftermath of the blast and the tsunami, Halifax burned. On the other side of the harbor, the Mi'kmaq settlement in Tuft's Cove was completed, instantly destroyed. The settlement would be entirely abandoned after the disaster.

The devastation hampered rescue and relief efforts, and those efforts were made all the harder the next day, when a blizzard hit the still decimated city. Sixteen inches of snow came down, wind swept through, and people trapped in the wreckage couldn't be reached or died from exposure. Houses all over halifax had to be sealed with tar paper since the glass of so many windows was destroyed.

As many as sixteen hundred people died instantly in the explosion. Some four hundred or more died in the aftermath. Over nine thousand people were injured -- and more Nova Scotians died in the blast than died in all the rest of World War I combined. Many survivors were permanently disabled. In today's money, after adjusting for inflation, more than half a billion dollars worth of damage came from this blast

But we opened this gruesome remembrance by speaking not of the thousands killed or injured, but by speaking of one man. One man who had a moment of clarity. A realization.

The man's name was P. Vincent "Vince" Coleman, and he worked for the Railroad. He was a dispatcher, and his station was down in the trainyard, which itself was down by the docks. And as it turns out, he understood the danger. He heard what the sailors said. He knew -- he knew that the Mont Blanc was carrying munitions, and that it was on fire. And like any rational man he started to flee.

And then he stopped, because he was the train dispatcher, and he knew that the passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due any moment.

There were three hundred people on that train.

Vince Coleman had a family, and a life, and could almost certainly have escaped death, if not harm. But in that moment of clarity, he turned around, ran back into his office, and started tapping out morse code. A fast message. A desperate message, rendered into dots and dashes and sent down the line.

Stop trains. Munition ship on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye.

Vince Coleman did not make it out of his office. The Mont Blanc exploded. He was killed.

But the inbound from Saint John stopped, less than four miles from the station. Had the message not gone out, it almost certainly would have either entered the blast radius and been blown apart, the cars tossed like toys, or hit the twisted and destroyed track and derailed. Either way, many if not all of her crew and passengers would have been instantly killed.

There were other repercussions of this message. Because of it, news of the disaster spread like lightning down the wire, allowing for relief and rescue efforts to be immediately mobilized. Further, the train that Coleman had saved was immediately pressed into service, bringing survivors to safety where they could receive care and shelter. Almost certainly, Vince Coleman saved a lot more lives than the three hundred people on that train.

But that three hundred would be more than enough. Much more than enough.

It's always hard to say "what would I do," in situations like this. Our natural impulse is to say we'd have acted the way Vince Coleman did. Of course we would. Save three hundred people, including children? It seems like a no-brainer. But it's easy to say that when you're sitting at a desk typing. It seems far more likely that I'd have thought of my fiancee -- thought of my friends and family. Thought of people I knew that I could try to save. Thought of myself. And no one would think the less of me. We don't castigate those people who fled to save their own lives in Halifax that day. It was a natural reaction. A human reaction. It was no more cowardly an act than jumping out of the way of oncoming traffic. We are wired to survive -- to fight for survival.

It takes will and courage and dedication to overcome that impulse. It takes honest to God heroism. It takes something that we all hope we have, but we never know we have until the moment arrives.

Vince Coleman had it.

Ninety years ago today, a man named Vince Coleman made the stark, specific choice to die so that at least three hundred people could live. In the wake of one of the worst disasters to ever hit the North American continent, Vince Coleman chose the lives of three hundred strangers over his own life. He sacrificed himself. He sacrificed his continued presence with his family. He sacrificed his future.

But he became, in that moment, an icon. He became a hero.

On this, the ninetieth anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, I choose to remember Vince Coleman. For those who have not heard the story, I pass it to you. For those who have, I help remind you. Sometimes, heroism comes from choosing your duty over yourself.

And if you're out driving, and you see someone in your lane coming towards you, for Christ's sake stop well away from him and let him past. I don't care who has the right of way. It's not worth your life, much less everyone else's.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:46 PM | Comments (14)

December 3, 2007

Eric: Winter Storms, AntiNanowrimo and Christmas on the Satellite of Love: a stirring from the grave

There's a winter storm outside -- the first solid evidence of Winter in the first week of December for several years. The New Hampshire tourist industry -- by which I mean the ski industry, the snowmobile industry, the ski industry, the ATV industry, the ski industry and did I mention the ski industry -- is breathing a sigh of relief, as it looks like we might actually, y'know, have a ski season before February this year.

(Not that they were taking any chances, mind. I've driven by a bunch of phallic "look at our new snowmaking equipment" billboards since early September. By God they were going to be skiing this year whether we liked it or not! And, of course, I like it fine though I myself haven't gone skiing for at least fifteen years. Probably more like twenty, now that I think about it. Christ, I'm old.)

It is the Christmas season, though very few people seem to care this year. Including me, though I'm well ahead on my Christmas shopping for the first time... well, ever. (I am entirely in favor of fiancees who have well developed Amazon wishlists. I have a well developed Amazon wishlist too, but that's less for my fiancee and more for my family, who love me dearly and haven't a clue what sort of gizmos to buy me. I'd post a link for the curious but it would seem crass, and I like to wait at least four or five posts into a revival after a multiple week hiatus before I appear crass.)

For the most part, all is well. We wait patiently for the government to let Wednesday and I get married. (We could get word any day, or it could easily go into February with no word a'tall. We keep the lines of communication open to the single greatest immigration attorney in the world, and we check the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website, and we wait and we hope and I get up there whenever I can (she can't come down here until she comes down here to get married. That's just the way the law works.) and we talk every day, and that's what that is right now.

There's a winter storm outside, but the home fires are burning well. Having weathered financial issues aplenty over the Summer (as I'm sure you all remember), everything is fine now. I actually have some money in a savings account. Not a lot, but some, and that builds with every paycheck. There's always more unexpected events on the horizon, but barring the same kind of sudden, rapid smackdown of them that started the summer travails, things should just be okay.

I have it on good authority that the Month of November was, for me, essentially an anti-Nanowrimo. Which isn't to say I've gone negative on Nanowrimo. I've enjoyed it when I did it, and I enjoy seeing it when others do it. But for me, it was a month where I generated... well, essentially nothing, both here and on Banter Latte. Almost certainly I needed that. If you use your brain for writing too many days in a row without a break, it gets hot and eventually the RAM fails.

But it's December now, and it's the Christmas season, and we're heading to close the year out. There's things happening, in the world and on the web. The Russians own LiveJournal, the Primary is a month away in the state I live in, and Chuck Norris has embraced the meme in more ways than one. Halfpixel has become a full on online guild a la Dumbrella, bringing the Blank Label collective down to a tight six In Mystery Science Theater 3000 news. Rifftrax has started doing heavy advertising in targeted media, the Rifftrax crew has also formed "the Film Crew" which is doing the MST shuffle, which means the Mike Nelson/Kevin Murphy/Bill Corbett version of MST3K is fully back in production only minus the muppets and the SciFi network. At the same time, the original MST3K team of Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, and special bonus not-quite-original-but-still-seminal Frank Conniff have launched Cinematic Titanic, which somehow doesn't make any reference whatsoever to Rifftrax or the Film Crew (and vice versa) even though Mary Jo Pehl has done work now for both groups. And if that wasn't interesting enough, Best Brains, Inc., in the person of Jim Mallon (the original executive producer and the voice of Gypsy) has spun up some truly crap web cartoons 'continuing' the story of the Satellite of Love, alongside some old school folks like Paul Chapman, who we all remember as Pitch. Right?

Okay, the crappy webtoons are clearly just designed to get you buying DVDs, but still! It's... something....

That's right. Three entirely distinct entities of former MST3K folks, all cheerfully suckling at the teat of a show that went off the air in 1999. Three collectives of entertainers, writers, gadabouts town who all have legitimate claim to some of the MST3K legacy. Three separate performing troupes that are not acknowledging the other two's efforts in any way, shape or form, absent a brief mention on the Cinematic Titanic website that Josh Weinstein was the guy who actually hired Mike Nelson in the first place.

Yeah, there's no behind the scenes 'fun' going on there. None at all.

The interesting thing is, for all three of these groups... we're actually seeing models that the webcomics world pioneered in play. The MST3K site, with its free crappy Flash animations (seriously, guys, I know that the art is supposed to be 'stylized' but it looks... um... bad) is drawing eyeballs to sell videos. Rifftrax works off of -- I swear to Christ -- Micropayments, and from all accounts it's been monster successful. That's right. Someone made micropayments work. With, I would add, podcast technology and absolutely no DRM. It looks as though Cinematic Titanic may do the same, though we don't yet know. The Film Crew is straight online distribution -- they don't advertise in traditional places, their production facilities are essentially a minimal set possibly made in someone's garage, and they're clearly selling DVDs briskly.

Everyone still reading these words will recognize the models at play. And clearly everyone involved with MST3K has the advantage of a massive cult phenomenon from the 90's (probably the defining cult phenomenon among geek culture of the 90's, all apologies to Babylon 5 -- Buffy was transitional into the 21st century so nyah) to give them a continuing fanbase. But the simple truth is, it's not costing them much money to make Rifftrax. You or I could do it with scriptwriting time (and talent we might not possess, of course) and our personal computers. Admittedly, Nelson partnered with Legend Films who's shouldering the website costs, but come on.

Put yet another way? Other media besides comics have begun to figure out the whole web thing. Between that and the rise of direct-to-DVD stuff... and the fact that both Amazon.com and fucking Wal-Mart have come out as anti-DRM...

...well, it's an interesting time to be on the web.

But then, winter storms are always fun to watch from the inside.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:07 AM | Comments (16)

November 14, 2007

Eric: Service Disruption

It's nothing technical, you understand.

Seriously. As near as I can tell, everything's aces. The internet is working, the websites are up, and while I did migrate to Leopard, that was about as seamless an OS upgrade as I've done for a while. And Time Machine just plain works, for the record, which is staggeringly cool.

Well, all right. Upgrading led to some issues with my windows partition and I had to reinstall it, but honestly. It's the first time I've ever had to reinstall Windows in the era of Boot Camp, so how upset could I be?

So it's nothing technical. And yet, there has been an interruption of service.

It may have been my last trip to Ottawa. You can tell when it was -- it was the day my first Superguy post in years went up. And that was really cool, as it was on the heels of Gary posting, and there's been a flood after us so Gary started something. Apparently the collective Superguy writers have been waiting for someone to break the ice. And now they have.

But the day it went up, I drove to Ottawa, and spent a week up there. Up with Wednesday, kept by the government out of the United States until they get through processing the fiancee visa that will let her come down and let the two of us get married and on with our lives. This is the longest visit we've done for a long time, and it also featured a move to brighter surroundings for her. And time spent together. And time spent listening to a radio station with ten minute synopses of Ottawa in general. And time spent being on the weaker side of the dollar divide while in Canada for the first time in my life.

For the record? When they make the same jokes to you you made about them for your entire life? You don't get to be anything but gracious about it. Even when gasoline ends up costing five bucks a gallon after conversion. God damn it.

It may have been the change of time. I love love love love love the day we Fall Back. I am no fan of Daylight Savings Time. I think the system should have been abolished years ago. I am no farmer, and I like the day being an hour later in the morning, thank you kindly. But I am also of an age where the time change screws with me something fierce. It took a few days this year, as the trip back corresponded to it so I was exhausted enough to make it easy, but I'm in the throes of crappy sleep cycles right now.

It may have been work, which has been busier than November normally is, not the least of which was a day we had a power outage and the central core's backup generator didn't kick in. We managed to shut everything down before UPSes failed, but it's like doing work on someone's heart -- when you stop it from beating for a few minutes, it's gonna be a few days before they're feeling up to jogging and you have to do a lot of post-op stuff.

I've had people e-mail me. Just to make sure I wasn't dead. I appreciate that. I'm not dead.

I'm just not writing.

Which is weird.

I have ideas, mind. Tons of them. Banterable ideas. Websnarkish ideas. It's not that. It's not that at all.

But it's not actually going onto paper.

Maybe this notice of service disruption is the jolt I need. Maybe that'll get the big writing stone rolling down the hill.

I sort of plan on writing more Superguy today. I enjoyed that, and it too might spark things.

If it does, it'll go up sometime this week, and then a Myth will follow it, and Justice Wing will follow that.

And maybe somewhere in there I'll talk about the sale of City of Heroes and Issue 11 and dual blades and flashback and stuff. And talk about Zuda and how their interface (and their decision to downsample God damned cursive into it) makes the Baby Jesus cry and no one gives a shit about Zuda as a result.

And, you know. Stuff. Things.

I dunno.

But for now? I'm okay. I am.

We're just having a minor service disruption. Please stand by.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:31 AM | Comments (6)

September 18, 2007

Eric: Now, if *religious* people were upset, I could understand that. Of course, I'd have no sympathy, but I'd *understand* it.

(From Something Positive. Click on the thumbnail for full sized 'snap!')

There are a few strips out there that really nail geek culture. They understand geek culture, and when they satirize it, it is often spot on. Home on the Strange is one of the most prominent right now, and it's good -- it really is. But it's not brutal. It doesn't go for geek culture's fucking throat. It's sympathetic to geek culture. "Look how silly we can be," it says. "We don't talk about season five of Babylon 5! Hee hee!"

On the other side of the equation, you sometimes see... well, newspaper strips try to make fun of geek culture. Curtis goes there sometimes. But the problem with a lot of those strips are they come from non-geeks, so it's not that it's mean spirited -- it's that it's clueless. Like trying to buddy up to a pack of rabid Browncoats by saying how you really liked Captain Kirk and Han Solo, the best response you can hope for is pity.

No, to really savage geek culture you must be inside geek culture, but be willing to tear all pretension away from it.

Ladies and gentlemen, Randy Milholland.

Now, this is not a remembrance of Robert Jordan. I'm not really qualified to do a remembrance of Robert Jordan. I have a copy of The Eye of the World sitting on the bookshelf behind me in the office where I'm typing this, given to me by an associate going on ten years ago, but I haven't read it. I've never really done the whole Wheel of Time thing. In my defense, I've also only read one Harry Potter book.

That isn't the only Robert Jordan book I own, by the by. But that's getting ahead of the essay.

Regardless, Jordan has clearly done something remarkable. I mean, really really remarkable. And it may be the greatest testament to a writer I can conceive of. And I mean that exactly as it sounds -- there is no higher praise for a writer than I can think of than the one I'm about to give Robert Jordan.

Robert Jordan's work has so enthralled his fans, both hardcore and jaded, that with the announcement of his death, everyone -- in or out of the fandom -- thought "oh my god he's not going to finish Wheel of Time!" instead of "oh my God Robert Jordan is dead."

In part, this stems from the knowledge we've had of Jordan's illness. We've known he was sick, and we've known he was not likely to survive. I wrote an essay about that in 2006, entitled "There is life, and there is living. But they're best done together. In volume." I talked about his cardiomyopathy in that essay, and my own cardiomyopathy as well. And I mentioned I would buy his latest book the next day (as it turns out, I bought Crossroads of Twilight. I have no idea if that was his latest or not, but it was there. I haven't read it, but it's made me think of finally reading The Eye of the World.)

Well, here we are, a year later and he has succumbed. Whether it was to congestive heart failure or to complications in the chemotherapy or something else I don't know. Someone reading this probably does. And I am saddened by this. But even though I've never read any of his books, my immediate thought on hearing the news was "Oh Christ -- he didn't finish The Wheel of Time." When I told someone else, afterward -- someone else who to my knowledge has never read Robert Jordan either -- the response was, immediately, "did he publish that last book first?" We are both sympathetic people, with absolutely no investment in the series to date, and before sympathy or reflection or even the "oh, what a damn shame" response, we both immediately jumped to "aw, shit. He didn't make it. Now the series won't be finished."

I can think of exactly one other writer who would have provoked this reaction. If J.K. Rowling had been hit by a bus before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, the outpouring of grief would have been monumental, but it would have been eclipsed by the shrieks of "OH MY GOD SHE DIDN'T FINISH THE SERIES!"

Robert Jordan inspired that. He did it by creating a series that hooked enough people that it became a holy quest for them. As God was their witness, they were going to make it to the end of The Wheel of Time. When others gave up on Jordan, they hung in there. They kept the faith. And now....

And now.

Of course, they will in fact see the end of the story. Even as J.K. Rowling went on record that the end of Harry Potter had been fully outlined in case she did get hit by a bus, so Jordan went on the record that he had kept his family fully appraised of what needed to happen in this final book, so that it would be completed in case he died. This was a necessary precaution, given his health.

But, the argument will go, it won't be the same. And that's true. And a number of fans will vehemently boycott the book that "the family clearly put out to profit on his legacy," even though it's clear Jordan intended for this story to be finished.

In other words, Geek Culture is in full swing. And that brings us back to Something Positive.

Now, we know that God, in Something Positive, is a full on bastard. We've seen it before. He does horrific things to Davan just to see the look on his face. This is a foundation of the strip.

Therefore, it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Something Positive that God would cause Jordan's death purely to finally break Mike. Who, you will recall, is the face of Ugly Fandom, all the way to the present. He is Geek Culture at its least palatable, and even as he continues to walk the path of redemption he can backslide.

I know that there are Jordan fans who are pissed over this episode of Something Positive. For "belittling his death," apparently. To me, this validates the strip. Because this isn't about Robert Jordan, even as this essay isn't a remembrance of the man. This strip is about the fandom. About geek culture. About us. From Mike's innately selfish point of view, God did kill Robert Jordan just to make him snap. Freaking out at Milholland for this is A) missing the point of the strip, which is not about Robert Jordan but is about geeks, and B) making it clear you're exactly who he had in mind when he wrote it.

Does that deny the real pain people are feeling? No. But it is observing it, and it is not being gentle about it. That's the business Milholland is in, and business as always is good.

Robert Jordan was clearly a remarkable writer. He inspired passions and dedication and a general sense of his magnum opus that rivals Harry Potter. And we, as geeks, think first of that work -- and how it impacts us -- before even feeling grief for his death. Milholland nailed this one, and nailed us with it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:26 AM | Comments (26)

August 27, 2007

Eric: Ack-phhlpt.

(From Opus.)

Remember when Opus was going to save the Newspaper Comics Page. And through it newspapers themselves?

Oh yeah. There were announcements. Berkeley Breathed was coming back, and circulation was coming five steps behind him. And it was going to be a whole new era, both artistically for Breathed and commercially for the papers. Breathed was going Sundays only, a la Outland, and was going to get a half-newspaper page. And Breathed, having moved into the twenty first century (well, artistically, anyhow) was featuring a lush, painted palette on these new pieces.

And most of all, Opus was going to be a newspaper comic. No web presence, no sirree bob. If you wanted to see what had happened to Opus and Steve (and occasionally Bill) after all these years, you were going to have to buy yourself a paper! Because that's how it was supposed to be. The web was sucking the life out of comic strips, and it was time to take a stand. Here -- here's a bit from a 2003 Salon article about it:

But business is no place for nostalgia. When Breathed retired "Outland" in 1995, David Shearer of the Washington Post Writers Group -- Breathed's syndicate -- expressed some remorse over the fate of the strips' sizes. "I'd like to see comics displayed bigger. We all would. But that's not the reality of it," he said, pointing toward electronic media as a place for artists to experiment. Ironically, with Breathed's return, the WPWG is using that missed experimentation as a selling point. "The one and the only place to see 'Opus' will be in newspapers," Shearer says. "This is a tremendous opportunity to increase circulation."

And this was going to be a true sequel. This wasn't just "the return of Bloom County." This was "over a decade has passed, and these people are older and flabbier." In fact, several beloved characters -- like Binkley or Milo Bloom or Oliver Wendell Holmes -- were no-shows, because Breathed didn't want to depict them as teenagers (or older). He went on the record about this.

And it premiered to much ballyhoo. And it went into papers.

And then... nothing. No one cared.

Oh, I don't mean to say Opus didn't and doesn't have fans. It does. Heck, it makes me smile more weeks than it doesn't, and that's not always true of comics I read. But Opus's impact was essentially negligible, both on the comics world and on the world of newspaper circulation.

Do you need proof? Opus launched in 2003. It's a four year old comic now. Did you realize that? Had you realized that he had been around for four years? He's a full year older than Websnark is, and Websnark definitely lost its new blog smell a long time ago. (Note to self -- make mention of the anniversary sometime within a month of said anniversary. Jesus, Eric. Try a little, would you?)

In part, the problem was that glorious painted style. Ironically, it would have looked pretty sweet on the web, where the much deeper palette would show the gradations to good effect. Put onto the comics page it came across as dark and muddied, and subtleties were lost by bad LPI counts. It went away soon enough, replaced with essentially the same colors we saw in the Sunday Bloom County.

This was made worse as newspapers began to shrink the comic. The half-page thing didn't last long at all, really. When it was clear that Opus wasn't spiking numbers, there was no real impetus for editors to bow to the Washington Post Writer's Group's demands and strictures. Given the choice between letting them shrink Opus so they could fit more comic strips in or having them drop Opus entirely, they let them shrink it. Ultimately, that meant the painted style had to go, and a coloring style very very reminiscent of the 80's run went in.

Naturally, the "newspapers only" stance died next. The Washington Post -- the flagship paper for Opus -- began to run it on their virtual comics page, and gradually it moved into other online venues as well. It really didn't have much of a choice -- if it was going to start appealing to the comic strip fans out there, it had to go to where they were and do their best to draw them in,.

(Not that that strategy has been successful either. I mean, in several years of posting, Opus hasn't been covered by The Comics Curmudgeon even once. Now, while there's a case to be made that that means Opus is actually pretty good, so Josh Fruhlinger has little to say about it... not appearing at all suggests he just doesn't read it.)

How far have we come from launch? Well, recently Opus went to Salon, which will arguably be the best place to read it moving forward since they're going to maintain an archive. Sadly, the older strips aren't going up there, so we'll have to wait for the inevitable collection.

And also recently... Lola Granola showed up, and so did Binkley and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Binkley and Oliver... were the same age as when we last saw them, so everyone knows. This despite the presence of Steve's own son, who is now Binkley's age.

So what, one is tempted to think. These are the comic strips. Not every strip is Gasoline Alley (thank God), and real time aging is overdone. Which is true enough... if they hadn't made such a big deal about it, and about how if the kid characters came back, then they'd have to be teenagers and Breathed didn't want to draw them like that.

Hackwork? Not really. I mean, it's still funny and Christ, they're Breathed's characters. He can do whatever he likes. But it's been really, really interesting for me to track this experiment in revivals -- revivals of Berke Breathed, revivals of the newspaper comics, revivals of fortune. And to see the early stands taken -- admittedly, stands that were largely based in hubris, but also stands that meant something to Breathed and (it seemed) his editors -- give way to the painful economic necessities of publishing in the modern world.

And we have come full circle now, and it seems the last great threshold has been reached. From that same 2003 article/interview in Salon we see Breathed write:

As an end, controversy is a dead end. It's why TV shows tried to throw in nudity some years ago. I notice now that the ripples de jour are lesbian kisses. It's a sign of desperation, not good writing. Not to say that if I could figure out a way to throw in some hot lesbian action into "Opus," I wouldn't.

True enough. And in its own way, sad enough. Because hey -- guess what? We have controversy in Opus. And sadly, it's not lesbians making out.

You may have heard the story. Opus is running a series of strips where spiritually mercurial and flaky Lola Granola has been trying out different philosophies, theologies and spiritualisms in an effort to find herself. In the most recent strip, she has latched onto a new one -- terming herself a Radical Islamist. In her words, it's the hot new fad on the planet.

It's a pretty funny strip, truth be told. And it says something rather tame about radical Islam and something a bit more brutal about people who leap into new religious fads without thought or real, honest spiritual consideration.

That's not why I'm discussing it. I'm discussing it because newspapers have pulled the strip, because they're worried people will be offended.

That happens a lot in the newspaper world. It's kind of a boring story these days. Though in this case, it's clearly patently ridiculous. Lola is fully garbed (albeit more brightly than one might expect) and is certainly not tearing Islam down with her statements about it. Really, aside from one note about "a man's rightful place," it would probably be completely acceptable to any Muslim reading it, and almost certainly any American Muslim -- the ones most likely to read it -- would be sophisticated enough to take it in good faith. It sure as Hell doesn't come close to the Johnny Hart Islam Outhouse controversy of a few years back (or any number of controversies from B.C. before his death). But still -- comic strips get pulled. It's what happens.

Except... one of the papers pulling the strip is the Washington Post. In fact, that's almost certainly why it's getting airplay.

And it is getting airplay. Hell, Boing Boing took a stand on it, using the cheerful phrase "chickenshit" in it. Which is perfectly apropos. The move really is chickenshit, and dumb to boot. And lots of pundits are noting that in this time of declining readerships, pulling strips that might actually inspire some controversy is a stupid move at best.

I understand these feelings. And I agree with them, but not completely. Not because I think the strip should have been pulled -- it's patently absurd to have pulled this strip. No, I have reservations because I smell a Washington Post sized rat.

Remember, Opus is syndicated by the Washington Post Writer's Group. The same organization that owns and publishes the Post syndicates and distributes Opus. They're different divisions, and it's certainly possible that the Post editors decided they would pull potentially offensive (only not really) strips from the paper without consultation or connection to the editors of the syndicate... but it seems just as likely that if the Post's editors had a problem with the strips, so would the syndicate's editors -- and so would their mutual owners.

On the other hand... the Washington Post pulling a potentially offensive comic strip from their paper (but posting that strip to the web page) -- and that strip being Opus, by Berke Breathed, still considered by some outlets one of the great rock stars of the cartooning world?

Now that's a story.

And a story means people talking about it.

Publicity. Energy. Zazz.

Do I think this was all a master plan on the part of Breathed and his editors? Probably not. It seems more likely that these strips were sent out to papers, one or two pulled them, and someone at the syndicate thought "waaaaaait a minute..." But I do think that Breathed shifts with the wind. We saw it with Outland, which started off as the whimsical flights of fancy of a poor little girl named Roland Ann whose real life was miserable, so she needed a fantasy life she could escape to. By the end of it... it was Bloom County. Bill Watterson hit the nail on the head with a satirical cartoon he sent to Breathed, which Breathed published in one of the Outland collections or a treasury or something. It featured Breathed pouring money into the gas tank of a boat, kicking Roland Ann to the curb due to her innate unmerchandisabilty. Which may not actually be a word, but I digress.

I'm forced back to that Salon article/interview from 2003, where they were talking to Breathed about his intentions for Opus. Sadly, it's a burka instead of girl on girl action. (Man, consider the... er... artistic merits of a Bobbi Harlow/Lola Granola marriage.) But either way, we've got desperation sign in spades these days. And I wouldn't put it past the syndicate to even hang the newspapers out to dry if it meant getting Opus into the young demographic elite. They don't do those great Dakin Opus plush penguins any more, but they'll start churning them out in a heartbeat if there's a demand. And if the tee shirts are subversive this time and sold through Hot Topic instead of through Wal-Mart, I'm sure the money would still spend real nice like.

Really, if this wasn't some kind of publicity stunt, it should have been. It's the only thing that makes this ridiculous strip-pull seem even remotely sane. And if it was, it's been effective. The web's buzzing. People are talking. I wrote 2,200 words that should have gone into "Interviewing Leather" on it.

And lots more people saw this strip this week than saw last week's slice of theological cheesecake. And even more will see next week's banned strip. And a good number of those people will stick around for the week after that.

Maybe they'll be in time to see Cutter John and Portnoy's inevitable return. And maybe Dakin should start sourcing fabric and polyfill, just in case.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:53 PM | Comments (26)

August 26, 2007

Eric: Yay! Disgruntled election posting!

The United States Presidential primary elections and caucuses -- the system that the major parties use to determine their Presidential Candidates -- was created in large part to ensure that all states got a chance to nominate major candidates. Remember, for a very long time communication in this nation was at the same rate as speed of transport. This is why Paul Revere had to do a midnight ride instead of posting "D00ds, teh British ar cuming" to his MySpace page. Without some system to distribute the contest among the different states, many states would never get to see the candidates or have any opportunity to have some influence on that aspect of the election process.

However. We now live in an era of instantaneous communication. The Presidential primary elections and caucuses system is now officially just an extended, mind numbingly expensive parade, giving disproportionate power to a small number of states early on in the process. I am privileged to live at Ground Zero of this process, New Hampshire. As a result, I've had vastly better access to Presidential candidates in the last couple of elections than I ever had living in Maine, Upstate New York, or Washington State. They wanted me to like them, so they could leave New Hampshire with "momentum."

It's pretty cool, but that's hardly the point. And now, with various states in a January primary bidding war and a showdown with Florida where they're being threatened with having their Democratic delegates stripped because -- I swear I'm not making this up -- their Republican controlled state legislature violated the DNC's guidelines (because, see, they want to make it seem like the DNC is shafting Florida so the Republican candidate takes Florida in the general election), the current system is revealed as the creaking, cruft laden mess that it's been for a long time. All, of course, culminating in a Convention which has neither drama nor point other than being a week long commercial, which the networks no longer even provide major coverage to since, well, C.S.I. Miami gets better ratings.

So. How do you fix it? How do you make it possible for everyone to have impact on nominations, make conventions relevant again, and get everyone to shut the Hell up about all this?

Simple. Two primaries. Just two.

The first would be on Super Tuesday, and it would be held in all states that award 35 delegates or less to the convention. This would include states like Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware and the District of Columbia, and would be both a bellweather and give the smaller, less populous states a chance to shine to begin with.

The second would be on the first night of the Convention, and would include all the states with more than 35 delegates. So before the Convention, no one would have the nomination sewn up, while the also rans would be washed out in the initial run.

The Convention would become far more interesting, because there would be actual voting going on. Before ten p.m. at night, the smaller states would cast their votes and preparations would be made, and then past ten p.m. states would be reporting their results to their delegations, who would then cast their votes. It would be good television, full of poignancy, and it would pull eyeballs to the set. Then on Tuesday any needful wrangling would take place (entirely possible, since this system would make it once again possible for more than one candidate to be in position to be nominated). The results would be certified on Wednesday. On Thursday, the candidate accepts the nomination and a Vice Presidental candidate is announced.

We get drama back, all states have a voice in process, and no state is set before any other. Which would piss off my fellow New Hampshire residents, but hey -- they'd still be the in the first primary and would still have enough delegates that no candidate could ignore them.

And we could maybe, just maybe, shut the fuck up about the process and get onto the business of deciding who the best candidate is based on his opinions and record.

Ah, but now I'm just writing fairy tales again.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (17)

August 16, 2007

Eric: It would, however, be acceptable for April to end up Roadside.

So. We all know (well, everyone who cares even slightly knows) that For Better Or For Worse is going to be "ending" sometimes soon. We put "ending" in quotes because we also know it's not actually going to end. Instead, it's going to freeze time. The New Pattersons will become the focus, time will freeze, character development will stop, April will be forever trapped in the first trimester of pregnancy, the horror of marrying Anthony will forever be kept an inch away from Liz's brain....

...and so forth.

Fine. I can accept that. And I can accept and even honor the fact that Lynn Johnston -- until two years ago or so considered one of the most consistently awesome newspaper cartoonists and now reviled beyond rationality, all thanks to newly unmustachioed Anthony -- won't be handing off the comic to other creators, as syndicated artists have been doing since the beginning of time immemorial.

But. That doesn't mean we have to listen to her.

I swear to God. The day "For Better Or For Worse" goes into freeze-limbo? A new webcomic should start, continuing the story.

Oh, there would need to be mild changes. The Petersons instead of the Pattersons. Avril instead of April. Shit like that. And the character designs would have to change at least slightly.

But why couldn't a webcartoonist -- or a cabal of webcartoonists -- not continue the strip on... freed from Johnston's railroading and editorial concerns... bringing it back to its true roots, grounded in fallibility and a sense of reality.

Consider the chance to write about Liz's growing sense of ennui and even a trapped feeling stemming from this spineless passive-aggressive creature she's rebounded into bed with. Consider a chance to take teen star Rebecca and take her down a frightened Lindsey Lohan path. Consider just how elaborate a train layout you could give John. And consider the opportunity to actually have people slowly call Elly on her tureens of bullshit.

It wouldn't be hard. Assign an editor. Gather a number of talents. (Hell, David Willis and Aerie might get into bare fisted combat at the opportunity.) Go plotline by plotline, shaking up the creative team as you go so everyone gets a chance to play.

The rules would be simple: no radical changing of the fundamental underpinnings of the strip. FOOB is realistic. The only magic or fantasy is when one is considering the heartwarming sacrifice of a beloved and noble pet for a meanass ungrateful child. No satire -- this isn't "magnify the faults of FOOB for all to see," this is "pick up the story and actually get it back on track." And absolutely no animated gifs of the characters blinking, because that shit's creepy.

It would, of course, be necessary to continue to come up with patently ridiculous catchphrases and euphemisms for April and her peers.

Ideally, the people involved would be people who love -- really love -- For Better Or For Worse, but who can't stand seeing what's become of it in the name of wrapping it up in a nice big bow (and insuring that Liz Patterson is no career minded whore who marries someone she didn't go to elementary school with).

Who's in?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:46 PM | Comments (89)

August 6, 2007

Eric: For those playing along at home, I think the subject on this post broke the RSS feed.

Several weeks ago, suddenly and without warning, a swath of Livejournal accounts were suspended without notice, their materials taken down, over reports of depictions of child pornography and other violations of their Terms of Service. The methodology used by Six Apart to determine what constituted a violation of the terms of service was extremely suspect (in many cases, they apparently used the list of interests on someone's profile page, so for example a survivor of incest or pedophilia who was an activist in the abuse recovery scene might find their journal banned as promoting the activities they were most opposed to), and many, many people got really, really pissed off. It was a monumental public relations nightmare for Six Apart, which desperately tried to deal with the monumental fallout for several days. Many long time users of Livejournal got very upset, whether they were directly impacted or not. Several got accounts on other journaling communities that used similar code (sometimes the same codebase, as LJ's engine is open source). Places like Greatestjournal. Deadjournal, or Journalfen got a sudden boost in users.

But, Livejournal managed to come out from under it. "We're sorry," they said. "We did this all wrong. We have undeleted most of the deleted journals, so we can begin to do this properly. But please understand, this is a policy that we're going to implement, and many of the journals we've restored are going to be deleted again."

It's several weeks later. And now, a whole new block of journals have been deleted again. And people are very upset. They're upset because it's apparently the LJ Abuse team who decide what constitutes artistic merit in the case of depictions. They're upset because there's apparently no appeal, and protests that a given picture actually depicts eighteen year olds or otherwise consenting adults have no effect.

And I?

I find myself oddly apathetic. Because this is exactly what I expected would happen. And people should have known that after the last incident.

Six Apart is not the Federal Government. There is no right to Free Speech, or right to Freedom of Expression on Livejournal. There are terms of service -- particularly for those who have paid Six Apart money -- but those terms of service are subject to change, and those changes only need to be posted to the Paid Accounts community to represent appropriate notification. (And to my knowledge, most Paid account holders don't subscribe to that community. Christ knows I don't.) This is a private company, who owns private servers, and they have every right in the world to say "here's business we're not going to accept," or "here's content we're not going to host," or "here's a person who we don't want having a journal on our system."

Every. Right. In the world. Period. It's their ball, their bat, and their baseball diamond. And they made it absolutely crystal clear several weeks back that they really, really don't want to be in the slashfic or slashpic business.

Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the position of the folks on the other side of this equation. These are people who have used the community building tools that are Livejournal's stock in trade, sometimes for many, many years. They've paid money to Livejournal. They've built up significant online identity with Livejournal. Livejournal, they feel, is theirs. At least in part. They were there back when Brad Fitzpatrick owned the thing. They feel they've done nothing wrong and they've acted in good faith, and that this is total bull.

I sympathize. But they don't have a leg to stand on, here. It's Six Apart's playground, and they can tell anyone they like not to play any game they like. They can charge for access to the slide. They can tell any group they wish that the teeter totters are off limits. They can, in short, push my dumbass metaphor to the limit in any way they wish.

Now, the justification that Six Apart is using is, of course, protecting the children. Or restricting child pornography. Or whatever other buzzword is being used this week to make people react emotionally instead of rationally. Whatever. But what they really mean, to be frighteningly blunt, is we don't want slashfic here. This week, it's alleged depictions of pedophilia. Next week or next month, it'll be copyright infringement. Or any number of other legal grey areas that will let them quietly (well, let's be honest, loudly and hamhandedly) excise materials they don't like and don't want to be associated with.

This is entirely their right. And fanficcers, slashficcers, writers of sexually charged fiction and potentially even straight fiction writers should be taking strong notice -- because they could in fact be next. Because the one thing Six Apart can't do is promise something in their terms of service and then not deliver it -- which means that if person A has his work taken down as a violation, and he reports person B -- even if person B isn't violating it in the same way (or if there's question if person B is violating it at all), Six Apart, to try and avoid legal trouble, is going to ultimately take down Person B's work too.

What does this all mean? Am I happy that Livejournal's going down this path?

Not really. I'm not a slashficcer and I'm at best an occasional fanficcer, but I am a writer and I use Livejournal a lot. I use it as my RSS aggregator. I use it to keep in touch with friends. I use its social networking controls, at least in part because almost everyone I know is on it. And I don't want to see a massive exodus of the people in my life away from it because it can't be trusted.

But I have no control over that. SixApart gets to make that call. And Livejournal can't be trusted at this point.

So, I'm apathetic about the new round of deletions, because I saw it coming and I think everyone else should have, too. Which is a little mean of me, but that's the way it goes. People should have been moving to Journalfen or Greatestjournal to begin with. Or, someone with tech savvy who loves all of this stuff should be taking the open source code base, getting hosting or a server or whatever (and grabbing appropriate sponsorships), and making this into an LJ style system counterpart to fanfiction.net. Because this is the course Livejournal's on, and at this point there's no going back. You can't trust them with your slashfic or your NC-17 art. Period. And that's going to creep into fanfic in general, or erotica in general, or porn in general. And then from there, it may creep into regular fiction and writing. You don't know it won't, and it's clear they're not going to be on your side as this goes forward. That's what a loss of trust means. They're going to do what they feel is appropriate to make their business into the kind of business they think it should be.

I'm sad because it means the glory days of Livejournal as a place where people met and wrote and journaled and connected with one another are over, and Livejournal has passed zenith and is moving towards nadir. Which frankly, we knew. Other social networking sites passed it long ago. Which is the tragic side of this decision on Six Apart's part -- they're not in a position to be alienating large chunks of the user base they have left.They need those chunks of user base, because it's not just the pornographers who are going to leave. It's any number of people who think Six Apart's wrong in this. Or just folks who think this means Six Apart can't be trusted any more, and their journal is way, way too important to them to be in the hands of someone they can't trust.

Am I going to continue using Livejournal? Yes I am. Because I don't use it for those purposes. I use it to keep up with friends' journals. I use it to read RSS feeds. I use it because I like the mechanism of the Friends' List and there's no real way to replicate that Friends' List elsewhere yet. But if enough of my friends go somewhere else, I'll end up going there too in an effort to keep what I want in a site like this live.

At the same time? There was a time when I'd use a Livejournal community to put together fiction writing projects of certain kinds. I don't use it that way any more. Any of my creative work I'm going to have on a site where I'm paying for the hosting and can set up whatever I like -- and even then I'll keep robust backups in the unlikely event that Dreamhost catches a severe case of Dick.

And sadly, it's very unlikely this same community of users will come together anywhere else in a singular sense. Which means I'll need to follow several different communities to keep up with everyone, and I'll have to pick and choose where I'll post my own Livejournalish style posts. And ultimately, I'll end up only following one other journal service because dude, I have a life, and that means I'll lose some connection to folks. I'll fill in some of the gaps with RSS feeds and the like, but what was once a really cool thing will fade out of my life -- as Usenet, Listservs and the like did before it. And several years from now, when I'm reminiscing with several geeks of my generation, the talk will turn to Livejournal, and we will talk about what had been cool about it, and what ghastly mistakes will have been made on it. And someone will say "is it even still out there?" And someone else will say "yeah, I look at it every now and again. There's a few thousand die hards on it who refuse to go anywhere else. They're convinced everyone will come back." And there will be a few derisive snorts at these dinosaurs who won't let go of the past, and the kid geeks at the next table will have no idea what we're talking about.

Which, if you get right down to it, was an odd path for Six Apart to decide to walk down, but hey -- they walked down it.

And the folks who continue to walk down it with them shouldn't be surprised when it leads places they don't like.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:23 AM | Comments (20)

July 24, 2007

Eric: Requiescat in Pace: Tammy Faye Messner

Let us speak then of the dead. It's something we seem to do more and more of. The last time I spoke of the dead, I was speaking of Chris Benoit, and of the conflicted feelings I had as a man I respected and enjoyed as an entertainer had turned out or turned into a monster. This time, I speak of someone we all knew, once upon a time, was a shallow, bad and hypocritical person, and who I speak well of now as a kind and decent woman who, in the end, meant what she said.

A person I, and most of the people who know anything about the last twenty years of her life, mourn now the way we mourn any person who is essentially decent, kind and open, and who did her best to spread a message that on balance was a good and decent one -- far more so than many of the others of her kind and era did.

I speak, of course, of Tamara Faye LaValley, who was known professionally as Tammy Faye or Tammy Faye Messner at the end of her life, and who millions remembered (and mocked) as Tammy Faye Bakker, wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker.

I was a child in the 70's and 80's, living in rural Maine along the Northern Canadian border. I have never needed a Saturday Night Live sketch to tell me who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were. I had the PTL Club. And if it seems weird that I had watched it, you don't understand what television used to be like, especially in Northern Maine. Until the cable came, our television universe was CHSJ (the New Brunswick Television System) on Channel 6, WAGM on Channel 8, three French channels (two of which barely came in) after that, and MPBN (the PBS affiliate) on Channel 11. Period.

WAGM, in particular, was our gateway into the world. It was primarily a CBS affiliate, but officially it was an affiliate of all three networks. They would (usually) show CBS shows when they were supposed to air, and shows on ABC or NBC would show up at odd times -- the 7 o'clock hour, for example. Or on weekends. But despite this plethora of programming, there was never enough programming to fill the dial. Old, bad movies would play here and there, after Captain Kangaroo and the game shows and the soap operas. And weekends? Saturday morning was the CBS cartoon lineup, and then there was a long void all day. Sunday mornings there were various religious shows, then various crap, then they would pull in ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Why did I watch it? I was a kid living in the middle of nowhere. I had Canadian television, French television I couldn't understand, Public Television, and whatever cheap crap WAGM threw at me. You're damn right I watched it. All of it. I watched Jim McKay excitedly present ice barrel jumping. I must have seen every episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I watched Hee Haw. I watched It's The Law, Front Page Challenge and The Beachcombers on CHSJ. I watched To Tell The Truth and What's My Line, in the days when Soupy Sales was the high point of those shows. The high point.

And I watched The P-T-L Club.

My parents didn't. They had better things to do, and who could blame them? I don't know if my sister watched it or not, but I don't know how she could have avoided it -- she was even more of a child of the 70's than I was. But I did. I was young, and let's be blunt. This show was amazing. It had music (not like Lawrence Welk, another show I watched out of the 'there's nothing else to do' theory, but more exciting music), it had shouting and gesticulation and sobbing -- let's be blunt. It was a freak show. A spectacle. And kids love spectacle.

And it had Tammy Faye Bakker.

Tammy Faye Bakker seemed too over the top to be real. So heavily made up she seemed greasepainted, always laughing or sobbing at what seemed like near hysteria (for many years, mascara pouring down her face from tears was practically her trademark and calling card), she seemed like a clown. A literal clown. Especially when a kid like me was watching -- I knew from clowns, and I knew television wasn't real. And there was no way that freak was real.

But it wasn't just kids like me watching the show. There had been religious programming for a long, long time, but it was P-T-L (for PRAISE THE LORD! shouted enthusiastically) that inaugurated the television crusade. Billy Graham had been the closest we'd had to a public crusader and evangelist, as once a year WAGM would give over the To Tell The Truth/What's My Line block to him for a week of shouting and praying, but this was something else. This was up close and personal and in your face. Witnessing. Testifying. Exhorting!

And, as you all know, begging. Begging for money. Money to show your faith. Money to continue the faith. Every Church in America "passed the plate" and churchgoers understood that's what kept the church going and enabled them to help the poor and needy (this was a given in these somewhat simpler days -- churches helped the needy. It was most of what they did with their time in between sermons. At least, that's what people assumed back in the day). Well, they were passing the plate to America, and they expected to see it fill fast, brothers and sisters!

And they were a monumental success. They were the vanguard of a boom, informing and being informed by ministries and ministers like Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle!), and later on Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others of their ilk. They were so successful they launched a theme park. A theme park for Jesus. Heritage U.S.A. was another huge success, bringing in crowds of people to ride rides and have good family fun and obey Jesus.

Meanwhile, a few years later, cable done come to my town, bringing with it NBC and ABC on a regular feed, plus what was then called Superstation WTBS, and -- for a glorious twelve hours a day -- a mysterious and exciting new pay cable service called Home Box Office. And with these new, dramatic options, The P-T-L Club followed Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk into the department of "never watched, because damn, man. I have a life." WLBZ -- the NBC affiliate -- in particular held my attention. They still produced most of their own post-soap opera television. Sure, it was crappy movies just like WAGM had been, but they were slightly better crappy movies and they were introduced and presented by Eddie Driscoll, who rocked so hard you could measure him seismically. So I hadn't seen The P-T-L Club for quite some time when scandal rocked it. Jim Bakker had allegedly drugged and raped a church secretary, the ministry had paid her hush money and covered it up, and donations were going to support a lavish, decadent lifestyle for the Bakkers. (As a side-note, Jimmy Swaggart was the man who "broke" the story of Jim Bakker's transgressions, as well as another minster name of Marvin Gorman. This led Gorman to hire a private investigator to investigate this man who was purging "cancers in the body of Christ." That led to Swaggart's own habit of prostitutes coming out and his own fall from grace. I digress, but it's always fun to remember that taking joy in and promoting the fall of your rivals is a good way to fall yourself.)

Bakker's actions were reprehensible, and Tammy Faye was pulled in for the ride. It was just too easy to include her. She seemed at best incredibly naive -- and at this point, no one was ready to believe she could be anything but as venal as the rest of the defrocked. The P-T-L Club had preached prosperity theology and the Bakkers had lived a good life. Too good a life, as it turned out, as financial improprieties came to light and the IRS came a-calling. Jim Bakker went to prison. The pair got divorced. And Tammy Faye Bakker became a footnote and a joke. Just another scandal. Just another flim flam artist.

The thing is? She meant it.

She really did. Oh, she wasn't pure and innocent of all the goings on. There were rumors of prescription medicine and addiction. There was a clear opulent lifestyle she embraced. This is not to exonerate Tammy Faye Messner of the choices she made.

But when she said that God loved you? And loved me? And loved everyone? She meant that. She meant it with all her heart. And she felt that included everyone. The rich and the poor. Criminals and the innocent. The healthy and the sick. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of all creeds and races. Everyone. During the heyday of The P-T-L Club in the eighties, when AIDS was mysterious and homosexuality denounced by most evangelists as dirty and sinful -- with the implication that HIV was a divine judgement against them -- Tammy Faye Bakker had gay men and women on her show. She had AIDS victims appear. She exhorted her audience to pray for these people -- not to abandon their sinful lives, but to be healed of their illness, like any Christian should pray for any sick person.

After her divorce and remarriage, Tammy Faye slowly began to emerge. Her message was the same, even as she embraced her (admittedly freakish) public image. She launched a (secular) talk show with openly gay (and HIV positive) actor Jim J. Bullock. She appeared on programs and documentaries. (One notable documentary brought her back to Heritage U.S.A., long abandoned and falling apart. She broke into tears at the sight of it, wishing she could just spend some time painting things and making it look a little nicer).

And then she got sick. She got cancer. Colon cancer. She left the talk show, and worked on fighting it -- and seemed to win. It went into remission, and she stuck to the edges of popular culture. She traded on her image -- in a move almost stunning in its self-understanding, she appeared as a recurring guest star on The Drew Carey Show as the mother of an overweight, heavily made up caricature of a character named Mimi Bobek. And most famously (or infamously), she appeared on a season of VH-1's freakshow of the has-beens The Surreal Life, appearing alongside porn star Ron Jeremy and Vanilla Ice, among others.

And a whole new generation of people -- and an old generation of skeptics -- discovered they really liked this woman. She was honestly, truly kind to everyone. She was unafraid to espouse unpopular opinions but those opinions weren't ever exclusionary or mean spirited. She declined to accompany her castmates to see a psychic or attend a nudist resort, but she didn't condemn them for their choices. Co-star and Baywatch babe Traci Bingham described the experience of knowing her and hearing her speak on the show as life altering.

And then she got sick again.

She was seen undergoing treatments on her son's documentary series, One Punk Under God. She needed oxygen and had to stop making appearances for the most part. In telephone interviews, she described her hospice care and told people to never live their lives in fear but only feel hope. On July 19, she and her husband Ron Messner appeared on Larry King Live, and she was almost shockingly thin -- the woman parodied and known for being heavyset having dipped below seventy pounds, the skin loose on her skeletal body. It was known she was dying, but her appearance was hopeful and full of faith. From the transcript:

KING: Now you've always been so upbeat, the feeling of god being with you. Does that remain?

T.F. MESSNER: That remains consistent. I talk to God every single day. And I say, God, my life is in your hands and I trust you with me.

KING: We have an e-mail from Renee in Strongsville, Ohio: "I admire you for your unshakeable faith. Do you believe when you leave this Earth, you're going to go to a better place?"

T.F. MESSNER: I believe when I leave this earth -- because I love the Lord -- I am going straight to Heaven.

That was the tone. That, and excitement over having gained five pounds, and really looking forward to biting into a burger, which she had been craving. And expressing love and thanks to everyone who had spoken for her. She mentioned the gay community, who had "opened their arms to her" when the bad times had come and who she would always be thankful to. And she said she was mostly unafraid, thanks to her faith, but that she was afraid for her children and the sadness they would feel if she died. But that she continued to have hope.

That was July 19. On July 20, she was dead.

And with her dies a little bit of my childhood. And with her dies what might be the shining bright spot in the midst of a darkness that had spread over Christianity in the 80's, with cynicism and hypocrisy and avarice and scandal. In the decades since all that happened, Swaggart's been found with another prostitute (and unlike his first time, he flatly told his congregation that God told him it was none of their business) and said that if any gay man looked at him with lust, he'd kill him. And Jerry Falwell, who presided over the fall and the end of the P-T-L Club, though having brought a certain humor to his ministry, also brought intolerance and hatred and ignorance. Pat Robertson recently apparently called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez in God's name.

Tammy Faye? Just wanted everyone to love each other and accept each other and live without fear and in faith.

I'm not a Christian, but I suspect Tammy Faye -- though she would certainly have witnessed to me -- would have accepted me and been charitable and kind to me and assumed only the best and only had hope for me.

If there is a Heaven, I am confident Tamara Faye LaValley is in it. Very likely singing. And Earth is a slightly brighter place for her having lived, and a slightly sadder place for her having passed.

And that, in the end, is exactly what I think she would have hoped for.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:10 AM | Comments (17)

July 10, 2007

Eric: So, having written Saturday's essay, here's a long philosophical essay about the 600 pound webcomics gorilla who's just been sighted coming into town.

(From "Zudacomics.com." I swear, that's what it's called.)

It was inevitable.

In one sense, we can blame the Foglios. If blame is the right term. Other folks had crossed the digital divide both ways. Hell, Scott Kurtz had done okay for himself with his Image comic and his print collections, and DC themselves did the Megatokyo shuffle. But in those cases, it was an example of successful people on the web moving on into the print arena. The big companies understood that. That made sense to them.

And certainly other print creators had gone to the web before the Foglios. Others had decided that they could make a better run of it online, or that it would be a good supplement, or that it would grow their overall readership.All that made sense too.

But then the Foglios gave up comic books for the web. They said "look, printing a regular comic just isn't making us money. If we want to do this, we need a new system." And they put it into place. And it worked.

The Foglios were a known quantity. Phil Foglio had done work for DC in the past. If they could do well by moving to the web, there was something to this.

Seeing that, various folks at DC clearly started (or continued) to research webcomics and webcomics collectives. They researched what was working and what wasn't and they researched ways to monetize successfully. I promise you they've looked long and hard at the full on collectives like Keen or Modern Tales and at the guild-style associations like Dumbrella, Dayfree or Blank Label.

And it's finally happened. The shoe is dropping. DC Comics is launching a webcomics collective.

Not a portal. Not a gateway. A collective. There is a distinction, and it is an important one.

According to their press releases, intellectual property is going to be "shared." What that means, in the end, depends on their contracts. But that's the first thing to bear in mind. This is a professional site. If you become a cartoonist for Zuda (seriously -- Zuda?) you're going to be signing a contract with them. One that will say what rights you have and what rights they have. One that will, among other things, limit you to the "page" they've decided on. (Infinite canvas, scminfinite canvas. You're working on a 4:3 ratio and you'll bet your editor won't want something so large and detailed that it's not print friendly.) Which brings up something else: you will have editors. And those editors will be editing for content and quality. You will be expected to be on time and have a buffer ahead. If you decide to pitch Zuda and strike out on your own, you'd better make sure there's an escape clause in that contract first, and you'd better make certain you understand what your sharing of intellectual property means before you begin.

Does this sound doom and gloomish? Does this sound like I'm warning you off of Zuda or DC?

Well, I'm not.

Seriously.

I don't know what their terms are going to be, and I don't know how well they're going to pay, and I don't know whether or not "shared IP" is code for "work-for-hire but if we keep producing your hit webcomic after we leave we'll pay you a small percentage of ad revenues and put your name on the site under a 'created by' credit" or anything else. But it's entirely possible, from the standpoint of a comic reader, that Zuda could rock. Because it's doing a few things that no one else is right now. Things that should be red flags for creators, but could be boons for readers and fans: standardization and editorial control.

Back when Weds, Howard Tayler, Shaenon Garrity, Rich Burlew and I (with special guest Phil Khan) were at Swarthmore College, Shaenon and I gave a lecture on the importance of editors -- how the lack of an editor gave webcartoonists an almost unparalleled sense of freedom, but that carried with it the dangers of a lack of discipline. Editors are good things. They make you produce, on time and to spec. They tell you when you suck and they make you do bad work over again. They remind you that you're being paid to do this -- if indeed this is how you make your money -- and you god damned better not forget that or they'll stop paying you to do this. Editors provide a lot of good things for any creative endeavor, and a creative endeavor without one can suffer if it's not careful.

Well, Zudacomics.com will have all the disadvantages that strong editors entail. You're not going to be free to do whatever the Hell you want with your comic. You're going to have to produce. It will have to be of a given quality. It will have to conform to their standards. You are not going to radically shift directions in your comic without having a pretty significant discussion with the Zuda team first. And yes, you're going to have all of your comics fit in a 4:3 box. They've already come out and said that.

I'm not sure if animation's going to be acceptable or not. I seriously doubt they'll be Flash friendly. Unless the whole damn site is run in Flash to prevent bandwidth theft.

But. All the good sides of editors are going to come with this too. The stuff that comes out will in fact be of a certain level of quality. Possibly very good quality, especially if they pay well. They might in fact get some really good artists who know the form and can produce seriously good comics, because they're a steady paycheck instead of a hand-to-mouth operation. It's going to be far less likely that unexpected hiatuses will happen, because they're probably going to be working way ahead. (And yes, that means that "strips going up the same day that something happens" effect will be limited, which does have its down side.)

In short, Zudacomics might very well come out with a pack of really good webcomics. Webcomics with a lot more potential for print deals. Webcomics that are far more likely to show up at Barnes and Noble than going it alone will do. Webcomics that will have the attention of one of the large companies, which makes the chance to draw a story for Marvel or DC at least slightly less unlikely.

And, if Zudacomics is successful, then the other collectives and guilds are going to be in a weird position: they're going to become the Independent Webcomics Collectives, instead of the Webcomics Collectives. Especially if Zuda makes DC money, because you know Marvel will turn around and do their own, and probably so will some of the others. And they have money for major advertising in other media, designed to bring eyeballs to their web sites.

There's every chance, of course, that they'll do this wrong. Never underestimate the potential of a given company to make bad choices when moving into a new venture. But if they do do this right, they're going to become a major player on the web, and very possibly move into broader territory than any of the existing collectives.

So one thing that existing collectives, guilds and independent comics creators need to start doing is figuring out what it will mean, bottom line, if Zudacomics does well. Some will be fine. Blank Label and Dumbrella are largely made up of webcartoonists who produce day in and day out, building quality, and holding their audience through consistency, quality, and that same discipline I alluded to above. Scott Kurtz is likely going to be fine, for all the same reasons. Achewood is likely to be fine because of its idiosyncratic nature and its quality.

But Zuda can be bad news for Modern Tales, for Graphic Smash, for Girlamatic, and for Keenspot -- all of which have some rock solid comics but also have some random or fly by night ones -- and for the various guilds that don't have a solid core of artists producing with that same regularity. Not to mention various complete independents who go on long term hiatuses with no end in sight, because how hard is it to write and send a god damned script to your cowriter or update your damn static art comic anyway, Eric! We all know that the major collectives have some strips that produce like clockwork and some that just don't. That's going to have to change. Keenspot in particular is going to have to have a lot of internal discussions about this. If Zuda starts growing fast, producing a good number of strips that are considered high quality and a good sense of discipline, Keenspot's traditionally hands-off approach to the Spotted is going to come across as unprofessional, and the sense of 'arrival' that comes with being asked to join Keenspot is going to evaporate. And, of course, if Zuda ends up paying better than Keenspot (or Modern Tales) do, there's going to be a certain number of artists who will take the concept of paychecks and security and run with it, even if it means sharing their intellectual property, locking their stuff into a single publisher, and going back to a model that any number of artists went to the web to get away from.

Back in my acting days, we called that "working for Disney." A lot of what we were doing on the Renaissance Festival circuit was in high demand down at Disney World. Actors who could hold a sense of character, work the street and interact with the public all at the same time fit the Magic Kingdom (and more to the point, Disney/MGM) like a white glove. And a good number of folks took that deal, because it meant becoming an employee instead of an independent contractor. It meant health insurance, and a 401k, and the chance to get a real apartment and develop a normal life.

However, it also meant that you weren't doing the actor's life any more. You weren't moving from one show to the next, one town to the next, shifting gears and shifting lifestyles at the drop of a hat. You were going to work for Disney instead, performing the same role day in and day out, holding to a specific line and quality, following the Disney Handbook in all ways (including -- in the case of a guy hired to be a pirate -- having his beautiful pirate's beard shaven off, because Disney Employees at least at that time had to be clean shaven, only to have a fake one applied to his face every day so he could play his part. Honest to Christ.)

So, even though we were all derisive and dismissive of the Disney option (most of the time Disney World was referred to as "Mauschwicz" on the circuit) everyone was tempted by it and a lot of good actors took it, because a steady paycheck and the chance to build a life without scrabbling for money and that next role every minute was really, really attractive.

And those folks who really, really want to make their webcomic their day job but who aren't good at the merchandising or the rest of the things that make it hard to survive as a professional independent artist may well sign on Zuda's dotted line and go to work for DC. If they pay enough to make it feasible, it will really appeal to some people. Including some really, really talented people.

So, yeah. There's lots to be wary of. And yeah, the whole "contest for a slot" thing has strong echoes of Platinum. (Though I'll tell you, I'd die laughing if D.J. Coffman came up with a strip for this and got it through. And don't pretend he couldn't -- Coffman's got the chops.) And there's going to be lots of "hah hah -- DC's pretending it invented the webcomics collective" and busting on the man.

But if DC does this right, there's going to be some seriously good webcomics out there as a result.

And if that happens, things are going to change.

As a reader and aficionado of comic strips, I'm looking forward to Zuda. I'm looking forward to what might be some really cool comics. As an observer of the industry, I'm interested to see what they're going to bring to the table, pro and anti. But as someone who spent some time (brief, but existent) helming a webcomics collective and who knows a lot of folks for whom webcomics are their bread and butter, I think this is a time to be paying close attention to what's happening, and what it could mean for everyone else.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:31 AM | Comments (46)

July 7, 2007

Eric: Apropos of nothing, it's Heinleinmas. To celebrate, I didn't eat a free lunch.

So what happened?

This is what's being asked. People have noticed that while I don't eschew webcomics these days (I've done three webcomics related posts since spinning back up), I'm not anywhere near as focused on them as I used to be. And I do almost no posts about the bigger issues, the trends, the controversies, or whoever's pissed off at whoever else any more.

This is true.

So what happened?

Honestly?

I still love comic strips. I still love reading them on the web. I read dozens a day (though I've cut back from the hundreds I used to read). And sometimes I'll see something I think is really cool and want to talk about it, or see some point I want to make in another, or see some trend or technique or what have you and I'll want to write about it.

But the rest of that stuff? Somewhere along the line I stopped giving a shit.

The question is, of course, why. And there's a lot of reasons for it, but I think the primary one around them all is this: we're talking about a distribution method, here.

That's all.

The difference between webcomics and newspaper comics is distribution.

Now, there's a lot of baggage which goes with that. Newspapers tend to get their comics from syndicates, for example, and there's lots of stuff to be said about editorial mandate and syndication rights and merchandising and all the rest, and the ultimate freedom of the web and the ability to sink or swim on your own yadda yadda yadda. There's tons to be written about that. I know. I've written tons about it.

And I really don't have much more to say on the subject.

Seriously.

I think the situation's improved over the three years I've been writing for Websnark. I also think that improvement had absolutely nothing to do with my writing, so please don't take that as me taking credit. When Diesel Sweeties got the syndication deal they did, and when Girl Genius went out of the pamphlet business over to web distribution (but always with an eye to selling collections), we really saw how the world had changed since, say, 2002. Even back in 2004, those folks who had quit their day job to make comics were vanishingly rare. These days, there's quite a few of them, and there are at least a few methods of doing it (merchandising a la Dumbrella or Questionable Content being probably the most prominent) that have been reproducible.

Once you have a good number of people who base their living around their comic strip in a series of business models that are reproducible, the method of distribution becomes less a revolution and more a factor in how you see that business model through. These days, the web is a dirt cheap way to get your comic in front of the eyes of people who might give you money, and it's being used to that effect.

Which brings up the question of innovation on the web. The evolution of illustration, using the tools set before us to new and exciting effect.

Yeah, there's some of that.

Seriously, I like some of what the Tarquin Engine and similar things have done. I really do. And I've seen stuff with protoanimation (or actual animation) that's really cool. Though a good amount of 'animation in webcomics' is really 'Flash based cartoons,' and I don't see the need to lump them together. I'm still digging PvP's online cartoons -- I think they've matured well as the months have passed and I'm glad I subscribed, but I don't see those as 'comic strips that are moving,' I see them as cartoons and judge them accordingly. That they're based on a comic strip doesn't change that, beyond (once again) the comic strip's popularity has made it possible for Kurtz, Straub and the folks at Blind Ferret to make some money. And that's all to the good.

On the other side of the question, the real, lasting and powerful innovations that have happened out there -- the ones we see the most use of right now -- are content management systems. Ways of presenting and distributing and archiving the comic strips. Not innovations in the comic strips themselves. Look at the most popular webcomics, and you tend to see very straightforward illustrations in sequence, without multimedia, movement or the like. You also tend to see good reference materials (like a cast page) and archives (by date and storyline, generally, although not always). Sometimes you see search engines (Ryan North, take a bow out there) or the like. That's something books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets -- all the other ways of distributing comics to the public -- can't compete with. And people have done some amazing things with it. And we've talked a lot about it. But again, it comes to distribution.

Some of you are decrying the definition of success with either popularity or financial gain. And I'm with you. A comic strip is successful if it meets its goals, and often those goals can be artistic. A strip with eight readers might be beautiful and poignant and wonderful and absolutely successful. And it might use techniques and skills and tricks that you couldn't reproduce on paper. All true. Just like someone could do the same thing with a photocopied minicomic that did things on paper that to date we just can't replicate on the screen. C'est bien. Mea culpa. I'm not arguing that.

But that's not how most of the comics I've encountered on the web have proceeded. Most of them have been sticking with the same toolset and visual language as comics in the paper, in books or graphic novels, or in magazines or pamphlets. And that's okay with me, because I tend to like that sort of thing.

Which, by the by, is why I read comics on the web. They're delivered to me automatically, by my selecting a single tabset in Firefox. (Well, one of five tabsets, but I digress.) It's useful and convenient for me to read them this way, whereas I don't have any interest in buying a newspaper to read them, and I only rarely get comics or graphic novels. (I do get them, sometimes. But it's rare. And I don't get them from Marvel these days, but I digress again.)

All well, all true, and all good. And I've talked a lot about all of it in the past.

And I'm not sure how to say much more on a lot of it without just repeating myself, again. Filling up space without saying anything new. And I'm not sure why I would want to do that.

Which brings us to the meat of the subject. I'm not talking about the Webcomics community much these days. I'm not talking about who hates John Solomon or Joey Manley or Scott Kurtz or Penny Arcade or Robert A. Howard and who's defending any of that list to others or who's doing anything like that. I'm not diving into the fray giving my two cents on it or talking about who's being mean or who's being thin skinned or who's right or who's wrong or any of that stuff. And the core reason why is, as stated above, I just don't give a shit any more.

Seriously.

For one thing, there is no webcomics community.

None.

It doesn't exist.

If you think you're in it, you're wrong.

There are comics on the web, and they have fans. And those fans are sometimes fans of more than one comic on the web. But are they a community? No, not really.

I have met and talked to passionate fans of Questionable Content who have never heard of Penny Arcade.

Seriously. They know Questionable Content. But they don't know Penny Arcade.

And there are no doubt tons of Penny Arcade fans who've never heard of Questionable Content.

Almost everyone I've asked tells me they don't currently read Megatokyo. But thousands upon thousands of people do read Megatokyo, and power to them. I read a bunch of shit you don't. I promise you that. I'm a huge fan of some pretty obscure webcomics. But you read a bunch of shit I don't read. I promise you that. And I keep running into comic strips that are celebrating their five hundredth strip with a fanbase in the tens of thousands that I've never seen the slightest reference to before.

And that makes perfect sense, in the end, because the only thing many webcomics have in common is their distribution method. And distribution methods are a piss-poor means of tying a community together.

Now, webcartoonists can and I think are a community. They have common interests, common ties, common problems and common challenges, and to a degree they form a community both to help with them and because mankind is a social beast. But "webcomics fans" are almost always fans of certain webcomics who have then defined themselves as "webcomics fans." But webcomics ain't a genre. Not like science fiction or fantasy or anthropomorphic or detective stories or any of the rest. Hell, "comics" ain't a genre either.

Comics -- comic strips, comic books, sequential art, illustration, call it what you will -- is a medium. A means by which stories are told. Some of the more outre comics out there on the web might constitute a different medium than all the rest of the comics, but for the most part they don't. For the most part Nukees and For Better and For Worse tell stories using similar tools and similar visual language techniques, operating in the same medium.

For Better and For Worse, by the by, is on the web. It updates every day on the web.

In other words, it's a webcomic. Just like Nukees is. And all the rest.

So. Fans of certain webcomics get upset at other fans of other webcomics (or even the same ones) sometimes. Cliques of webcartoonists gather -- naturally enough -- and sometimes get pissed off at other cliques of webcartoonists. Somewhere in all this, someone calls Scott Kurtz something mean and William G gets people mad at him.

I'm sorry. I used to care. I really did. I cared for a long time. I passionately cared.

But these days? I just. Don't. Give. A Shit. It's webcomics drama, and it'll pass soon enough.

"But wait!" you shout. Well, some of you shout. Look, give me my illusions. "What about the discourse! You said you liked the discourse!"

I do. I enjoy literary criticism. I enjoy making points about the things I read or see, and having others debate them.

That's not what any of that shit's about. It's just not. Look, John Solomon can be very funny, but he's not trying to encourage a debate over the finer points of Dominic Deegan. He's entertaining a fanbase, either by making them laugh their asses off, by giving them sharp relief by saying something they wish someone would say, or by enraging them by saying things they find hideous and hurtful. They all seem to work -- people are certainly entertained. And if you take any of the other 'controversies' running around, they're almost never about actual criticism -- about actual critique. They're either about "X sucks!/No X rocks and YOU suck!" or they're about something tangential.

When I see something in a comic on the web I like, I'll talk about it. When I see a point I want to make, or I get inspired to write a thesis on anything from a character arc to a storytelling technique I'll write it, but I've never had any interest in writing reviews and if I had interest in diving into the whole mudslinging match I've gotten over it with time. Mostly, I want to write shit I find interesting over here, or try to write something new over at Banter Latte. And with luck, the essays over here will inspire some discussion -- that discourse I like so much -- saying why I'm right or wrong. Without luck I'll still have fun writing them, which is after all the real reason I'm doing it.

(As for Banter Latte -- that's not really discourse-related. I mean, you'll like it or you won't.)

There's plenty of people out there who do like doing reviews, and power to them. And others who like doing rants or diving into controversy (or creating it). And power to them. And if that's your thing, power to you too. I do read some of those sites too, you know. There's nothing wrong with enjoying them.

But I just can't bring myself to care any more about the gigantic, titanic debates of a nonexistent community whose definition comes from a fucking means of distribution. I used to, but I don't any more. And I don't feel badly for not caring any more. That's the kind of thing that happens over time. The things you used to think were amazingly important stop seeming important. Or even interesting.

If you find them important or interesting? Cool. Power to you. I have no doubt but that there's going to be plenty of chances to weigh in on them.

As for me? There is other stuff catching my interest these days. I'll do my best to write about it. If what catches my interest also catches yours, I hope you'll read about it. If not, I thank you kindly for your attention and support.

Oh, and Feral Chicken has been spending like twelve bucks a day advertising his comic for over a week. Given that, I can't just snark him and not have it look like quid pro quo, but damn man. I felt like I should say something. That's a lot of gas money.

Peace.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 7:15 PM | Comments (51)

July 4, 2007

Eric: Because sometimes we need to remember harsher times in 1776 on this day....

THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Whether the independence of the continent was declared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had it been eight months earlier, it would have been much better.

We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in a dependent state.

However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own*; we have none to blame but ourselves.

But no great deal is lost yet.

All that Howe has been doing for this month past, is rather a ravage than a conquest, which the spirit of the Jerseys, a year ago, would have quickly repulsed, and which time and a little resolution will soon recover.

• The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil; and there is no punishment that man does not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country.

All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc.

Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!

Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt.

Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before.

But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.

Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.

As I was with the troops at Fort Lee, and marched with them to the edge of Pennsylvania, I am well acquainted with many circumstances, which those who live at a distance know but little or nothing of.

Our situation there was exceedingly cramped, the place being a narrow neck of land between the North River and the Hackensack. Our force was inconsiderable, being not one-fourth so great as Howe could bring against us.

We had no army at hand to have relieved the garrison, had we shut ourselves up and stood on our defence. Our ammunition, light artillery, and the best part of our stores, had been removed, on the apprehension that Howe would endeavor to penetrate the Jerseys, in which case Fort Lee could be of no use to us; for it must occur to every thinking man, whether in the army or not, that these kind of field forts are only for temporary purposes, and last in use no longer than the enemy directs his force against the particular object which such forts are raised to defend.

Such was our situation and condition at Fort Lee on the morning of the 20th of November, when an officer arrived with information that the enemy with 200 boats had landed about seven miles above; Major General Green, who commanded the garrison, immediately ordered them under arms, and sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry = six miles.

Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack, which laid up the river between the enemy and us, about six miles from us, and three from them.

General Washington arrived in about three-quarters of an hour, and marched at the head of the troops towards the bridge, which place I expected we should have a brush for; however, they did not choose to dispute it with us, and the greatest part of our troops went over the bridge, the rest over the ferry, except some which passed at a mill on a small creek, between the bridge and the ferry, and made their way through some marshy grounds up to the town of Hackensack, and there passed the river.

We brought off as much baggage as the wagons could contain, the rest was lost.

The simple object was to bring off the garrison, and march them on till they could be strengthened by the Jersey or Pennsylvania militia, so as to be enabled to make a stand.

We staid four days at Newark, collected our out-posts with some of the Jersey militia, and marched out twice to meet the enemy, on being informed that they were advancing, though our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs.

Howe, in my little opinion, committed a great error in generalship in not throwing a body of forces off from Staten Island through Amboy, by which means he might have seized all our stores at Brunswick, and intercepted our march into Pennsylvania; but if we believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control.

I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice it for the present to say, that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit.

All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back. Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him.

There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude; and I reckon it among those kind of public blessings, which we do not immediately see, that God hath blessed him with uninterrupted health, and given him a mind that can even flourish upon care.

I shall conclude this paper with some miscellaneous remarks on the state of our affairs; and shall begin with asking the following question, Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces, and made these middle ones the seat of war?

The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

And what is a Tory?

Good God! what is he?

I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: Your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe is as much deceived by you as the American cause is injured by you.

He expects you will all take up arms, and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him, unless you support him personally, for 'tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants.

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day."

Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.

A man can distinguish himself between temper and principle, and I am as confident, as I am that God governs the world, that America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign dominion.

Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives, and the continent must in the end be conqueror; for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

America did not, nor does not want force; but she wanted a proper application of that force.

Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off.

From an excess of tenderness, we were unwilling to raise an army, and trusted our cause to the temporary defence of a well-meaning militia. A summer's experience has now taught us better; yet with those troops, while they were collected, we were able to set bounds to the progress of the enemy, and, thank God! they are again assembling.

I always considered militia as the best troops in the world for a sudden exertion, but they will not do for a long campaign. Howe, it is probable, will make an attempt on this city [Philadelphia]; should he fail on this side the Delaware, he is ruined.

If he succeeds, our cause is not ruined.

He stakes all on his side against a part on ours; admitting he succeeds, the consequence will be, that armies from both ends of the continent will march to assist their suffering friends in the middle states; for he cannot go everywhere, it is impossible.

I consider Howe as the greatest enemy the Tories have; he is bringing a war into their country, which, had it not been for him and partly for themselves, they had been clear of.

Should he now be expelled, I wish with all the devotion of a Christian, that the names of Whig and Tory may never more be mentioned; but should the Tories give him encouragement to come, or assistance if he come, I as sincerely wish that our next year's arms may expel them from the continent, and the Congress appropriate their possessions to the relief of those who have suffered in well-doing.

A single successful battle next year will settle the whole.

America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event.

Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.

Quitting this class of men, I turn with the warm ardor of a friend to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out: I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake.

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.

Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but "show your faith by your works," that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ' Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it. While our army was collected, Howe dared not risk a battle; and it is no credit to him that he decamped from the White Plains, and waited a mean opportunity to ravage the defenceless Jerseys; but it is great credit to us, that, with a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near an hundred miles, brought off our ammunition, all our field pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to pass. None can say that our retreat was precipitate, for we were near three weeks in performing it, that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy, and remained out till dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp, and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabitants spread false alarms through the country, the Jerseys had never been ravaged. Once more we are again collected and collecting; our new army at both ends of the continent is recruiting fast, and we shall be able to open the next campaign with sixty thousand men, well armed and clothed. This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils- a ravaged country- a depopulated city- habitations without safety, and slavery without hope- our homes turned into barracks and bawdy-houses for Hessians, and a future race to provide for, whose fathers we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it! and if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unlamented.

Common Sense.

December 23, 1776.

--Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, "The Crisis No. I"

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:00 AM | Comments (13)

July 3, 2007

Eric: Meanwhile, not far away....

So. I've been trying to work out... well, things. As folks know. And the writing is a part of what I've been trying to work out, because....

...well, because. I'm a happier person when I'm writing lots of stuff, and being a happier person is pretty much a good goal in and of itself.

And that brings me to trying to find the best way to actually do more of it, and to fire the writing spirit, and all that. Because... well, because I want to, and because I want momentum, and because that's all a cool thing.

Let me begin by saying that Websnark isn't ending. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. I like this place. I like all of you. I like the outlet. I like the chance to write on any topic or any subject, at any time. It's amazingly cool, and you guys make me happy.

However, it's worth noting that Websnark, in the end, is an outlet for nonfiction. There have been exceptions, here and there, but this is primarily a blog for commentaries and essays. Critiques, or just me talking 'bout stuff. And that's been amazingly cool, but it's also been limiting. In the nearly three years this thing's been a part of my life there's been a couple million words between Wednesday and I, but my fiction output has crashed through the floor. And that has created an imbalance in my humors, increasing bile and phlegm and requiring an infusion of foods higher in fire and air.

Now, I could change Websnark if I wanted. I could add in fiction, poetry, a wet bar -- whatever I felt like, at least as far as Weds would be comfortable -- and Weds is, at heart, desirous of my being content. But that doesn't seem like the right reaction to me. Folks who come here and who have been coming here have been doing so for very specific reasons. They'll indulge the odd Sestina or the occasional bedtime story, but for the most part they'd rather there not be a monumental shift in tone.

And honestly, I don't want to change what Websnark is. I like what Websnark is.

The solution, in the end, is to expand.

Which brings me to Banter Latte.

Banter Latte is a new blog, chock full of that new blog smell. It was born in the weekend following my existential writing crisis. It is dedicated to fiction, to poetry, to whimsy -- to all the stuff that Websnark isn't. It has a bunch of new bits of writing, some old writing that's been sitting on my hard drive -- sometimes for years -- and locked posts designed to let me put up chapters of novels I'm working on.

That this will hopefully also force me to, you know, finish and refine those novels is a side benefit.

The protected posts, mind, are still meant to be accessible. See, part of the problem of the publishing world adapting to new electronic distribution is the question of what "previous publication" means. By locking the posts, I can skirt the edge between publishing my novel on the web and providing a place for fans of my work and interested parties to read drafts of the posts without actually releasing it. And keeping it out of search engines at the same time.

So. What is Banter Latte?

Banter Latte is a place for me to write. Just like Websnark. They're meant to compliment each other. Folks who like reading what I write will want to head on over there and see what there is to see. Folks who like my essays but can't imagine enduring my fiction can avoid it. (Though I'll post regular links over here to the stuff going on over there -- mostly because I don't want this place going quiet again.)

Though quiet isn't as likely. As I've said before, when I'm writing regularly, I'm usually writing prolifically. You'll notice I've written more on Websnark in the time since I started beta testing Banter Latte than in the three months before. That's likely to continue.

Why "Banter Latte?" Because as has been mentioned, I have a love of dialogues taking place while my characters are drinking beverages. Nothing more or less. Also, I tend to drink a lot of coffee or tea while writing.

There is a schedule to Banter Latte, in hopes of building an audience and (paradoxically) making things easier on me. Mondays are "The Mythology of the modern world," when I tell whimsical stories about the myths behind everyday life. Post beta period, we have two entries up right now: Introductions and Coffee, and Why Does Starbucks Drip Coffee Taste Like Crotch? These are generally going to be written new for the site, which should keep me doing a few hundred or thousand words in a week, all to keep the pump primed. Wednesdays are "Storytelling" days -- vignettes, scenes, stories, past stuff and new stuff all blended. Some of the more serious stuff will go here, though I don't promise that. Right now, we have a short story set in the greater Gossamer Commons universe -- the first entry of Gossamer Reflections, called Whisperdance.

Fridays are when the protected chapters of novels in progress go up. One of the state goals -- born of a conversation I had with my father -- is that I'm going to write one chapter of a novel each and every week, thus making the completion of said novels far more likely. Right now we are in the semi-hard science fiction novel Theftworld, which is password protected (though right up in the nav bar or also on the sidebar you'll see a link to a form for requesting it -- it's not exactly hard to get access to the password if you want it.) We have two chapters plus a prologue and a bit of preface material up.

Thtree days a week with three types of content. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Random days. Any day I feel like doing something that doesn't fit one of those categories, I'll throw something into a Tuesday or a Thursday. That's where poetry will go, fan-fiction if I've a yen to write it, bits of other stories, or whatever. Or nothing at all. Those aren't officially scheduled days, but right now it looks like there's plenty of stuff for them. We have a couple of related stories in them right now: the first part of Interviewing Leather -- meant to be a Rolling Stoneesque interview of a minor supervillain, and we have On Call, a slice of life story about a doctor who specializes in superhumans, played more for laughs.

Finally, on the weekends we'll have very basic open topic posts, for people to shout out comments or make dook dook noises or do whatever it is you kids do.

And, of course, there's a chance to buy ad space if you want. Right now, it's going for like two cents, so it's a bargain!

In the end, all of this is meant to stimulate my doing what I like to do most outside of spending time with Weds or sleeping: writing. And I'm really excited about it. I hope you guys enjoy it. And I hope this helps keep the writing stream -- in Websnark and out of Websnark -- more regular than it's been.

Thanks all. And enjoy.

Oh -- bear in mind the site is still new. There may be functionality changes, and there almost certainly will be look and feel changes. So, you know. Be warned.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:46 AM | Comments (10)

July 2, 2007

Eric: Man, I used to write *happy* posts....

We all have our heroes. Sometimes they're real people. Sometimes they're fictional. And sometimes the line between the two blurs, at least somewhat.

When I was quite young, I knew who my heroes were. The Legion of Superheroes. Green Lantern. The Justice League. The Avengers. The X-Men. Good guys against bad guys, and all very, very exciting.

But above all of them, there were the Micronauts. The first major comic book company book to feature a toy license, the Micronauts were much more than the story of my favorite plastic and die cast metal toys (seriously, I had hundreds of those things) -- it was a grand saga. A full on space opera. A legend. A fantasy. An epic. And I was into it. Commander Arcturus Rann -- the legendary Space Glider and leader of the Micronauts. The beautiful, powerful Marionette -- the Princess Mari, dedicating her life to saving Homeworld from Baron Karza. The wily, canny, laughing Bug -- barely a pastiche of Galactic Warrior, but mostly unique to the series, bringing roguishness and humor to the darkest of situations. The taciturn Acroyear, named for his race, prince and exile, mighty warrior. Biotron, faithful servant for a thousand years and his counterpart Microtron, yang to his yin. Force Commander, Prince Pharoid, the beautiful Slug (don't ask), the mysterious Time Travellers and their Shadow Priests, the evil of Baron Karza, the might of the Worldmind, Captain Universe -- the hero who could be you! And so, so many more....

They were my heroes, and my friends. And through the grace of the Enigma Force, I will never forget them. I owned all their comics -- a complete run. Plus the unfortunate crossover with the X-Men. Plus the trades.

Now, a lesser hero but still one I greatly enjoyed was ROM, Spaceknight! Another toy based line, but this one far more integrated into the Marvel Universe (including a universe-wide crossover where the Dire wraiths attacked), ROM was the story of Rom, a Galadoran who was the first to volunteer to be remade into a cyborg in plandanium armor, who spans the galaxy fighting to protect those who would fall.

Heroes.

They weren't real, of course. I might have had a nine year old's crush on Princess Mari, but she didn't exist any more than Brandy Clark did. Yes, there is a Steve Jackson in the world, but he's not the man who was at once a friend and a rival to Rom (I always wondered if the real Steve Jackson was amused at his Marvel counterpart). But they felt real to me. They helped me to dream of broader things, to believe in the most noble of ideals, to let my imagination run wild.

Behind them, however, there was a real hero. A man who was incredibly formative to my childhood and to the man I would grow into. His name was Bill Mantlo, and he wrote comic books.

A lot of comic books.

Really, there was a time when he worked on almost every comic in Marvel's stable. He had a memorable run on the Hulk (a run where the heroes of Earth had banished the Hulk to other dimensions because he was so dangerous -- a plotline that should sound familiar since they ripped it off for World War Hulk's setup). He worked on Thor, and Iron Man, and even Howard the Duck. He worked on the Avengers, Captain America, Ghost Rider, and he even wrote a few X-Men comics here and there. When John Byrne's star was on the ascendence and his Alpha Flight was still a major comic, it was Bill Mantlo who took it over when Byrne left. He created Cloak and Dagger, for God's sake.

You know what? I'm going to steal a list of his work from the Howling Curmudgeons -- it's easier than trying to explain just how heavily he was involved in the work of this era of Marvel:

Alpha Flight, Amazing Adventures, Amazing Spider-Man, Astonishing Tales, The Avengers, Battlestar Galactica, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Cloak & Dagger, Daredevil, Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu, The Defenders, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Hero for Hire, Heroes For Hope Starring the X-Men, Howard the Duck, The Human Fly, The Incredible Hulk, Invasion, Iron Man, Jack of Hearts, Journey Into Mystery/Thor, The Mighty Thor, Ka-Zar, Marvel Age, Marvel Chillers, Marvel Fanfare, Marvel Premiere, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions, Marvel Tales (Marvel Tales Starring Spider-man), Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Treasury Edition, Marvel Two-In-One, Micronauts, Rawhide Kid, Rocket Raccoon, ROM, Sectaurs, Spectacular Spider-Man (Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man), Spider-Man and Daredevil, Strange Tales (2nd series), Super-Villain Team-Up, Swords of the Swashbucklers, Tales of Suspense (Captain America/Captain America and the Falcon/Steve Rogers: Captain America), Team America, Transformers, The Vision and The Scarlet Witch (the entire miniseries), Web of Spider-Man, Werewolf by Night, What If..., X-Men, and X-men and the Micronauts.

Seriously, dude.

Mantlo had an incredible sense of character voice and motivation. His series featured grand themes, but explored them in sophisticated ways. Relationships were passionate but never simple -- there was pain and joy in equal measure, and his heroes had to walk heroic journeys -- trawling the depths of despair before they could once again find hope. They were incredible.

And Mantlo wasn't afraid to take risks. He subverted the heroic and sympathetic Force Commander, turning him into a villain before killing him off to return Baron Karza to the universe. He killed every living thing on Homeworld -- a horrible, terrible loss -- without losing the idealism that held the Micronauts together. After setting the town of Clairton, West Virginia as the home of pretty much all of Rom the Spaceknight's human friends and secondary characters, he had the entire town killed off and replaced with Dire Wraiths in an effort to kill Rom and Brandy Clark. You couldn't take anything for granted in a Mantlo story -- except that in the end, after terrific pain and sacrifice, good would triumph. But would forever wonder at the cost....

Oh, over at DC he also wrote the Invasion miniseries. Yeah. He actually did one of the monumental crosssovers they did in the eighties, and it was one of the ones that actually did have impact and didn't suck. Who knew?

I can't overestimate the impact Bill Mantlo's writing had on me. I really can't. And it was a very sad day for me when he decided to move on from comics, and enter the legal profession. And even there, he was a hero. He became a public defender, apparently a very good and dedicated one.

And then came tragedy. In 1992, Mantlo was rollerblading when he was hit by a car. He had massive head trauma that led to a coma for more than a year. When he emerged, he had brain damage that he has never (and will never) recover from, needing constant care. Expensive care, I would add. His capacities are diminished at best and will never recover.

When I learned this... all the breath just left me for a while. It was so unfair. It was so wrong. Bill Mantlo deserved so, so much better.

But if there was one thing Mantlo wrote about, it's that being a good guy -- and deserving good things --was no guarantee that you would get them. Bad things happened to good people in Mantlo's stories.

The point, in the end, was what you did with the things you've received. Bill Mantlo needs us.

He needs me.

And he needs you.

Fortunately, there's an easy thing you can do.

Writer/Illustrator David Yurkovich has produced Mantlo: A Life in Comics, a tribute and benefit book that includes fiction, history, and interviews with everyone from Marve Wolfman to Jackson Guice. It costs seven dollars and fifty cents, and all the profits -- all the profits -- are going to help insure Mantlo's care now and into the future.

You can order it here.

My own circumstances aren't good right now (though thanks to you incredible people, they're vastly, vastly better), but on my next paycheck my order for this book is going in. And I pass it forward to all of you. If you were of the era I was, and you liked Marvel Comics at all, you know Bill Mantlo's work. If not, but you like comic books of any stripe, you're a recipient of his legacy.

When tragedy comes, it falls upon all of us to bring hope back into the light, to take off the cloak of the Shadow Priest and reveal the shining embodiment of idealism given form.

Put simply, he needs us.

That's reason enough, and probably all I would ever need to say.

Dallan and Sepsis preserve you all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:49 PM | Comments (6)

June 28, 2007

Eric: I wonder if everyone feels this crappy doing this.

(Stolen cheerfully from RPG World!. And check out the ultracool animation nockFORCE, by Ian Jones-Quartey and Jim Gisriel!)

I don't much care for this, but it's clear I have to do it. For a couple of months now, a series of bad breaks have kept me pretty low, financially. And people have bought of things and some folks have donated, and that's helped tons. Just absolute tons. But I can't seem to get ahead of it. It's not like I'm, y'know, spending money. And it's not like I don't have a job that pays me in money. But I just can't get in front of things, and trouble keeps pressing, harder than I'd like. And I need to get ahead of it once and for all.

So. I'm doing the auction thing, yet again. And I'll admit I'm going to miss these. First off, there is a five book collection of Nephilim -- the long out of print Chaosium occult RPG of the children of Angels and Man. This role playing game -- with lots of supplemental material by the staggeringly talented Kenneth Hite, I would add -- is one of those that RPG developers continue to cite as an influence today. Myself included. And this one auction -- this one auction -- includes the core rulebook, Secret Societies, Serpent Moon, Chronicle of the Awakening, and Major Arcana. This is a big deal listing.

Also in terms of "historic," "influential" and "well written" I have a second listing of multiple books: in this case, a listing of both The Primal Order and TPO: Pawns: The Opening Move. These were absolutely brilliant supplements, written by Peter Adkison, which took the rather lackluster support most RPGs had for gods and deities and the like in those days (Deities and Demigods listed tons of Gods, but made them into relatively standard monsters to be beaten, at least as far as their stats were concerned, as an example), and made them into something that could be quantified and used in a campaign effectively while still making them freaking GODS. There was also a brouhaha over what was a pretty clear case of copyright and trademark infringement in the games (Adkison had somewhat naively put in conversion rules for pretty much all the major and a frightening number of minor role playing games in the supplement, intending it to be a capstone to be used for other systems rather than a system in its own. Palladium, most notably, took exception to this). And what might be most interesting is these were the flagship products of a very small RPG company in the pacific Northwest which, while they sorted all this out, licensed a card game designed to be collectible from a guy named Richard Garfield.

That company's name? Wizards of the Coast. And on the backs of Magic and later Pokemon they absolutely conquered the planet. Sadly, leaving supplements like The Primal Order behind in the process. These books really are good. And this auction gives you both of them.

Thirdly, and most prosaically, there's d20 Modern. It's, you know. d20 Modern.

Finally... and I'll admit that while I hardly need the book for the rules (I have several other copies, including a legal PDF), I'm going to actively miss this one... I have the ultra-rare, first (limited) edition Black Hardcover edition of the In Nomine core rules. This was the last copy of the core rules I found -- the last version I didn't have. And it's by far the hardest to find and buy.

But, I don't need it. Not even for In Nomine. And it's got to go. They all have to go.

And I'll admit it. If you haven't donated but you've considered? Today's the day. Honestly.

(If you have donated, then I thank you.)

This isn't a threat. This isn't a "do this or Websnark goes away" or anything like that.

It's just... it's been a month. Of one thing after another after another.

Times are tough. So this is what I need to do.

If you can't spare change? Don't sweat it. I'll still be here. We'll still be friends.

Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (8)

Eric: How does someone even come up with a title for a post like this one?

Wrestling, to me, is something I associate with my big friend Frank.

Who, you will recall, I always refer to as "my big friend Frank." And have ever since the day he military pressed me over his head. Never being small myself, I became impressed with his massive muscularity. Frank is a refined man. An intelligent man. A gentle man. But a very physical and powerful man, as befits an alumnus of the South Philly streets.

It was on those streets, and at the Philadelphia Spectrum, that Frank developed his lifelong love of professional wrestling. At the Spectrum, Frank would see then-road agent Gorilla Monsoon at the gate. Gorilla -- with a keen eye for business and for building relationships -- remembered the Philly kid and would talk to him on the way in. "You still mad about what the Sheik did to Bruno?" Gorilla would ask. "You watch tonight, kid. I bet you'll go home happy. Bruno's mad."

And Frank did go home happy.

By the late eighties and early nineties, when Frank and I shared a couple of apartments in the Ithaca area, wrestling was one of those Things Frank Did. And for several months I mocked him mercilessly over it. This was stupid. This was asinine and ridiculous. Why do you watch this stuff.

Until Wrestlemania V, anyway, and a match between Curt "Mr. Perfect" Hennig, and Owen "The Blue Blazer" Hart. A match that was a stunning display of mat skills, of hardcore technical wrestling instead of brawling. I was blown away as I watched them go. And for months, I was glued to my set whenever a mat technician was on the screen.

Frank, being my best friend and being sensitive, mocked me with twice the energy I mocked him before. "Seems like my friend Eric's a rasslin' fan," he'd say, snickering. And he was right.

The gigantic guys didn't usually interest me, though. There were exceptions. We liked the Road Warriors in their prime. In a later era I marked out hard for Bill Goldberg. But you needed a certain charisma to be a big guy and still engage my interest in the ring.

Not so for the mat wrestlers. What another era called the technical wrestlers. Not the high fliers -- the crusierweights or luchadores, though I enjoy that style too. No, these were the mid-sized guys, who could wrestle an hour match and make a story out of it.

Owen Hart was great at it. But now he's dead -- fallen from the top of an arena during a pay per view. Curt Hennig was great at it, but he's dead too. Bret Hart was one of the best at it in his generation, but a concussion followed by a stroke put him out of the game. Dean Malenko, the iceman, was one of my favorites. He was a "crusierweight" who didn't go to the top rope. His gimmick was he knew every damn mat hold on the planet, and he could chain them together in an amazingly interesting story. He's not dead, but he's retired -- working as a road agent now, just like the Gorilla, once upon a time.

Eddie Guerrero was great at it. Really freaking great. But then he died of heart failure, years after he kicked his substance abuse problems, but still paying the price for the damages he'd wreaked on his internal organs.

And Chris Benoit was great at it.

This is a hard essay to write.

It's hard because I liked Chris Benoit. I liked him a lot. He was everything that I watched wrestling for. He was tough and smart in the ring, a good "ring general," who could take anyone, with any physique, and build a good match out of him. Like the Nature Boy Ric Flair, Benoit could have a sixty minute match with a broom and take your breath away the whole time.

I liked his personality. Benoit didn't have the kind of charisma a lot of wrestlers had. He could cut an okay promo, but in the end he let his ring work speak for him. And it held him back for a lot of years. He was the best damn wrestler in the building, but he didn't have the size that made you a top star without needing mike skills, and he didn't have the sheer mike skills that made you a star without needing the size. He was the darling of wrestling critics and serious fans of the form, though. Fans who were pissed that he kept being passed over for the top of the card.

This is a hard essay to like, because I liked Chris Benoit. He was a hard worker, and utterly unselfish in the ring. If he was booked to win, he still made his opponent look good. If he was booked to lose in a hard fight, he made his opponent look either superhuman or like a total bastard (depending on what was needed). If he needed to be destroyed for a storyline, he laid the fuck down without whining.

When Bret Hart wrestled a match for the first time in the arena his brother Owen died, the WCW management let him do an old style mat match -- a full length match, taking out all the stops. A match style almost unheard of during the height of the Monday Night Wars.

Bret chose to wrestle it with Chris Benoit. And it stands out as one of the best wrestling matches I've ever seen.

I liked Chris Benoit.

So did Frank. Frank liked him a lot. Benoit was of the old school. He's one of those guys who'd have fit in during the days of Gorilla and the Philadelphia Spectrum. If you were a serious fan, you wanted him to do well.

And ultimately, he did. He took titles. He took tag championships in ECW. He got the WCW World Heavyweight belt, the World Tag belts, the World Television Title, and the United States Heavyweight Championship. And in WWE, he took the tag belts, the United States Championship, the Intercontinental championship, the World Heavyweight Championship and he won the God damned Royal Rumble. Belts could come and go, but you only had one Royal Rumble winner in a year, and that winner had to carry storylines for the first quarter to third of the year. A Royal Rumble winner was expected to headline at Wrestlemania, and there's nothing bigger in a wrestling promotion.

Benoit did it by being a damn good wrestler. Nothing more, nothing less.

I liked him. Frank liked him. A lot of people liked him. And Hell, I don't know anyone who hated him.

Well, Kevin Sullivan wasn't his biggest fan. Sullivan was a wrestler and promoter, and one of the last bookers of WCW. Sullivan booked his wife, Nancy Daus, into a romantic triangle with Benoit. One that became real -- Benoit ultimately married her. And when Sullivan got the book in WCW, he actually booked Benoit to become champion. And the same night that Benoit won the belt for the first time in WCW was the night that Benoit and his friends in the "Revolution" made the jump to the WWE. A jump made in large part because even as a champion, Benoit couldn't see himself wrestling under Sullivan's book. And without a doubt Benoit flourished in the WWE.

A note, before we go on, about Nancy Daus. This was a woman I remembered fondly from her days as a heel manager in WCW, her era as "Woman," as one of the real prototypes of the modern wrestling diva. Nancy Daus could play a face, switch to a heel, and sell both roles and the transition. It's a damn hard skill, much prized in the modern era, and she's one of the pioneers of it. She was beautiful, a good actress, able to take a bump (a prized skill in women managers of her era) and able to sell both that bump and her 'interference' in matches. She was good at what she did, and deserves mention.

God, she deserves mention. Writing an essay about Chris Benoit without writing about Nancy Daus would be unthinkable now, because Benoit....

Man, I don't want to write this.

Last week, as near as we can tell, Chris Benoit suffocated his 7 year old mentally handicapped child to death. One of the current prevailing theories is he actually applied a wrestling choke hold to his seven year old son until his son died. He bound the hands and feet of Nancy Daus, his wife, and then asphyxiated her. And then, probably a day or two later, Chris Benoit set bibles next to the corpses of his wife and child, went down to his gym/basement, and hung himself with the cord off one of his weight machines.

A brutal crime. A horrific double murder followed by a suicide. The man killed his wife and seven year old son. And then hung around with the bodies for a couple of days.

When I heard the news that Chris Benoit was dead, it hurt. Another wrestler I really liked was dead way too soon.

When I heard that he died after killing his wife and son....

It is horrifying. It is monstrous. It is the kind of crime you can't easily put into words, no matter how much you want to or need to.

And it made all the worse because I liked Chris Benoit. I rooted for him. I enjoyed watching him wrestle. He seemed like a decent guy. A stand up joe. And he killed his mentally retarded seven year old son.

It's not just me. Frank described himself as stunned. And the wrestling world went into shock. The day that the tragedy was announced, the WWE canceled Monday Night Raw and aired a tribute to Chris Benoit. They've taken some heat for that since, now that we know that Benoit killed his wife and son, but at the time I don't think the WWE could have truly known that. And I know that they weren't thinking clearly. Benoit was liked in the company. In the locker room. And they've become sadly good at putting together tributes and retrospectives of "superstars" who die way too god damned early.

They have apologized, of course, though any number of wrestlers still can't get their heads around it. The death of young Daniel Benoit in particular horrifies everyone. Bret Hart mentioned how Chris Benoit worshipped his son -- a popular refrain.

The son he killed. Very possibly using a wrestling hold.

WWE's made some errors since then. They've published a vehement defense against the idea that Benoit was suffering from "roid rage." Unfortunately, such a defense, coming after the tribute episode, makes the company seem like it's doing damage control -- like the last thing they wanted was steroid use by a wrestler conflated with the murder of a defenseless child. That's the worst thing they can do, because now people are going to conflate those two things -- and question whether or not the WWE had pressured Chris Benoit to take steroids.

This is not an accusation on my part. I hope to God they didn't, because if they did, with a child dead now? As a publicly traded company? That could mean the end of the WWE in its current form. Honestly. You don't mess with the SEC with a child lying dead.

And Nancy Daus. The beautiful, talented, saavy Nancy Daus. Who once started divorce proceedings against Benoit but later retracted them.

She's dead.

Daniel Benoit is dead.

Chris Benoit is dead.

God help me, I don't know how to feel. I don't know what to do. I liked Chris Benoit.

It's going to be awfully hard to despise him. But would anything else be appropriate? Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit are dead. And he did it.

He did it.

Somehow, that match in tribute to Owen Hart? Seems less impressive now. Everything seems less impressive now.

I don't know. This sucks.

All my thoughts and hopes with those left behind. With a family in shock. With friends who are feeling a thousand times worse than I am. With the hardcore fans who are feeling just as conflicted now. With the coworkers who are dealing with their grief over Chris Benoit at the same time as they are trying to reconcile their horror at the terrible thing he did.

Hell, I feel badly for Vince McMahon right now. No matter what sketchy things he's done in the past, he would never, ever want a seven year old child to die. I believe that with all my heart. And he's going to be the only man in all of this to have to show accountability. Because this is a monstrous crime -- as black and dark and horrible a crime as we can imagine, the murder of one's helpless disabled child, the binding up of one's wife to make her helpless and then murdering her, and then committing suicide after it is done -- and people will want resolution. They will want to know why this happened, and what would make Chris Benoit, this guy we all liked, into a hideous monster.

And they're going to look at McMahon, because he plays a bad guy on television, and he's done sketchy things in real life in the past. And because we don't have anyone else to look at. Because the man who killed Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit is dead, so we can't get any resolution there.

It's not fair. I think McMahon would be repulsed by the very thought of a father killing his son. But the best case scenario will now focus on the schedule that Benoit was working -- all those days on the road in the year, the lack of an "off-season" either in television terms or in sports terms. All the physical stress of wrestling. The need, sometimes, to use steroids just to recover, without even using them to bulk up.

Right now, all those questions are going to be asked of WWE management. Shareholders are going to want answers. And because WWE is a publicly traded company, so is the SEC and possibly other federal investigators. Because a seven year old boy is dead, and so is a woman who was tied up first. And it's their father who did it. Their father, who was missing a pay per view wrestling event at the time. An event he was going to headline.

So yeah. I feel really badly for Vince McMahon right now. This is a dark day.

Most of all?

I feel badly for Frank. Because deep inside Frank is the kid who used to talk to Gorilla at the Spectrum.

And that kid isn't going to understand this. Because the next time the WWE comes to town, no one's going to make it better. No one's going to get revenge. No one's going to redeem the darkness or beat the evil.

We're all just going to have to live with it.

And that sucks.

Rest in peace, Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:00 AM | Comments (22)

June 21, 2007

Eric: State of the Burns

The question is, what now?

Websnark is going on three years of age, and obviously for the last couple of months it's been at best "quiet." Which is to say I haven't written jack shit for it.

On the other side of the equation, there's the rest of my writing life, where....

...hm. "Not. Jack and Shit."

Nothing of consequence to livejournal. Little to nothing in fiction. Little to nothing in essays or e-mails. Little to nothing... well, anywhere.

My general accessibility has also been much much restricted. I don't e-mail folks. I connect to favored chat hangouts and say nothing all night.

It's not that I'm a complete hermit. I see people at work. I talk to Weds daily, including videoconferencing. (The greatest boon to long distance dating since [inset Mail order Bride joke here].) I speak to my folks.

But I've largely withdrawn into myself. Which happens to me on occasion. My activities become solitary. I just kind of... recharge for a while. Go into a cocoon.

I've had a lot of troubles the past couple of months to boot. Some health. Some financial. Some annoying. (For the record? Losing your driver's license is a pain in the fucking ass and I don't recommend it to anyone.) Some USPS related. I really need to get another major eBay campaign going to start pulling myself up out of some of this shit, but I've been avoiding it, largely because I can't imagine cheerfully announcing more eBay auctions on here without having written anything lately. It seems ungracious, even though I'm not soliciting donations when I do it. "Hi! I'm not entertaining you right now, but feel free to buy some of my old RPG shit!"

Yeah, not so much.

I can tell this one's serious though. because both my father and my fiancée have mentioned that... you know, Eric, you haven't been doing very much writing lately, have you?

Which makes some sense. They all know that writing is kind of my mental checksum. It's what keeps me on keel. And I like to do it. I like it a lot.

So the question is "what now?"

I've thought "I should write about...." for Websnark about two hundred and fourteen times in the last couple of weeks. But I don't have anything ending that sentence just yet. I mean, there's lots of Webcomics out there and I read a bunch, but what can I say about any of them that I haven't already said a dozen times or more. The same with video games or pop culture or political science or what have you. What is there for me to say?

Dad and I discussed my beginning a "chapter a week" fiction writing program, where I do one chapter in a seven day period. It's a good plan. It might get The Recluse done. Or Theftworld. Which is still one of my favorite titles. Hell, I could write Adjusted League Unimpeachable for freaking Superguy if it would get me back on writing track.

But that doesn't help here. And I admit it. I'm selfish. I'm not ready to surrender Websnark. This is a part of my writing landscape. My writing life. My psyche.

It got me engaged for Christ's sake.

And you folks have been awfully good to me. I like you guys. And it seems like that's an important thing too.

So the question is, what should I write about. What can get the spark going? What can get the ball rolling. And make no mistake, when I write (and your milage may vary) there's momentum and inertia involved. It's way easier for me to write five thousand words on day nine of regular writing than three hundred words on day one after time off.

One friend suggested I combine my poverty with my typing skill and auction off topics for me to write about. That's something I've generally been against except for charity, though there does reach a point where it becomes appealing. Though there is generally a feeling of 'payola' involved that makes me quail. "Hi! I just spent five hundred and twelve dollars buying an essay from you. Please write about my webcomic Anime Treacle. Just tell me what you think, okay? No pressure to give me any preferential treatment. Did I mention that five hundred and twelve dollars was my food money for July? No pressure."

...uh... yeah.

So I could solicit for topics. That's always fun. Which, assuming anyone's still reading this (and as of the moment I'm typing this the freaking site's down anyway) means there'll be some comments with suggestions. I'm down with that, but then there's a potential backlog which might seem insurmountable. Or ungracious.

Man, I'm concerned with seeming gracious, aren't I?

Or maybe... maybe I could accept X amount of money to write short vignettes or fiction bits. Do something improv style. Give me a setting, a genre and characters and see what you can come up with, writer boy.

Or would that seem weird?

I dunno.

All I do know is this. I haven't forgotten you guys. I haven't forgotten Websnark, or writing.

Things are just... odd, right now.

Oh, before I forget? Howard Tayler hit seven years like a week ago, over at Schlock Mercenary, and Cheshire Crossing put up issue three in all this, too. Both topics deserve more, but at the absolute minimum, they deserve mention.

EDIT: Just to make things crystal clear, this is not, not, not! a donation solicitation. Some of you guys are amazingly generous and I appreciate that, but dude. I haven't written jack shit for two months. When I'm producing that's one thing, and thank you for your support. When I'm not, your generosity should be turned to the places that are producing. In my humble opinion. Don't make me stop this car and come back there. Don't think for one minute I won't turn around and go right back home. And I'll speed, and I don't have a license on me so if I get pulled over they'll take me to jail! Is that what you want? Well is it?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:13 PM | Comments (34)

May 25, 2007

Eric: Jesus. He's away for a solid month, and his second post is on frigging City of Heroes. God damn rip off....

Eleanor regained consciousness slowly, a feeling like a thousand ants crawling over her skin filling her senses as she regained some sense of herself. She had blacked out on her way to her Founders Falls apartment, and awakened just outside of Louis Forest. To her horror, she realized she was suspended six feet off the ground, held by an unseen force, while a baleful green fire surrounded her. Dimly, through the flames that seemed to burn her soul but not her flesh, she could see red robed cultists chanting, a blue robed wizard with burning green eyes leading them, and some kind of spectral horror floating above them.

"Stop!" she shouted. "Don't do this!"

"You have a destiny!" the mage cried out. "Your sacrifice will open the gateway to a new kind of darkness through the world as we know it!"

"Noooo!" Eleanor cried.

There was the sound of a whip-crack, as inky darkness seemed to swell all around the Circle of Thorns. A vapor-wreathed fist slammed out of the blackness, driving into the stomach of the mage. It was followed by a flurry of blows from phantom arms and a twisting assault. The green fires faded, and Eleanor dropped to the ground. To her shock and joy, a woman in a black and white camouflage jumpsuit was beating the cultists senseless. First one, and then another, and then with a titanic series of darkness-fueled blows, the spirit itself was driven from the plane.

"Why -- Umbral Lass! You saved me!" Eleanor said, leaping to her feet even as Umbral Lass crouched and searched the fallen cultists.

"Yeah, yeah," the heroine said, rifling the mage's pockets.

"I never thought I'd actually meet a hero," Eleanor said. "Especially one who just--"

"Oh shut up, you cow!" Umbral Lass snapped. "Six cultists taken out and not one of them was carrying Spell Ink? I have regenerative powers! I need to boost them with unholy superscience and that means SPELL INK! Get out of my sight! I have to go find more Thorns!"

"But--" But the darkness dynamo was gone, leaving Eleanor to make her way home, just one more speed bump on the heroine's quest to build healing inventions.

Crafting had come to Paragon City.

In the last month, after Weds had returned to Canada... I found myself... well, unmotivated. It was the kind of thing where you're recovering. It's like grief, I suppose. The apartment seemed empty, the days seemed routine. The chemicals didn't make things more than 'okay.'

In such a situation, I turn to City of Heroes. That's most of where I was during the month of not being here. Heck, I've got a character in the middle 40's now, and I'm in striking distance of the elusive 50th level.

For those of you who remember I've been playing since launch, having preordered the game more than three years ago, the fact that I'm just now getting close to 50th level should amuse you. To you I say "screw you. I have a life! Really! Stop laughing!" But regardless, this meant I was doing some heavy punching of Malta operatives and Carnival Psychics right about the time that Issue 9 hit City of Heroes, and with it brought a full fledged crafting system to the game.

Crafting, for those who don't know, is a staple of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft used it to flesh out their worlds, giving the heroes something to do besides punch evil. It was addictive in its own right -- the first time you find yourself playing your Dwarf Hunter for sixteen hours at a time, all on one island, killing off six legged alligators you can skin and turn into pants... you realize you're in this for more than Orc punching.

City of Heroes didn't have crafting. It had been looking into ways of doing it for years, but in one sense the genre doesn't really fit it. Super heroes don't take fallen supervillains and skin them for jackets. (Though admittedly if they did crime rates would fall.) With the Ninth Issue of free content updating (well, eight of free content -- one of those issues was City of Villains), they finally rolled out the brand spanking new Invention system.

In the invention system, you get salvage from defeated enemies. You can also find (or buy) recipes to combine that salvage into inventions. Most of those inventions work the same as other Enhancements -- little add-ons that improve your powers, which fit into one to six slots on each power. For instance, a couple of damage enhancements and a couple of accuracy enhancements make your power more likely to hit and increases the damage the power does. Makes sense? Sure it does!

On the normal enhancements system, you can only use enhancements within three levels of your own. So, if you're thirtieth level, you can use anything from L27 to L33.With invention enhancements, you can still slot one in that's up to three levels higher than your own, but lower level ones never lose effectiveness. Among other things, this means that three L25 Invention enhancements slotted into a power will give you roughly as much of that benefit as any other levels, which means you never have to upgrade them again. (The reasons why get into Enhancement Diversification and diminishing returns and the nature of Single Origin Enhancements versus Invention origin enhancements and whatnot, but for all practical purposes three L25 Damage Invention Enhancements will top that power's damage out straight through to L50, for example). Of course, different enhancements require different salvage -- some of it rarer than others, so the hunt for Stuff is on!

There are also other, more specialized Inventions. You can Invent temporary powers -- say, the ability to become intangible five times. And you can Invent costume pieces which you can redeem at the taylor. Say, winged boots, or wings made out of bone, or fairy gossamer wings..

Finally, there are also Invention sets -- rarer invention enhancements designed to all work together inside a specific power. On their own, they give bonuses to one or more of your powers. But when you get more than once Invention Enhancement from a given set into a single power, you get "set bonuses" that can be significant -- like a 10% bonus to your regeneration, or greater maximum health, or having all your powers recover more quickly, or getting various defenses. A hero who doesn't normally get defenses against things like knockback, being put to sleep or immobilized or the like can use these set bonuses to great effect. My own Dark/Regen scrapper now has obscene regeneration rates, a lot of speed, recovery times for both endurance and recharging powers like no one's buisness, and psi defense. Anyone who's played a non-Dark Armor scrapper in this game knows the joy of Psi Defense.

To facilitate getting your grubby hands on rare invention recipes and the salvage needed to build them, the game has added Consignment Houses. These are places where you can put up your unneeded salvage, recipes, enhancements and the like for other people to bid on. Someone beats your bid? Someone gets your stuff. In a truly cool move, the Consigment Houses are cross server -- both American and European -- so if someone out in Estonia has bid four million influence on Hamidon Goo, and you put Hamidon Goo up in the consignment house with a 3.5 million influence minimum bid, you get some sweet Estonian influence and he gets the chance to build Ghost Widow's Embrace Invention Set Enhancements. Or roll around in mitochondrial jello. Whatever makes Estonian superheroes happy, I suppose.

The system, mechanically, works and works well. It's easy to do, easy to work with, and everyone starts spending time in consignment houses selling off crap and jockeying for bits and pieces of salvage to make their own Inventions. (Though I'm not sure "invention" is the right word -- you're not inventing the stuff, you're following 'recipes' you buy. I'm impressed by anyone who buys a DIY book on building a deck and builds it, but I don't generally credit him with inventing the deck.) Badges spice things up as well, and it's possible to ignore the system entirely if you don't want to do this stuff. (Though if you're a PvPer -- and you still play City of Heroes in the first place -- not going for Set bonuses while your opposition tunes around them is asking to lose a lot of fight. But honestly, how many people are playing City of Heroes for PvP and not using the Invention system?)

Conceptually, it's a little harder to justify. I mean, the system rests on the idea that after beating up criminals, you get to take their stuff. Including things like bars of gold, silver and platinum. Or high tech gear. Last time I knew, that's called 'mugging.' Even police officers don't get to rifle the pockets of downed drug dealers for paraphernalia they can use to build better nightsticks or sell on eBay. It just seems weird that the superheroic invention system rests entirely on petty theft, coercion and armed assault.

Of course, that makes it perfect for City of Villains. (In City of Villains, the consignment houses are called the Black Market, and they look like trucks that the stuff "fell off of.")

Would I make it any differently? Well, maybe. I've always felt City of Heroes needed a secret identity system, and it seems to me this would work for that -- have criminals 'drop' clues or secrets that someone with a detective Secret Identity can convert into influence or Arrest Warrants or manufacture into special missions... while someone with 'reporter' could turn them into stories which go for influence, or for Exposes, or manufacture into special missions... an 'occultist' could turn arcane secrets and clues into arcane powers or missions, techs could do the same to technical secrets and clues... and so on and so forth.

But, it's not for us to say what we would do differently. It is for us to assess what they have done. And in my estimation, the invention system works. It adds a new layer to the game -- one I find fun and engaging and useful. One that's helped distract me from the loneliness of the apartment.

I'll keep it up. Heck, it's six months at the least before my Canadian Fiancee magically is allowed by Immigration and Naturalization Services to become my Living-with-me-wife, and that's a lot of loneliness to defer into experience points. L50's around the corner, and various forms of almighty squid follow that....

In the meantime, excuse me. I have to go mug criminals for their spell ink. And would it kill people to sell off a few more Numina's Convalescence recipes?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:31 AM | Comments (29)

May 24, 2007

Eric: On the other hand, Black Scorpion did get made into a television show briefly... maybe that's where they're taking this brand!

(Image number one of this article originated -- for some value of Originated -- over at the Newsarama article where Adam Hughes discusses all this. Which isn't really what I'm talking about here, but you should know where it came frome. Credit. It's what's for dinner. So, you know, have a big lunch.)

So let's have a conversation about brand management, shall we?

I know there's been a lot -- I mean a lot -- of discussion on a recent Sideshow Collectibles Mary Jane Watson Comiquette statue designed by Adam Hughes. A statue where Mary Jane is wearing a stripper thong, is in the full on "presenting" bent-over pose, and who seems sexily servile. There's been significant 'discussion' on the intent of the statue, on the apparent sexism and/or misogyny of the statue, of the almost absurdly 'skanky' dimension of the statue. About the anatomy of the statue -- hell, lots of discussion. Pretty much all of it deserved. I was stunned at the sheer blatentness of the statue.

But I wasn't surprised by all of it, mind. I mean, the collectibles market is laden down with sexualized depictions of comics characters. This was a particularly egregious example of the form, but it's hardly unique. I mean, this market's what made Todd McFarlane a millionaire -- toys of grotesques and of hot chicks (and of hot chick-grotesque hybrids) are big business, and plenty of comic book stores are laden down with them. This was just one more on the pile, as sad as that pile was. The outrage was heartening, as it's outrage that leads inexorably to change, but that's still not what I'm here to talk about today.

No, today I'm here to talk, as I said at the top, about brand management.

Brand management is a key component to success in the comics industry today -- particularly at the big two publishers. At DC and Marvel, comic books don't really pay the bills. They don't sell nearly enough comics to do that, these days. This ain't the eighties any more. Instead, brand exploitation pays the bills. Options by studios to produce properties based on your intellectual property. The actual licensing fees paid as part of those produced television, theatrical or other adaptations. Licensed merchandise -- from the statue we see at the top of the page to the girls' backpacks with the hot pink and sparkly Superman/girl symbol on the back. Tee shirts. Action figures. DVD sales. The characters at DC and Marvel bring in the long green, and more often than not they're not bringing it in sequential art form.

So, when one's brand makes the money, one needs that brand to be out in the public eye. They need it to appeal broadly. And they need to manage that brand. They need to carefully ensure that the brand isn't damaged, that it's not inappropriately applied. They want it to continue to make money for decades to come.

That's brand management. It's not just ensuring the brands are known and available for sale in many forms, bringing in cash. It's ensuring that the brands aren't significantly damaged by those sales and licensing, thus killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. And part of brand management is timing.

Let's be blunt -- overly sexualized and even misogynistic depictions of Mary Jane Watson Parker are themselves a brand, and they have been for a long time. Mary Jane originated as Peter's new supermodel hot girlfriend. She was a media figure. Hell, she first appeared in the comics with the phrase "face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" In fact, the original dichotomy Mary Jane's presence set up was between herself -- aggressive, sexual, superhot -- and Gwen Stacy, who was more passive, more virginal, more 'girl next door' (despite the fact that Mary Jane actually lived next door to Peter). It was Betty and Veronica, with our man Pete as Archie. And, you know, a complete absence of the Lodge millions. So it was almost certain, when Marvel began licensing Series eight hundred and sixty four thousand of "our hot comics characters done in pressure treated plastic," that one of them would be of Mary Jane and would pay particular attention to the fact that her breasts are made out of solidified helium. We might not like that fact, but it was still true, and from a purely cynical capitalistic standpoint, it makes economic sense. Mary Jane is a brand, her sexuality is part of that brand, and people will buy it. Ergo -- it will be made available for them to buy at a hundred twenty-five bucks a pop. Face it Tiger, the brand management team just hit the jackpot.

But the timing of the announcement... was horrible brand management. I mean it couldn't have been worse. Because all of this hit right as Spider-Man 3 hit the theaters.

Spider-Man 3 is also the leveraging of a brand for money, pure and simple. The intellectual property has been adapted and packaged so that millions of people can shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to watch Tobey Maguire beat the living Hell out of Topher Grace. And it worked. As of today, according to our friends at Box Office Mojo, Spider-Man 3 has taken in $286,385,002 domestically and $466,984,781 in non-American markets. That's over three quarters of a billion dollars, or almost half a billion dollars more than the reported production costs of the movie.

Stop and consider this for a moment. After paying for the movie's production costs, Spider-Man 3 has taken in half a billion dollars of profit.

At the moment, Spider-Man 3 -- and the other movies in the series -- are by far the most important expressions of the brand on the market. Vastly more important, in brand management terms, than the comics. And the people going in and shelling out three quarters of a billion dollars to see the movie are vastly, vastly, vastly more important to the brand right now than the few hundred or thousand who might buy the statue we're talking about. To the overall health of the brand, the Kirsten Dunst depiction of Mary Jane Watson is vastly more important and more strongly perceived than any of the Supermodel versions of the character.

I saw Spider-Man 3. Unlike a lot of my peers, I actually enjoyed it a lot. And I was surprised at how much I liked Kirsten Dunst and the evolution of Mary Jane in it. She was very real, very human in a superhuman world. I found her story compelling.

And she mostly wore stylish clothing. I can't remember any examples of her wearing clothes that didn't involve a full dress. (EDIT: I've been reminded that for a while, she also wears a white blouse buttoned up to the neck, plus a short black skirt and very conservative black hose, a la an upscale waitstaff uniform. Oh baby. Oh baby. Oh.) I know she didn't wear any brown midriff baring scoop neck babydoll tee, jeans with strategic tears in them, and the kind of thong that only strippers wear (for the record? "Sexy" thongs in today's fashion market at most barely peek over the edge of the jeans. They don't wrap above the hips like some kind of harness for parachutes that anchor on the crotch.) And she sure as Hell doesn't have 44FF breasts displayed like cantaloupe.

Whether or not this kind of sexist depiction is ever appropriate, it's certainly lucrative and therefore Marvel is going to license it. However, in an era where Mary Jane Watson's brand is vastly more lucrative when it ties back to what the people who shelled out three quarters of a billion dollars in the last twenty days have seen, this aggressively sexist depiction isn't cute and it isn't pin-up art -- it's confusion in the marketplace. People who seek out examples of Mary Jane based on the movie will run into it and be turned off. It hurts the overall brand of Mary Jane Watson. And it damages the potential profit that brand can make.

That is a catastrophic failure of brand management. In the wake of these millions of movie dollars being spent, the absolute last thing you want on the mainstream media is a debate about the inappropriateness of your pissant limited edition sex statue. Sure, it's good advertising for the sex statue. And indeed, the statue has sold out in preorder. But the damage isn't to the statue or its sales, it is to the brand, and is of the variety that causes highly paid brand managers to lose their jobs. Saucy Mary Janes would be fine in this climate. Naughty, coy Mary Janes wouldn't hurt the brand even if they annoyed some of the fans. This thing? Hurts the brand.

And it underscores the thing Marvel is worst at right now. Stop and consider. On June 17 of this year, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer will be released. And yet, the past year's comics have depicted Reed as a particularly weak supervillain whose actions, directly or indirectly, led to Captain America getting shot. We can debate the quality of the comics (and we have), but from a brand management standpoint they're horrible. You don't poison core fanbases of your franchise just before releasing a movie that cost a hundred and thirty million dollars to make. That's just stupid. Next year, they're going to try to launch a new Iron Man movie and franchise, and that same year of comic books put Tony Stark not only into a supervillain's position, but conflated him with the Bush administration and Halliburton.

See also: a future Spider-Man killing Mary-Jane with horrific cancer caused by his radioactive sperm two months before his movie comes out.

Now, as a writer and a fan of superheroes (though admittedly not a fan of what Marvel's done to superheroes in the last few years), I wouldn't want to have storylines dictated by the brand management team either. But this is the business that Marvel is in now. This is the business they've been in for years, and it's vastly better business than the comics side stuff. And in corporate America, you follow where the money's flowing. And right now Marvel's doing a terrible job at that.

As one last example, I give you the cover to Heroes for Hire #13, a comic rated by Marvel for teenagers. This would seem to be something entirely different than what I was talking about -- there are no burgeoning merchandise deals for this new version of the Heroes for Hire. There are no movie deals in the offing. One could debate whether or not they really want teenagers to pick up comics featuring highly sexualized victimized women on the cover (including one who apparently had her costume unzipped nearly to her bellybutton by a tentacle creature), but does it really belong here in my nice cynical essay about brand management?

In short? You bet it does. Heroes for Hire is clearly designed to go after a specific market segment. From the promotion it's received and most of the cover art to date, that market segment is clear: Birds of Prey fans. Over at DC, there's a highly acclaimed and clearly successful comic book series starring several strong women who do the superhero thing. It's smart, fun writing in an excellent comic book that manages to prove that you can have (mostly) equal -- even feminist -- takes on superheroes and make them really good superhero stories.

The comics were successful enough, in fact, that they got their own WB series. Now, the television show failed, but that doesn't change the fact that Birds of Prey is a successful comic with enough penetration in culture that they successfully optioned it. Brand Management 101 says there's money to be made off of Oracle, Huntress, Power Girl, Black Canary and Other.

Marvel, of course, can't make money off those characters. They don't own them. But they can assemble their own thematic versions and build a brand based on them. Comics 101 -- if Superman is successful, here's twelve guys just like him at other companies!

So. They're after the Birds of Prey audience, both for short term comics sales and for longer term critical acclaim and brand building.

The Birds of Prey audience is, to be blunt, feminist. At the very least, they're comfortable with superheroines being depicted in a strong, well defined character way. At most, they're solidly feminist, believing in all that "superheroines should be strong figures who aren't needlessly sexualized for male readers." A significant portion of the Birds' audience is female, at least judging by the commentary around it.

So. Brand Management is simple in this case: strong women. They can be attractive and even sexual, but they have to be strong and capable.

Here, we have a cover with five people bound, about to be... er... attacked by tentacles. One of them is male. That's Shang Chi, and he's aggressive, fighting the horror, not giving in.

The rest are female, and they're docile, almost drugged, not resisting at all. With... er... evidence of arousal. And Colleen's being apparently partially stripped by an octopus.

If your brand management plan was to go after Femforce's demographic, you're well on your way. But if you're going after the Birds of Prey audience you just failed your brand management skill roll critically. It will be many, many issues before a lot of Birds of Prey fans will even consider picking up your comic. They sure as Hell won't be blogging about it in a positive way. They sure as Hell won't be extolling it or pushing it to their friends.

In other words, it won't be penetrating the culture as anything more than another example of comics-for-35-year-old-guys-check-out-Misty-Knight's-Rack.

That's a failure of brand management. Oh, and for those who have pointed out that a woman was the cover artist who depicted it? Sorry, the point remains -- this cover will alienate the market segment the comic was designed to appeal to.

Bad brand manager. No paycheck.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:32 AM | Comments (56)

April 24, 2007

Eric: Because I am still alive, some fast facts!

It has been a busy few weeks, storms and all.

Part of the reason for the busyness has been practical. Wednesday is in town. More to the point, Wednesday is in town for the last time for at least six months. Why? Because we will have specific forms filed immediately after she leaves town, and those forms will lead inexorably to her being back here permanently (and married to me, which makes me a very happy person), but while they're in process the government will not let her return to the country. And they will take six months to process. If we're lucky.) So it's important to us to, among other things, consume every waking minute with each other to its fullest. Which has meant sitting and typing on almost anything non-work-related has fallen by the wayside.

I assume all of you would forgive me for that, of course. Because Dude.

We're feeling very very good about the byzantine process of securing Governmental Approval For American Burns to Marry Canadian White thanks to our lawyer -- the startlingly kickass Virginia "Gini" Judd, esq. (EDIT: The link now works! Yay!) Mlle. Judd is someone we know and trust -- she's the wife of Ferrett Steinmetz, author of Home on the Strange -- she, Ferrett and Weds had a great time hanging out in England before she made it back onto this continent. She's already made a process which seems alien and frightening seem much easier to deal with, and we're excited to have her helping us.

(As a side note -- if you or yours are looking into family law, bankruptcy, immigration issues of any form, or just general civil legal stuff, I heartily recommend her. She Knows Her Stuff.)

A few things have happened. I haven't talked about Vonnegut, and it's likely the statue of limitations for writing a remembrance has passed. So let us just remember that the man was willing to appear as himself in a Rodney Dangerfield movie where he writes a term paper for a student on his own work, which gets an F because "clearly whoever wrote this knows nothing about Kurt Vonnegut." Which at once revealed his opinion of such things, as well as denoted something about the man himself.

More germane to my life, my Microsoft Explorer Thinks We're a Phishing Site experiences have been collected into a Help Desk plotline that was seriously funny. Among other things, it actually featured a Wednesday-Day-Of-The-Week joke that actually made Weds laugh -- and very few of those make Weds laugh these days. (For the record? That's not a challenge. Seriously. I've had enough date puns made about Weds's name that I'm ready to never hear another one. Weds has lived with them.) At the time I wanted to push it, but things were just -- well, see above. But by god, you should go look at it.

Also, I've had some other project just go up on some site. It slips my mind right now, however.

Things are well. Weds is well. Oh, and my car seems to be okay -- some gum-out seems to have fixed it right up.

(One last bout of eBay will be going up in the next day or two, for those who have wondered. But obviously the storm has passed, and thank you all for your generosity and cheer. I hope everyone loves their Stuff.)

I'll try to be around more often than I've been in the past month, though... well. I have her for another nine days, and then just when I can sneak to Canada, and you'll understand that I'm going to miss her, so for now....

Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:20 PM | Comments (31)

April 17, 2007

Eric: The road falls away

Time slips away from you.

Time slips away from you and around you and past you. There was a storm here, a few days ago -- a Nor'easter, they called it, which seems weird since the same storm dumped snow on the Midwest before it reached us, but what the heck. Weds and I went driving last night, with an intention to go down south to Manchester. On the way, we found closed roads because the water, running down hills, had undercut and collapsed the roads.

Being enterprising folks, we circled around and tried to go another way. That way led down a road where there were collapsed sides, and we finally came to a point where there was absolutely no way to move forward. A river had sprung up, cut the road down the middle for a good three hundred feet, and then vanished, leaving only the clear signs of water and an abject lack of passable roadway.

Wednesday stepped out of the car and moved off to a safe distance, to tell me when to stop the car as I slowly backed up, moved forward, backed up and inched around to go back the way we came. The reason for this was simple: the ditch on one side of the car was now a good twelve feet deep, and if I inadvertently backed over it the car would have been swallowed up and very possibly rendered undrivable. Which would have been inconvenient. Also, the car might have fallen backwards, landed on the roof, and potentially done me a mischief. Which would have been painful.

Slow and steady got the car turned around, and we drove back up the road, deciding that there was nothing in Manchester worth adrenalin. As we drove back, slowly, we came upon a wild turkey, running down the center of the road in a certain degree of panic. We tried to get a picture of it, but it got into the woods and hid from direct view of us. Which, given that a turkey doesn't know the difference between a camera and a rifle and doesn't know that Thanksgiving won't be for seven more months shows admirable wisdom on his part.

We came back home, driving into town and going out for dinner at the Wolfe's Tavern. The place was practically deserted -- there may have been two other couples in the whole place, and the bar section was empty except for one guy watching Bill O'Reilly speaking on the Virginia Tech shootings. I watched about ten seconds as we headed to the salad bar. It was restrained and respectful -- two words I don't normally associate with Mr. O'Reilly. And I considered how ruined roadways and the weather were unpleasant, but far worse things had been happening in the world.

This is a Sarah Vowell attitude -- one best laid out in her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot -- she goes to the sites of American tragedy and generally has a lot of fun at them. She thinks it's a way she gains perspective. Yeah, it's a bummer that the movie was sold out, but at least she's not being slowly crushed to death under the weight of stones because she's being accused as a witch. They Might Be Giants did a song about it called "It Could Be Worse" on the audiobook version of the book, and it's now my ringtone for when work calls me. Yeah, it's 11 at night and someone's calling to tell me I have to shlep across the street and reboot a few servers and get things working, but at least we're not being forced to march two thousand, two hundred miles in a forced relocation where four thousand of our number died of disease, fatigue, starvation or dehydration, ultimately being forced to live in Oklahoma.

Yeah, there was a bad storm. And as it turns out, routes not just to Manchester and Concord but to Maine, to Rochester, to Portsmouth and to Conway were closed yesterday, some just washed away. But it's not like a madman loaded a couple of nine millimeters and started killing people on my school's campus. Wolfeboro might be an island today, but no one died and we have plenty of toilet paper and twinkies. Perspective is a good thing to have, here.

Reactions to the tragedy have been varied but predictable. Some people are calling for stricter security on our college campuses. Some people are calling for stricter gun control laws. And the blaring of 24 hour news channels which are providing live, up to the minute reports on an event that ended yesterday with horror and death but which is not now ongoing will only magnify the tragedy and make it all the more tragic through reactions. Now, I'm a liberal, and I have a solid set of opinions on gun control laws and on the culture of firearms that's emerged in this country, but as with Columbine before it Virginia Tech does not change that opinion. Nor does it validate it. We are discussing the actions of a madman, doing something unthinkable on a campus where people live. There is little to be done to prevent the actions of madmen, because they have all the time in the world to plan for the things you haven't prepared for. This man would have caused mayhem, horror and death one way or another. Perhaps stricter controls or security would have saved some lives. Or perhaps it would have caused the madman to build crude incendiary devices instead and potentially killed more. We cannot predict the actions of madmen, and we must not overreact when they happen. We must consider the pain, the horror, and what legitimate lessons can be learned from tragedy. We must do so soberly, away from the passions that tragedy evoke. And as we learn more about why Cho Seung-Hui went on a murderous rampage at the college he had attended for years, we must try to learn what we can to identify where the system did fail, without surrendering ourselves to fear of what unknown things might happen. That way leads to xenophobia, to armed guards on college campuses, to a police state being locked down further, and to no promise that someone else won't kill a bunch of kids somewhere else anyway. We have defined much of the Twenty-First Century as a reaction to horror and terror, and few today would claim those reactions ended up being wise or correct. This time, we have to learn from those mistakes and horrors the same as we must learn from the tragedy in Virginia.

The waters recede slowly, but the damage is left in their wake. I have no idea when the roads connecting my town to the rest of the world will be repaired. It's not like my town is the only one to have damage done in what was after all a pretty major storm. There is much to be discussed -- I've been away for a little while, and as I said at the top of the essay, time has a habit of slipping away from you, like water. I'll try to be better, and more here. I'll try to comment on things left uncommented on. I'll try to add something to the dialogue or the day.

But if I miss it, I won't overly stress. It could always be worse. This is minor in comparison to so many things in life.

Be good to each other and to everyone you meet.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:20 AM | Comments (28)

March 27, 2007

Eric: For all the fifteen year olds out there? Yes, you can summon succubi in the game. Yeesh

The thing about Sorcerer is it's short.

Seriously. A hundred and thirty one pages in an attractive hardback that itself is six and a half by ten. It's a tiny little thing. The size of a hardcover comic book, really. And at least three of the pages is an essay elaborating Edwards's GNS Theory. (Said theory has since been deprecated and incorporated into the Big Model. Speaking as a literary and critical theorist, the GNS and Big Model theories are fascinating reading, if a hair structural for my taste. At some point, I should really codify my own theories of collaborative roleplaying as improvisational performance art, but -- as happens so often -- I digress.)

And yet, despite the economy of text, Sorcerer is dynamite. It really is. You read through the pages and it blows your preconceptions out of the water. That shows real economy of text.

The way Edwards accomplishes this is twofold: first, there is economy of text. Edwards is a master of using four words the way a more florid writer (me, say) would use twelve.

Secondly, Sorcerer is a book of concepts. Thematic concepts, practical concepts, mechanical concepts all alike, but concepts. Many if not most RPGs or sourcebooks to come out in the last fifteen years -- certainly since the heyday of White Wolf -- have been executions of concept. If you read Vampire: The Masquerade, to use a now-outdated but classic and well known example, you are reading a book about a realized world. The mechanics woven through the text highlight and derive inexorably from the specifics of the campaign world that the system is modeling, and as a result that system is altered contextually when it's woven through a different role playing game. This is even true of the modern World of Darkness game -- it is more streamlined and "universal," but Vampire: The Requiem doesn't simply add on to the World of Darkness rules -- it recontextualizes them.

Not so with Sorcerer. This is a very specific book, but it is not a book of execution. The core mechanics elaborated so simply and clearly here suggest a plethora of different possible executions. Edwards gives some suggestions and examples, but you find yourself coming up with different paradigms the system works for just naturally. What is left unsaid is as interesting and evocative as what is said.

This isn't to say Sorcerer lacks assumptions. You can't develop a realized role-playing game without assumptions. Even the bare bones System Reference Document that is the cornerstone of d20 -- perhaps the polar opposite of Sorcerer -- is chock full of assumptions. And the most basic assumption of any role playing game are the words "what if."

Seriously. Think about it.

"What if Vampires were real, and were quietly moving behind the scenes, eking out an existence and forming a society within our society."

"What if superheroes really existed, in a world that conformed to the four color adventures of the comics of our youth?"

"What if brave adventurers in a pseudo-medival society crawled through underground passages, killing everything they find, sacking ancient burial mounds and catacombs for their treasure?"

The Role Playing Game is an attempt to answer that question -- preferably having fun while you do it.

Well, Sorcerer's "what if" is pretty simple. "What if the only paranormal power in the world came from intentionally summoning demons?"

That's it.

Note that "what if" doesn't encode what demons are. It might be the Abrahamic demons of the major current world religions. It might be the original Greek ideal of the dæmon -- a creature between a mortal and a god, possessing wisdom or knowledge, possibly petty, possibly noble. It might be a computer daemon given form. It might be a Ferengi ship captain, and man -- would the price of power be worth it?

As I said -- this is a game of concepts, not executions. The concept is simple. The execution is up to the gamemaster.

Which is how these games used to be presented, back in the days of mimeographed and hobbyist roleplayers building and presenting games. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was incredibly detailed and complex -- it was all about the execution -- but the details of the world were entirely left up to the Dungeon Master. Hell, even buying the sprawling original World of Greyhawk product gave you a pile of names, a hex map, and a few very general comments about places like Blackmoor, but the specifics were left up to the the Dungeon Master's discretion. The Dungeon Master filled in the core gaps in the theory, and the players drove the execution in practice. Compare that with the next generation's Seattle Sourcebook for Shadowrun (which is still one of my favorite products, it's worth noting). This was an incredibly detailed Sixth World retelling of the greater Metropolitan Seattle area in a magipunk universe, right down to where you could get Ork food in Puyallup -- with the additional layer of actual Shadowrunners hacking into the files and leaving their own comments about what you'd really find in these places.

Not so with Sorcerer. It's got all the rules you need to create a sorcerer, to go through the process of contacting, summoning, binding and commanding the spirits, to create the statistics for those demons and to elaborate the powers innate to those demons. But it has no assumptions as to what those demons are, what kind of people the sorcerers are, how this has impacted society, or anything else. The rules exist as a theory. It's up to the gamemaster and the player to figure out the execution.

And the player does get to participate. One of the cooler (and more eminently stealable) concepts of the game is the kicker. This is the final part of character creation, and it is essentially a player authored upturning of the character's anthill. One of the core elements of the English novel is the establishment of the norm and the introduction of something that breaks the norm, introducing conflict. That's the kicker. From before you start playing, there's something that has the character out of his happy place... and it's something the player brings to the table instead of the gamemaster.

That's cool.

I've been turning these things over in my brain for a few days. I've been bouncing them off my usual gaming cohorts. I've had story ideas burble up -- it's a fertile field. There's lots of little touches I like (the total and intentional lack of telepathy or "magic evil detection vision" for one. You never realize what a crutch such effects are until you take them out of your game world entirely), but they're all designed to make me think about what kind of world I would make out of these concepts.

None of this is new insight. Sorcerer has been making the rounds for years. Ron Edwards received the Diana Jones Award -- perhaps the most prestigious (and certainly the most difficult to receive) award in the RPG Design community -- largely on the strength of Sorcerer back in 2002. Five years is an eternity in these terms, and Sorcerer's been sitting on my shelf for most of that five years. Hell, it looks like actually buying the game is difficult at the moment -- it's still listed as 'in print,' but it's out of stock. And unlike most modern RPGs -- especially from independent and small press publishers -- it's not available in PDF form.

As a side note -- I am a total RPG PDF junkie now. Give me a way to put my collection on my laptop hard drive and carry it with me? Yes please thank you. Make it searchable to boot and I will be your absolute best friend.

But that's as may be. Right now, I'm turning Sorcerer over and over in my brain, and coming up with things and thoughts, of which this is just a few.

And isn't that a cool thing for a role playing game?

(Auction updates -- most are ended or ending, and it's gone really well! I'm going to put some more things up later today or tomorrow, to keep the cycle moving forward as money is very helpful and I'd like to get ahead on things I've gotten behind on, but for the most part thank you everyone for bidding and participating. And man who thought Amber would go for almost seventy dollars?)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:26 AM | Comments (21)

March 6, 2007

Eric: Seriously. Old *Jimmy Olsen* comics used to sell over seven hundred thousand issues a month. Not Superman -- *Jimmy Olsen.*

I was watching a show on the History Channel, called How William Shatner Changed the World. It was one of those shows that tracked the people who actually made things like ion propulsion drives for NASA unmanned spacecraft and the cellular telephone and had them saying "well, yeah. I was watching Star Trek and hey -- Data was listening to music on his computer so I went down to my job at Apple and then I wrote Quicktime and then we invented the iPod."

You know, a fluffy show, but fun. This one featured some of Shatner's trademark (for this decade) self-deprecating humor.

But... they made an interesting contention in this show.

See, Star Trek was low rated, but then snowballed. And was huge. And Star Trek: The Next Generation was even bigger. (And if you haven't been playing along at home... we're reaching the point where Star Trek: The Next Generation was as long ago as the original Star Trek was when TNG first came out. Feel old yet? But I digress.)

And then Deep Space Nine came out. Which was my favorite of the series. And it did okay... but it was significantly lower rated than Next Generation which was on at the same time.

And then Voyager was lower rated still.

And then Enterprise was lower rated enough that it tanked.

We all know these things. And we all know the justifications. "People were burned out on Star Trek. Competition from cable and the internet killed them." Et cetera. But that's not what they were saying on here.

No, their contention -- and it was a throwaway -- was simple. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation were Roddenberry's vision of a future where humanity's problems were solved and technology was a good thing that made life a paradise and allowed humanity, who had matured, grown together and embraced that paradise, to develop themselves and explore the galaxy. Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise were darker shows where there were interpersonal conflicts between the crew, a more "realistic" approach to technology (which often failed) was adopted, and there were universal wars, terrorism, and lots of bad things and tense moments. And the millions of people who loved Next Generation didn't love these darker shows in such great numbers, despite their critical acclaim (the critics loved Deep Space Nine -- and so, for that matter did I). They loved the overall sense of optimism that Roddenberry had brought and people like Braga, Berman, and Behr eschewed as hokey.

Now, I don't know if this is right or not. I don't have demographics or interviews or statistical data. But it was an interesting contention for me, because it goes hand in hand with where I think comic books are dying.

See, comics used to be bright. They were optimistic. The good guys were good guys. The bad guys were bad guys. And the good guys eventually won. This was true at DC, where generally the heroes were stalwart and upright, and this was true at Marvel where the heroes were flawed and had problems. But it was still true.

Over the last several decades, comics have "grown up." They've become more realistic. And we ultimately had things like Zero Hour and Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis and Civil War. And some of those series have been popular and everything, but comic books have been in major decline. The most popular books today get the kinds of numbers that middle of the road-to-unpopular books got in the seventies (and let's not even think about the forties or fifties. Superman used to sell many millions of issues a month.) Hell, over on Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics site (which is always good fun), an entire essay was devoted to pointing out that back when comics were stupid they vastly outsold the most popular comics of today. Even Little Dot.

And I've wondered for some time when the comic book companies became ashamed of superheroes. When did Realism, and "secret identities are bad" and "goofy heroes like Ralph and Sue Dibney need to die" and "the government needs to regulate all super heroes in a clear nod to Guantanamo Bay" and "hey, let's show Hank Pym immediately after employing the potential kinky sex acts that shrinking your body to the size of a dildo imply on his ex wife and former abuse victim Janet in our flagship team comic!" take the place of "Captain America beats up Hydra so they can't conquer the world" and "Iron Man is a good guy who fights bad people who want to take over the world."

I mean... what if the William Shatner documentary was right? What if the reason Enterprise tanked was because they'd lost the clear, clean message of the original series and Next Generation. What if the reason comic books are a niche item (and Manga outsells them in bookstores) is people liked the clear cut good versus evil stuff more than the 'popular' depressing 'realistic' stuff?

It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:04 PM | Comments (53)

February 21, 2007

Eric: And now, literature.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around On the Banks of Lethe. It's not easy. But James Grant does that to my brain.

I think I probably got into Grant's stuff thanks to Randy Milholland. When Grant's original webcomics magnum opus, the Jay Storyline, was in full flower over at FLEM Comics!, Randy did small cameos in Something Positive. Jay was one of the people Davan knew back in Texas. Simple enough. That led me to FLEM, which later on led me to Two Lumps. I loved it.

I loved it because Grant is a sick fuck. Which is really the only way to describe him. Except he's a funny sick fuck. He's a talented sick fuck. He reminds me, in his own way, of George Carlin. When I watched the DVD of The Aristocrats, I was pretty blase through the telling and retelling of the most obscene joke in the universe. I'm a jaded person by nature, when it comes to such things. But while Sarah Silverman's deadpan version was the best and most memorable, George Carlin's is the one that got me within three gags of actually throwing up. And yet, it was still funny.

That's the kind of power Grant has. And it's a power he carries through into his writing.

I read and greatly enjoyed Pedestrian Wolves, Grant's first book. It was vivid and evocative -- a shout down down the throat of New Orleans, written before Katrina and in its own way a testament to a city that doesn't exist in the same way any more. However, I wasn't sure that Pedestrian Wolves was so much a novel as a travelogue -- a taste of the city, of the mores of the place, of the scene, of one man's understanding of the streets he had walked. Grant's second book, the aforementioned On the Banks of Lethe is a solid, full on, hardcore novel. It's the story of Charlie, and it's the story of memory and loss. Which can't possibly be coincidence -- it is absolutely nothing like the short story "Flowers for Algernon," or the novel that it grew into, and yet when you read about Charlie in Lethe, you think of Charley in that original story. You think about pain. You think about loss.

If I were to describe the book, I'd be somewhat at a loss. It's got a little Noir to it -- a little sense of the One Good Man fighting a battle. But at the same time, it's Noir as written by Sean Stewart and soundtracked by the Sisters of Mercy. The One Good Man is always a flawed figure, but this time his flaws are held together with barbed wire and set on fire. It's Portrait of the Artist as Cursed By Non-Euclidean Monstrosities.

And it's fascinating. Fascinating as the stare of a cobra.

There's no comfort in this book. I never got the feeling that Charlie would win. I saw him struggling, and trying -- saw him trying to hold on to the woman he loved and the world, but this is James L. Grant, so I figured there would be a few shotgun blasts to the ego along the way. And the book doesn't disappoint. It reminded me of some other stories -- Vellum, by Hal Duncan. Perfect Circle by the aformentioned Sean Stewart. Even "The Unpleasant Occupation of Jonathan Hoag" by Robert Heinlein (though more if the other side won in that particular work). The imagery is powerful and disturbing, the voice is solid.

In a way, as stated, this really is Grant's first novel, since I don't think we can really call Pedestrian Wolves a novel. And there's some sense of that in the book. He overwrites a bit, here and there. Sometimes phrases like "Daughter of Red" beg to be shrunk down instead of repeated over and over again. But these are comparatively minor -- like brushstrokes on one of Charlie's paintings. The paint may seem thick in places, but it adds texture to the whole.

This is not a comforting book. But man, it was a good ride getting to the end. I'm looking forward to the next time Grant takes a few shots at our collective psyches.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:01 PM | Comments (15)

February 14, 2007

Eric: Life is what happens while you're making other plans.

Yeah, posting every day. Hah hah... good times, good times.

There's this play I'm in that's ramped to high. I get to be pure uncut evil. There's the chain of minor to not so minor illnesses that define my life. There's... well, there's trips to Canada to see my fiancee. You have to grok that in the priority list.

And... well, there's writing. I've done quite a bit of it despite all of the above. It... er, just wasn't for Websnark. But on the plus side, I feel once again privileged to wear tweed and a beret when I go to coffee shops.

I'll play some catchup on here over the next few days. Lots of goodness to talk about in the world. Thanks, all!

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:37 AM | Comments (8)

February 1, 2007

Eric: Many notes, in various forms.

Work started just before 7 and ended... hm. A couple of minutes ago. No breaks today. There was... a problem last night. Tomorrow will be the same. No Wiiplay tonight, and restricted before that (I was deathly ill at the start of the week, and this much exhaustion can't possibly help with that.)

I haven't written my Order of the Stick snark yet, though it keeps getting better and better. This is amazing stuff. If you're not reading it, you ought to be, really.

PvP launched its animated series today, which served as a backdrop while I worked. As Scott Kurtz himself admitted in comments, the pacing wasn't as solid as one would like, and he promises improvements with that. The voice acting was pretty darn cool (I know there was the Skull controversy, but at this point I can't hear him any other way). The others were at least serviceable -- and Brent is spot on perfect. If I had my wishes granted by scantily clad djinni... well, first off I'd be mind numbingly rich, the workstuff would be dealt with, and Wednesday would be declared Canada's Ambassador Without Portfolio to New Hampshire, but at some point we'd reach my PvP animated wishes, and they'd include a little more of the really good incidental music and more of a patter. However, it's worth noting I'll be back next month to see the next, and that's the core thing you can ask of a first episode.

Note to T and Phil. I will, I swear to God, write back. I'm just exhausted.

Note to Frank. See above, times six. Man, do I have things I owe you.

Note to WiiFolks. I'll be adding everyone tomorrow night when I recover from round to from Oh My God Work Is Eating My Soul. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm.

Note to Wednesday -- I love you, and I'm sorry I'm not exactly focused at the moment.

Note to Activision. Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the Wii is f-f-frickin awesome.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:41 PM | Comments (32)

January 29, 2007

Eric: All this said, even after all this time I'd wait in the cold for a ROM Spaceknight. But we knew that.

On friday, temperatures were below zero, especially in the early parts of the morning. Saturday was also bitterly cold. Sunday, on the other hand, saw a spike of temperature, up to a practically balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit as of 4:45 in the morning.

I was standing in that cold. It was approximately four and three quarters hours since my 39th birthday had ended, and I was spending that first morning waiting outside a WalMart in Windham, Maine. A WalMart that would be selling 19 Nintendo Wiis at 6 am. And I was not alone.

I am not a passionate gamer. Not really. I loves me some City of Heroes as you all know, and I'm forever beholden to Soulcalibur and its ilk, but for the most part I'm a casual gamer. I do not own an XBox 360, and currently I do not plan to buy one. I do not own a Playstation 3, and as near as I can tell no one who doesn't already own one plans to buy one of those. They sit on the shelves next to excited handwritten signs declaring that they are in stock, and people just sort of shrug. There is something to be said for the additional muscle these 'next generation' consoles have, but almost every review I've seen for almost every game released for them is the same -- the graphics are generally slightly prettier (though to be honest, it doesn't look that different to me. I've never cared about being able to see the sweat on a game avatar), but the games play exactly the same way as their lastgen versions did. The same button combinations, the same moves, the same modes. And all too often, the games lack some of their predecessors' functionality. For no good reason I watch XPlay, and review after review they go over this is essentially the same game as Madden was on the original XBox, only with slightly better graphics and fewer game modes. And so forth.

That will change, by the by. Games like Gears of War couldn't have effectively existed on the original XBox, and as developers get comfortable with the greater power and capacity of the XBox 360, the games they release will become bigger and grander. Which is all fine and good for the serious gamer, but of less interest to the casual gamer. As for the Playstation 3? At this point, it almost doesn't matter what they do. It's had the kiss of death in the popular culture -- it's considered lame. Half the people (it seemed) who waited on line to get one turned around and sold it on eBay for a profit, and now no one's into them at all. When prices get slashed way down, they may regain share, but I wouldn't count on it.

The Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, is a casual gamer's dream machine. It's innovative. It doesn't have the graphical power of the other nextgens, but in part that's because they decided to make the console more fun instead. It was the Christmas must-have. It continues to sell out whenever it becomes available.

Which is why, two months after the system release, I was standing in the cold for one.

I wasn't alone. There were a good number of others waiting too. High school and college guys who didn't luck out before. Parents (and grandparents) trying to make good on Christmas promises. A couple of little kids who were so excited you could power a turbine with them. Every new person who showed up kind of chuckled, too. "I'm glad I'm not the only one," was the common refrain. "I was gonna feel ridiculous if I was the only one."

At the same time, there was a way I was the only one. I was neither a late teens/early twenties guy, nor a parent or grandparent, nor a ten year old kid. I was a full adult, waiting in the cold for a toy. For myself. For my birthday.

Which might be 39 in a nutshell.

This is your last chance. Your last shot. Right now, I'm still thirtysomething without kids. I'm not beholden. I can cling to the extended adolescence that has been the hallmark of my generation -- the first generation of Generation X. I don't have to be all the way grown up just yet. I can still get excited for a new toy. I can still wait in the cold to buy it. I can still drag my amused parents on a pre-dawn quest. (Which was nice, as they could run to Tim Hortons and grab me coffee.)

The time came. There was acrimony as it looked like they opened other doors first and there was the possibility of line jumping. The doors opened. There was a mad dash to electronics. And everyone who waited got a Wii. (Though the first guy in line -- who sent his 12 year old son at a full on sprint to be the first to the electronics counter -- wanted to buy all 19. The WalMart employee just snickered, said "one to a customer sir," and moved on to the next.)

I bought my Wii. I didn't get any additional games or the like, just then. I wanted to try it out on its own merits. And I was in no way disappointed. The Wii is fun. We brought it back to my folks' house and set it up. We downloaded patches. We created Miis. And we bowled. And I was stunned at how... well, good the bowling was. My mother, who became disenchanted with video games after Zelda went 3D and the maze games of the Ladybug era were phased out, happily did the same kind of bowling dances you do at actual alleys when she did well. And the bowling went exactly as bowling always does for me. I do really well for four or five throws, and then I overthink it and it becomes harder. My Dad hooked to the right generally, too. And all that just amazed me.

Boxing? Really cool. Tennis? A lot of fun. Baseball kind of bored me, but golf was okay. All in all, it was a fun thing. A good thing. A good game that everyone enjoyed.

Tonight, I'm going to buy my first real game for it. (Not counting The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that I downloaded off of virtual console last night, of course.) Everyone tells me I should grab the new Zelda, and of course I will. I love Zelda. But the thing that really, really stood out for me was how much fun the party game aspect was -- so I'm thinking I'll grab WiiPlay or Warioware -- quick, easy and fun games that don't take long and really use the Wiimote and the like.

Next year, I'll be forty. Chances are likely I'll have a wife and household. I trust I'll still enjoy fun, but I don't anticipate I'll wait in line at four forty-five for a toy, no matter how cool it is.

But this year? I got the best toy on Earth for my birthday, and that just plain rocks.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:54 PM | Comments (26)

January 25, 2007

Eric: On having a research department, even when they don't know it.

A couple of days ago, I caught a story.

This happens to me. I'll be walking or driving along, and something will occur to me, and I'll decide "huh." And the next thing I know I've got an opening, at least twelve scenes and a denouement in my brain, trying to claw their way out. And, because I was cursed by influenced by Hard Science Fiction, I then need to... oh, you know, do real honest to Christ research on the subject in question.

Now, this is not science fiction. If anything, it's Magical Realism, set in today's world. Something very Sean Stewart, with a soupçon of Hal Duncan for good measure.

What?

Soupçon.

It's a word.

Yes, it's originally from the French, but it's an actual, honest to Christ in-Webster's word now. It means "smidge."

No I couldn't "just say smidge." Jesus.

Anyway.

Lost my train of thought.

Oh, right. The story. It's a very contemporary story, and it's meant to actually be a road trip sort of story. In fact, it's meant to be a shunpiking story. Shunpiking isn't in Webster's but it's a fantastic word which should be. It means "avoiding major highways and interstates and turnpikes in lieu of back roads, secondary roads and the like." It means taking the remnants of old Route 66 instead of the thruway. It means driving through small towns and places instead of bypassing them.

That's what this story needs.

So I want to do it right. So I have a starting point and an ending point. And I have an internet. And if you look at our friend Mapquest, they have an "avoid Highways" feature to them! Score!

Only... said feature only works for trips of 250 miles or less. And even with interstates and highways, it estimates the trip I'm describing as over 2,700 miles.

Now, going step by step, leg by leg in 250 mile jumps is one solution to this problem. But it's not a good solution. See, the only way to effectively do that is to chart your course via interstates and then select waypoints along the way. You can then tell it to give you a shunpiker's route between those waypoints. The problem is, it's entirely possible that if you shunpiked across the country you'd end up far away from where the highways run, through the dead areas between major interstates. By using the highways as your guide, you end up less shunpiking and more tacking around the direct route -- you still end up passing through the major points serviced by those highways. It's just less convenient for you.

I checked the other driving direction services online, and as near as I can tell, those services don't even have a shunpiking function.

So, I've spent the last several days wrestling with this -- in my brain. I've been trying to either find a new service or find software that might do it without being unreasonably expensive for what, in the end, is going to be a single use or... I don't know. Something. Because I really, really want to do this right, and I don't see any good way to do it electronically.

This morning, the solution hit me. It had the triple advantage of not costing me anything (at least anything additional), giving me the route I specifically want, and providing me monumental amounts of research on the side, thus saving me time elsewhere in this process.

See, I'm a Triple-A member. I have been... well, practically forever. And once upon a time, before GPSes and the Internet, they were my route planners. If you're a member, you can call them up any time and order a triptik -- a printed series of flip maps with your route highlighted in orange highlighter, that someone has painstakingly mapped out for you.

I haven't used them for this in years. Between things like Mapquest and GPSes, I have lots more convenient ways to find routes to where I'm going. I'm sure they've had a sharp decline in these services over the years.

But now I had a project my GPS and Internet couldn't help me with.

So I called my member service number (not the roadside assistance number), and talked to a travel agent. And she cheerfully took the information I wanted down. I told her about the shunpiking, and she told me she could arrange all secondary and back roads with no problem at all -- where possible, anyway. And she offered to send along state maps and tour guide books with tons of additional information. All, of course, at no charge. I am a member, after all.

It is worth occasionally remembering that as wonderful as our Internet is, there are times the good old fashioned way is vastly better.

Things have been nuts. Catching up begins now. Rock on, dudes.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:34 AM | Comments (23)

January 17, 2007

Eric: So, how was *your* weekend?

It's two fifty-six in the afternoon on Tuesday. At 1:14 I watched Wednesday step through the door onto the accessway of her plane to Philadelphia and her Canadian transfer. The Manchester Airport was built to be airy and pleasant and accessible, and the security precautions of the last six years have only moderately changed that. Bulletproof Lexan between me and her didn't blunt my line of sight of her, and cell phones mean being able to talk right up until.

Which is sappy, I realize, but you have to understand. We do this entirely too often. I drive up to Ottawa, we have a great time, and then I have to climb back into my car and drive away, and neither of us really want that. She comes down here, and we settle into a routine that's warm and inviting, satisfying and pleasant. And then she has to leave. That's the part I'm not too fond of.

It was mitigated, of course, by the knowledge that there's just so much longer we have to do this. I asked, she said yes. We're engaged. And that makes a difference.

My friend and panelmate from Arisia, The Ferrett, says I shouldn't call her my fiancee -- and that she shouldn't call me the same. "You might as well just get started calling her your wife," he said. "Since you're getting over calling her your girlfriend anyway. Why relearn the habit after the marriage?" And I can see his point. At the same time, it's actively fun to call her my fiancee right now. It's like trying on a new jacket, and running your hand over the nape of the fabric. At some point you become used to it and then inured to it, but at first it's just cool. Why wouldn't I want that same experience again after the ceremony takes place?

As for when the ceremony takes place -- well, that's a darn good question. We're not looking for a particularly long engagement, but the details aren't really up to us. Despite the fact that we were born less than four hours away from each other by the driving of the automobile... despite the fact that we grew up with the same local television channels, the same cultural referents, the same potato-driven interruptions of the standard calendar and the same freaking weather, we are considered foreign to one another, and our respective governments must process, acknowledge and ultimately approve of our getting married. Until we know what Immigration has to say about our Visa applications (which haven't yet been filed, due to total lack of time since the weekend to do so), we won't know when she'll be let into the country to live with me. And by the nature of the Fiancee Visa, we will then need to get married within 90 days after she has been. That is the rule, and we will abide.

Which probably means a small and nigh-perfunctory civil ceremony, followed by a fully planned out reception et al with invitations and starchy clothes and wedding registries and all the fun that is getting married. And that will be cool, but we can't very well set dates for any of it.

Knowledgeable people who have passed the bar have told us this is the way to go, by the by. It is easier and faster to get the fiancee visa approved than it is to actually get a wife into the country.

(Before someone asks -- yeah, we're looking at her moving here. It makes more sense, given our current employment circumstances. Naturally, if someone reading this wants to give her a Canadian dream job, we will both be pleased and reconsidering our plans. Though it is worth noting we like our domestic circumstance in America.)

Three forty-one, and I've managed to find the thing causing bigass trouble to our RSS feed. I predict a veritable flood of stuff, followed perhaps by another spike of traffic. We're probably moving to Project Wonderful soon, ad-wise (it just makes sense), and it has been noted that we should really have done so back on Thursday or Friday, before the wedding announcement. It has been a mind-numbingly large amount of traffic since then (six figures of pageviews, easily. Which is very, very cool all around). And there is something to be said for that, but... well, on balance I'm glad I didn't. I didn't propose to Weds as part of a ratings stunt or a moneymaking venture, and the amazing people who pitched in and helped out didn't do so to make us money. Better to do the switch when things are settled back to normal, which will happen soon enough. If people bid on our ads based on traffic patterns, they should have accurate information about those traffic patterns.

Some people have asked me about traffic since I came back, it's worth noting. Well, we were up well over 60,000 pageviews a day at our peak. 2006 eroded that significantly, and rightfully so. Since the traffic's gone back up, we've moved to between 20,000 and 30,000 pageviews. I anticipate a moderately slow increase, unlikely to hit the same peaks as the past, ignoring for the moment something like this past weekend. Certainly, the weekend didn't hurt overall traffic, despite my now having to make up essays I missed.

Which brings up one of the amazing sides of all of this. The response to the proposal has been staggering. Weds and I have been downright delighted with the comments and responses and calls of "Dude" and "Merf" and "Woot" all over the web. On Sunday, we sat for a while in an internet cafe, waiting for some friends of hers to join us for fast nosh and squeeing and the like. We did vanity searches and Technorati searches and giggled at comments and acted... well, like a pair of giddy kids who just got engaged in front of the freaking planet. People have been fantastic, and we are really, really touched. And thank you all.

A special thank you should also go to Phil Kahn. Phil agreed at the 11th hour to be the emergency "fill in" guy, just in case one of the last panels couldn't make it. He also penned an 18th panel to go after the whole thing, but I didn't receive it before we went down to Arisia, and the bandwidth and network at Arisia were so spotty I couldn't get it uploaded. I include it here, so you can pretend it followed the Milholland Money Shot Cliffhanger. Phil is a dude.

But so many people are dudes. Not the least of which is Ursula Vernon, who happily provided a new Snarky which I then didn't think to add to the comic either. I include it up above (though viewers of the video broadcast got to see it). Along with all the other artists in question -- the artwork, some black and white, some color, all essentially springing forth from their brains (for the record, my stage directions to everyone were "Eric standing and smiling as he talks," which means every nuance, every reference, every detail and every cool thing in those panels were put in by the artists themselves) was perfect. It brought Weds to tears when she saw it, in a very good way.

Okay, so I cried too. Give me a break -- I'm sentimental.

Everyone I contacted was supportive and happy. (Two never responded, it's worth noting, but I assume that means nothing but that spam filters can be overzealous -- it's happened way too often to me.) Of everyone who did respond, only one artist opted out, and that was schedule based -- he had just way too much stuff to do, but he wished us well.

Another fast note, this time on the ring. One or two people noticed the ring in the Milholland Money Shot Proposal panel had a red stone instead of a white one. Neither Weds nor I are partial to white diamonds (and we both find the "two months salary" thing absurd -- if I'm going to spend enough money for a car or computer on my fiancee, we're going to get a car or a computer), so we went with sentimental and meaningful to us instead of cold.

There was some discussion among my family, by the by, of my using a diamond that had been my grandmother's. So it's not sheer economics that caused us to eschew the thing. We could easily have had full on bling -- and classy bling at that -- had it been the direction we wanted to go in. Weds and I had been talking for some time about 'hypothetical' rings, and that was the guide I followed. The metal is titanium (Weds has some metal reaction issues with jewelry, and besides -- titanium is the geek's platinum when it comes to engagement rings). The central stone is garnet, which is why the ring stone is red. We also have smaller black diamonds on it, which look cool. And in the end, don't you want this thing to look cool?

Which brings up one other thing -- one or two people have asked what would have happened if Weds had wanted to say no, and here I was being so public. Well, the simple fact is, Weds and I had discussed marriage often. I hadn't asked her to marry me, but there was more than a little discussion on the finer points of Immigration Law, rings and "what we should do if we ever got married." I am a firm believer that you shouldn't ask someone to marry you if you're not pretty old certain of their answer to begin with.

Did that mean the proposal was risk free? Of course not. But she said yes and spent the rest of the day... well, weekend... deliriously happy. I conclude it was well done.

We fast forward (in one sense) to ten fourteen p.m. On Wednesday. This is the sort of thing that "just happens." I ran out of power at Panera. I climbed in the car. I drove home. And....

...well, I coped. The apartment is quiet when it's me and the cat. And I was exhausted. The trip, the con, the engagement... everything. I dozed, I talked with Weds on the phone, we tried to get the Slingbox working (by now we've succeeded in that) and then a night's sleep, an ultra-early morning, a day's work and catchup, a four hour theater rehearsal. ("So look out for me! Oh muddy water! Your mysteryyyyyyyyy's both deep and wide!") I got home and crashed again, this time for a couple of hours, easily.

Of course, there was something else to report from work today. See, I had a very... um... public proposal. Which means that someone posted a link on the school's Firstclass server. Which means everyone at the school had seen it.

I've worked here for just shy of nine full years. In that time I've never walked into the dining hall only to have the students applaud. I could get used to that. The cast of the play did the same, later on.

It's nice. It's very nice. And I'm surprised to realize how differently I feel now. My status has changed. I'm an engaged man. A fiance. I have a fiancee of my own. That's stunning.

And it's wonderful.

The massive "makeup posts" start tomorrow. There's lots of stuff to talk about. Lots of strips I thought were cool. Lots of things.

But as for me, for now? I'm tired again. Night, all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:59 PM | Comments (33)

January 14, 2007

Eric: The necropost for January 14: Star Harbor Nights

A brief post to make up for the missed day on January 14 (penned all the way on January 29), in praise of Star Harbor Nights, a superhero fiction site run by the action squad of Alexandria Erin (who is a sometimes commenter over here at Websnark), Quinn Isley and Sonya Kenderdragon (which might -- might be a pseudonym. Though, given I used to write superhero fiction under the name Eric, Lord Sabre, I'm not about to rag on someone for a sobriquet.)

I know from Superhero writing -- especially the building of a shared universe completely separate from those that came before. As I've mentioned many, many times my first heavy internet activities were based around the Superguy mailing list -- which while more satirical than Star Harbor Nights certainly shared some of the frenetic joy in the form that Erin, Isley and Kenderdragon have brought to their stuff.

It reminds me, really, of how much I miss writing Superguy, and things like that. Last November, I made a serious effort to do a superheroic mosaic novel. Sadly, said novel was a failure -- it just fell apart almost immediately. I might be able to write several novels about the intertwined stories I was mosaicing, but I couldn't create enough of a thread to make the mosaic work.

So, if you like superheroes for themselves (as opposed to liking "the X-Men" or other character specific stuff), you might want to give Star Harbor Nights a look see. It's free, so it sure can't hurt, and they seem to be having a lot of fun, and in the end that's the sense I would want in a site like this one.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:57 PM | Comments (5)

January 12, 2007

Eric: Necropost: On the Culling of iTunes

(Written January 26) Recently, I underwent a Culling of iTunes.

Part of the joy of iTunes is the astoundingly simple access to music, the convenient management of your music library, the trivial capacity to download new songs, and somewhat inflexible but always cheerful organizational tools. I've used it for years now. And, as I mentioned some time ago, iTunes allows us to express our musical tastes without exposing them to the sniffs or snorts of others. If we want to enjoy ourself some Pat Benatar or "The Final Countdown," we can and we do, and it's no one's business but our own.

But there is a down side to this. Once a song enters your MP3 collection... it is generally a very cold day in Hell before it leaves it again. You begin to hoard your songs. It's as if you can't bear to lose any of them. Even if you're not interested in listening to something, you might want to listen to it someday. So your music collection grows and grows, and you begin to come up with new playlists of stuff you actually like and might want to listen to so you don't need to weed your way through a thousand songs written by ten thousand people about things you couldn't care less about to begin with.

Which is where I was. I had like forty gigs of music and another thirty gigs of video, which meant I couldn't fit my collections on either my old 20 gig iPod or my spiffy new 60 gig iPod video. It was time to Do Something About It.

Naturally, I backed stuff up to external hard drive, 'just in case,' but otherwise I was brutal. Stuff I actively liked stayed in. Stuff I had an active interest in listening to or developing an appreciation of stayed in. Other stuff went. Frank Zappa went, because even though I know he's brilliant that brilliance hasn't translated into an actual desire to listen to the songs. And if Frank Zappa went, no one was sacred.

I cut it down to about seventeen gigs of music. Most of the video made the cut (though I wiped most video podcasts, because I subscribed to them originally because I didn't have video for my Video iPod, and now I have tons of it. The complete run of Justice League Unlimited. The complete Venture Brothers. A near complete Penn and Teller: Bullshit. A disturbingly large amount of Power Rangers: SPD -- but more about SPD another time.

And now, when I drive, I just click on my library and hit shuffle, and listen. Sometimes I click to the next song because of mood, but almost everything that's on the playlist is something I actually wouldn't mind hearing. And that's cool.

As a side note, one of the miscataloged things I saved was my rip of the Hitchhiker's Guide CD sets -- the ones of the original radio shows. And because I didn't quite understand how to rip CDs of audiobooks before, it both wasn't tagged as an audiobook and was broken up into 2-5 minute chunks. And as it turns out, that makes for surprisingly fun brief bits of humor interspersed among the music. It seems weirdly intentional.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:23 PM | Comments (5)

January 9, 2007

Eric: The State of the Steve Jobs Reality Address

In Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.

You have to understand. I'm a long standing Apple fan. My big graduation present from high school, back in the mists of time before most of you were born, was an Apple IIc with monitor and printer. One of my first purchases in Seattle was a behemoth Macintosh IIvx that was surplused from Boeing. Later, I upgraded to a Duo 230 with DuoDock (man, I loved that combination). The first major purchase I made when I established myself as middle class was one of the last generations of the Pre-Mac OS X Macintoshes, the Power Macintosh 8600. (A computer still in nominal use today, I would add.) At my day job, I sysadmin for Macintoshes. I've been a part of the purchasing decisions for the school, and had a significant role in close to four million dollars worth of Macintoshes and other Apple products over the past decade.

And MacWorld Expo is one of those wonderful times of year to be a Mac user. We get our Brent Sienna on -- we go all pretentious and excited, and we tell the world about the exciting world we live in that you too can be a part of. And the centerpiece of MacWorld Expo is the Steve Jobs Keynote, where he comes out onto the stage in his sweater, lights gleaming off his receding hairline, and proceeds to redefine reality with the power of a Balseraph and the conviction of a Preacher who sells used cars on the side. It's fun.

And so we came to this year's MacWorld Expo. And this year's Keynote. Coming off of a banner Apple year, no less, with a lot of excitement in the air. There's a new operating system coming out. There's Core Duo 2 computers. There's things, and we're full on ready to grab hold of them. And we were waiting for Brother Steve to come out and show us the promised land.

Well, we have seen the land of milk and honey now. Only I can't say that the milk is healthy for drinking and the honey would trigger my dumping syndrome, and I'm feeling at best some Christmas Let-Down.

It's not that the previewed products are bad. They're not. They're solid pieces of engineering. They're exciting. They're well designed. In short, they're Apple products.

They're just not products... well, for me. Or, for that matter, for most of the Apple faithful.

There was the usual "here's how much better business has been" gloating, and the obligatory Microsoft mocking (including yet another Mac vs. PC commercial -- which continues the odd but moderately delightful casting of the Macintosh as the somewhat staid straight man and the brilliant John Hodgman getting all the laughs as the PC. Frankly, the Mac's a better computer but I'd rather spend time with the PC.) And then we actually got to the new product announcements. The charting of the course for the year.

That course opened with the Apple TV -- a box that looks like a very thin Mac Mini. The device is designed for WiFi or network access, and it allows full on synchronizing with a Macintosh and streaming from up to five others. It then feeds that signal at 720 dpi into a widescreen television, letting you take all the video you suck down from the iTunes store and otherwise get it into iTunes and watch it on... well, your television.

And it looks good. That much is very, very true.

But... it requires component video or HDMI out, and a widescreen television to use. And... it has a 40 gig hard drive, which is smaller than my iPod Video currently has. The iPod Video I can put on a dock and watch on the television I already own, rather than necessitating me buying a new television.

Which doesn't make the Apple TV a bad product. It's not. It's really slick. But it's nothing that'll be in my life any time soon. For three hundred bucks I could get some pretty staggeringly cool video components for my current setup. And if I did get a new HD television, that money would probably go a lot farther towards grabbing a full PVR for it, instead of an interface for the more limited selection of video in my iTunes folder.

(I actually have a ton of video in my iTunes folder, but a plurality of it came from my Tivo, which means it's not high definition in the first place.)

But fine. A cool thing I can't use is still a cool thing, and it was clearly setting the stage for something amazingly cool.

Really.

In Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.

It's called the iPhone, and it's been rumored approximately as long as there has been Apple and Cell Phones. It is a full on next generation Smartphone, which looks as easy to use as Apple products usually are. It has monumental integration with contact information, it's widescreen with a massively cool touchscreen interface -- it's absolutely the next generation of these things, and at four or eight gigabytes of storage--

Um...

Well, it'll replace your Nano, dagnabbit! And it's gorgeous and exciting, just plain working and blowing the socks off of any other phone in the room. Which is good, because it's as expensive as any phone in the room, with a two year commitment. But it deserves to be. Seriously -- this thing is just astounding.

But, it's exclusively on Cingular, and Cingular doesn't work all that well in these here parts, and I'm not going to pay that much money for something that might not work all that well for me. If I were in the big city, I'd think a lot harder about it -- it's that much the sex -- but right now it wouldn't make sense at a fifth the price, and I'm sure it wouldn't work financially for that amount of money.

Even if they worked well in my area, that is a lot of money, and while I have an iPod Video and a cell phone and a PDA, and this wouldn't cost as much as all three of those did... I already have an iPod Video, a cell phone and a PDA, and they're not going to give me my money back for those.

Okay. So there were two cool things -- and an intimation that Google and Apple were getting really cozy together, these days, and an announcement of Paramount coming to the iTunes store, which... um... well, cool, I guess. And then they had a musical number... but it was okay. They hadn't done "One More Thing." There was always "One More Thing" and it would blow everyone's socks off. Maybe it would be Leopard related, or a MacBook Tablet (though the new third party ModBook is poised to come out at least until the cease and desist). Or something.

But there wasn't. There wasn't one more thing. Except an annoucement, that Apple Computers was becoming Apple Incorporated. After all, they sold digital music, and music players, and phones, and consumer electronics. It doesn't make sense to call themselves a computer company any more.

And... that was it. A thing for the television, and a cell phone. No computer announcements. No Leopard update. No software update. No announcement that the Intel Adobe Creative Suite was about to come out....

...and here we were. At MacWorld Expo (not AppleWorld Expo), we had a couple of really cool consumer electronics announcements, and a musical number. The tone for the year has been set, and it ain't the Macintosh.

But in Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:12 PM | Comments (32)

January 7, 2007

Eric: Erratatica!

I've had some interesting (and sometimes spirited) reaction to my recent City of Heroes post. I stand by it, but in writing, I let enthusiasm and memory guide my writing, and said memory failed me in a couple of areas. Areas which should be acknowledged and corrected.

For those who are new around these parts, when I need to issue a correction -- and it does come up -- I leave the original essay up. It seems to me that the nature of discourse requires we have our errors stay in the record.

The errors, it's worth noting, were not in the thesis. The core theses -- that Issue 8 was a superior edition to City of Heroes which both introduced great innovation and highlighted other innovations that have come along to distinction, leading to a revitalized game that deserves to be played -- I stand by without comment. The errors were in supporting materials.

Probably the most egregious was in terms of the various holiday events that have happened. I had forgotten that last year's winter event had temporary powers (including a really cool Jingle Rocket Flight Thingy, and yes indeed, a costume part) aplenty, for example. And I ascribed the first co-op Hero and Villain mission to the Halloween event, instead of to the Valentine's Day event from significantly earlier. The halloween event didn't have a co-op mission -- but it did have the ability to add a permanent costume slot to a character, which was a really cool perk.\

The reason this is important is twofold, really. One, because it again highlights that the innovations listed predated Matt Miller's heading of the development team. We need to remember that Jack Emmert initiated many if not most of the innovations that have revitalized the game that he was one of the core visionaries behind.

The second reason this is important, however, is it really does highlight the stronger public relations position the game is in now. I remember very clearly, when City of Villains was scant weeks before release. I was in the beta, and like most folks in the beta I loved City of Villains. There was a groundswell of excitement both for the expansion/new game, and for what it implied for the future of City of Heroes itself. (Things like Elite Bosses/Archvillain scaling, the more mature mission design, contacts who gave cell phone numbers early instead of late in a contact tree, and... well, Masterminds, which remain the coolest archetype ever. I still wait for the last to be ported in some fashion into City of Heroes -- perhaps by creating a 'duplication' powerset). There was some real, hardcore excitement.

Which is when "Enhancement Diversification" was first announced. And it was announced on the beta forum for City of Villains, where anyone who broke the NDA to tell the regular community about it would be subject to losing their beta status and very likely from City of Heroes entirely.

Naturally, someone immediately broke NDA. And a huge maelstrom burst. Now, I don't actually think the Cryptic team was trying to deceive anyone. I think they had decided the Enhancement Diversification scheme was the best thing for the game, and they were actually going to their beta testing community with it because they actually meant to... well, beta test it. However, the way it all went down made a lot of people angry and upset.

And it made them angry and upset just a few weeks before the first sequel game and/or paid expansion of the game came out. Scant weeks before they wanted people dropping money in stores -- and recouping a lot of investment and development costs -- their most devoted fanbase was, to be blunt, losing their shit.

That was, to put it mildly, a public relations problem. It got people angry when they wanted them frothing with excitement. And it was hardly an isolated incident.

Matt Miller, on the other hand, has built significant momentum and enthusiasm, both by having several successful big changes and events in a row, by teasing future upgrades and new elements ("oh, gosh, we accidentally turned the Wentworth's contacts on on the test server! How could we have so foolishly let people see these potential future plans that we're doing -- woe! WOE!")

Now, there's been problems too. Maybe most significantly, there have been some persistent bugs in the game. One of the most serious I'll quote from the Known Issues page:

Gauntlet and other Inherent Taunt powers currently do not effect Lieutenant, Bosses or Underling rank critters.

What this means is one of the lynchpins of team-based City of Heroes, the Tanker, has trouble with his most important power. Tankers are designed to absorb massive amounts of damage, so they have the power to attract the attention of the enemy, so that the squishier heroes can avoid being smacked around. Take those abilities away, when it comes to the most dangerous enemies, and that's a major problem. Heck -- one of the things I love in Veteran Rewards is the team base teleport, and I've been dumped out of it back to the zone I just left more than once.

But despite persistent issues, the majority of players seem to be pretty darn happy and excited about the future. Not blasé, not pissed off, not accusing the devs of immorality... happy and excited for the future.

That's public relations. And they're doing it well. And that's a good thing for this game.

Had I gotten the details right the first time around, that would have been made clearer.

(I also had a couple people point out I described the Event co-op missions as 'task forces,' which mean something quite different in the game, and I called the old Faultline a Hazard Zone instead of a Trial Zone. I regret those errors too,)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:44 PM | Comments (17)

January 3, 2007

Eric: Strange Homes, Strange Times

(From Home on the Strange.)

There's been plenty of discussion, over on the internet byways, about Questionable Content's core premise. The debate, simply put, is whether or not Questionable Content is specifically a romantic comic strip -- and whether the core relationship between Faye and Marten is the centerpiece of the strip -- or if the comic is a more general comic about a group of people and their various relationships and oddities. As late as last year at this time I would have solidly said it was the former. These days, I'm not as sure. Still, for a good number of Questionable Content's readers (and various obsessed thanksgiving turkeys), the question remains "when are Marten and Faye going to hook up/have sex/declare everlasting love."

I'm not here to talk about Questionable Content today. I realize that might be slightly confusing, but bear with me. You see, I'm here to discuss Home on the Strange. And it's hard for me to discuss Steinmetz and Pare's strip without at least having Questionable Content come to mind. Because if the central question of Questionable Content is "when are these two going to get together," the central question of Home on the Strange seems to be "when are these two going to break up already!?"

In this case, "these two" can refer to either of the major couples in the strip. Tom and Karla are the primary couple -- theirs is the home which is apparently on the strange. Izzy and Tanner are the other. Not long ago, I read a comment by Steinmetz about how Izzy and Tanner were the "more dysfunctional couple" of the two, and I agree with that -- but it's like saying a 36' sloop is "pricier" than a powerboat. That's very true, but that doesn't mean the powerboat's cheap. And you can't exactly call either relationship a pillar of understanding and stability.

Not, I hasten to add, that there is any problem with this. Home on the Strange is a strong strip and all the characters are believable. So don't take this as your old pal Eric panning a strip he in fact loves. I'm not. This is analysis. You remember that, right? I used to do that sort of thing, once upon a time....

Let's pause for a moment and examine how the two relationships are similar. Both involve a male and a female. In both cases, the woman has taken a dominant position -- this isn't absolute, mind, but it's persistent. In both relationships, the woman is setting the tone, the rules and the agenda. When the male is setting out on a misadventure of some sort, the woman is generally being indulgent (or finds out too late to do anything about it, which leads to the argument). When the woman sets out on a misadventure, it is generally against the advice and better judgement of the male. (In fact, more often than not, it's against the better advice of Tom, who has been generally cast as the sanest and most well adjusted of the characters -- the Mary Tyler Moore to Izzy, Karla, Tanner, and the rests' Ted Baxter, Murray Slaughter, Lou Grant et al.) Both use various geek reference points as channel markers, and both are largely based on sex.

But more about sex in a bit.

Finally, both are marked by a strong desire on the part of the woman in the relationship to have the world be the way she wants it to be, while both are also marked by a strong desire on the part of the man to have the woman be happy while actually living in the real world. Which is where we get to the nub of things.

This is actually best demonstrated between Karla and Tom -- the 'less dysfunctional couple.' Karla is a woman who sees the world dogmatically. She typifies a geek trope, actually -- she believes her opinions and experiences are natural laws. When she meets Izzy -- a "fellow nerd" as she puts it -- she proceeds to "pour all her favorite fandoms into her." It's a cute, funny and very real strip. I've seen the phenomenon between geeks many times... right down to "we do not talk about season five."

Which is the nub of Karla, in a way. She loves Babylon 5, but we do not talk about Season Five. The same with Buffy. She loves Buffy. She talks about Buffy constantly.And if you haven't seen Buffy, you will see Buffy. Karla's world is the way Karla wants it, and when it isn't the way Karla wants it, there's trouble.

Which is where a lot of the conflict of the strip comes in. Karla has a new friend, and she has a lonely friend in Tanner. So she sets them up (against Tom's advice). The date goes as badly as Tom thought it would, and it looked like Izzy was on her way out of the strip. Tom manages to patch things up.

Then, Karla wants Izzy involved in Seth's roleplaying game. Now, she doesn't acknowledge all the warning signs that Izzy isn't like her when it comes to roleplaying, because Karla can't comprehend that another girl gamer might not want what she wants from roleplaying. So once again, we hit disaster -- Izzy nearly destroys the campaign. (And naturally, it's Tom who saves it. See a trend? Thought you might!)

Izzy, on the other hand, is generally more than happy to live her own life and let Tanner live his -- so long as the terms of their life together are absolutely locked down. After their disastrous first date, Izzy declared they would never have a relationship. There was no romance. Now or ever. But, of course they could have sex. Eventually, they clearly settle into a committed relationship -- only Izzy refuses to admit there is a relationship. Eventually, this becomes problematic -- Tanner wants there to be something he can point to. Izzy simply doesn't. It leads to arguments which leads to problems. Now, obviously the last panel is the evocative one there, but the most significant panel of that strip, to my mind, is the third. Tanner says "oh! So you set all the boundaries in this? I don't get a say?" The answer, unstated, is of course yes. To the point that Izzy refuses to tell Tanner she's moving to a new apartment on the chance he might want to live together.

Which brings us inexorably to sex. Obviously, the one area where Tanner and Izzy do see eye to eye is sex, right now. And it's pretty straightforward. For Karla, on the other hand, sex is power.

And more to the point... sex is currency.

In its most benign form, sex becomes a reward. Tom saves Seth's RPG campaign, despite the fact that Seth is actively trying to sleep with Karla (which Karla apparently knows, which says something). He does it because it means a lot to Karla. So Karla rewards him with hot Cosplay sex. Which is successful. In fact, it seems pretty much always successful. (Possibly because Karla is absolutely attracted to Tom's conversational skills, as opposed to his body.) Later, Karla -- having learned absolutely nothing from her experience with Izzy and roleplaying -- wants Tom to teach Branch how to roleplay. Branch is a monotoned creepy girl and Tom knows this is a desperately bad idea, but Karla sees herself in Branch (see above: Karla sees her experiences as universal) and wants to draw Branch out, the way she wishes someone had drawn Karla herself out as a teenager. Tom absolutely refuses. As he says, there are limits, and she just hit them. The way Karla gets around it? Cosplay sex. I'm reminded of the old Berkshires circuit joke: a prostitute is a woman who has sex for money. A wife is a woman who has sex for a new refrigerator.

Well. In the last couple of weeks, we've absolutely hit pinnacle point with both of these relationships and all of these relationship trends. Tom is running a play by e-mail campaign with Branch, and Branch wants to go sexual. Tom is opposed to it. He knows this is a bad idea. Karla, still embodying herself in Branch's experiences, demands he go through with it -- to the point where she takes over writing the sex scenes to live out the fantasy. Only they learn that Branch is a virgin.

Tom freaks. This is way out of his comfort zone. He refuses. He knows this is a bad idea, and when Tom knows things like this, Tom is always right. Karla, on the other hand, is still convinced that this is a safe way to bring Branch out of her shell, and she continues to see herself in Branch, so she pushes. And when Tom doesn't budge, she uses sex to entice him once more.

Okay. Two things, before we go on.

First off? We already know that Branch has become romantically... let us say interested... in Tom. Not in the game, mind. In Tom. Which means yes -- Tom is right. This is absolute dynamite and Karla's lighting the fuse while smoking in a room full of gasoline. Which is not a complaint, mind -- we the readers are waiting patiently for the Earth Shattering Kaboom.

Secondly, however... this is staggeringly creepy. Think for a moment if Tom was the girl and Karla the man. Consider a wife being pressured to consent to explicit cybersex with someone she finds creepy and clingy and problematic by a husband who sees this in terms of a fantasy and who sees himself in the potential stalker? This would not be the adorable misadventures of a geek couple in an odd world, this would be grounds for the wife's friends offering to give her a place to stay until she can get her feet under her. I'm pretty sure Lifetime's done three or four movies on this topic. Pushing your mate past their comfort zone in sexual matters is never good. Pushing your mate past their comfort zone in sexual matters with someone outside the marriage is not cool, man. It's just not cool.

Over on the other side, Izzy has learned that Tanner continues to talk to the ex girlfriend who cheated on him. Now, let me open by saying Tanner's a fucking moron. I'm sorry, but if a person cheats on you multiple times, stiffs you on large amounts of money, and actively uses you, and you give that person any opportunity to continue to screw you over, you're an example of evolution in action and should not be permitted to breed. Please let us stipulate that before we move forward.

Izzy is not reacting as a friend who is concerned. She is acting as a girlfriend who is pissed off. She is demanding that Tanner not "keep secrets" from her. And when Tanner (rightfully) points out that she moved apartments without telling him, her response is "I never fucked my apartment!" When she continues to scream at him for "going behind her back," he answers that he thought they weren't dating, and is angrily told to "stop using my own logic against me!" It's all a very clear call back to the last argument. Izzy wants to set the boundaries. She wants to be able to live her life exactly as she's comfortable with. She wants Tanner to mold into that boundary without complain. And she doesn't want him to push those boundaries or set boundaries of his own. In particular, she wants him to act as a boyfriend would, without actually letting him even talk about her to others as a girlfriend.

And then goes on to talk about how she has decided what movies they're going to watch on Christmas, because after all this is setting a tradition for next year. And the readers start thinking expletives about this woman, while Tanner quietly -- veeeeery quietly -- rebels.

So.

Like I said at the top, this strip has become an interesting contrast to Questionable Content. Both strips are entirely about relationships and interpersonal interactions. Questionable Content's conflict and tension derives from wondering just how the romantic tension between the cast members will finally, ultimately resolve. Home on the Strange, on the other hand, has developed the opposing tension. We can see that these things aren't going to end well. There are going to be explosions, on all sides. Which could lead to severe ugliness.

And that's why we like this strip. It's one thing to rubberneck at a train wreck. It's another to watch two trains very slowly head for each other on the same track.

And you will note: Tom and Tanner can both see the trains coming.

Ain't that a kick in the head?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:29 AM | Comments (32)

January 2, 2007

Eric: Waking up from Slumberland: The End of Narbonic

(From Narbonic.)

Endings and beginnings. Narbonic is over.

We knew it was coming, of course. Shaenon Garrity never made any secret of the fact that she had a story to tell, in many chapters, and when it was done, it was done. And now that we're on the far side of it, we can have a reckoning.

And it was amazing, in these last several weeks, to have callbacks to references none of us ever considered appear. We met a time traveling daughter we never suspected was related to the cast in her two earlier appearances. And like a lot of Narbonic fans, the moment she made a reference to those two times, I tore through the archives until I found them. We had the swimming pool get filled, the future change, Dave go mad, and most horrifying of all Mell becoming a Lawyer.

This last bit of Narbonic, entitled "Genius," was not as frenetic or insane or action packed as... well, any of the chapters that came before. And this was fitting. "Madness," the arc that preceded it, was the climax of the series. It was where the basic conflicts came to a sudden, titanic conclusion. It was the end of the saga.

"Genius," on the other hand, was denouement. The end of the story. We tied up loose ends. We saw people actually moving on with their lives. We checked in with Mell, with Artie, with Lovelace, with Madblood (back, as always, at his mother's). We saw Dave, now through the painful and violent transition into true Mad Scientist, settle into his new existence. He got work, found purpose, found (fatherly) love, and went to make things right with Helen. It was a quiet story, with few explosions and no one dying on screen.

As said, it was appropriate.

The last strip was, as we have seen every New Year's Day since the beginning, Dave in Slumberland. This has always been one of the great strengths of Narbonic. Garrity is a true student of the art and history of comic strips, and these flights into the mind of Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland have always been note-perfect and, with the strength of hindsight, eerily predictive of what was to come. Garrity has played a subtle game, and we feel all the more amazed to see she put every piece of the puzzle right out onto the table for us to see, and even gave us occasional walkthroughs to follow. And, as with all the Dave in Slumberland strips, we are given glimpses into the future. Only this time, it's a World According to Garp/Animal House style glimpse, where we're told bits and pieces of what happens to our heroes and the supporting cast over the coming years. (One of the pictures is an explicit shout-out to Animal House, in fact.) And it seems to me that everyone more or less gets what is coming to him or her.

Narbonic is over.

I feel an odd emptiness in typing that sentence. I've made no bones that Narbonic is my favorite comic strip. It got it right. It got everything right. It was well drawn (though Garrity begs to differ. Because she is wrong. With wrongness.) with a perfect blend of Story and Funny. It had astounding pacing, from one strip to the next. And yet, each strip's individual execution was crafted and superior. Garrity knows her trade and knows her craft and Narbonic is a master class in the art of the hand drawn, four panel comic.

Which leads us into our own future. Narbonic is over, so long live Narbonic: starting on the First, Narbonic: Director's Cut began. Taking a page out of Aerie's handbook, Garrity is now republishing Narbonic from day one, seven days a week, with commentary on each strip. And the first two strips have incredible commentary, including links, callbacks, references to her pre-Narbonic work, notes on who in her real life inspired what characters... I called Narbonic a master class before -- well, now we're getting the lecture notes.

And of course, when Queen of Wands did its commentary reposting, it was going from a 2-3 day a week strip to a 7 day a week strip, so it finished up in (relatively) short order. Narbonic has been seven days a week for... well, forever. Going back to the very first week of Narbonic strips, I see six strips and a full color Sunday strip. Which means that the six and a half years of Narbonic will take six and a half years to actually process through to the end of the director's commentary. That means that Narbonic: Director's Cut will live in my daily trawl until August of 2013 -- and since that's after the Mayan end of the world where the entire universe will collapse in on itself and we'll all become Orks and shit anyway, that essentially means forever, at least from my point of view.

And that's great. That's wonderful. I'm really looking forward to it.

And of course, Garrity is still writing Smithson and Li'l Mell, not to mention freelancing over at a little company called Marvel and editing Modern Tales. She's not going anywhere. I have no reason to feel badly. There's daily Narbonic, continuing Garrity writing... what else could I want?

And of course, the answer is "the next chapter of Narbonic." I want it so badly I can taste it. Or failing that, a sequel series full of the same joy. Maybe the adventures of Artie as he moves into the (banal) real world. Maybe a coffee shop banter series starring Caliban! I mean, Hell -- Questionable Content has snarky baristas, but Faye didn't actually fall from grace into the Pit of Hell in her last job, now did she? Or maybe a tight legal drama with pistols starring....

...but it's not happening.

Narbonic is over.

For the first time since September 3, 2004, I don't have an answer to the question "what is my favorite comic strip?" The dream's over.

Time to face the day.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:48 AM | Comments (27)

December 19, 2006

Eric: Download this book! Right now! Before it stops being free!

I am not in the habit of repeating things I see on boing boing. It's not because I have anything against boing boing. I don't. I enjoy pop culture tidbits, Cory Doctorow losing his shit about copyright, and Xeni Jardin writing about sex as the next person. However, typically I figure I don't need to repeat it. Most of you will have seen it anyway.

Well, I'm not taking it this time. For a limited time, John Hodgman's brilliant book, The Areas of My Expertise, is available on iTunes as an audiobook for free.

For free.

Guys, I paid for this audiobook on Audible.com, and it was worth every penny. It's one of the audiobooks I've listened to as I drive from New England to Ottawa and back, as I do every couple of weeks now that Weds lives up there. To see that it's free now is to say to me "Eric, you must tell the people of this glorious thing."

For those who don't know John Hodgman, shut up. Yes you do. He's the PC on the "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads. He's on the Daily Show. He's brilliant and funny and the audiobook is wonderful. But it doesn't have to be wonderful right now because it's God damn fucking free so download it already.

Whew.

In other news, read today's Something Positive, because holy Fuck.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:36 PM | Comments (42)

December 17, 2006

Eric: Script Format is kind of fun.

I'm not entirely sure what this post is.

It was born out of a couple of Aaron Sorkin parodies I'd seen, like Mad TV's Studio 69 on Van Nuys Boulevard or Kevin Levine's brilliant If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball. I was laughing about it with Weds, and said "I should write a script where Aaron Sorkin was writing about a webcomics collective."

And, since this has been a week where I've needed a diversion or two, I did.

Only I'm not sure what it is, in the end.

It's not a parody of Studio 60. If anything, it's a Sorkin satire. Only I caught myself trying to really catch his cadences. I caught myself trying to invoke what I really like about Sorkin.

Because despite everything, I do like Aaron Sorkin. On a recent episode, he had a subplot featuring two freshmen writers and the staggeringly brilliant Mark McKinney, and whenever they were on the screen, it was electric. It gave me hope. (There was also this subplot where we learn Harriet Hayes might be the most brilliant comedienne ever according to the show, but despite the fact that she does their Weekend Update pastiche -- an entire sequence where she does nothing but joke setup-punchline -- she is incapable of actually telling even the simplest knock knock joke in the world. It was a subplot meant to make Harriet endearing and instead makes us think she's got neurological damage and would never in a million years be hired for a comedy show, but I digress).

So... I'm not sure what the resulting three scene script is.

And as a result, I'm going to post it here. Behind a cut, as it's... well, huge.

Please enjoy Aaron Sorkin's Comicsense.com.

(Oh, and yeah -- I'm fully aware no actual webcomics collective would be organized like this. Cut me some slack. Sorkin writes about workplaces.)

AARON SORKIN'S

COMICSENSE.COM

[SCENE ONE: The metropolitan offices of Comicsense.com -- a webcomics collective fighting its way up the pack. The offices are full of desks and piles of clutter, made all the more chaotic by the lack of cubicles, walls or offices for the most part. There are several winding paths around the desks, drawing tables and production equipment. As we fade into the scene we see DANNY WALSH, Executive Producer in charge of web content. He is looking over a messy pile of printouts. Near him, two Administrative Assistants, CAROL and SHELLY, are waiting on his words.]

DANNY

Eight months Bobby's been drawing this thing and Hell if I understand what this strip is about.

CAROL

It's about a robot pirate captain.

SHELLY

I thought it was about the talking dog.

CAROL

The talking dog is comic relief.

SHELLY

The talking dog is comic relief?

CAROL

The talking dog is comic relief.

SHELLY

But he did that whole plotline where the talking dog met his parents.

CAROL

Did you notice the parents were talking dogs too?

SHELLY

Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

CAROL

I'm just saying -- they make such a big deal over the talking dog--

SHELLY

Well, it's not like you see them every day.

CAROL

But when his parents show up, everyone just accepts that they're also talking dogs.

SHELLY

What kind of parents would you expect a talking dog to have?

CAROL

My point is--

SHELLY

I mean, is it that they talk or they're dogs that has you in a tizzy.

CAROL

I'm not in a 'tizzy.'

SHELLY

You seem a little tizzed out.

CAROL

I just think that if they're surprised at one talking dog, they should be three times as surprised when they meet three.

SHELLY

Is the surprise cumulative?

CAROL

It seems like it should be.

SHELLY

Because after the first talking dog, I'd think you'd get jaded.

CAROL

I think I'd always be pretty impressed by dogs that talk.

SHELLY

The talking dog really isn't the main character?

CAROL

He's the comic relief.

DANNY

You two keep talking and talking but I still don't have any idea what this strip is about.

CAROL

A robot pirate captain.

SHELLY

With a talking dog.

DANNY

See, this is how wars break out.

[Danny hands the paper pile to Carol and begins to WALK TOWARDS CAMERA on a Steadicam shot. He is joined almost immediately by JAKE PARSONS, Editorial Director and writer of the hit Comicsense.com webcomic COFFEE SHOPPE. They WALK AND TALK as they weave between the desks.]

JAKE

I've lost it.

DANNY

You've lost it.

JAKE

I've lost it.

DANNY

You had it?

JAKE

Oh, I had it.

DANNY

But now?

JAKE

Not so much.

DANNY

What's the problem?

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

DANNY

You can't find the funny?

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

DANNY

How's the plot coming?

JAKE

I'm not doing plot today.

DANNY

You're taking a break from the plot?

JAKE

It's been plot heavy. I need a couple days.

DANNY

Away from the plot.

JAKE

I'm giving the readers a break.

DANNY

Easing back on the heavy.

JAKE

My audience likes to laugh.

DANNY

Everyone likes a few yuks at the end of the day.

JAKE

It's what makes me at the top of my game.

DANNY

Fifty thousand readers.

JAKE

Fifty thousand unique IPs.

DANNY

People from around the world.

JAKE

I get hits from Dubai.

DANNY

I've seen the webalizer stats.

JAKE

Presidential suite of the Burj al-Arab, they're trolling the archives.

DANNY

Sunnis like to laugh.

JAKE

That's a problem, though.

DANNY

'Cause you can't find the funny.

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

[The pair are joined by systems administrator SIMON FISHER, a somewhat geeky but oddly compelling figure. He is played by Joshua Malina.]

SIMON

I'm hearing an interesting buzz around the building.

DANNY

Yeah, that's the lights. We're having maintenance look at it.

SIMON

You're so funny! I have a hard time believing United Press Syndicate let you go.

DANNY

Well, you know. No one likes to laugh while wearing ties.

SIMON

The buzz is we're courting Pennyfarthing.

DANNY (snorts)

Yeah, and while we're wishing I'd like that Baron Karza I asked for when I was seven.

JAKE

I was more a Force Commander kind of guy.

DANNY

Force Commander was lame. He had handles on his cheeks.

JAKE

Those were air hoses. He had to breath in that helmet, you know.

SIMON

This is fascinating but let's get back to the subject at hand, shall we?

DANNY

Pennyfarthing.

SIMON

You know how many readers they have?

DANNY

Seven and a half million.

SIMON

Seven and a half million readers, Danny.

DANNY

Jokes about Super Mario Brothers never go out of style, do they?

SIMON

If you seriously court these guys, I gotta know about it, Danny.

DANNY

It's not gonna happen, Simon.

SIMON

Seriously. I have to know.

DANNY

Seriously, it's not gonna happen, Simon.

SIMON

I don't care how much of an ad buyer's dream they are. They're an IT nightmare waiting to happen.

DANNY

It won't happen in a million years, Simon.

SIMON

They update spot on at 11:27 in the morning three days a week.

JAKE

You can set your watch by them.

SIMON

By noon they've had millions of hits. They make servers sob like schoolchildren just by showing up on time.

DANNY

We're not getting them, Simon.

SIMON

They link to a website and it crashes, guys.

JAKE

Wait, what do they call that? They have a name for it--

DANNY

Sporking.

JAKE

Right! Because they did all those strips early on--

DANNY

The ones with the sporks, right.

SIMON

I'm serious, guys. We get these people they're gonna need a dedicated server. They might need dedicated bandwidth. We try to put them on our existing servers and our whole three-day lineup's going to hemmorage.

DANNY

Simon, listen to the words I'm saying. We're not going to get the Pennyfarthing guys. It's not gonna happen. There is no way in Hell Pennyfarthing is coming to Comicsense.com.

SIMON

I need a heads up if they're coming.

DANNY

They're not.

JAKE

I lost it, Simon.

SIMON

You lost it?

DANNY

Jake has just four hours to get a script to Dale or Dale won't have time to draw it and then half the United Arab Emirates won't have their morning Funny.

SIMON

Yeah, they're big comic strip fans over there.

[SIMON splits off from the pair as they continue WALKING AND TALKING.]

JAKE

We're getting Pennyfarthing, aren't we?

DANNY

I need to talk to Jubal about it.

[The pair are joined by MIRANDA CLAUSS, reporter for The Comics Informant.]

MIRANDA

You've been ducking me, Walsh.

DANNY

I wouldn't call it ducking you, Miranda.

MIRANDA

What would you call it?

DANNY

More of a sidestep, really.

MIRANDA

Joke all you want. The word on the street is--

JAKE

Wait, they're talking about us on the street?

DANNY

Actually, I think they actually draw the words on the street. Like, with chalk.

MIRANDA

You had seven cartoonists walk.

DANNY

It's the most exercise they've had in months.

MIRANDA

Laugh all you want, Danny. You lost Hinterlands, Sirocco, Furbridge Heights--

DANNY

Yeah, we "lost" Furbridge Heights.

MIRANDA

It's got a solid readership, Danny.

DANNY

And that fact scares me more and more every day.

MIRANDA

The furry community thinks you guys hate anthro comics.

DANNY

We... have that talking dog in Bobby's strip.

JAKE

Doesn't he just play second banana to the Robot Pirate Captain?

DANNY

There's some debate.

MIRANDA

Danny--

DANNY

His main character is a skunk/beaver crossbreed stripper, Miranda. This wasn't The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell. The only reason Furbridge Heights wasn't porn is because we told him we'd lose our Paypal rights if he crossed the line.

MIRANDA

And if you had The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell, Furries wouldn't care, but you don't. So they just know that you had a solidly read Furry comic, and he walked. Along with six other people.

DANNY

It happens. We have churn.

MIRANDA

You're not upset?

DANNY

Why should I be upset?

MIRANDA

The Alexa stats on Hinterlands alone--

DANNY

Oh, don't tell me you buy into Alexa rankings.

MIRANDA

It's an independent website that gives you a solid indicator of--

DANNY

It's a sham, Miranda. Pure and simple. It's not a representative sample of anything. It doesn't use statistical modeling or selection criteria or anything else. It only includes those people who actually download the Alexa toolbar. It doesn't include Mac users or Linux users because it's for Windows only. It doesn't even include Firefox users. If you want to measure impact on the web, use Google PageRank. Or Technorati. Hell, check Bloglines but don't shove an artificial "ranking" down my throat because it sounds good.

MIRANDA

So. You're saying Hinterlands wasn't a popular webcomic?

DANNY

...it was popular enough.

MIRANDA

So. You're not upset that seven popular comics left, regardless of whether or not you liked them.

DANNY

Jesus and Mary Chain, Miranda -- of course we're upset. Of course we want those strips. Of course we want their audiences looking at our ads and going to our online store. But they felt they could do better on their own, and I'm not going to trash them in your magazine just because of that. I hope they do better on their own.

MIRANDA

Commendable.

DANNY

We try.

MIRANDA

Will you be that philosophical if Debbie takes Fishtails to the Houghton/Wilkes Syndicate?

[JAKE stops walking, prompting the other two to follow suit.]

JAKE

Debbie's doing what?

DANNY

Oh, Hell.

JAKE

Debbie's considering a newspaper jump?

DANNY

Thank you, Miranda. Like Jake wasn't heading to a nervous breakdown to begin with.

[JAKE crosses OFF stage left]

JAKE

Excuse me.

DANNY (shouted after Jake)

Don't lose focus! Fifty thousand expatriate Iranians need their Funny!

JAKE (shouted from off camera)

Whatever!

MIRANDA

I thought those two broke up.

DANNY

You'd actually have to start dating before you could break up.

MIRANDA

Are you guys getting Pennyfarthing?

DANNY (crossing off)

Oh, leave me alone.

[SCENE 2: One of several art studios in the building. This is DEBBIE DAWSON'S space. The area is cluttered with art supplies of all varieties -- pencils and pens and easels, of course, but also brushes and paints and watercolors. A powerful Apple computer sits on the desk, silently earning us product placement money. DEBBIE DAWSON is there -- a twenty-eight something perky artist with cascading blond hair and a cheerful attitude. As she sits and painstakingly draws a line, her door is slammed open and JAKE storms in, causing her pencil to skid.]

JAKE

Are you out of your mind?

DEBBIE

That was two hours of work, Jake!

JAKE

Are you out of your mind?!

DEBBIE

Two hours I can't get back! I have deadlines too, you know.

JAKE

When were you going to tell me about this?

DEBBIE

Some of us actually draw our own strips, you know? We don't spend all day frittering away--

JAKE

When were you going to tell me about this?!

[DEBBIE turns away, uncomfortable]

DEBBIE

...I don't know what you're talking about.

JAKE

Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?!

DEBBIE

Yes, Jake. Houghton/Wilkes. The Houghton/Wilkes Newspaper Syndicate. I'm having discussions--

JAKE

You're doing a newspaper jump.

DEBBIE

I'm having discussions with their editorial board.

JAKE

You're not going to do this.

DEBBIE

I think that's my decision to make, Jake.

[JAKE stares at DEBBIE a long moment, then walks to one side, looking at a framed strip on the wall.]

DEBBIE

You know, some of us didn't start all this out of some dream of redefining the world of online distribution, Jake. Some of us fell in love with comic strips in the newspaper. We read Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes and fell in love with the form. And we dreamed about the day when we could open the newspaper and see our strip there.

JAKE

Sandwiched at 40 LPI between Beetle Bailey and Hagar the Horrible.

DEBBIE

Not all newspaper comics are Beetle Bailey or Hagar the Horrible.

JAKE

And none of Houghton/Wilkes's strips are Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

We have a responsibility, Debbie. In fact, more than we, you have a responsibility--

DEBBIE

A responsibility to who, Jake? Fishtails is a good strip. I want people reading it. Houghton/Wilkes is going to put it in a hundred papers to begin with. They're talking about print collections. Collections sold in Barnes and Noble, not just on the Comicsense.com website.

JAKE

Where they can sit between fourteen Garfield collections and seven Foxtrot collections.

DEBBIE

Alphabetically they would come before Foxtrot.

JAKE

Trust me. Bill Amend trumps the alphabet.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

You have a responsibility to those who came before us, Debbie. To Al Capp and Walt Kelly. To Charles Schulz and Chester Gould.

[JAKE turns to face DEBBIE, slowly advancing as he speaks.]

JAKE

Comic strips used to be epic, Debbie. They used to be the playground of Windsor McKay and Segar and Hal Foster. Flash Gordon wasn't a movie or a movie serial, Debbie -- it was a comic strip. This is the form of Terry and the Pirates. Look at Blondie in the thirties and then look at it last week, and you tell me you want to be in the newspaper.

[The pair lean close, suggesting a kiss.]

JAKE

You're a foot more talented than any of us, Debbie. Fishtails is the real deal. Of course Houghton/Wilkes wants it. But they don't really want it, Debbie. They don't want your grand stories or your edge. They want a family friendly version of it. They want the version that would come after their editorial board gets done with it. Your gay characters would lose their teeth. Your wit would be blunted. You'd be just another flash in the pan strip that they'd announce and trumpet and then would vanish. You'd appear in a hundred newspapers and then you'd be in fifteen papers after people complained that Luann got cut to make room.

DEBBIE

For Better or For Worse has edge. The Boondocks has edge.

JAKE

They're not Houghton/Wilkes either.

[DEBBIE looks away, at the wall of cartoons.]

DEBBIE

Bloom County was in a thousand newspapers, Jake.

JAKE

Opus is in two hundred, and you're not Berke Breathed.

[DEBBIE turns back to face JAKE.]

DEBBIE

So I spin my wheels here?

JAKE

You're not spinning your wheels.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

You're not spinning your wheels. You have three hundred and fifty thousand people show up to read you every day. You quit your day job to do this. You have a rabid fanbase. You have awards. And you're going places. You're going to break through. There's going to be animated specials. There's going to be collections in Barnes and Noble. Collections where you get the lion's share of the royalties -- not a syndicate and not even ComicSense. And one day you will be in newspapers, but you'll hold onto your web rights and your merchandising rights and your control over your own property. You're going to do it. Don't grab a third rate newspaper syndicate with a fourth rate deal. Don't give up your merchandise and your freedom. Not for these guys.

[The two look at each other for a long moment.]

DEBBIE

I hate you.

JAKE

I'm comfortable with that.

DEBBIE

I have a deadline.

JAKE

Me too. People in Dubai are yearning for my wit.

DEBBIE

Someone would have to be.

[JAKE turns and walks out. DEBBIE watches him go, then slowly smiles, very slightly.]

[SCENE THREE: Musical cue: "Take a walk on the wild side." The office of JUBAL GREEN, elder statesman of comics and the principal investor and chairman of ComicSense.com. He is gruff, but speaks with wisdom. DANNY enters through the door, knocking on the frame.]

DANNY

Are you aware that they're reading Coffee Shoppe in Dubai?

JUBAL

I suppose that explains all the burka related fan mail Jake and Dale get.

DANNY

Seriously. The webalizer stats--

JUBAL

Webalizer tracks location based on domain name. The domain name for the United Arab Emirates is dot ae. What happened is someone, probably in America, came up with a domain name that dot ae suits, and they registered with whoever owns the rights to dot ae. Some firm in Qatar gets twenty bucks, some guy on the web owns the rights to 'titan.ae,' and Jake--

DANNY

--has readers in Dubai.

JUBAL

That's right.

DANNY

Only not really.

JUBAL

That's right.

DANNY

Okay.

JUBAL

You didn't come into my office to talk about Jake's stats.

DANNY

No.

JUBAL

Mind telling me why you did come into my office?

[DANNY looks off to the side.]

DANNY

Pennyfarthing.

JUBAL

I've been hearing rumors.

DANNY

You and everyone else.

JUBAL

You made them an offer?

DANNY

They made us an offer.

JUBAL

They made us an offer.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

Pennyfarthing made us an offer.

DANNY

Pennyfarthing made us an offer.

JUBAL

I'm listening.

DANNY

They're sick of bandwidth bills, their sysadmin is in the extended process of flaking on them... they want to get out of the business of running a comics website and into the business of exploiting their brand.

JUBAL

What's the deal on the table?

DANNY

Eighty percent of ad buys, reduced Comicsense.com branding on the site -- though we can do the linkbox -- merchandise in our store but book collections through their guy. And they would comp us nine designed banner ads, so we could get their look and feel in targeted advertising.

JUBAL

Have you talked with Simon about this?

DANNY

He caught me in the hall. We'd need a dedicated server. Probably manage the bandwidth. He says it's an IT nightmare but you know Simon. He kind of lives for IT nightmares.

JUBAL

So what needs to be done?

DANNY

Nothing.

JUBAL

Nothing?

DANNY

Nothing.

JUBAL

Everything's been done?

DANNY

Nothing's been done. I'm passing on the deal.

[JUBAL leans back. He doesn't look surprised. DANNY is slightly nervous, not looking directly at JUBAL.]

JUBAL

The most popular webcomic in the history of webcomics offers to come over to our website, and you're passing on the deal.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

And that's why you came to my office.

DANNY

No, I came to your office so you could fire me.

JUBAL

For passing on Pennyfarthing.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

Why?

DANNY

'Cause Pennyfarthing is a slam dunk. We get them, we shoot past Keenspot and Modern Tales. We reverse the trend away from online syndicates and towards online guilds. We wipe the bad press for losing seven creators in the last week, and we replace a contentious furry fanbase for Furbridge Heights with seven and a half million gamers. Of course you need to fire me for saying no.

JUBAL

No. I mean why did you pass on Pennyfarthing?

DANNY

For the same reason Debbie needs to pass on Houghton/Wilkes. It's a dream deal but it's not a good deal.

JUBAL

I'm listening.

DANNY

We bring in Pennyfarthing, and they become the eight hundred pound gorilla. We have to rededicate a majority of our press and advertising to them. Getting the message that they're part of Comicsense.com. Their deal would be better than what we give anyone else, which would breed discontent in the creator pool. Discontent that would only be increased by the staggering degree to which Pennyfarthing would overshadow everyone else on the site.

JUBAL

We could manage that.

DANNY

Maybe, but that's not the whole of it. Editorially, they're just not a good fit.

[DANNY turns to face JUBAL, walking towards the desk.]

Pennyfarthing reaches gamers. It's a niche we barely scratch, and on one level getting them would be good. We'd get some percentage of them reading our comics. But on another level, most of them wouldn't be interested in Coffee Shoppe or Hybrid Deal. Pennyfarthing just isn't like our lineup, and we can't expect a huge crossover appeal from their readers.

JUBAL

We would get some of them. And some of seven and a half million--

DANNY

Sure, but there's a downside to that. We'd also get buried under an avalanche of trolls and dicks. Fractions of men who hide behind an internet login and spew over everything they see.

JUBAL

Danny, I don't care what their rep is. The vast majority of Pennyfarthing readers are perfectly nice and responsible internet citizens.

DANNY

Yeah, but a certain percentage of all internet fandoms are mouth breathers who think this whole thing is a video game and that winning comes through slash and burn. Apply that percentage to Pennyfarthing's readership and you get a number close to Comicsense.com's whole current readership. All people who take delight in hitting forums and messageboards for webcomics they hate and turning them into steaming piles of crap. And they'd hate most of our comics.

JUBAL

And you figure all this means I should fire you?

DANNY

Seems like it.

JUBAL

Is that why United Press Syndicate canned your ass?

DANNY

It... might have something to do with it, yeah.

JUBAL

And you don't credit me with being smarter than United Press Syndicate? Danny -- what was the most significant comic strip to come out of the thirties and forties?

DANNY

Li'l Abner.

JUBAL

What about the fifties?

DANNY

Peanuts.

JUBAL

The sixties?

DANNY

Pogo.

JUBAL

The seventies?

DANNY

Doonesbury.

JUBAL

The eighties?

DANNY

Lemme jump ahead here. The eighties was Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side, in kind of a three way race. And the nineties was Dilbert. Why?

JUBAL

Just this. What's the most significant newspaper comic strip of the past six years, Danny?

DANNY

I... don't really know. I'm not sure it's been figured out, yet.

JUBAL

We're six years into the decade, and you're an expert in comic strips, and you don't know which comic strip is the most significant of the decade?

DANNY

Well... yeah. I mean, the Boondocks got a deal at Adult Swim, but--

JUBAL

But nothing. The newspapers are dying, Danny. It'll take decades, but they're going the way of eighteenth century pamphlets. For a while, the only reason half the newspapers in this country were being sold was the comics page. Now, that's not a compelling reason any more. We're in the wild times now, Danny. It's chaos. And if comic strips cling to newspapers, the form will die with them.

DANNY

Comic strips aren't dying, Jubal. There's... like a billion of them right now.

JUBAL

That's right. On the web. Where we are. It's a crazy time. An exciting time. An explosive time. But it's fragmented, right now. No one webcomic -- not Pennyfarthing, not PvP, not Something Positive or anything else has taken the cultural place of a Li'l Abner in America, because no one knows where to go. No one knows where the really good webcomics are. The independents thrive on word of mouth. The first generation of online syndicates grabbed every strip with an audience they could get. Or they went the other way, and went so idiosyncratic only the intellectuals or the gamers wanted to read them. The one way an online syndicate can really thrive and flourish is through editorial standards, Danny. If they grab strips with the broadest appeal, that fit together into a cohesive comics page, representing the spectrum of comics while remaining consistent in quality, the word will get out. People will begin to gravitate to that syndicate. The publishing world will see them as professionals. The reading public will ee them as a gateway to good comics.

[JUBAL leans forward.]

JUBAL

That's where we're headed, Danny. I don't know if Comicsense.com will become that portal. I do know that the only chance we have is if we make hard decisions. Professional decisions. We need to say 'this is a good strip, but it doesn't fit our site, and we pass.' That's why I hired you, Danny. I need someone who can look the single most popular webcomic's creators in the eye and say "I'm sorry. You don't fit."

[DANNY looks away, smiling a hint.]

JUBAL

What's the PR fallout look like?

DANNY

The rumors are out there. I'm saying there's no chance Pennyfarthing would come to our site.

JUBAL

What are the Pennyfarthing guys going to do?

DANNY

They're going to have to address the rumors, and keep their street cred. I expect they're gonna make fun of us.

JUBAL

Sooner rather than later?

DANNY

I'd bank on it.

JUBAL

And they'll link to us in the bargain?

DANNY

Seems like they generally do.

JUBAL (smiling)

Then you might want to let Simon know that at 11:27 tomorrow, we're going to be having a few hundred thousand guests show up.

DANNY

Seems likely.

JUBAL

Now get the Hell out of my office. Some of us have work to do.

[The camera pulls back. The music swells up, taking center stage, in time for Lou Reed to sing: Jackie is just speeding away/Thought she was James Dean for a day/Then I guess she had to crash/Valium would have helped that bash/Said, Hey babe,Take a walk on the wild side.]

[Fade to black and EXEC. CREDITS, as the song continues: I said, Hey honey/Take a walk on the wild side/and the coloured girls say/doo do doo do doo do do doo....]

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:22 PM | Comments (61)

December 13, 2006

Eric: An unreasonably warm rain

It is a rainy day in New Hampshire. Rainy and unseasonably warm. Yesterday, I had been in Maine with my family, and my sister had been looking through the newspaper for the week's upcoming weather. "They say it's going to be unreasonably warm," she said, misreading. It got a laugh. Perhaps you had to be there.

We had gotten together the night before, because that's what you do when someone passes away. The family gathers. We felt oddly, more than anything. We had known that Grammie would die, sooner or later. She had been in decline, mentally, for many years, to the point where she couldn't walk or speak, though her body remained healthy. Healthy for a 96 year old, anyhow. It had turned into staying overnight, and then getting up the next morning and doing many things. For one, I hadn't had a chance to view the body. If I didn't attend to it that day, I wouldn't have another opportunity, and it was important to me.

That was yesterday. Today, it was raining. And it did indeed seem unreasonably warm.

Death is too much with us.

---

It was midday when I got pinged by a friend. Not the kind of friend who reads Livejournal, mind. Or at least, not my Livejournal. He didn't know about any recent events in my life, or the extended life of my family. He didn't read the Portland Press Herald either. He didn't see the notices -- not even the paper's story declaring my grandmother the "featured obituary of the day," which made us all pretty happy. He didn't read the actual obituary we put together, my mother, my sister and myself, bouncing wording back and forth...

Madeleine Ames Chicoine
WINDHAM -- Madeleine passed away peacefully Dec. 11, 2006. She was born March 26, 1910, the daughter of Forest J. and Lizzie (Mann) Marsh in North Gorham, Maine.
She attended schools in North Gorham and graduated from Windham High School in 1928. In 1929 she married Philip L. Ames of Windham. They eventually moved to Portland where they resided until Philip's death in 1960.

"Martin Nodell died," my friend told me.

"I know. I'd heard." I was a bit absent as we spoke.

"I thought maybe you'd write about it. You write nice remembrances."

"Do I?" I thought about my mother, my sister and I , talking about the right wording, trying to distill Grammie's life appropriately. Succinctly.

"Yeah. I mean, he was a big deal. I mean, he wasn't a big deal, but he should have been."

"This might not be the right week for it," I said, not wanting to seem insensitive.

"He created Green Lantern, you know. The original. Alan Scott."

I allowed as I did know.

"You know, you never wrote about Dave Cockrum either," he said. "That surprised me. I mean, you're such a Legion fan and all."

"It's been an odd time," I said. "I've been tired, and busy."

"Yeah, well. I was just surprised is all. I wanted to see what you'd say about them."

"Them?"

"Cockrum and Nodell."

"Oh."

"They deserve notice," he persisted. "Don't you think they deserve notice?"

Twenty four hours before, we stood in the family home on the lake -- the property I grew up visiting my grandmother on. It was bitterly cold inside the house, where the heat and lights were off, a mute testament to its unoccupied state. "It's colder in a barn than out," Mom said. I stood in the house while my mother and sister were looking over clothing. We needed to find something appropriate for Grammie. Well, they did. Dad was downstairs, putting the electricity on so we could get some lights. And I was wandering, a little bit. Looking around.

"Yeah," I answered in the here and now. "They deserve notice."

Madeleine was an energetic homemaker and dedicated gardener. Within her community she was a Cub Scout den mother, a member of the PTA and the Deering Band Mothers Club, and a founding member of the Suburban Club. Her children grown, she worked over the years as a clerk and manager at Len Libby's, Sears, and several other retail stores.

The Golden Age Green Lantern stood out, even among the lurid heroes of the Justice Society of America. His story was lush and rich -- Alan Scott, broadcaster, had his life saved by a magical lantern, carved from the stone of the Starheart into first an ancient lantern, then recarved into a train lantern by a man suffering from brain damage. Three times the Starheart burned. Once to bring death. Once to bring life. And once to bring power. Alan Scott was the recipient of that third fire -- a fire that became the light of the Green Lantern. He wielded that flame through a mystic ring that gave him almost unlimited power. Only the natural world -- in particular, plants and wood -- was impervious to the power of the Green Lantern.

I remember my first encounter with the Green Lantern. It was at my cousin Cory's house. He had a comic book which featured "two classic stories of the Golden Age Green Lantern." On the cover, the Hal Jordan Green Lantern was looking with shock and amazement at the scenes of his Earth-2 predecessor -- no doubt to remind the reader that yes indeed, this was Hal Jordan's comic book. We're just bringing you a different Green Lantern this month.

I was maybe five. Maybe six. I don't remember. I had never seen Hal Jordan before. I didn't bother to pay attention to the guy in the body stocking on the cover. Instead, I read the comic. Read about Alan Scott. Read about the Green Lantern. In the end, he'll always been the real one, to me. Oh, I loved the Hal Jordan Green Lantern. I loved the Green Lantern Corps, the neoLensman aesthetic brought to the concept's redesign in the Silver Age. Green Lantern was cool.

But Alan Scott was more than cool. He had character. He had texture. He was mysterious, and his ring was amazing.

There was comic relief in those comics, too. "Doiby Dickles," a cab driver, palled around and cracked wise. I was never a huge fan of Doiby, I'll admit. But then, Doiby didn't come from Martin Nodell. He was created by the writer who worked with Nodell during Nodell's tenure -- a man named Bill finger -- and a subsequent artist called Irwin Hasen. When Nodell drew his mythic mystery man, he meant there to be mystery alongside the action.

My father, in one of our earliest discussions of comic books, knew from the Alan Scott Green Lantern. He remembered the Green Lantern Oath. I think it helped connect us in an early age. I think I felt like Alan Scott belonged to our family -- we remembered him. Not Hal Jordan. The real Green Lantern.

When Martin Nodell was pitching his idea for a new comic to various authors, Madeleine Ames, nee Marsh, was living in Portland, Maine, in the Deering neighborhood. She was raising her family and making her home. She seemed tireless to those who saw her. She was involved in her community, in her schools, in the lives of those around her. Having come of age during the Depression, she never wasted a thing. She was neat as a pin, a lover of life and of dance and of music, but always with a sense of decorum. Always with a sense of propriety. Her husband, my genetic grandfather, was Philip Ames -- a watchmaker.

Among the effects collected from the nursing home on Monday was a photograph of Philip Ames. It showed him at a worktable, looking up. It is essentially the only impression I have of him -- he passed away eight years before I was born. Hard at work, looking up to have his photograph taken. A kind face. A dedicated face. Along the bottom of the picture is a note in pencil, indicated it was taken while he worked for Carter Brothers, a jeweler in Portland.

Along the top, my grandmother had written, very precisely, "how I loved him so."

In 1969, Madeleine married Donald Chicoine of Livermore. Upon his retirement, and until Don's death in 2000, the couple traveled the United States and Europe, summered in the family home on Sebago Lake, and wintered in the home Madeleine built in Nokomis, Florida.

My earliest memory of the property I mentioned above was even older than that first time I saw a Green Lantern comic book. I was... man, maybe three years old? And I remember a piano.

It was a toy piano, of a style no longer made, but once desperately common. It looked like a miniature grand piano, and all the keys worked, causing tinny little notes to play. It was exactly the kind of toy piano Schroeder had in Peanuts. I loved Schroeder, with the kind of irrational fixation that three year olds get, and I had declared I loved "Beeth-oven," pronounced as it was written, which is to say pronounced wrongly.

At "White" Grammie's, there was that piano, and it was enthralling.

She was called White Grammie not as a statement on my Grandmother Burns, but because she had a white topped car. My sister, who at the time was very little herself -- I hadn't been born yet -- could only distinguish between the two grandmothers by fixing on that detail. The white car Grammie. White Grammie. By the time I could distinguish between words, it was a given in our house. There was Grammie Burns, and there was White Grammie. I'm not sure I knew her married name was Chicoine for quite a few years.

That piano stood out in my memory. It was distinctive and exciting to me, and I loved playing it. One trip to their house was bitterly disappointing to me, because the piano had disappeared. "Oh, we couldn't find it," I was told. It may have been so. It may also have been that White Grammie and Grampa Don simply decided that listening to five hours of a three year old hammering on the keys of a toy piano was too much to bear. In either case, it was much, much later that the piano would be found again.

I remember that piano, and I remember oatmeal cookies. Grammie always had oatmeal cookies. And I remember a series of candlesticks she had that had prisms hanging off them like icicles. Sitting in the window, they caught the sun. I remember lying on her carpet, not far from a Parcheesi set, looking at the pools of rainbow cast by the prisms.

And I remember Grampa Don, an amiable man with precise hands and a warmth of spirit. A man who used to craft little people and animals from seashells he would gather during their winters in Florida. A man who was quiet, but always so gentle and loving.

And I remember Grammie.

In a way, she defined dignity to me. A woman who always had control over her environment, Grammie worked hard to make it seem like she didn't need to work at all. Gatherings became catered affairs in Grammie's kitchen, always seeming effortless on her part. She could take little and make gold from it -- I remember treats she would make with the leftover pie crust dough she would roll out. She would bake them, seasoning and spicing them, and creating little cookies from those leavings called chiggers which I generally liked more than the pies themselves. Pies were heavy, and even though Grammie made a wonderful pie, those chiggers were like crisp heaven on a plate.

But no matter how busy Grammie had been, no matter how much she worked, she was always dressed impeccably. She generally had on jewelry or a brooch or a silhouette. Her hair was always perfect, as near as I could tell. She spoke quietly, but with firmness, and she expected to be heard and listened to. And you did. You just naturally did.

During these years and times, Dave Cockrum was working in comics. In fact, he was directly responsible for two out of the three biggest success stories in the comics of the seventies, eighties and beyond. He was working at DC, redesigning the Legion of Superheroes, and following his designs over the next several years the Legion went from a backup story first in Adventure and then a sideline to Superboy and into the single most popular comic being published. Until the eighties and the heydey of the Teen Titans and the X-Men, the Legion ruled the roost, and it was largely the new costumes that Cockrum (and to a lesser extent, Mike Grell) put the team into. He took them out of their Adventure-era sixties jumpsuits and costumes, born of the Jet Age and swiftly becoming dated, and ushered them into an era of plunging necklines, nearly nude women and pony-tails. His costume design for Phantom Girl remains the best she has ever looked. His design for Lightning Lad is still the costume most associated with the character -- the costume that appears on the new cartoon series today.

Some of the designs he made for new Legionnaires never got brought into the comic book, though. Instead, they came with him when he crossed the street and helped design the all new X-Men. Characters like Nightcrawler, Storm and Colossus were wholly created, visually, by Cockrum. He was the first artist on the new X-Men, outlasting his co-creator Len Wein (who left the series after just an issue and a half) and collaborating with Chris Claremont, the writer still most associated with the Mutant team.

Between the Legion and the X-Men, Cockrum was strongly responsible for some of the most popular comics of the past forty years. His designs made DC and Marvel countless amounts of money. His costume and character designs fueled merchandizing that still goes on today.

"You know," I said to my father, as I looked through the cupboards of the house, just yesterday. "There should be oatmeal cookies in the cupboard."

There weren't, of course. Grammie hadn't lived there for many years. As she had gotten older, her body had remained healthy but her mind had slowly slipped. Dementia, it was called -- not Alzheimer's, or so I have been told, but I couldn't tell you the distinction. While Grampa Don was alive, he could help keep care of her, even as she declined, but when he died almost seven years ago there was no real way she could continue to live on her own. It couldn't be done. So her children found the very best homes available -- places where real love and affection went into elder care. And they stayed involved in her life. My Aunt Dona, who lives in California, flew out several times a year and spent all the time she could visiting. My Uncle Alan saw to her needs, and my mother saw to her affairs.

During the time, other folks lived in and stayed in the buildings on the property. When my sister and her children moved east, she lived there for several months while getting her new home squared away. My whole family goes there during the summer, to enjoy the lake and the company. What food was in the cupboards were artifacts of those visitations. Dog biscuits (most of my family is beholden to dogs) and staples. Crackers. Sugar, sealed away against the elements.

But no oatmeal cookies.

"I guess she hadn't had oatmeal cookies here for a while anyway," I said. "Even when she was here. I don't think she got out to the store much when she still lived here."

"Don't worry," my mother said. "I kept her in cookies."

As a lifelong Democrat, Madeleine had a strong commitment to charities and causes dedicated to relieving suffering and uplifting the human spirit.

Martin Nodell was largely forgotten. I'd seen many publications claim the Green Lantern had been created by Gardner Fox or Alfred Bester (who did create the Green Lantern Oath, or so they say). Or Bill Finger, who certainly gave him his voice, though the creation was really Nodell's. Or else they mention John Broome and Gil Kane or even Julie Schwartz, confusing Hal Jordan with the creation of the Green Lantern. Nodell was an afterthought. A footnote. The kind of fact people like me came up with so we could sound superior on Internet message boards.

But Nodell was perfectly happy with his role in comic book history. He did conventions as late as last year. He had left comics early on, and had gone on to do commercial illustration and advertising. It was later in life that he really realized that an entire subculture revered his contributions, and he gradually embraced that subculture and enjoyed his part in it.

Dave Cockrum wasn't forgotten, but he wasn't remembered as he should have been. The Legion renaissance was credited primarily to Paul Levitz (and later to Levitz and art collaborator Keith Giffen, who did another redesign of the 30th Century in the 80's, and then an ill-advised grim and dark redesign in the late 80's moving into the 90's). The X-Men, even though Cockrum was the principle artist for several years before and then after, were really credited to Chris Claremont and John Byrne. (Which is a real shame, as that credit fed Byrne's legendary ego -- and for my money Byrne was never as good a draftsman as Cockrum.)

But Cockrum was a dynamic force in comics all the same. He adored them. He ate and drank them. The night he passed away, he was wearing Superman Pajamas and sleeping under a Batman blanket. In an odd synchronicity, he was to be cremated while wearing a Green Lantern Tee Shirt. Cockrum legitimately loved comics, in all their manifestations.

Nodell died because that's what happens to 91 year old artists. Cockrum died much much younger, at 65, due to complications and health problems stemming from diabetes.

Madeline Chicoine, my grandmother, was 96 years old, going on 97. I don't know if she ever actually read a comic book in her life.

But she understood heroes. And she understood that we have to carry heroism in ourselves, every day. She gave substantially (not that she had tremendous resources to begin with) to charities. In particular, she supported Opportunity Farm -- a home for at-risk children who have nowhere to turn. She couldn't bear the thought of kids having nothing and nowhere to go, and she felt passionately that they needed to be given a chance. She was the sort of person who would cry while watching the news, because she couldn't bear to think of such suffering. But she never felt that suffering just had to be endured. She believed -- she truly believed -- that each and every one of us had the capacity to relieve the suffering of others and make the world a better place, and that with the capacity came the responsibility to act on it.

In the attic of the home she once lived in, while my sister and mother looked over clothing, I noticed white out of the corner of my eyes. I leaned down, and moved a magazine off a pile, and saw the toy piano. Easily thirty-five years old, that piano was, made out of wood painted black -- a black that was peeling and fading in places. I plunked my finger down on three of the keys, and heard it ring out, and for the first of three times yesterday I cried.

Madeleine is survived by her children, Dona (Ames) and Elton Clark of Glendale, Calif., Alan and Edie Ames of East Sebago, and Dian (Ames) and Roland Burns of Standish; her grand and great-grandchildren, David Clark; Suzanne, Steven, Catie and Will Sanchez; Brian, Angie, Taylor, Owen and Hailey Clark; Laurel, Gary, Christy and Tim Webber; Alan and Ann Ames; Peter, Alice, Brittany and Matthew Ames; Bill, Kyle, Caleb and Elise Bourassa; Kristan, Hilary and Hadley Gibson; and Eric Burns; beloved nieces and nephews Joanne Pratt, Joanie Grady, Bert and Betty Murch, Mary and Walter Sawyer, and Richard Hall; and her cherished new families in the Casco Inn and Ledgewood Manor.

It was sunny, yesterday, and cold. Not like today, when it's raining hard and unreasonably warm. It was that kind of day that saw me with my parents walking into the funeral home, so I could view my grandmother.

My mother and sister had viewed her the day before, when I had still needed to be at work. This would be my last chance, and it was important to me. The times I have encountered death, I have better been able to handle it when I could see the body of the person I loved. My grandfather Burns. My Grampa Don Chicoine. It was hard, and painful, but it forced closure upon me. The times I haven't been able to view a body -- like my Grandmother Burns (I had been three time zones away with no chance to return), or my childhood friend Richard (closed casket services) -- the deaths had stayed with me far longer. I had more I had to work through.

And I wanted to see my grandmother one last time. I wanted to.

There was a sign on the path as we walked up to the door, "Chipmunk Crossing" it warned. And I smiled, slightly, at the mental thought of it. I can appreciate a funeral home that has a slight touch of whimsy.

We were met by two men in grey suits. They were smiling and pleasant. Comforting. Making sure we knew all would be attended to. They had brought my grandmother back out to be viewed upon my request -- we had called before heading over. I turned off my cell phone, and we went in.

The reason this would be our last chance was because Grammie wasn't to be embalmed. Which relieved me, to be honest. I find the very concept of embalming creepy. When I die, I don't want to go anywhere near embalming. I equally don't want to be sealed away in a concrete bunker. I came from the Earth, I want to return to it. Given my druthers, put me in a burlap sack and compost me.

Well, we weren't going to do that to Grammie, but there was no desire to embalm her either. Services were going to be graveside, without a viewing. There was no need to introduce other elements.

She looked peaceful. And beautiful. Her face was smooth. I was stunned at... well, how much like my grandmother she looked. If that seems odd, remember that Grammie had been in a decline for some time. She had lost that dignified, precise mind, that sharp will. She had slowly moved into the past, and then beyond. The last time she and I had spoken, while she was still able to speak, she hadn't known me. She could recognize that I was a nice person, and people she did know clearly thought highly of me, so she was very loving and warm to me, though she had absolutely no recollection of me. She had seemed much older then than I could ever remember her seeing. Much, much older.

The times before that, when I saw her, she had asked me things many times. Asked about work. Asked about friends I hadn't seen in years. Asked again about work. Asked about... asked about me. She was frustrated -- she could tell her mind was going, and she didn't want it to.

That had been years before, but she had spoken about death then. To her, death wasn't something to fear. She believed. She knew that it would be a reunion with my grandfather Philip. And she knew that the confusion she was feeling would be alleviated.

Looking down onto the face of my grandmother, I saw no sign of that confusion. I kissed her forehead, noticing almost in a detached way how cool it was, and I cried a very small amount. I whispered that I loved her. And then we headed out.

That was the second time I cried. The third time was late into the evening, lying in bed, remembering her and remembering the day, and feeling oddly fragile and mortal. Grammie was the last of her generation to pass on. Now my parents' generation moves into the on-deck circle. My aunts, my uncles, my mother and father. And we have many years, fortune favoring us, before it becomes likely, but it was still the passing of an era. A passing of time.

My friend Eileen said something to me, earlier today when I was seeing her. I work with her, and I was back with her, and we were discussing life and death. "I really want to see all my friends and family and freeze them. In fact, I want to freeze them in their twenties. It's fine if I get older and die, but it's just not fair that they will."

And she's right. It's not. We shouldn't have to put up with death. It's unreasonable. As unreasonable as fifty degree weather in mid-December.

But we have to put up with it. And we have to move on from it. Life has to go on.

My friend was right. Even though he would never have brought up dead comic artists in a week where my grandmother died had he known, he said something that rang true to me. We need to note these events. We need to note these people. Those we loved and were close to. Those who influenced us or brought us the things we love. The Dave Cockrums and the Martin Nodells. The Madeline Ames Chicoines.

My grandmother would understand that. She understood that you did what needed to be done. You remarked, because it was the right thing to remark. You affirmed the lives of others. You witnessed. You did your part. And you tried your best, each and every day, to make the world a better place.

It was the kind of lesson the Green Lantern taught one generation, and Nightcrawler taught another.

You had to do it, in part because you wouldn't always have the chance to. Life would go on, whether you wanted it to or not. And this was true enough. As I prepared to write this essay -- not the easiest one I've ever committed to the ether -- I glanced at my Livejournal Friends list. And there I saw that Peter Boyle, the character actor known for Young Frankenstein, Taxi Driver, Yellowbeard and many other shows and movies, had passed away at the age of 71.

Outside, more rain falls. It is unreasonably warm.

Tomorrow, there will be more to do.

A graveside service will be held on Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, at 10 a.m., at the Brooklawn Memorial Park in Portland. In lieu of flowers, donations in Madeleine's memory may be made to: North Windham Union Church, 723 Roosevelt Trail, Windham, Maine 04062

Goodbye, Grammie. I will always love you.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:55 PM | Comments (20)

December 7, 2006

Eric: I believe it's actually an old Austrian word that means "Under the Koffler." But I could be wrong.

People who know me know one of my favorite role playing game developers is Mister Chad Underkoffler. Which is a fun name to type, but that's not germane to the discussion at hand. One of the earliest essays I ever wrote on this website was in praise of Chad's innovative and creepy Dead Inside. Last year, I enthused at length on Truth and Justice, the first really new and innovative superhero RPG to come along in quite some time. All Underkoffler, all superior. This stuff was and is just plain good.

Well, Mister Underkoffler (seriously -- take a moment, grab a pen, and just write Underkoffler. It's an unexpectedly complex pleasure!) has come out with his third RPG -- this one somewhere between an expansion and a campaign sourcebook. His subject matter this time is fairy tales -- true, honest to Christ kid's stories that start in Oz, segue into Wonderland or Neverland, take a sharp left at Narnia and travel back through Grimm with an intent of making Mother Goose pay protection money. It's called The Zorcerer of Zo, and it's good. It's damn good. It's got wonder and hope mixed together with just enough ironic self-awareness that you can play it any way you like. If you want to be Cinderella twenty years later, with six kids and a mortgage payment due because her layabout husband isn't good at anything but being Charrming? You can be. At the same time, if you want to be a walking and living set of Tinkertoys, rebuilding your limbs into new and useful structures you can be that too. It's one part Through the Looking Glass, one part Wicked, at least two parts Sondheim's Into the Woods and a scosh of Willy Wonka to taste.

And it's available for preorder right now. This preorder is for a resplendent softcover book, and within a day of preordering you get The Zorcerer of Zo as a PDF, so you can launch into it immediately even before you get the book itself. I heartily recommend it.

Or I would heartily recommend it. But you see, there's a hitch. I edited the book.

This is a new line for me. I've been a professional RPG writer and developer for several years now, which is heaps of fun and occasionally gets me money. This is the first time I'm being paid to edit a book though. To offer my command of English and my perspective as a reader and a RPG writer and player to improve a work. I was thrilled to get the gig and I loved every minute of doing my job.

However, that means I get a small slice of royalties from this here book. So if I come on here and say "Dude! You totally need to buy this book because it rocks!" it's at least a little unethical, because I get some of that thirty bucks.

The temptation is there, of course. It's Christmas. I have bills to pay. Not to mention the price of gasoline -- half the time in Canada, which is an ancient First Nations word that means "ninety-five cents a liter." You shelling out cash for this book makes my car go vroom, and that makes Eric a happy person. But if I don't preface my advocacy with "by the way -- I make money from this, so my opinion may be colored by that," I become a dick.

No one wants to be a dick. Jesus Christ, it's Christmas.

At the same time, I honestly do think Zorcerer of Zo is a fantastic game, unlike anything else out there. It uses an even lighter version of Underkoffler's Prose Descriptives Qualities (or PDQ) system -- which means it's like ten minutes between grabbing the game and playing it. Its got a sense of style and wonder, and it has an in-depth description of the first campaign ever run in Zo -- which both shows you the sensibility of the game and gives you ideas galore. And it contains a complete and playable campaign world which you can use, steal from or ignore as you see fit. I think anyone who likes fairy tales, fantasy or role playing games would get their money's worth out of it.

So. I'm stuck on the horns of a dilemma. How do I extol the virtues of a good game, heartily encourage you all to buy it (and thus increase my own cashflow), maintain my professional sense of ethics, and manage not to be a dick in the process?

I have no idea.

So buy the game anyway. The man's name is Underkoffler, for Christ's sake. That's reason enough right there.

Come with me... and you'll be... in a world of pure imagination....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:24 PM | Comments (22)

November 29, 2006

Eric: Unabashed appreciations are fun to write, you know it?

From Goats.)

Jon Rosenberg's mind is a strange, strange place. It's easy to become lost there.

Things aren't always easy to follow in Goats these days. Oh, that's always been true. Some of the epic battles against Gregor Mendel got 'complex,' in their time, but there used to be more of a reset after plotlines. Things got back to some value of normal. Philip and Jon ended up back in the bar, Neil and Bob went back to their amusements, Toothgnip went back to nailing chicks. The usual. The normal.

Eventually, Rosenberg got bored. And then he got ambitious.

Two years ago today, he started a plotline called Space Wizards. It started the cast on a roller coaster of change, of understanding, of universal apocolypse, of talking vegetables and universe-hopping virginal farmer's daughters. In short, Jon Rosenberg set "normal" on fire with a matchstick of mayan demon fire.

And it's been fun. Folks at the time e-mailed me, saying he was going for a Cerebus Syndrome. But that wasn't accurate -- the Cerebus Syndrome is when someone's been mostly humorous and decides to go for a balance of serious with humor, in hopes of getting the best of both worlds. Misdone, it leads to First and Ten Syndrome -- the replacement of humor with drama (or melodrama) in such a way that you alienate your existing audience and completely fail to attract a new one.

Rosenberg hasn't done either of these things. Goats is, if anything, significantly funnier today than it was two years ago. And it was pretty damn funny two years ago. What Rosenberg did was change the underlying assumptions of his comic -- he went from picaresque, where short adventures and jokes passed through, to recurrent -- where each strip builds on the last. He changed the scope from moderately local to epic. And he let his inner bastard (never too far from the surface) out to have fun.

And here we are. It's been two years. Not long ago, Rosenberg celebrated his birthday and his two thousandth comic strip, alike. And I took some stock. After all, I read Goats every day, but I had been having some trouble keeping track of what was going on. Goats is a complex strip these days, with plots that go past labyrinthine and straight into "what the fuck?"

So. I decided the best way to refresh myself and to see how well Rosenberg's experiment has gone was to start over from the reboot. To hit that link to "Space Wizards" above, and gorge myself on the plotlines.

So I did. I went through Fish's transformation into Fineas. I went through his revenge on Toothgnip, the trip to the Mayan underworld, the discovery of the lands of the space monkeys and the infinite typewriters. Our cast set each other on immortal fire, kidnapped each other into grayscale bars, became messianic figures to transdimensional farmland totalitarianist theocrats, and drank many, many glasses of fine single malt scotch.

And you know what I discovered?

Jon Rosenberg is a demented genius.

Demented is obvious, and needs no explication. Genius, however, becomes revealed as one devours the strip, watching huge chunks unfold as fast as you can click the next page link. He builds constantly, each new layer fitting atop the foundation that came before it. The resulting story might be sprawling and huge -- an invention Rube Goldberg would love -- but by God it does what it set out to do.

If you're new to Goats, make the commitment to jump in. Start with that link to Space Wizards up above. You might be a little confused in the beginning -- there's no cliff's notes to follow -- but the story should be pretty comprehensible. By the time you get to the far end of Good Hitler vs. Space Hitler, it will soon become irrelevant. The history of Goats before Space Wizards is great, but hardly necessary to the adventure to come.

If you're not new to Goats, you already know this.

I opened saying it's possible to get lost in Rosenberg's mind. And that's true, reading day to day. But going back and rereading from his new beginning on? That makes it all plain as day.

Better hurry up. We have only six years before it all ends. And, if Goats is to be believed, us with it.

And the next time I see Jon Rosenberg, I'm going to stand him to single malt. I figure alcohol can only make things better.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:28 PM | Comments (10)

November 27, 2006

Eric: On history and the future, without much on the subject of pay-for-play

So let's talk web animation.

I'm one of those folks who isn't sure about pay-for models when it comes to web animation. I had little to say when Ctrl-Alt-Del did it, because I don't read Ctrl-Alt-Del, so I didn't have to decide if I was willing to shell out the cash to watch animations or not.

Well, as you almost certainly already know, PvP is releasing a pay-for animation series. So now it's something I have to consider, because I do read PvP. I like PvP. And so here we are.

Now, unlike many critics of the model (critics who most famously include the Penny Arcade guys and... well, Scott Kurtz himself), I've never had an innate problem with pay-for content. I was and am a Modern Tales, Graphic Smash, Girlamatic and American Elf subscriber, for example. The biggest problem with the model (as Gabe and Tycho included in their Webcomics Manifesto at the back of their reissued/remastered/new-take-on their first book) is it creates a barrier to creating and holding an audience. Well, PvP already has an audience -- a substantial one. So, in one sense this is a new experiment -- will all those monthly unique visitors turn into the few thousand subscribers needed to enable Blind Ferret to at least pay off their production costs? The quality of the first teaser is pretty damn good, with strong (and well engineered) voice acting. (Though there are intriguing differences between this setup and the strip -- the cubicle environment for one. C'est la guerre. Different media, different choices. Kurtz (and Kris Straub -- Kurtz's most prolific collaborator) are apparently both writing and executive producing the series, and succeed or fail, it's clear they're putting their all into it.

That's not why I'm here. I'm going to subscribe, but then I would, wouldn't I.

I'm here to talk about Dino Andrade.

Dino Andrade is one of those names that you'd only know if you were anal about things like voice acting. Which I'll admit I am. I'm the sort of person who pauses the Tivo so I can read the voice actor credits at the ends of things like Justice League Unlimited and Legion of Superheroes, because voice acting can make or break a project. It's damned hard to voice a character and have it work -- you're doing an entire performance with inflection, minus your hands, your eyes, your face, and everything all actors in other media work with all the time. You don't even have the advantages of radio drama -- in radio drama, your voice is in a vacuum which the listener can build a scene around using imagination. In animation, you're distracted by the visual. We actively listen to radio. We passively watch television. It's a huge transition, and as a result voice actors tend to slide by us.

Dino Andrade is not a world famous voice actor. That would be one thing, and easy to explain. Dino Andrade is instead an engineer, a producer, a voice coach, a voice teacher -- and one of the strongest and most significant elements of one of the most significant voice actresses of the past twenty years. An actress who happened to be his wife.

Her name was Mary Kay Bergman, and she passed away in 1999.

If you don't recognize that name, you're not alone. A lot of people don't recognize that name. But there's a lot of names you would recognize. Let me quote myself, from a remembrance I wrote for her back in my old online journal, at the time:

For those of you saying "who's that...?" Mary Kay Bergman was the voice of every female character on South Park. From Wendy Testeberger to Mrs. Brofloski to Mrs. Cartman to the Nurse with the Fetus on her face. Every one of them.

She was, for all intents and purposes, most of the movie in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. She sang the entire of the Blame Canada song in four different voices. "What what whaaaaaaaat?" was her. Mrs. Cartman jovially explaining what a rim-job was was her. She also played the role credited only as "Female Body Part," which has to be the greatest mystical vision sequence of all time.

She, of course, didn't get as much attention or as high a billing as Minnie Driver, who was the voice of Brooke Shields for one stinking line.

Mary Kay Bergman was more than South Park, though. Unlike Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman was a voice actress for years. She was the current voice of Daphne, in Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and Scooby Doo and the Witches' Ghost. She was the animated version of Batgirl. She was significantly involved with Beauty and the Beast, the animated Disney Hercules movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan and The Iron Giant. She was a villain on The Tick. She was Mrs. Butterworth in the commercials where the bottle talked. She was the official voice of Snow White in Disneyland, Disney World and any Disney productions where it came up. She was six different voices in Star Wars: Episode One. She was the female vocalist in Weird Al Yankovic's "Pretty Fly (For a Rabbi)."

When I mentioned her passing to some fellow killer geeks, all of whom were respectful, one of them said "I think I've heard of her." He didn't mean it to be an insult. It was the level I was at before I noticed she was dead and went websurfing.

A star on one of the most popular TV shows currently out there commits suicide. She was also in both the South Park movie and The Phantom Menace for Christ's sake. And the people who most consumed the shows she did most of her work on vaguely knew of her name from somewhere.

She clearly did more voices and work on The Iron Giant than Jennifer Aniston, who voiced Hogarth's mother. But Mary Kay Bergman's name didn't appear above the title, even though Jennifer Aniston's voicing was the weakest in the movie. But Jennifer Aniston is a star, you see. For reasons that escape me at the moment, but give me time....

One of the sites I did research on had a picture of her. She was a strikingly attractive red haired woman. She was close to forty at death, and looked it, but she could have played Daphne at forty with no trouble at all, it seems. Her husband posted a message to her fans on her own website. And she did have fans who left condolences. And, as it was in an open guestbook, there were some morons too. I fear for the species sometimes.

This seems deeply wrong to me. Voice acting isn't simple. Animation isn't simple. We should have enough respect to mourn when someone who's brought a lot of joy into the lives of others dies tragically early.

Well, I mourned -- at least as much as I mourned any television and movie actress whose work I really liked. And I pass that on to you.

And if you like a cartoon, from The Powerpuff Girls to The Simpsons to South Park, get to know who the voice actors are. So, when one dies, you won't have to wonder why you feel badly.

It was almost exactly seven years ago I wrote that, but it still sticks with me. It's a lesson I learned then, and I've tried to live by it. I track the voice actors and actresses I like, and I treat them with the same significance I treat other actors. More, really, because these are people who have to endure hotshot 'stars' walking onto their turf and getting better billing for generally weaker performances. It was a happy day for me when Peter Cullen was given the gig for voicing Optimus Prime in the live action Transformers movie -- almost certainly the studios would have preferred the voice of Clint Eastwood or Bill Paxton or someone like that, in hopes of drawing in a crowd even if it meant a substantially weaker performance.

These things mean something to me. They should mean something, damn it.

And after all this time, Mary Kay Bergman still means something to me. Jesus -- Batgirl, Daphne Blake, Snow White and Sheila Brofloski? How could she not mean something to me. That's a huge part of our culture at the times she lived in.

And so I feel a kinship with her widower, who has continued since then to teach, to support voice acting, and most of all to keep the memory of his wife alive.

I've seen some people online say they didn't like Skull's voice -- basing that on the one minute we've seen, so far. And I can understand that. But the one thing I'm certain of is Dino Andrade knows voice acting. He knows how to build a character, make it expressive, and give it a soul. And if it continues to kindle the flame that Mary Kay Bergman sparked, I'm entirely behind that.

It's likely I would subscribe to PvP on the basis of Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub.

It's certain I'm going to subscribe if Dino Andrade is involved with it.

Besides, the little dinosaur 'grab-handle thing' Skull handed Brent the coffee with absolutely sealed the deal. "Gnram gnram!" indeed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:55 PM | Comments (25)

October 31, 2006

Eric: Time for the yearly Wikipedia bitching-out. After all, they've been *so* successful in the past, right?

From Girly.

I've received a number of e-mails about Josh Lesnick.

Specifically, the removal of Girly from Wikipedia.

Now, we've discussed this before. In fact, it's been a solid year since the last time we had this conversation. And in that year, as near as I can tell, the poisonous culture that's infected Wikipedia seems to have gotten no better.

It comes down to this -- very few people who are cognizant of Webcomics as an artistic form would even think about eliminating Girly. Girly's significance is broad and persistent. Josh Lesnick has been doing this for years. Josh Lesnick is one of those webcartoonists all the other webcartoonists read. He has had tremendous influence over the form. His development of Slipshine rewrote the book on NC-17 webcomics. Wendy was one of the seminal comic strips on the web, and while it's not Lesnick's best work it helped shape all that came. Cutewendy was a time of huge creative growth for Lesnick which itself provided a blueprint to many who came after of how to create and develop a purely joyful gag comic and have it Just. Plain. Work. And now we have Girly -- Lesnick's finest work to date, and a strip that has tremendous critical acclaim and a reading list that as far as I can tell includes put never everyone who is considered a notable webcartoonist by Wikipedia.

But Wikipedia has no mechanism for understanding derived influence.

They have no means of accepting solid expert opinion that says "this person is notable, not because of the breadth of his popularity, but because of the tenor of his popularity." Which is depressing, because that's why we actually need encyclopedias. If someone began to do serious research into, say, expanded canvas. Or into the influences on people like Scott Kurtz (who said on Digital Strips that he was a big fan). Or into the history of Keenspot. Or into the history of artists leaving Keenspot....

Well, they would turn to Wikipedia, figuring that it would be a more up to date and complete reference.

Only it's not. It doesn't come close.

I'll admit -- I use Wikipedia all the time. It's convenient, as a starting point. But I am always -- always -- conscious of the fact that it's only as reliable as the fatigue levels of competent people to refute incompetent but entitled people -- and that sooner or later, the incompetents always win that fight. As evidence, I submit Girly -- a strip no serious student of webcomics would describe as anything less than "notable," which failed the acid test for deletion because serious students of webcomics figured out long ago Wikipedia sucks on toast for this field, and only gets worse.

In the meantime, there's Comixpedia.org -- a comprehensive resource on webcomics that actually doesn't suck because the people involved actually know something about the field they're "editing." Go figure.

Girly, Wendy, Cutewendy, Slipshine, and Josh Lesnick himself all have extensive entries on that.

Gosh, almost like the Webcomics community -- for some value of community -- considers Lesnick notable, or something.

One can only look forward to whatever comes to replace Wikipedia, in hopes that it will succeed where Wikipedia -- a noble experiment with many, many good aspects -- has so clearly failed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:55 AM | Comments (100)

October 23, 2006

Eric: Addendum to the last -- Jesus, Sorkin. Go read a paper or something.

To add on to the last post... because now I'm obsessed....

One of the current subplots involves Jordan McDeere's brief ex-husband writing a tell all book about his life and sex club patronage (not that squeaky-clean Jordan enjoyed such nasty things -- and as a side note does anyone on the planet care about the scandalous lives... of network executives? I mean, show of hands -- who here could name six current network executives working for any of the networks? And of those executives, how many of them have sex lives you give a shit about. Anyone? Anyone?) It's as ridiculous as McDeere's drunk driving arrest making the news, when... well, see above RE network executives and giving a shit.

Well, now I've come to find out that the prostitute a drug-using Aaron Sorkin used to patronize wrote and self-published a tell all book about it.

With luck, Sorkin will someday soon run out of axes to grind and might get around to writing engaging television about things we actually do give a shit about.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:12 PM | Comments (11)

Eric: Live, from Studio Sorkin on the Aaron Sorkin strip, it's Monday Morning...

Long time readers (and really, who's left around here these days) know I love Aaron Sorkin. I love his dialogue, which takes the art of broadcast (or theatrical) dialogue back to the heydey of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I love his plots, which excel at taking the glorious and reducing it to the mundane -- and taking the mundane and exalting it into the glorious. (That's what made his tenure on The West Wing so good -- first off, he humanized the administration of the White House. You got a real sense of the everyday knocks and pressures the leaders of the Free World went under. And then, he managed to get you to care passionately about Farm subsidies and payroll deductions. The little day to day issues that are of paramount importance to actually running a nation like this were the real conflicts of the show. The big ticket stuff was just backdrop. Until he was forced out.)

Hell, the only Tom Cruise movie I've seen more than once is A Few Good Men. Sorkin's writing is solid enough that I can get over a near-pathological hatred for Tom Cruise. That's saying something.

Beyond actually loving Sorkin's work, I've also loved what Sorkin represents. In an era where, in Futurama's words, writing is essentially one of the minor technical awards at the Oscars -- in an era where what big name star you attach is paramount, what director you secure is key, but who actually writes the thing is irrelevant because it doesn't chart at the box office -- Aaron Sorkin became a significant and major presence because of his writing. His was the name to emerge from Sports Night. His was the name to cling to The West Wing. His departure from The West Wing is regarded by many as the shark-jumping moment of that series. Sorkin was like a megaphone shouting down into the well of American entertainment: the writer matters. What the writer says and does matters. And more to the point, absent the writer, none of the rest of it matters. The only way a kickass actor or director or producer can save a trainwreck of a script is if they essentially rewrite it. And that's not enough, in the long run -- there's a reason the phrase you can't polish a turd exists.

Needless to say, I watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

It's funny. NBC/Universal sort of owns me, right now. A year and a half ago, I'd have said that was impossible, but here we are. Of my top four slots on my Tivo's season pass list, three are taken up by NBC/Universal shows. Two of those are on NBC itself, on Monday Nights (Studio 60 and Heroes). The third is over on wholly owned subsidiary SciFi (come on -- you knew I watched Battlestar Galactica, right?). The fourth... well, I'm an old school Legion fan, and they have honest to God Interlac on that cartoon. Of course I watch it. But I digress.

Studio 60 is on one of those top four slots, like I said. But it's not number one. Nor is it second. Of the top four shows I will not miss recording at this stage of the game? Studio 60 is fourth.

And I'm not sure how solidly it's going to stay there.

On last week's show, Danny (played by ex-West Wing alumnus Bradley Whitford) looked up at the skybox in the theater -- the box reserved for the top brass at the fictional NBS television network -- and noticed that for the first time since he and fellow wunderkind Matt Albie (played by Matthew Perry) took over the venerable live late night comedy show Studio 60, the network president (Jordan McDeere, played by Amanda Peet) hasn't shown up to watch the show. Which is a laborious way to get to the quote I want to quote: "You think she fell out of love with us? It happens. People change."

Which is true enough.

Of course, Jordan hasn't fallen out of love with Studio 60. She's just out there fighting the good fight for quality broadcasting over mindless but popular schlock. But it's an interesting quote nonetheless. And it makes me wonder -- am I falling out of love with Aaron Sorkin? It happens, you know. People do change.

Only, I think it's Sorkin who's changing. Not me. Because in the old days? Sorkin was pretty good at concealing his jabs, his backbiting, and his thefts from his own life -- he certainly didn't let them interfere with his work. These days, the whole affair is All About Sorkin, and frankly it comes across as lame.

Let's start with the entire premise of the show. Four years prior to the pilot, NBS forces pioneering television producer Wes Mendell (played commandingly, passionately and all too briefly by Judd Hirsch) to fire hotshot superstar writer Matt Albie after Albie publicly supports Bill Maher after Maher's controversial post-9/11 statements blew up. Albie's BFF Danny Tripp walks when Albie walks, and the two go off to make movies, where they become so hot they're nuclear, baby -- living good is the best revenge. Flash forward four years, and the show is a shell of its former self, as Mendell's lack of backbone over Albie has translated into a complete loss of power across the board. Now his show is being written by total talentless hacks, standards and practices dictates what he can and can't do, and his life continues to be an ever descending spiral into irrelevance. Finally, after he tries to get an actually funny sketch on the show, both to inject humor into the show and as an act of penance (the sketch was one written by Matt Albie years before), only to have it shot down because it might offend Christians (the sketch was called "Crazy Christians" -- go figure), Mendell snaps on live national telvision. He goes on a rant so reminiscent of 1976's Network that the show name checks Network no less than twelve times through the rest of the show. The fallout is monumental, Mendell is fired, and in the process of damage control brand new NBS president Jordan McDeere says the core problem is people will think Mendell was right, and by firing him they just proved his point. To usher in a new era of courageous, quality television, they rehire Albie and Tripp to take over the show -- able to get them because Tripp, a recovering drug addict, fell off the wagon and failed a drug test, so for two years he can't get bonded to direct a movie. So, the pair comes onto the show to reverse its fortunes even as McDeere reverses the fortunes of the network as a whole, while contending with interpersonal issues ranging from a hack-laden writing room to Albie's ex-lover, Christian comedian Harriet Hayes (played by Sarah Paulson) distracting Albie by being all hot and sexy and stuff, while still... you know, being all Christian, too.

Got all that? Good.

A solid enough premise for a show? Sure. You have an automatic built in conflict right at the top -- every week they have to produce ninety minutes of cutting edge comedy to be performed live in front of America. You have tons of potential subplots. You have many quality actors playing many interesting characters. With quality. Granted, it's a television show about television, lacking even the underdoggish qualities that helped make Sports Night so endearing in the first place. Sure, Sports Night was about a television show -- but it was about a show that struggled hard to make third place among late night cable sports roundups. In part it was compelling because the stakes were so small. Studio 60 is a network's flagship show -- meant to be a solid competitor for comedic mindshare with Saturday Night Live itself, which is innately less interesting. But that's surmountable. In the end, we have a lot of characters, many of whom are sympathetic, and we have a lot of opportunities for that cracking Sorkin Dialogue being delivered at fast pace while the character stride through the set. And that's what we look for.

The problem is, Aaron Sorkin isn't writing the show I just described. Instead, he's writing Studio Sorkin on the Aaron Sorkin Strip Starring People Portraying Aaron Sorkin's Life, and as I said above, it's just lame.

Let's start with the whole situation. Take "Wes Mendell" and replace it with "John Wells," the executive producer who worked with Sorkin on The West Wing and who stayed on the West Wing after Sorkin was ridden out on a rail, and you have the situation Sorkin was in with NBC when he became controversial and was forced out. And you better believe he's making NBC pay for that now -- those gutless, spineless cowards who got rid of Sorkin when the going got tough are going to pay now that he's back.

Only, well, Sorkin wasn't fired for political comments. He was fired because he got arrested for drug possession years after he cleaned up his act in the first place, plus he was constantly late on the scripts he insisted on writing himself (and late in a network production means people sitting around doing nothing while being paid unimaginable salaries and overtime, which greatly upped the cost of doing business for The West Wing), in a time when the ratings were beginning to slip. But that's okay, he covers the drug issue with Danny Tripp (who mostly stands for Thomas Schlamme -- the director Sorkin works the most often with. Sorkin and Schlamme are pretty transparently represented by Albie and Tripp, though their qualities are intermingled between the pair) who then admits to the (secret) failed drug test on national television because that's courage (and thus subverts the whole point of bringing the pair in. Honestly, in the real world Albie and Tripp would be shown the door right then, because the entire point of bringing them on the show was to rehabilitate it, and they can't do that if Tripp's own drug woes become the story).

So. Matt Albie and Harriet Hayes are ex-lovers, driven apart because she's a Christian who actually recorded a Christian album and promoted it on the 700 club, and he's an agnostic Jew who thinks that Pat Robertson is evil and hypocritical. (Which she agrees with, but she still appeared on the show). Which would be a great point of romantic tension on the show, if we could ignore the fact that Aaron Sorkin used to go out with West Wing alumna Kristin Chenoweth, a self described liberal Christian comedian, television and broadway star who recorded an album of Christian music which she promoted on the 700 Club. I guess the best way to win an argument with your ex-girlfriend is to make it a subplot on your multimillion dollar television show and clearly paint you in the right and she in the wrong. Oh, wait, I don't mean 'best way to win an argument.' I mean 'most self-indulgent and moderately creepy way to perpetuate an argument.' My mistake.

Which isn't quite as unctuous as one of the faceoffs that Danny Tripp has with Jordan McDeere. McDeere has had an old arrest for drunk driving surface. Because we are meant to think that McDeere is spunky and pert and perfect in most every way (Sorkin actually quotes the famous exchange between Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore about McDeere: "You got spunk, Mary. I hate spunk." It is always a mistake to remind people of truly groundbreaking television on your show about television that isn't actually all that groundbreaking), it is the most bloodless "drunk driving conviction" we can possibly imagine -- McDeere pulled over herself, went to ask the cop directions, the cop had her blow in a breathalyzer, found she was over the legal limit, arrested her, and then the Judge literally expunged the arrest from her record. But, that doesn't stop Tripp from sermonizing to her about the differences between their vices:

Jordan: I'm sorry for the stupid thing I said in your office -- about the drugs.

Danny: Thirty thousand people died in car fatalities last year. Seventeen thousand of them weren't wearing seat belts.

Jordan: ...what does that have to do with anything?

Danny: No, it's just... you read it all the time. Two guys in a car. One wearing a seat belt, the other one isn't... they're doing sixty down [Mullholland Drive], they blow into a telephone pole. The guy wearing the seat belt's got two bruised ribs, a cut on his forehead and the guy without the seat belt gets decapitated.

Jordan: I was wearing a seat belt.

Danny: I'm sure you were. I'm just not as sure that everyone else on the Long Island Expressway was. When... I put a life in danger, it's my own.

Now, beyond the fact that we're talking about a drunk driving situation where the woman pulled over to ask a police officer directions and got caught over the legal limit, we're also discussing a drunk driving situation that apparently happened like twelve years before the episode. Danny, a known drug addict, was caught by a drug test two weeks before, and as a result has had his career capsized. So the argument is specious since all accounts are Jordan McDeere doesn't drink and drive. But beyond all of that....

Well, you know, I'm going to quote the master snark-meisters at Television Without Pity -- specifically, "Joe R," who says it as well as can be said:

They banter awkwardly for a moment, and then Jordan apologizes for "the stupid thing [she] said earlier, about the drugs." That's kind of her, and more than he deserves. Danny doesn't quite see it that way, however, and proceeds to, I swear to Christ, lecture Jordan about how when he does coke it's a victimless crime, because he's only harming himself, but when Jordan has a drink and then chooses to get behind the wheel, she's putting all sorts of people -- especially the seatbelt-less! -- in danger. Gee, thanks, DAD. When I first saw this scene, I almost couldn't believe they had Danny go there, and not even temper it by having Jordan call him a dick, because: oh my God, seriously. I'm sorry, Aaron Sorkin, that everyone made jokes about you smoking crack. They really should have taken a look at the gin and tonic in their hand before mocking the crack pipe in yours. Now can you please go back to making a TV show instead of telling everyone else what assholes they've been for criticizing you? Sometime before NBC cancels your low-rated ass?

Joe gets it in one.

In a later episode, the network is pitched a "sure fire hit reality show" by an extremely transparent pastiche on Mark Burnett, which all the networks are chomping at the bit at, but Jordan passes on it, and has to fight the Chairman of the network who goes to the owner of their parent organization to overrule her. She actually quotes Aaron Sorkin from an interview he had, likening Reality Television to "bad crack in the schoolyard" and goes on to say that if they stick to highbrow programming, they'll make money. Which is very Aaron Sorkin (one of the most egregious pre-Studio 60 inserts Sorkin did was a jab at ABC back on Sports Night, when he had the new corporate owner of the Continental Broadcasting Corporation say "anyone who can't make money off of Sports Night should get out of the moneymaking business") but also downright stupid. First off, reality programming is just like any other programming. There's bottom feeders and there's less so. Hell, PBS has reality shows where people try to live the way their ancestors did, and the reason The Amazing Race keeps winning Emmys is because it's actually good television. It especially amused me as the quote came out in the same week that NBC made it clear their new strategy was to program the weeknight "family hour" -- eight to nine PM -- with game shows and reality shows, from The Apprentice to Deal or No Deal, because... and I can't help this argument never got made on Studio 60... reality programming is vastly less expensive than scripted television. So, during a time when NBC is rehabilitating their last place stance with really solid programming like Heroes and (so I've been told) Friday Night Lights, they're managing to pay for it by giving over the least lucrative hour of television to the cheapest venues for television. This is how grownups do this kind of thing, you see. Grownups who understand that the television market is shrinking and ad buys don't go as far as they used to, and wishing doesn't make it any different.

But Sorkin is all about wishing. Still smarting after all this time over his Internet experiences, he throws a snarky bit into the mouth of one of his actors decrying blogging (gosh, why did that attract my attention) as being credential-less, and wishing the New York Times would go back to being the Media Elite instead of paying attention to some woman with "a freezer full of Jenny Craig and five cats." Now, I'll admit I'm not unbiased, but that's just stupid. This isn't journalism we're discussing -- this is criticism. The blogger in question was writing an opinion piece, and that kind of thing requires no more credentials than the trifecta of argumentative essay writing: a well written thesis, concrete support for one's thesis, and an audience to read it.

And then there's Darren Wells.

Darren Wells is a professional baseball player who is now casually dating Harriet Hayes. This makes him a foil for Matt Albie, who after all broke up with Harriet Hayes not long ago. She gave him a baseball bat that Wells signed -- one that as it turns out had his phone number on it. "You gave me a used cocktail napkin, basically," Albie snarks to Hayes in what was, admittedly, a fun exchange and one of the better moments of the show. Since then, we see Albie carrying the bat around, in reference and echo to Aaron Sorkin himself, who reputedly carries a baseball bat around with him as well.

But, Albie goes on long tears about Wells -- especially the fact that he gave Hayes a bat when he's a pitcher -- that he couldn't get a hit if his life depended on it -- and you know what? He's not all that great a pitcher either, damn it! And he's taller than Albie and bigger and stronger and younger, and and and and....

...and I'm sitting here going "wait a minute. His name is Darren Wells?"

Remember back above? Remember John Wells -- the producer of ER, the guy who was co-exec of The West Wing. The one who didn't leave when Sorkin got curbed? The one who took it over?

Yeah.

He's a pitcher, not a slugger. He couldn't get a hit if his life depended on it.

Pitching concepts to network executives, hit television shows. Oh, that Mister Sorkin is a clever one.

Only... ER predated The West Wing. It's still on now. And its ratings are significantly better than Studio 60's. Not only is it a pretty crass jab at someone who didn't stand by Sorkin when Sorkin was screwing up, it's a fluffed one.

And that brings us to the core conceit -- the biggest problem Studio 60 and Aaron Sorkin have: the core principle is "really good, highly literate television will work. The problem is, networks are shoveling out garbage so that's all people have to eat." And there's something to be said for that.

Only Studio 60 is operating way, way below expectations. Some people say it's too "inside," and that's true. Honestly, no one gives a damn about the high pressure world of Saturday Night Live except the people actually inside that world -- they just want to laugh on Saturday nights. All the topics on Studio 60 are fascinating, I'm sure, to the entertainment industry, but we need a lot more of that beautiful Sorkin dialogue and characters we really, really care about for anyone else to actually enjoy this stuff. And there's way too little of that right now.

Part of the problem is we lack one of the staples of the Sorkin ensemble cast. Generally, there's always a mentor figure, above the plucky heroine and snarky (Jewish) writer, who acts as a moral compass, a foundation, who lends gravitas to the proceedings. On Sports Night, it was Robert Guillaume, playing Isaac Jaffe. On The West Wing, it was the incomparable John Spencer as Leo McGarrey. And on Studio 60, it's clearly Judd Hirsch's Wes Mendell, only Wes doesn't make it fifteen minutes into the pilot before he's ejected from the building. It's like that point on Sports Night when Isaac has had a stroke (prompted by Guillaume's own stroke) and is hospitalized and far away from the proceedings -- there is a gap. An absence. A definite wrongness about everything. Only it started on Studio 60 on day one. They're all plucky upstarts or hacks or greedy network executives. We don't have that one person who can calm everyone down and get them all to talk to each other.

(It's possible the currently underutilized Cal, as played by Sorkin alumnus Timothy Busfield, is meant to settle into that role. However, on the pilot he was put in danger of losing his job and he hasn't actually settled into a firm sense of position in the cast since.)

As it is, we have morality tales and moralizers and pluck and wit and some beautiful performances. I'm serious -- I was never a fan of Friends and even within that cosm I didn't like Matthew Perry, but Matt Albie is a great character and Perry acts the Hell out of him. We also have a lot of glimpses of sketches which, to be honest, aren't that funny (to Sorkin's credit, they're unfunny in exactly the way that Saturday Night Live is generally unfunny, these days), though it makes it dissonant to hear how brilliant these sketches are. And there's some downright strange decisions. (I happen to like Sting, and I happen to like the Lute, and I thought the traditional lute piece and the cover of his own "Fields of Gold" that Sting did on the last episode were both beautiful, and I spent the whole time thinking "wow, this has totally derailed the show. Why am I watching Sting play the lute? What the Hell, people?")

But mostly, we have a show which comes across as Aaron Sorkin taking out his personal grudges against the world. And if he were doing it in a way that had us applauding and coming back for more, that'd be fine. But he's not. He's alienating people. He's boring others. He's confusing still others. And he's managed to not only not win Mondays, he's managed to be completely upstaged by the higher rated, far more compelling Heroes. In fact, he's managing to lose the audience Heroes leads in.

And each week, fewer viewers come back to watch Studio 60.

And I keep thinking "come on, Sorkin. This is you. You can pull this out. You can make it work."

But maybe he can't.

People change.

And people fall out of love.

We'll see what happens.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:44 PM | Comments (36)

October 11, 2006

Eric: Culture and Identity, and the kindness of coffee counter clerks.

They are, in the end, two of the simplest transactions in Western Civilization.

Seriously. You're on a long trip, on major highways. You pull off, and hit the drive through of a McDonald's. You order one of the extra value meals, with water. (Water and coffee are about all I can have from a McDonald's beverage menu.) You then stop at a coffee shop with a travel mug from that coffee shop, and get a refill with cream. I've done both thousands of times. I could do them in my sleep.

The highway in question was the Transcanada, heading southeast through Quebec. My ultimate goal was a border crossing in Vermont.

Now, the trip had been a lot of fun, up until that point. A little time in Ithaca and Syracuse, to show Weds some of the places I came of age as an idiotic twenty two year old. A drive north, across the border at the Thousand Islands. (A border crossing with a jam packed automobile, as we were moving Weds North. We were concerned of delays while being searched. As it happened, it took maybe twenty-two seconds of conversation and in we went.) And then, up into the greater Metropolitan Ottawa area.

Now, Canada is not America. There are a thousand reminders of that fact in every direction if you know to look. But Canada is comfortable for Americans. Especially for Americans like me. I grew up on the New Brunswick border. We used to go to Canada for lunch, at the Maple Leaf restaurant in Claire. I come from Acadia, where a variant of French is used on the street. I had decent enough French grades in school and I can still swear a blue streak in that hallowed patois.

But now, I was in Quebec. And it really hit home as I pulled up to the speaker box.

Intellectually, I knew the woman said something like "bienvenue à McDonald. Est-ce que je peux prendre votre ordre?" But it came out as meaningless sounds. All my smug complacency as to my knowledge and my place in the world just deflated.

"Parlez d'anglais?" I stammered, getting in wrong in more than one way.

There was a long pause. A difference voice said a curt "Yis?"

I ordered a Meal number two with water.

There was another pause. "Yis?"

I said something, relatively banal sounding, about chicken. It was the grilled chicken I was going for.

"Deux, yis. Yis yis."

Having no idea what else to do, I pulled to the window.

Three people were there. They were all smiling. I handed them a bill, and they murmured to each other. One nodded to me in an exaggerated fashion. They were all being very, very nice. They counted change, murmuring words half in English and French, and smiling very broadly when they handed me the money.

Now, I've heard stories about the Quebecois being (for lack of a better word) snarky with people who don't speak the language. I'm here to report that didn't happen. I legitimately think every person in this McDonalds wanted to help me, take my money, and give me food.

The same with the Tim Hortons I then went for coffee from. I actually walked into that place, as I had a travel mug, and it's significantly easier to hand someone a travel mug than it is to try and explain that you want coffee in a travel mug you already have to a person who doesn't speak your language. Walking in, I nodded pleasantly to the people coming out. They were dressed... well, somewhat differently than I would expect Americans to dress. I can't put my finger on it. Their clothes weren't radically different, but it was obvious just at the looking that they were people of another culture.

I held the door for a girl coming out as I went in. She favored me with a smile and a blur of language that might as well have been speaking in Tongues. I nodded, smiling without speaking. I felt my whole bearing shifting, becoming nonthreatening. I am a stranger here, I seemed to be saying. I mean no harm, nor disrespect. I simply need caffeine and I will be on my way.

I managed to stumble through je ne parle pas français at the counter. The girl behind the counter got a look of panic, looked around for someone, then gave me the most winning smile she could. "Yis?" she asked.

I held up the cup. She looked relieved and took it. She said something in French.

I blinked.

She repeated herself, slowly, then pantomimed putting things in the cup.

"Oh!" I said. "Coffee and cream?"

She paused, then nodded. She got the coffee and the cream. I think she would have liked to ask me about flavors and options, but neither one of us wanted that, right then.

She handed it to me very slowly, speaking in French very softly, enunciating each word.

And it hit me.

I was an idiot.

Literally. The only way that any of these high school kids could deal with me was to treat me as one of the feebleminded. Like I was developmentally disabled or just plain stupid. None of them were angry or annoyed -- just compassionate, and sympathetic to the sub-literate moron in their midst.

It is a shocking discovery. Less than seventy miles from my native land, myself a man who grew up in Franco-America, and my entire identity as an intelligent and literate man, given to rhetoric and clever turns of phrase, was obliterated. I was literally in a culture where I was reduced to pantomime and the kindness of sympathetic, almost patronizing strangers.

It's one thing to be depressed. I was plenty depressed. Leaving Weds behind in her home and native land was like cutting off a foot and replacing it with a clever bit made out of lego. I could walk and all, but every step reminded me of the loss. Now, I wasn't just depressed, I was an idiot.

I tried to get Ketchup chips for a friend from a convenience store, but I was simply not bright enough. The concept of "ketchup chips" was too difficult, and they weren't sitting out where I could get them. I got back into my car, thanked God for "pay at the pump" gas when I needed gas (though that involved long minutes of peering at the french display and occasionally making best guesses -- I must have looked downright stupid to any onlookers), and then driving once more, to make it back to America, where I could once more be a smart person.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:06 PM | Comments (39)

October 10, 2006

Eric: Apropos of nothing, she looks good in my green turtleneck.

(From Narbonic! Click on the thumbnail for full sized... well, you know.)

I am in Ottawa, Canada. It is very nice. I have met Frank Cormier and Meaghan Quinn in the flesh. They are both awesome.

Before that, we were in Ithaca. I showed Wednesday many places significant to Gossamer Commons.

In both places, I had alcohol.

I will tell you of these things in more detail another time. I have little time now. All I can say is this.

There was water in the swimming pool.

Was this the time? Does he need to <em>re</em>fill it? I dunno. But there was water in the pool today.

God, I love Narbonic.

Back later. I have to go tear my arm off.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:20 AM | Comments (34)

September 25, 2006

Eric: Requiescat In Pace: John M. Ford

And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me,
'Now you shall die,
Now none shall know.'
And the fool, looking down, believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulders, the naked stars,
Each one remembering.
--John M. Ford, The Final Reflection

I have a report from the truly wonderful weekend Weds and I had in Pennsylvania to write, but sometimes (all too often) life gets in the way. And then it's time to write another one of these damn things.

You may recall I'm part of a certain fraternity in the Role Playing Game developers community: guys who've written for Star Trek's officially licensed role playing game. That's an astoundingly cool thing -- a chance to play in the ultimate geek playground. But as neat as it is, the chances of actually influencing Star Trek that way are negligible. Sure, I can dream that someone will read my writeup on Mudd, decide it makes sense, and make reference to it in a later movie, but it's so astronomically unlikely that I might as well go back to hoping I win the lottery or spontaneous evolve superpowers: either of those is more likely. Even Kenneth Hite, arguably the finest Star Trek RPG developer in any system or game, hasn't had measurable effect on the universe we played in.

But one man did. One man hit the lottery. The same man who went on two write two Star Trek tie-in novels which rank among the best written, most popular, most commonly cited and most influential of the Star Trek tie in novels of all time.

His name was John M. Ford.

Ford's RPG work, over in Star Trek, was largely centered on Klingons. Back in those pre-Next Generation days, Klingons were an ill-defined metaphor for the Soviet Union -- a totalitarian race who enslaved peace loving worlds and turned them into fodder for their own empire. The closest we came to sympathetic Klingons was in Day of the Dove, and even that didn't make them into a fleshed out race. And in the plethora of Star Trek tie in novels, Klingons were adversaries and enemies at best. Barbarians and cruel sadists at worst.

Until John M. Ford came along.

Ford wrote several seminal products for the original Star Trek Roleplaying Game, published by FASA. He wrote The Klingons, Klingons: Star Trek Intelligence Manual, and Klingons: Game Operations Manual. He went from the then radical idea that Klingons shouldn't just be adversaries -- they should be a complete and fleshed out race. In fact, his work was designed to actually let players and GMs run entire Klingon-based campaigns -- campaigns that didn't need to focus on killing and torment, but actually were set in a consistent, workable, and above all alien empire.

Such things have been done before, and they've also been done since. But Ford pulled off something even more amazing. He (alongside editors and publishers at FASA) convinced Pocket Books and Paramount to let Ford also write a Klingon Star Trek-tie in novel. And that novel was entirely set in Ford's Klingon Empire, with the same terminology and assumptions he made for the role playing game being reflected in the novel.

That itself would be staggering. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in Star Trek. It would be many years and people like J. Michael Straczynski (with Babylon 5), Joss Whedon (with both Buffy and Firefly) and most significantly George Lucas (with Star Wars) before we would see tie-in literature and media incorporated into the official canon of their properties. Paramount has always been extremely chary about letting anything into the canon (including the entire Star Trek: The Animated Series). They sure as Hell never let two different license holders collaborate. That way lies chaos, and possibly even dancing.

But, they let Ford write his book. All by itself, that would be remarkable.

The book he wrote was The Final Reflection.

"It's not whether or not the bear dances well, but that it dances at all," or so they say. Well, this bear knew how to dance.

The Final Reflection is a serious and somber book about an extremely sympathetic protagonist who happens to be a Klingon. As we follow his life and times, we also learn about an empire where the strong grow, the weak fall into decline, and all others are kuve -- Servitor races, sometimes mistranslated as "slaves" (or even "meat"). There is even an analogue television program in the Klingon Empire -- Battlecruiser Vengence -- which culturally fits the same kind of roles for Klingons that a show like Star Trek (or, say, Galaxy Quest) would have fit for the Federation. There is the deeply significant chesslike game klin'zha. There is a heavy tradition of song, of music, of dreams. And of the stars in the sky above watching the deeds that brave men do and remembering them. There is an afterlife -- the Black Fleet, where brave warriors go to fight and spar for all eternity, killing their enemies a thousand times, laughing, and perhaps dying at their hands as well, for honor and glory.

Klin'zha is especially interesting. Our protagonist's foster father is a grand master of the game, and many Klingons believe that all of existence is itself an extended game of klin'zha (the Perpetual Game, as they call it). Fitting, perhaps, for a race that was itself largely defined (in this way, at least) as part of a Role Playing Game.

The Final Reflection sent a shockwave through Trek fandom. Back in those days, before any of us had ever even heard of Captain Picard, the Star Trek novels and the very rare movies (this was the same year that Star Trek III came out), the novels were what the faithful had to keep going. This novel stood out as one of the best -- it was serious, hardcore science fiction even if one cut out "Star Trek" from it entirely. It was even distinctive in that the original crew -- who had been in every other novel to come out, most of the time at the center of it -- were relegated to a wrapping device at the very beginning and very end of the book. This was a book almost entirely devoid of Kirk, and while both Spock and McCoy had some influence in the book, it was entirely different than we had come to expect.

Most of all, it was good. And it managed to make Klingons not just respectable, but sympathetic. People began to like the Klingons as more than brutes or enemies (or as more than a simple reaction against the Federation). While some folks (primarily Star Fleet Battles players, at least in my experience) enjoyed Klingons before that, it was always through the lens of their opposition to the Federation -- their antagonistic role. Now, Klingons could be protagonists.

Ford then followed this novel up with a second Klingon centered novel. It was a musical comedy.

Seriously.

The printed book was a musical comedy.

It was called How Much For Just the Planet and it was hysterical. From Scotty and a Klingon Engineer meeting and dueling on the field of honor (a golf course) to full sized inflatable starships, to an honest-to-Christ pie fight. And yet, the characters remained strong (and true to themselves) throughout. This was definitely the crew of the Enterprise from The Trouble with Tribbles and I, Mudd, but it was still the crew of the Enterprise.

While How Much For Just the Planet wasn't the same kind of epic transformation that The Final Reflection was, it was popular. Usenet sig files became full of quotes from it (my personal favorite being "Blueberry," Kirk thought instead of ducking. WHAM! Blueberry it was, which appeared quite often for a while in those sigs.) This was good old fashioned anarchic fun.

It was also a reaction against Paramount, who had explicitly kiboshed Ford's true sequel book to The Final Reflection. Their reasons became apparent quickly, when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, with a Klingon on the bridge. Paramount had begun to tighten their grip on Pocket Books's continuity, which in turn tightened their grip on the authors. Which Ford mocked in the book (at one point, Scotty looks at a distant mountain, notes its crown of stars, and makes mention of the comfort he feels in some higher power arranging them -- a clear reference to the Paramount logo).

Regardless, How Much for Just the Planet represented the end of Ford's involvement with the Star Trek license. But not his influence.

Klingons in The Next Generation and beyond are not Ford's Klingon's. For one thing, they're nowhere near as feasible, well developed, sustainable, rational, or alien. They are far more simplistic. And they're almost unreconcilable with the Klingons of the original series. In fact, the only way one could reconcile the two visions of the Klingon empire were through John M. Ford's eyes -- his Klingon Empire could support the original series and the far less sophisticated Next Generation model. However, even though Paramount went with other writers to create their House Klingons in Canon, you could see lots of places where the serial numbers have been filed off from Ford's version. The much mocked (and much celebrated) tradition of Klingon Opera comes from Ford, admitted or not. The three legendary Klingon captains from the Original Series to appear on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were named "Dahar masters," in echo of the foster father of Captain Krenn from The Final Reflection, an undrawn Grand Master of klin'zha.

And then there was "Heart of Glory."

"Heart of Glory" was the first Klingon-centered episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It featured Worf (the first episode to really put Worf front and center) meeting with renegade Klingon warriors. And it was clearly heavily influenced by The Final Reflection. Korris, one of the renegades, cries out "you have betrayed Kling!" in clear echo of the concept of klin from The Final Reflection. They make note of Worf's name (which he said was because he was fostered to humans before the "Age of Inclusion") in clear echo of the tradition of Klingons in Ford's work to change the first letter of their given name to K if they join the navy or M if they join the Marines. (All of the warriors' names began with K in the episode.) At one point, it looks like the Klingons were going to take a hostage, only to surrender the child in question. Worf is dismissive at Yar's concerns. ("Cowards take hostages. Klingons do not.") This was in direct echo of The Final Reflection:

Orion pirates take hostages for ransom. Kuve in desperation take hostages for their lives. And now the Federation shows us more rules than a Vulcan would make, about selling hostages! I will tell you what the Klingon law of hostages is: a dead thing is without value.

The only thing "Heart of Glory" lacked was Ford's name. It was a significant lack.

Ford has done much more than write about Klingons, of course. He wrote about elements of what would later be called Cyberpunk in 1980's Web of Angels, a full four years before William Gibson's Neuromancer and two years before the redefinition of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into Blade Runner. His book Growing Up Weightless won the Philip K. Dick award. He published poetry. And his RPG work was significant and broad: he did some of the seminal work on GURPS (including the GURPS 4th edition Characters section) as part of a long and fruitful association with Steve Jackson Games. He wrote some of the finest GURPS supplements, including GURPS Infinite Worlds and GURPS Time Travel. And he wrote The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, perhaps the single most significant work ever done for the Paranoia game.

Most of all, he was accessible. He was a notorious and fully forum gadfly. I had more than one conversation with him on the Steve Jackson Games forums. He was largely recognizable for his signature file, which was hysterical and which he changed at least daily (and sometimes it seemed for every post). He was also recognizable, of course, for being a funny and friendly and above all easy to talk to correspondent. Mike Ford (as he was called when not being formal) made any online home he was part of better by his presence.

And now he's dead.

Making Light broke the story. Neil Gaiman quoted the last e-mail he received from John M. Ford, just a few days ago. My friend Mason, who used to roleplay with him back in the days of the original pre-Seizure Illuminator BBS, is in shock. And everywhere I turn, people are sad, and so am I.

But not sad for Mike Ford himself. Because unlike so many of us, he had impact. He wrote good things people read and loved. He touched lives, he was always funny (even during some horrible health issues including a kidney transplant), he was always kind.

And I turn my eyes back to that improbable event that essentially no other RPG writer has done -- his Klingons, which actually reached up from his FASA products through truly great novels to help shape the course of Star Trek itself.

I said above that the one thing that "Heart of Glory" lacked was Ford's name. And it is true and it is wrong, not just because Ford's word deserved to be commemorated, but because Ford's work was better than what they ultimately went with. No episode of a future Star Trek will be dedicated to Ford's memory -- that's not the way Paramount works.

But his impact was still there. And in the poem I quoted at the top of this piece he pointed out an essential component of his Klingon culture. The stars see our actions. The naked stars know what we have done. It doesn't matter if the millions of fans of Star Trek know his name or not, if they know the things he did or not. John M. Ford's fans know what he did. His readers know what he did.

The naked stars saw his deeds, and each one remembers.

And so will I.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:46 PM | Comments (23)

September 20, 2006

Eric: Needful things and personal appearances

First off, and by far most importantly, Paul Taylor, the man behind Wapsi Square, has had a child with his wife. Unfortunately, the little one was born almost a month prematurely, and there are ongoing and mounting medical costs. His confederates at Blank Label Comics have put together a joint fundraiser to help this family through these expensive early months. There's some kick ass art and other such things being auctioned there, so go have a look and bid often.

If you'd like to contribute directly, there is a Paypal link on Wapsi's front page, or you can Paypal to pablowapsi@yahoo.com. In my case, I've both donated what little I could directly, and I also took the time to buy the Wapsi Square Print Collection, which I've been meaning to do anyhow. It's 160 pages of tasty goodness.

Secondly, for those of you who might be in a position to attend, there is a bit of excitement at the end of the week. Wednesday White and myself -- your action Snark team -- are two of the guests at the upcoming Free Culture Webcomics Lecture Series at Swarthmore College. In addition to Weds and myself we have good friend (and Modern Tales editor) Shaenon Garrity scheduled to be there. We have excellent online acquaintences (and people I'm looking forward to meeting in person) Howard Tayler and Rich Burlew coming. Finally, J.D. "Illiad" Frazer is coming, who I can't call an online acquaintance (I'm not convinced he knows what Websnark even is), but who I'm still looking forward to meeting.

The lecture takes place at 7 pm on Friday, with workshops on Saturday to boot. So, come on over if you're able and get your Academic on.

You know, after you give Paul Taylor a hand.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:05 PM | Comments (7)

September 13, 2006

Eric: Revelations

In the last five days, I have had a total of sixteen hours sleep. Which is a roundabout way of saying the school year has begun, and with it we have had our first monumental problems. I'm really tired of looking at my wiring closets at three in the morning. Life is miserable.

It is also worth noting that about seven days ago, Wednesday arrived. She is... well, perfect. Glorious. So, despite the assertions of the last paragraph? Life couldn't be better.

That's not what I'm here to talk to you about. See, I just got published.

Specifically, I was published (once again) over at Steve Jackson Games. And so, on top of my monumental fatigue, my first-week-of-school misery, and my joy at... well, domesticity... I have abject euphoria going for me. The combination should be considered a controlled substance.

Long time readers know that I love In Nomine. I love the game, I love the culture, I love the implications. I love the Symphony metaphor. I love playing with expectations. I love. This. Game.

Well, going back... man, eight years ago, we find that there were opportunities to submit outlines for expanded writeups of the Superiors. (Superiors meaning Archangels and Demon Princes -- the folks in charge of the War between Heaven and Hell.) And a lot of people ran out and did outlines for the major players -- Michael, Gabriel, Baal, Belial, Lilith. People you might have heard of, here or there.

And I? Submitted a proposal for Litheroy, the Archangel of Revelation.

Never heard of him? I didn't think so.

Litheroy was a so-called "minor" Archangel. This meant he didn't appear in the core rules, but instead was released in a supplement later on. He appeared, in fact, in the supplement that came with the In Nomine Gamemaster's Screen, featuring a skirmish in the never ending war between Litheroy and his opposite number (and Fallen former Servitor), Alaemon, the Demon Prince of Secrets. This supplement was ably penned by S. John Ross, and to be honest it was at most a blip on In Nomine's radar.

I loved it. And I loved both Alaemon and Litheroy. I loved them because they felt like such paragons of their Words (in In Nomine, a Word is a concept that a given angel or demon can be bound to, body and soul. In their cases, Alaemon's Word is Secrets, and Litheroy's is Revelation). I loved the dynamic between enemies that used to be so close. And I loved it because both of these Superiors subverted expectations.

Alaemon is an Impudite -- these are the most charming, social and human-like of the demons. But Alaemon's Word is Secrets, and he is paranoid and double-faced, never letting any of himself out where he could be hurt. In other words, one of the demons who most craves human contact and sociability is isolated by his Word and nature. I love that kind of innate conflict. It's so rife for character moments, for conflict, for tasty, tasty roleplaying. For eeeeeevil.

And Litheroy, the Archangel of Revelation, is a Seraph. The Seraphim are the highest order of angels -- the closest to God, and the furthest from Humanity. Their resonance and nature demands nothing but truth, and they have neither the time nor inclination to bend from it.

Only... Litheroy loves and is fascinated by humanity. He doesn't understand humanity. He can't understand humanity. But he yearns to understand humanity -- understand the alien twists and turns and self-deceptions they put themselves through. He believes that if they know the truth, it will set them free and they will find a purity of spirit to go with the great beauty of the human condition.

So. We have a demon who craves contact but fears everyone, opposed by an angel who is far removed from humanity but yearns to understand them. Each are subversions of what someone expects from a celestial of their type.

So. I submitted an outline for Litheroy, back in 1998. And as a lark, I did one for Alaemon too.

Alaemon got bought, and was published in Superiors 4: Rogues to Riches. And, while it's not my most celebrated RPG writing (I've been ENnie nominated for other stuff), it's considered one of my best. And some people say it's one of their favorite bits of In Nomine writing, period.

I don't know about that, but I know it makes me feel good.

Well, flash forward to two summers ago. Steve Jackson Games has created e23, their new online publishing venture. And with that venture comes new life for In Nomine. And hand in hand with that comes new life for Litheroy.

At this stage, I've published quite a bit of stuff in the RPG world. I've published in Star Trek supplements and written Westerns. I've done magazine articles and I've written [REDACTED BECAUSE DUDE, STILL UNDER NDA OVER A YEAR LATER AND WHAT THE HELL?!]

But, given a chance to actually write and publish Litheroy? The very first proposal I sent to the good In Nomine folks?

Oh, Hell yeah.

Writing it was a blast. Playtesting and editing was intense but good. And I am amazingly proud of the results. The "cover" art (sampled above) is by Ramón Pérez, of the fantastic webcomic Butternut Squash. The layout and production values of the PDF are great. And it took a long, long time to appear because....

...well, because that's the publishing game.

Most of all, electronic or not, this is an RPG product by Eric A. Burns. It's based on material done by S. John Ross, Derek Pearcy and others, but it was all put through the filter and crucible of my brain. This isn't a co-author credit, or a "section by" me. This is my damn RPG supplement.

It's significantly longer than was contracted for. I offered the extra verbiage at no extra fee, because I wanted to do this right. And I'm God damned proud of the result. Litheroy was, in his own way, as much fun to write as Alaemon was. It's somehow really cool to get into the mindset of someone so completely guileless. Someone who accepts the world is not as he wants it to be, but doesn't accept that it has to be that way or that it should be that way.

I'm torn. I really, really want people to spend the eight bucks and buy this thing. I want them to read it, and enjoy it. At the same time, I recognize that it's a supplement for In Nomine, and not everyone might be interested. Fortunately, if you go to the catalog page, you'll see a preview that includes a table of contents that maybe will whet your appetite, both for Litheroy and for In Nomine in general.

And one or two of you might buy it because, well... you like me and you want to buy my supplement. I'm utterly okay with that.

I'm a writer. I write. For money.

There's proof, right over there.

Work is Hell. Weds is here. I am published.

Life is good.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:14 PM | Comments (31)

September 6, 2006

Eric: Lea Hernandez Needs Our Help. Seriously.

Lea Hernandez, author and artist of the epic and wonderful Rumble Girls books, a former Transmetropolitan artist, as well as the former editor of Girlamatic, has suffered a terrible house fire. Her family is safe, though they lost some of their pets (two dogs and four cats). They have also lost an incredible number of the necessities of life and of Lea's business. They have lost most of their clothes. They have lost shelter. They have lost almost all of their media collection. They do not yet know how much of Lea's original art is gone.

Lea is an incredible person, a firebrand in comics (in Gail Simone's words, which I agree with), possessed of an iron will and a kind heart. And right now she is in great need, both on her behalf and on behalf of her own family.

I am going to repost what Gail Simone posted, via The Beat, the Talkaboutcomics blog, and other places. We ask everyone who reads this be as generous as possible. Lea has meant a great deal to the webcomics world, the print comics world, the world of graphic novels, the world of art... you name it, she's had an impact. Let's show her how wide that impact is.

Early this morning, the Texas home of award-winning writer/artist Lea Hernandez, my friend and co-creator of the graphic novel Killer Princesses, caught fire and burned. Half her house is now gone, and the rest is smoke-damaged. In addition, she lost at least six of her family’s beloved pets, two dogs and four cats. If you knew Lea, you’d know how devastating that is.

She’s lost a great deal of her family’s possessions, including irreplaceable art. She doesn’t yet know the full accounting of what’s been lost at this time.

Most know Lea as the brilliant creator of such works as Rumble Girls and Cathedral Child. She drew the Marvel Mangaverse PUNISHER book, and has drawn for TRANSMETROPOLITAN, among many other accomplishments. She is also the co-founder and original editor for GIRL-A-MATIC, one of the most important venues for female-friendly comics created to date.


She’s also my friend, and it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have a career in comics if she hadn’t asked me to write Killer Princesses for her to draw.

And finally, Lea is one of the last great firebrand hellraisers in comics.

Lea has two (wonderful, amazing) special needs children and right now they need a place to stay and some clothes to wear. More than that, they need some help, and fast, in the form of donations to her paypal account. Lea’s a proud person so I’m going to ask FOR her. This is important, and a great chance to do a wonderful thing for a creator who has consistently enriched this industry we all love so much. Please, take a moment and send WHATEVER YOU CAN to Lea’s paypal account and help make this time a little bit less painful for someone who would do the same for you if the positions were reversed.

If you’re a retailer, I ask that you set up a donations jar. If you’re a creator, I ask you to think of how devastating this would be to your career and donate what you can. If you’re a reader, I’m asking you to take a moment and hit the paypal link. You’ll be doing something heroic and you’ll feel great about it, I promise.

Read what Lea had to post on a neighbor’s computer while wearing her pajamas at: Livejournal.com/users/divalea

Donate (PLEASE) to her paypal account at: REVISED: divalea@gmail.com

Finally, if I understand the story correctly (as told to me by Lea’s good friend and current Girl-a-matic editor), it was Lea’s daughter hearing the smoke alarm that allowed the family to get out in time, so for God’s sake, do everyone you love a favor and CHECK YOUR SMOKE ALARMS.

> Thank you so much for helping. Really, any amount you can send will make a difference. That’s all I can say.

Sincerely and gratefully,


Gail Simone

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:59 PM | Comments (10)

August 29, 2006

Eric: Omnipedia: Meta'd

I did this a while ago, as part of a background for a role playing thing I was doing. Hand in hand with it was some noodling with old Superguy concepts, and the odd notes for background materials for some potential fiction I wanted to write.

Why I did it in the style of a faux Wikipedia article I can't say.

Anyhow, it interests me, and I figured it might interest some of you, too. So enjoy.

---

(Taken from 2025 Omnipedia article on Meta'd, under a Creative Uncommons License.)

OMNIPEDIA "One Tome to Rule Them All, One Tome to Find Them. One Tome to Bring them all and in the Darkness Define Them."

Category: Culture: Modern Street Gangs

META'D

The Meta'd (pronounced 'metaed') are a loose network of related 'sets' or street gangs in major metropolitan centers of the United States. Originally centered in the Midwest, particularly Chicago and Detroit, the Meta'd now have significant concentrations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and the Pacific Northwest. Unlike most street gangs, the Meta'd typically organize around paranormals (thus the word 'meta'd,' which is derived from the slang term 'meta,' which means superhuman or paranormal human), and so often individual sets of Meta'd can rival much larger non-superpowered (or "norm") gangs in power and influence. Meta'd are typically identified by wearing blaze orange (the color typically worn by hunters), with different sets using different applications to denote their individual set allegiances. Some sets of Meta'd have rivalries as intense as any the Meta'd have with external street gangs. Meta'd are often associated with the more militant side of neo-punk music.

History

The Meta'd first appeared in Chicago, when Ted "Slash" Condit and Roberto "Burn" Gabriel struck up a friendship, though they were members of rival norm street gangs. The pair realized they had more in common than they had with their gang members, and both knew other paranormals (generally with limited powersets) who found themselves marginalized even within their own gangs or separate from themselves. Forswearing their old allegiances, they founded the L-Train Loop Meta'd in 2014.

The Meta'd grew in Chicago and the ideas began to spread to other cities almost immediately. To a certain degree, this caught authorities by surprise, since there was little indication that paranormality had become quite this common. (The conventional wisdom to that point had the rate of American paranormality -- which was believed to be a higher concentration than the rest of the world -- was approximately 1 in 1.1 million. By that standard, statistically there should have only been two or three paranormals in all of metropolitan Chicago. Instead, the Meta'd of Chicago had grown to 50 members in various loosely affiliated sets by 2015. While some no doubt came from other cities, there was clearly a much higher native paranormal population than was previously expected. Some sociologists believe that due to discomfort with their abilities (and the differences perceived between themselves and normals) a high percentage of metahumans with limited powersets never reveal themselves as paranormal -- with the appearance of the Meta'd, these paranormals -- particularly those from disenfranchised, disadvantaged or economically depressed or otherwise dysfunctional conditions -- found the idea of a safe haven very appealing.

Over the next several years, the different sets of Meta'd have grown and flourished in and around other gang cultures. As Neo-punk began to gain traction in urban areas, many Neo-punk artists have developed strong ties to the Meta'd community, with groups such as the Cheshire Kittens and Death of Superguy using Meta'd as security for their venues. (The Cheshire Kittens typically wear blaze orange on stage, identifying themselves with the Meta'd directly, though it's not not know what if any set they were ever actually part of.)

The Meta'd Today

The Meta'd have known sets in Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, New York City, Miami, Baltimore and Boston. The sets are at best loosely affiliated, and rival sets have been known to emerge in the same city. At the same time, Meta'd typically stick together when threatened by norm gangs, so many norm gangs simply leave the Meta'd alone.

Gang income comes from the usual sources -- protection/extortion money from their neighborhoods, crime, petty theft, being hired out by bodyguards (particularly among neo-punk artists and the neo-punk community), and in some situations controlling drugs and/or prostitution in their areas. Most sets -- even those who run drugs to norms -- eschew drug use themselves for safety reasons and to set them apart from norms. Some sets specialize in the so-called Power drugs that grant some measure of paranormality to normals for brief periods of time as part of their effect (or side effect). There are rumors that some cut these drugs (or make them unusually pure), either in an attempt to injure norms or to drive the creation of new permanent metahumans. Gang representatives dismiss such claims as propaganda.

One interesting division between sets are their attitudes towards sympathetic norm gangs. Some sets of Meta'd form alliances with norm gang sets as part of a mutual protection pact (these are called the "Live" Meta'd, for "live and let live."). Others eschew all such alliances as a violation of what the Meta'd stand for (these are known as the "Pure" Meta'd). One of the best known of these schisms is in the Seattle Meta'd community. The Aurora Street Meta'd are a set of Live Meta'd directly tied to a norm street gang that calls themselves the Aurora Street Metabees (for "Meta-wannabe"). The Metabees wear bright shocking green bandanas on their left upper arms. The Aurora Street Meta'd wear their orange bandanas on their left upper arms and a darker green bandana underneath it. In contrast, the Broadway 2-Told Meta'd, from the Broadway neighborhood, are a strictly Pure Meta'd set who guard their territory from any encroaching norm gang activity, and wear their blaze orange on their right arms. (And naturally wear no green colors at all.)

Politics and Sociology

One common trait between Live Meta'd and Pure Meta'd is in the political arena. Many Meta'd actively campaign for broader acceptance of metahumans in society. The restriction of paranormals from such lucrative careers as professional sports (often seen as a route off of the streets for athletic norms, but denied to metahumans as unfair to human competitors) and various legislation designed to maintain public order and enforce fair business practices are seen as blatantly discriminatory against the metahuman community by a significant percentage of the Meta'd.

More radical elements within the Meta'd hold forth that the superior abilities the Meta'd possess should yield superior privilege -- that if metas were given unrestricted access to the opportunities the norms enjoy, then metas would swiftly displace norms at the top of the social order. They call for immediate abolition of all legislation restricting paranormality and its expression in legitimate business, holding forth that given equal opportunity, metahumans will swiftly outcompete normals. They also hold that this truth is self-evident to the point that normals actively conspire to oppress metahumans, in order to preserve norm prerogatives. Finally, some sets of Meta'd believe themselves wholly above norm law, since the laws are written to benefit norms over metas.

One prevailing theory among cultural anthropologists and sociologists is that with the decline in the past two decades of so-called "Supervillain activity" (in particular the grandiose schemes of potential world-conquerers, many of whom employed low level or otherwise less potent metahumans), the paranormal elements of law enforcement are seen less as protectors and more as oppressors by the underclass. Absent a more ritualized "supervillainous" outlet, they find themselves collecting and developing into ganglike structures. Certainly, a key component of the Meta'd philosophy is that "super heroes" are traitors to their race, acting to protect norms instead of exalt metas. Meta'd have similar responses to the concept of secret identities -- finding such 'passing' behavior to be the social equivalent of closeted homosexuals, who feel they will have their rights infringed upon and become social outcasts should their secret be revealed. The act of concealing one's paranormalities so that they can appear 'normal' is referred to in Meta'd circles as "bluesuiting," from a speech given by Meta'd activist Helen "Cold-T" Taylor:

"You know what I'm talking about. The god lands on Earth, and conceals his spandex suit and bright red cape. He puts on a blue suit and tie that makes him look stiff and awkward, and combs his hair to look unexceptional. His eyes are much better than human eyes, but he puts on glasses so he looks weak, and frail. He clothes himself not only in mundanity but in depectitude, and acts the part of the awkward fool, so no one suspects he is not a man, but a god. The Meta'd reject these blue suits. They reject these glasses if we do not need them to see. We reject the idea that we must not just conform but present as inferior to the normals around us. We stand before you proud, distinctive, and dare I say it superior. We embrace our godhood."

Another catchphrase of Meta'd philosophy is the principle of "Just Clever Enough," which is held up as a key component of norm oppression of metahumanity. This too comes from a Meta'd activist's speech -- in this case, Charles Foster White ("I.Q. Nu") of San Francisco's Wharfside Meta'ds:

"We threaten norms because we outdo them in every way. The golden trait of humanity over all other species has always been intelligence. They think, they rationalize, they use language, and they conceptualize, and so they can master lions and tigers that are stronger and faster and more physically robust. And now there are metas. And one of the four most common metahuman expressions is enhanced intellect. Metas think better than norms. Metas rationalize with greater facility and sophistication than norms. Metas can develop languages and concepts norms cannot begin to keep up with. If intelligence is the great advantage of humanity, then humanity is doomed.

"However, the norms have figured something crucial out. While they stand at the top of the heap, they do not need to be smarter than metas. They do not need to be more clever than metas. They do not need to be better than metas. They simply have to be just clever enough. They have to be just clever enough to pass laws that say we cannot use our powers in the course of human affairs. They have to be just clever enough to lift some of our most powerful up, and convince them to act on behalf of norms over metas, to negate our advantages. They have to be just clever enough to consistently act in their own best interest instead of in the interests of a greater justice. They have to be just clever enough to know that if they keep us minimized and disorganized we cannot pose a threat to them no matter how powerful or clever we are.

"And so I say we must not strive to outthink them. We must not strive to use brute intelligence or strength against them. Instead, we must come together. We must recognize their tactics. We must understand that if we act as one, with organization and with cunning, we can defeat the impediments they put in our path. We do not need to collectively be more clever than all of them -- we need to be just clever enough to act in our own best interest, in a way that counters them. Once we do that, our natural superiorities will let us outstrip them, and we will assume our rightful place without any need for violence or pain."

This sense of inevitable superiority over norm society is a common trait among Meta'd. Some sets of Meta'd (particularly Live Meta'd sets) feel that as metahuman expression becomes permitted in norm society, the natural advantages paranormals possess will elevate them to prominence. Others -- particularly among the Pure Meta'd -- believe that being "just clever enough" involves knowing when to actually strike back. The debate is typified by Evolution versus Revolution -- the former believing that Metahuman superiority is inevitable and will come in due course, the latter believing that only by shattering the old world order can a new world order take place. Neither camp, however, is particularly concerned with what happens to norms as society changes. "Norms don't care about me," Cheshire Kittens guitarist Tabitha "G-Listening" Strong once said. "So why should I care about them? I'll look after my own kind. There's a lot of norms out there. If they got off their fat asses and did for themselves instead of letting Uncle Tom metas protect them, they'd be able to take care of themselves, right?"

The use of paranormals as 'super heroes' and other forms of law enforcement -- which some might say is the traditional use of paranormals in American society -- is seen as direct evidence of a cornerstone of the Meta'd philosophy: the oppression of the paranormal on behalf of the normal. The recognizable tropes of Superhumanity -- the distinctive (often sexually exploitive) costuming, the adoption of codenames so as to make them archetypes instead of identifiable people, the use of "secret identities" to allow super heroes to assimilate into norm society when they aren't acting to protect that society, and even the use of 'signals' and other dramatic devices for norm police to summon paranormals at their whim to fight (generally metahuman) opposition are seen as clear signs of the devaluation of superhuman identity hand in hand with the exaltation of superhuman acts on behalf of norm society. "Good" superhumans strike down antisocial metahumans on behalf of norms, then change into their blue suits, put on their glasses, pretend to be norms themselves, and don't even ask for thank yous in return. Meta'd activists claim that these acts marginalize and devalue metahumanity on both sides of the equation -- "uppity" metahumans get struck down by docile "superheroes," thus preventing norms from having to do anything about paranormal rights.

Paranormal poet, writer and philosopher Dr. Harold T. McGinnis (himself a public Meta'd sympathizer), wrote about the issue this way in The New Yorker:

"My heritage is African, my birthplace is America. And, like many African Americans of my generation, I have reaped the benefits of the Civil Rights struggle that began previous to the Civil War in this nation and culminated in the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. And while we have not yet achieved all our goals, we are vastly closer than our grandfathers were. And so I have studied the Civil Rights Movement and the attendant movements that surrounded it, and I have been struck at how differently the Metahuman Rights Movement actually is.

"Blacks used to extol 'Black Power,' but more telling was the Black Panther's exhortations of 'all power to the people!' All people, not just black people, and not just white people, should share in the power. This was the key to our struggle in those days -- we were not asking to be made masters in the house where once we were slaves. We were demanding that our former masters look us in the eye and shake our hands, both sides free and equal in all things.

"This is not something metahumans can say, with a clear conscience. We cannot claim a desire to be equal in all things with our normal brethren, because we cannot be equal to them. Our powers and abilities make us demonstrably, obviously superior in too many ways for us to claim 'equality.' If all barriers were stripped away tomorrow -- if metas could compete with norms in all arenas, then the next day would see the sun setting on norm dominance. They simply cannot compete.

"The Zooside Meta'd of New York once challenged the New York Knicks -- that year's World Champions -- to a pickup game. The Knicks declined, which was probably smart on their part. The Zoosiders have four different metas with enhanced dexterity, speed, agility and accuracy in different ways, not to mention a character whose arms stretch far enough to let him 'dunk' free throws and another who could leap for a dunk from center court. However, the idea that these tall men of basketball are "world champions" is ridiculous on the face of it. I say, let them play a team of Meta'd. In 2019 the NBA Salary Cap was made $142 million per team. All right. Do a best out of seven series between the Knicks and a given local Meta'd gang. If the Meta'd win the best of seven series, give them the next year's one hundred and forty-two million and let the Knicks try to make ends meet. Do you think the Knicks will take me up on that offer?

"Put metas of intellect into 'publish or perish' positions in direct competition with norms, and they outperform the norms four to one in research and publication. This has been shown time and again, to the point that private laboratories typically have clauses in their contracts that restrict meta researchers from claiming full patent rights or exercising stock options in the same way, lest they overwhelm their less gifted colleagues and end up running the company de facto if not de jure. American business learned the lessons of Awesome Amalgamated and Harxxon Energy well, and norm executives have moved to secure their industries and their positions against the encroachment of the next Andy Awesome or Chalandra Harkness.

"Give metas a chance to use their paranormalities to make a living, and they will always -- always -- exceed norms in that same position. I don't care if we're discussing steelworkers who can withstand the heat of blast furnaces or nanotechnicians who can shrink to atomic size or even ditch diggers who never get tired and can dig a ditch in fifteen seconds instead of fifteen minutes. When give absolutely equal opportunity alongside norms, with all preference or prejudice taken out of the equation, the metas win every time.

"That means that we cannot demand equality and expect to be heard. It cannot be done. And we cannot even blame the norms for their perceived prejudice or short sightedness. The norms are not short sighted -- they can see all too clearly the inevitable result of metahuman equality, and they don't like the looks of it one bit.

"And yet, metahuman equality -- the reduction and elimination of all barriers to metahumans in society -- is inevitable. It is inevitable because it is the only fair thing to do, and it is inevitable because if America doesn't open its society to metahumans, some other society will -- and that society will overrun America in the long run. Darwin is alive and well, and the most fit will take over the right niche, like it or not. The question is, will American norms figure out that their long term best interest is in embracing their future quickly, letting themselves take a subordinate role to their gifted and superior children, and letting our Nation be the leader in the changes to come... or will they hold onto their power and suppress the smartest, fastest, strongest and most capable members of their society, marginalizing them and calling them "villains," until one day they discover that the Europeans are colonizing Titan and curing cancer and running their flying cars without gasoline, and no one will even trade with us because of our backwards ways?"

{This article has been MARKED FOR DIVISION into "Meta'D," "Meta'D Philosophy" and "Just Clever Enough." Please go to our forum and make your opinions heard!}

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Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:26 AM | Comments (45)

August 13, 2006

Eric: And crude euphemisms appearing in my e-mail box in five... four... three... two...

Every so often, someone tells me sexism in comic books doesn't exist. That yes, the costuming is sexualized but it's the same for both sexes.

Here's what I'd like to see.

I'd like to see every team based comic book in a month have its sexes inverted. All the men become women, and all the women become men. But page composition should remain exactly the same. Posing should remain the same.

And costuming should directly port. The new "Batwoman" or "Captain America" wear costumes exactly the same, except cut to be similarly form fitting on a female figure. The new "Wonder Man" or "Scarlet Warlock" (I won't dignify what they've done with the Scarlet Witch over the years with Wiccan terminology) would have clothing similarly cut to bare legs, buttocks, and pectorals. (Probably some kind of high cut wrestling unitard or the like.) Obviously, a character like Spider Woman would end up with a full body suit. However, in cases where "full jumpsuited" heroines usually have front zippers unzipped to somewhere between the cleavage and the navel, the resulting man will have his suit unzipped the same amount.

In the comics themselves, posing will port absolutely one to one. Where male superheroes have poses that accentuate the buttocks or penis, the new female characters will have the same. Where they have nonsexualized poses or poses accentuating the face, the new female heroines will have that. Where female superheroes are posed to accentuate their breasts, crotch, buttocks or legs, the male hero will have his pectorals, crotch, buttocks or legs accentuated exactly the same way.

Which brings us to anatomy. In cases where the male superheroes have exaggerated physiques (Superman, Thor and Captain America all fit the bill) the new heroine versions would have similarly exaggerated female anatomy (so Superwoman would be large breasted and hipped, as an example). On the other hand, where male physiques aren't particularly overly enhanced (like, say, Spider-Man) the female hero would be similarly slender and small busted. The primary goal should be to highlight the differences in male body types in that given comic as different female body types. Finally, overtly sexual heroes (especially in the area of the Johnson -- say, the Schumacker era Bat Codpieces and Nippled uniforms) would yield similarly overtly sexual heroines, while more restrained heroes would produce sexually restrained heroines.

Similarly,in situations where superheroines have exaggerated female anatomy (large bust and hips, generally), the man would have exaggerated musculatures (think bodybuilders/male strippers), buttocks and crotches. So, Wonder Woman would yield a Wonder Man who looked like an overbuilt prettyboy pro wrestler with an armadillo down his speedos who is at least as well built as superman with particular attention to detail in the primary male characteristics, while (most depictions of) Kitty Pryde would yield a slender runner's build hero. Once again, the primary goal is to show the diversity of female forms in a given issue turned male. And in situations where a heroine is overtly sexualized, the resulting hero should be overtly sexualized.

This would carry through to the villains and bystanders as well. Male police officers in the original would be female in the new version. Female secretaries in business professional outfits would be male secretaries in business professional outfits. Female secretaries, on the other hand, in 'business professional' that looks more librarian dominatrix than anything would yield men kitted out for their fantasy appeal more than their businessplace professionalism. Male thugs of various sizes and shapes would be female thugs of various sizes and shapes, and vice versa.

Above all, and I can't emphasize this enough, no more attention should at any time be drawn to the sexual characteristics, poses, attire or attitude in the new comic than in the original comic. The urge to either overcompensate or undercompensate for the gender swap would be overpowering. It would have to be fought off at all costs. For the experiment to work -- for what level of implicit sexism actually exists in comics to be appropriate revealed -- the comics would need to map as closely as possible.

The thing is? If they were absolutely accurate to nine decimal places, at the end, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of comics fans would think they were exaggerated to desexualize the women and overly sexualize the men. Consider the cover of New Avengers #7, conveniently on Wikipedia. We would have a large busted (though fully clothed) female Sentry with some sexuality to her walk (though not overly much), a slender Spider-Woman, an almost entirely desexualized Iron Woman, a Spider Man (James Drew) at least as muscular as Sentry is shown on the original, in a filmy bodysuit absolutely posed for sex (with very prominant and large penis), a female Captain America (chesty, but in highly concealing scale mail, not terribly sexual at all), a short, somewhat squat female Wolverine, and a well (and loosely) covered ronin. Going inside the comic, we'd find a world full of women with occasional token men (all slinked up in their SHIELD uniforms), and every page (the Drew) Spiderman was on would emphasize his pectorals, his buttocks, his legs or his crotch. And of course, he'd be the only man on the team, and his maleness would be kind of emphasized as primary characterization.

Or consider a Justice League -- sure, you'd have a busty Superwoman and Captain (ex-Billy) Marvel, a somewhat more slender Green Arrow or Hal Jordan Green Lantern in full body suits, a Batwoman mostly covered by her cloat at all times -- heck, if we're lucky a faceless female Question in a business suit and trenchcoat. But you'd also have Wonder Man, Zartra and Black Canary (the latter two in netted tights and high cut hipped costumes). And of course, Power Boy.

Look, I don't claim any moral high ground here. I play mostly female characters in City of Heroes because I like to look at them. Hell, back in my Superguy days, I had a character (admittedly meant as a bad Wonder Woman parody) called Spandex Babe. But the simple fact is this -- there is monumental sexism in American comics. Not mild sexism. Not "oh, it's there but it's not so bad, because the guys are just as sexualized as the girls." Monumental. If we had a single month where a second issue of all the team comics came out with all the genders reversed as absolutely fairly in all ways as possible, the vast majority of (male) comics fans would accuse them of being A) unfairly balanced and B) borderline male pornography.

(Almost certainly that actual accusation would be "gay pornography," but that's another essay.)

The first step to acknowledging the sexual double standard and the extremely prevalent and overt sexism in comics is to actually acknowledge it. So why not come right out and do it. One month, where we just flip roles. Let's see how many male role models most teenaged American boys would want to follow would come out of that month.

While we're at it, let's see how many of those teenage boys bought the issues in question.

Gosh, maybe we can figure out one or two reasons why girls don't buy as many superhero comics as guys while we're at this.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:22 AM | Comments (91)

July 17, 2006

Eric: Oh, might as well finish the job.

I've been asked about the Webcartoonist's Choice Awards, as well.

I have two basic reactions, really.

First off, there's no winner I disagree with. I think pretty much each and every one of them is deserving.

At the same time... I'm perfectly fine with an award where webcartoonists nominate the... er... nominees. And then vote. I think that's perfectly valid. But when you've started by taking a small group and having them select the nominees, you have to accept who they nominate. Tossing a nominee from a category as inappropriate in effect negates the people who devoted a nomination slot to it, mostly because they disagree with your definition. Or because they got organized enough to screw with you.

So, you know. I'm happy enough with the list of winners, but I'm having a hard time putting much stock into the whole affair this year. On the whole, I'm beige.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:20 PM | Comments (29)

Eric: You know, I haven't gotten into trouble in a long time.

I should open this discussion with a frank admission: I don't read Dominic Deegan.

I have friends who love it. One friend in particular has tried on numerous occasions to engage my enthusiasm. That he didn't succeed proves nothing other than I'm not him, and he's not me. It's one of those that just didn't grab me. There are lots of them. It happens.

That's not what I'm here to talk about today.

I get mail. It's generally a lot of fun. But a non-trivial amount of the mail I get... well, has an agenda to it. Or at the very least wants to line up sympathetic support from perceived authorities (after all this time, I still have some trouble seeing myself as an actual authority, mind). And today I've gotten some mail about Dominic Deegan. In particular, about the note that Michael "Mookie" Terracciano (the webcartoonist in question) put up on the strip, reprinted here wholly without permission:

Wow.

I had a lot of people really mad at me this weekend. Lots of forum posts and e-mails about how upset y'all were about Siegfried's death. There was even some name-calling in a few instances. I kinda felt like there was a big middle-finger hovering over me wherever I went this weekend, like one of those little black rainclouds... only in the shape of a middle finger. Hell, even my mother was mad at me this weekend (although for completely unrelated reasons).

But Siggy's demise seemed to open up a floodgate of feedback about how unhappy many of you are with this storyarc and the comic in general. Many of you said that the comic has "gone astray" or "descended into melodrama" or "there's too much angst." For those of you who would like things to lighten up, I ask you to bear with me for just a little while longer while things wrap up with The War In Hell. Afterwards, things won't be so "epic" around here.

Oh, and there won't be so much crying in the rain.

Now, I know why I'm getting mail about this. I'm getting mail because of terms like "Cerebus Syndrome" and "First and Ten Syndrome" and stuff I've written about General Protection Fault and the like. I get that. I understand.

(Though it's worth noting, for those who have equated this situation with GPF's -- Terracciano's saying "hang in with me, and things will cycle up." Darlington said, roughly, "go away and come back and read the whole thing as a single unit after the morbid stuff is over." Apples and oranges. But I digress.)

And you know -- it's possible. Maybe Terracciano is going for the Cerebus. Maybe he's going headlong into First and Ten. I don't know. I don't read the comic. Though it's worth noting -- if the series has been a mixture of serious and light all along (or at least for the last X amount of time), then it doesn't apply. It's when you go from wholly lighthearted to angst-ridden that we have First and Ten. In any case, I don't know.

I do know, however, that I was drawn, inexorably, to the Dominic Deegan forum. Maybe because of the trainwreck principle. I dunno. I was chatting with a friend online at the time, and he went too, and we were both kind of stunned.

My favorite comment in the thread about the note:

[...] if Michael can't handle negative as well as the positive, then he's not an artist worth shit.

Holy fuck dude.

All right. Let's cut to the chase. Because I don't know Dominic Deegan, but I do know fandoms. And I know artists. And I know what happens when a webcartoonist brings his story into an unpopular area. The vast majority of readers trust the artist knows what he's doing and hangs in there. Generally, a smaller group gives feedback, some of it negative, and see above. They hang in there, having registered their concern.

And then there's the other fans. The ones who take it desperately personally. Mookie is ruining Dominic Deegan! Doesn't he understand? This -- this is shit! This is all wrong, and any cretin should know better! We should take this away from him! We should destroy it now, before he shits all over our memories! He's wrong! And bad! WRONG AND BAD!

I talked about them before. It's in one of the most popular of the evergreened essays. And their byword, spoken or not, is entitlement. They feel that because they've been good and loyal readers, investing their time and energy and yes their love into Dominic Deegan, they have some stake in it. Some ownership. And when things happen they can't abide, they're ready to flense Terracciano to the bone over it.

Well. I believe them. I've loved webcomics this deeply before. I know how painful it can be to see characters I love die, and bad things happen, and horrors be inflicted. And failure occur. I know.

Get. The fuck. Over it.

You're not paying for this. You're reading it. And believe it or not, conflict is not a bad thing. Dominic and his... um... orc friends are going to have some mind numbingly miserable days. Dominic Deegan has always been a story comic (as near as I can tell), and that means everything has to go hideously wrong sometimes. If you can't abide the direction it's going in, if you can't take the pain of seeing characters you love going through hell, or if this just isn't what you read Dominic Deegan for and you feel he's lost you as a result? Stop reading the damn comic. Write about it if you must. God knows I do, in those situations. (You might remember those essays.) But be constructive, explain your reasons why, try not to be acrimonious and then leave.

Good on Terracciano for not punching out of his storyline. Clearly, he's going to stick to it until it gets where he wants. And he'll lose some people for doing that, and maybe he'll gain some others. But if you're sending venom and vitriol to him because he's making the comic something you don't want to be, turn off the fucking computer, go outside and rejoin life. You don't have to support it if you don't want to any more, but Jesus Christ, don't be those people. Those people suck.

Oh, and one other thing?

Terracciano clearly can handle the negative as well as the positive... because despite the shitstorm, he kept going. And almost certainly that's what's pissing you off the most.

He doesn't owe you anything. This isn't his job. You're not his bosses. He understands that you might leave. You have to understand that if this is going to be worth your time in the first place, he's got to draw it without caring if you leave or not.

Jesus, people. Think.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:58 PM | Comments (73)

July 13, 2006

Eric: In Memoriam: Jim Baen

I remember where I was when Robert Heinlein died.

You know how people from an earlier age than mine remember where they were when they heard Kennedy was shot, or where others from a later generation than mine remember where they heard Princess Diana had died? For me, it was Lieutenant Robert Anson Heinlein, U.S.N (ret.).

Lt. Heinlein died in May of 1988, which was the tail end of my second year at Boston University. I had moved off campus in that year, and into my first apartment. It was a squalid affair sitting right on the green line on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton -- a one bedroom apartment I shared with my good friend Andy. (That we both slept in the same bedroom didn't bother us, particularly. We had both moved out of the dorms at B.U., where having a roommate was de rigueur. And this place reeked of being a one bedroom apartment shared by two bachelors. There were constant problems with cockroaches (I found one inside a sealed tin of homemade hot cocoa mix. To this day I have no idea how it got in there), though it was cheery with good windows and the floors were... well, wood, if not 'hardwood.'

We loved it. It was our home. It was an expression of our first true freedom. It was a pit, but it was our pit.

I was at home. Alone, as it works out. Sitting at a drawing table Andy had set up. Doing something -- possibly inking a picture he'd drawn of Iron Man. I was a terrible inker, but he was cheerful and liked to do joint projects, so we endured. The television was on behind me, but I'd tuned it to the public access channel, which meant it was showing a neon green screen with white text scrolling on it, letting us know about exciting community events in Brighton. As with most public access channels of the late eighties, it broadcast a local radio station while it did this. Unlike most public access channels, it was broadcasting NPR, which meant I was listening to All Things Considered.

Which at the time was unusual for me. I'd grown up listing to All Things Considered, but I was 20 years old and vastly more likely to have MTV on in the background than NPR, whether it was on the television or not. But on this day, it was All Things Considered, and they told me that Robert Heinlein was dead. They talked about his legacy in science fiction and popular culture, they read a passage from Stranger in a Strange Land, and they pretty much did all the things you do in these situations. And I sat there in a haze and felt my whole world was melting out from underneath me.

Robert Heinlein was dead. Which meant that I would never again read a new Heinlein book (which turned out not to be true. For a while there, the estate was churning out found manuscripts, "restored" original versions, nonfiction essays and the like on a regular basis. And later this year year, his story notes for a new book will be released in an authorized novel by Spider Robinson).

But that's not what hit me the hardest. Not by a long shot.

I realized in that moment I would never meet him. I would never thank him, for his role in helping me grow. For the lessons he taught me. For the experiences he gave me. For helping create the content of my character.

And I realized he would never read anything I wrote. And that hurt almost as badly.

Really, that's the thing about having a literary hero pass away. You lose potential. You lose the chance that one day not only might you shake their hand and say something about how much they meant to you. But even more than that, you lose the chance that maybe -- just maybe -- they will read something you wrote that they enjoy, and you can repay them in kind, even just a little.

It's a sickening feeling. Like you had all the time in the world to do something important, and now there was no time at all left, and it's your own damn fault, and the Lieutenant deserved better.

Which brings me, inexorably, to Jim Baen.

James Patrick Baen had little to no direct effect on me. He didn't write the seminal novels of my youth, for example. In fact, I never even heard of him until 1992. 1992, you see, was the year that the seminal Heinlein memorial came out. It was called Requiem (and Tributes to the Grand Master). It included a few Heinlein speeches and lesser known stories (including one I have yet to read, so I can eternally know I still have a Heinlein story out there I haven't read), and a series of tributes and remembrances by the people who knew him and were as profoundly affected by him as I was. This was a diverse lot who included astronauts, mainstream writers (Tom Clancy was among them), and some of the greats of Science Fiction. Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Spider Robinson, Joe Haldeman, Larry Niven, Harry Turtledove, Gordon R. Dickson, Jack Williamson, Charles Sheffield... and others. Reading that book was profoundly affecting to me -- these were some of the absolute stars of science fiction. Some of the people who could call Heinlein a peer and a friend, instead of just an idol. And yet, they wrote things I could have written -- about growing up on the Heinlein juveniles. About the lessons he taught. About the yearning they felt to give back. A couple of them wrote about the intense pride they felt in knowing he had actually read their work (and that reminded me of my own sense of loss, from those years before).

And one of those remembrances was written by a man named Jim Baen. A man I had never heard of, which was very unusual in this group.

Jim Baen, as it turned out, was an editor and publisher. He had worked at Ace Books, and then Tor Books -- two of the great SF houses -- and gone on to launch his own company: Baen Books, which was an independent publishing house (whose books were and are distributed by the Pocket Books arm of Simon & Schuster). He related a story of how, when he was at Ace, he discovered that the one Heinlein book that Ace still had (a collection of essays) had a royalty rate half Heinlein's normal rate. Baen decided that was wrong and convinced his employers to double it, with no expectation of quid pro quid. This turned out to be a good move, as it prompted Heinlein to expand that collection into the staggeringly successful The Past Through Tomorrow at an advance that was vastly below his normal rate, and pitch it exclusively to Ace. Baen then edited the expansion.

Right there, I knew that if I ever met Jim Baen, I would buy him a drink. He was "in the honor guard." (The Honor Guard being the people I considered folks I... well, had to buy drinks because they were good to Heinlein. Spider Robinson was the charter member, when he put his career on the line to loudly defend Heinlein at a time when the SF community was trying hard to pretend he didn't exist.)

That Baen was someone special was highlighted more by Robinson's filk song "Ol' Man Heinlein," reprinted in that same collection. The specific lines were: "You and me sit and think/Heads all empty 'cept for drink/Tote that pen, jog that brain/Get a little check in the mail from Baen." And yeah, okay. "Tor" doesn't rhyme with brain but still....

Over time and over the years, I developed a respect for Jim Baen that far exceeded my appreciation of how he took care of Heinlein. For one thing, Baen was one of a dying breed -- a man who owned his publishing company (as opposed to selling it to a large multinational) and who selected books not just for salability but for significance. David Drake (in his superior obituary for Baen) mentioned how Baen had kept buying Keith Laumer's books (and in fact still keeping them in print today) despite Laumer's skills having degraded after a stroke in the early seventies and despite Jim Baen disliking Laumer personally because Baen recognized Laumer's significance and because he wanted to ensure an income for someone who had profound effect on Baen.

Loyalty is a rare commodity in the publishing game. All evidence suggests Baen had loyalty in spades.

But loyalty isn't enough to make money as a publisher. You need to have a good eye, a good sense of what will sell, and chutzpah. Baen had all of these things, and because he owned his company, he had the ability to indulge it.

There was a time when publishers kept some books because they made money and kept some because they should or they wanted to. Before conglomerates bought corporations that bought businesses, there were just companies that published books, and sometimes their heads could be idiosyncratic. The most famous publisher of the second half of the twentieth century was a man named Bennett Cerf. He actually was one of the regular panelists on What's My Line, given the tale end position and generally a chance to tell a (bad) joke at the top of every program. Today, writers can't get on television, much less publishers. Cerf founded Random House, and in addition to publishing the books that made that house great, he also bought the Modern Library, whose mission was to keep the great masterpieces in print in hardcover for libraries and the public. Cerf believed in that, and at the time publishers could do that. It is in no small part thanks to Cerf that the Modern Library persists today, too grand a name to be cut apart and watered down even though Random House is now a wholly owned subsidiary of publishing giant Betelsmann.

Well, Jim Baen owned his company and made his decisions. That allowed him to publish The World Turned Upside Down, which is a short story collection assembled by Baen, Eric Flint and David Drake, comprised entirely of the short stories they could get ahold of that had rocked their world as teenagers, setting them on a course that would change their lives forever. You know, in exactly the way Heinlein (and others) had done for me as a teenager. This is a massive collection -- almost seven hundred and fifty pages in oversized trade paperback (much larger than a standard paperback page) crammed full of words by people like H. Beam Piper, Arthur C. Clark, Jack Vance, Fritz Lieber, C.M. Kornbluth, Poul Anderson, that selfsame Keith Laumer and yes, of course, Robert A. Heinlein, selected not because they're the most salable of names available (though some of them are, of course), but because these were the books that had the goods. These were the ones that could hook a person. You slip in the big names and the big name editors, and you use them to slide in the names of people they've never heard of, in hopes that they'll go out and read twelve authors where they might have only read two before.

Baen did things like that. And in the last few years, he absolutely turned conventional wisdom, the internet and publishing on its ear.

See, e-publishing hasn't met its potential yet. Which isn't surprising -- we really haven't entered the information age yet. We're at the threshold, but we haven't gone through the door. But conventional wisdom is e-publishing is A) the future of publishing and B) a monumental threat to publishing in all its forms. Piracy was already a problem in some fields, because the internet persists in being open and anarchic and dupable. Book publishers (the same ones who in an earlier generation tried to restrict the sales of photocopiers lest they destroy publishing as we know it) have been terrified by the thought that people could pirate books trivially. This has guided their initiatives moving forward: Digital Rights Management. Systems that require the credit card number used to buy the book sometimes years after that credit card had been cancelled. Systems that assumed by definition that the fans of the book were criminals who wanted to do bad things.

Systems which, essentially universally, actual criminals cracked trivially. So it was all worthless, and did nothing except piss off honest people. But it was that or open the doors to anarchy.

Jim Baen said "screw it," and put up completely unprotected PDFs html files, RTFs and other open formats of his books.

On his website.

For free.

Honestly. It's called the Baen Free Library, and it has dozens of books on it, available in multiple formats. And the same books available in html format for reading right on the website. Want to read Larry Niven's Fallen Angels online? Go for it. Want to get the first four Mercedes Lackey Bardic Voices books (and other Lackey stuff) down onto your PDA? Okay. Want to try Lois McMaster Bujold on for size -- see if you like her style? You can. It's. Literally. Free.

Why did he do this? First off because DRM offended Baen. And second off because he believed, fervently, that someone who reads books for free online will then buy copies of those books or others by that same author.

Guess what. He was right. Sales of the books in the Free Library, plus other books by those authors, increased after they were made freely available. Which maybe people should have figured out before that, since it's been known for generations that putting copies of books in public libraries (which publishers also resisted) led to increased book sales.

It takes guts to try something like that. He did it and he was right.

Baen made himself available to the general public. He was a huge participant on his company's forums, Baen's Bar. He wasn't afraid to be himself on those forums, either. He expressed his honest opinions and he was sometimes frighteningly blunt for a man who, after all, was trying to sell products to the general public. But at the same time, while Jim Baen was himself a conservative (at this point in his life, anyhow), he never tried to stifle dissent or debate. He publishes a number of openly liberal books -- he might have disagreed with their content, but he didn't disagree with the right to express that content, and he could look beyond where he might disagree with the author and see the book for what it was: a valuable part of the discussion. In short, he respected men and women of conviction who supported their arguments, even when he disagreed with them. And he published the people he respected.

And women. Guys, Science Fiction is a field where the guys outnumber the girls by an order of magnitude. It's better in fantasy, but not astoundingly better. And yet, in going through the lists of authors, I counted (very quickly) a good thirty female authors currently in print at Baen. Not enough? Sure, but more than a lot of companies. (And some of them are giants -- Anne McCaffery publishes through Baen. André Norton. Catherine Asaro. Bujold and Lackey, who I've already mentioned. Holly Lisle. And many, many others. Baen was clearly more interested in finding a good story than anything else.

And he was actively, deeply interested in encouraging new talent. He honestly felt that here were giants in the field who haven't actually entered the field yet, and he wanted to be the one to let them through the door. His new project, a web magazine called Jim Baen's Universe, was at least in part devoted to that principle.

And all of this brings me back to the beginning of this story. It brings me back to a twenty year old in a squalid apartment who had heard that his hero had died... and there would never be a day when Heinlein would read his work. Never. He had blown it. It was too late.

It's not that I didn't have plenty of opportunity, practically beating my door down. For one thing, one of my good friends, name of Chris, is a regular on Baen's Bar. He had pointed to stuff I wrote for Websnark out to them there, and gotten some discussion going. And he encouraged me to participate. "There are some good opportunities here," he kept saying. "You should be getting to know these folks. Especially Jim Baen! He's great!" "Hey Eric -- you need to get a book over to Baen. They've been talking about how they're looking for stuff, and it sounds a lot like Trigger Man!" "Hey Eric! You need to check out Universe -- it's perfect for you, and they're looking for short story writers, especially ones not established!"

And I kept agreeing, but I never got to it. And yeah, I've always intended for Trigger Man to go to Baen Books, when I finished the rewrite. I just had other things on the docket, first. There was just stuff. There was still time. There's always still time.

Only, that's a lie. On June 28, after a massive stroke suffered sixteen days before, Jim Baen passed away.

There have been much better obituaries than mine. I never met the man. I never shook his hand. I seriously doubt he ever heard of me. But at that moment, when I read that he was gone, I felt something I hadn't felt for eighteen years. I felt that crushing, nauseating sense of lost potential.

Jim Baen will never read my novel. He will never know how grateful I was as a Heinlein fan for all he did and said about the Lieutenant. He will never know how grateful I am as a writer for all he's done to keep Science Fiction and Fantasy alive and thriving. Of how grateful I am for the Baen Free Library, and what it means for the future of e-publishing. And the sick, tragic part of that (from my own selfish viewpoint) is it's entirely my own fault. I could have gotten off my fat ass and submitted. I could have taken the myriad invitations offered and participated in the Baen's Bar. I could have sent the man a god damned e-mail saying thank you.

But I didn't. And now I can't.

And I'm sorry.

So, I do what I can. The family has asked that in lieu of flowers people purchase copies of The World Turned Upside Down, that book full of seminal short stories by seminal authors, which once upon a time blew Jim Baen's mind (as well as the minds of others, of course), and, in their words, "donate them to libraries or teenagers of their acquaintance." That, I can do. And I have. I now have four copies of the book. One for my school library, one for the town public library, one for a student I know who needs to have Science Fiction in his life.

And one for me.

If you want one, for you, for a teenager or for a library, it is available. As it is a book of short stories with conflicting rights in many cases, it's not in the free library, but it is available for download for a minor fee. Or you can buy it outright.

But it makes so much sense. Even in death, Jim Baen is less concerned about his name being lauded, and more concerned that young people be turned on to science fiction. That people who haven't had their world turned upside down should. And I can respect that.

I just wish I had told him so when I could.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:00 PM | Comments (29)

June 12, 2006

Eric: Schrödinger's Friend

Tracking backwards over several weeks. Tracking backwards through time. Tracking backwards to Orlando, Florida, where EduComm took place in the sprawling, almost frighteningly huge Orange County Convention Center, attached to InfoComm, which defies my easy description. A land of trade show booth babes and nerf swag and everyone and his mother showing off nearly identical large screen HD monitors and televisions. A land of panel discussions and presentations on the latest offerings and mergings of technology and education. Moodle was the big star of EduComm. Moodle, and apparently there is such as thing as "podcasting" out there.

But I digress.

This was an evening. In fact, it was Friday evening. EduComm was over. Two of our party had already left, flying back home. My Supervisor and I had decided to stay overnight that last night, rather than rush like Hell after the end of the Conference. And I was all for that, because that last night was my night to have fun. More to the point, it was my night to have dinner with an old friend I'd never met.

It's the era of the Internet, and these are recurring stories. We all have those friends we've gotten to know. Friends we know through message boards and instant messenger services and mailing lists and Livejournal. People we have slowly let ourselves get to know. People we like. People we consider intimate friends. We all have these experiences.

This friend I have known -- known well, I would say -- since 1993 or 1994. He dates back to the Superguy era. He's not the most public man I know, so I'm going to enpseudonymize him for these purposes. We'll call him "Clive Staples." Those folks who know him can work it out from there.

Please note. He is not in Webcomics in any way. He is not a regular contributor here. He is not famous or infamous on the internet in any given way. I am obfuscating his identity not because I want to create a fun game of "let's guess who Eric had dinner with," but because the experience I'm relating... well, has less to do with him than the experience, and because I'm respecting his desire for privacy. I ask, as your old pal Eric, that you do the same. And let us say no more about it.

We decided to meet in the lobby of my hotel. Now, this was a pretty cool hotel -- the Wyndham Orlando resort, made up of many small two story buildings on a resort complex with pools and other amenities sorted throughout, down on International Boulevard, which is something of a Miracle Mile in Orlando -- lots of neon signs and restaurants, stores and tourist traps. Not far away from Universal Studios, from Sea World, and from the Omnipresent Mouse. And just a mile and a half from the Orange County Convention Center itself.

(On day one, we were told it was "about fifteen minutes" away from the hotel, so we walked. It was very hot. And we were carrying computer equipment. It was a mark of personal pride that it was inconvenient and long, not a moment of horrific physical failure. I take the victories where I find them.)

So. I went down, about a half hour before we were supposed to meet, and I sat down in the lobby. I had a book, recommended to me by a good friend who's one of the best, most knowledgeable reviewers I know in science fiction and fantasy. The book was Vellum, by Hal Duncan, and it is indeed brilliant. (And that friend's own review of Vellum can be found here. Eagle's entirely right in his review, as he is in most of his reviews.) So. There with a good book, waiting.

And watching.

Hotel lobbies in Orlando are amusing affairs. Even here, in June, when it's miserably hot, there was the parade of families coming into town for their vacations. Orlando is enslaved to theme parks. Every restaurant, from the upscale (and weirdass) Salt Island through Perkins down to McDonalds has a "hospitality desk" staffed during all business hours, where discounted tickets to dinner shows, Sea World, Universal and the Mouse may be bought, and free shuttle buses arranged. They are as ubiquitous as slot machines in Las Vegas establishments, and just about as subtle. In the Wyndham Orlando, the desk called itself the "Concierge," but when I asked about a hotel service, the woman blinked blankly and informed me that she didn't work for the hotel and she had no idea what might or might not be available there. But, if I wanted to see Shamu the Killer Whale, she was my hookup.

I was opposite the Hospitality Desk, sitting, waiting for my friend Clive Staples.

There was a large number of high school students there. The Florida chapter of the Future Farmers of America were having their week long leadership conference at the same time as EduComm, and they were holding it at the Wyndham Orlando itself. Which meant during this scorching heatwave, there were piles upon piles of cheerful high school boys and girls... all in heavy, dark dark blue corduroy jackets with embroidered names and patches, and black slacks or skirts (girls also wore heavy dark pantyhose). I asked one of the girls if these outfits -- perfectly suited for doing outdoor work in October back in New Hampshire -- weren't beyond uncomfortable and into deadly.

She looked at me with the kind of pity I feel for Floridians in my New England homeland, the first day we approach 20 degree weather and they can't imagine it could be any colder, ever, and said "well, you get used to it." She wasn't even sweating. I, on the other hand, was wearing light colored shorts and a tee shirt and I was still pathetically glad I was waiting for Clive in an air conditioned lobby.

And so I waited. And I watched.

A man walked in. And I found myself wondering "is that him? Is that Clive?"

And it hit me. I had no idea what Clive looked like.

None.

Now, I don't consider Clive an "internet acquaintance." I don't consider him an associate. Clive is a friend. A very, very close friend. He was one of the first people I told when Weds and I went from associates to "dating." When I have depression, he's one of the guys I turn to. When I had my surgery, he was one of the last people I messaged. He has been there for me when I've needed a friend. I've tried to do the same for him. He could show up on my doorstep and I would take him in without a second thought. He knows my secrets, and I know his.

And like true friends, we have had knock down drag out fights, at least with words. We agree on a great many things and we disagree on a great many others. We feel passionately about the things we feel passionate about, and we don't agree on all of them. But he is intelligent and well thought out, and I respect him even when I disagree with him.

I'm in the acknowledgments in his Ph.D. thesis. Which I was very proud to see.

But... we've never actually spoken before this moment. We've only typed to each other. And I've never seen a picture. Of this specific coterie of friends, he's the one almost none of us have been in the same room as before. And there's never been any reason to discuss physical appearances.

It really sunk in at that moment. I don't have any idea what this man looks like.

I had preconceptions, of course. But they were vague, formed over long periods of time. Filling in gaps with assumptions which built on random choices my subconsciousness had made. I had my mental image of Clive. But that mental image had never been based on even slight bits of reality. I was waiting, in a hotel lobby, for a complete and total cypher.

Think about this, for just a minute. Think about the people who are close to you. Think about identity for a moment. I knew Clive. I knew his opinions, I knew his religion, I knew his job, I knew his attitude. I knew what he liked. I had bought him Christmas Presents. I had received Christmas Presents from him. I borrowed money from Clive once. This went way beyond any "internet friend" thing. I mean, most of my internet friends I at least had seen pictures of. In fact, a huge percentage of my internet friends were people I met at one time or another. In person. I know what each and every friend in common Clive and I have look like.

But not Clive. I knew everything in the world about him, except anything about his appearance.

A hispanic man of about the right age walked into the hotel lobby. Followed a couple of minutes later by a white man. And I honestly couldn't say that the white guy was a better candidate to be Clive than the Latino guy. We never talked about the color of Clive's skin. I had assumed he was white... well, mostly because I'm white. But there was no reason that had to be true, or even should be true.

Was Clive fat or thin? Short or tall? Handsome or ugly? I knew he was brilliant -- I've read his thesis -- but I had no idea if he could convey that brilliance in his bearing, or if like so many people he came across as intelligent when he had a chance to write things down but lacked any social skills. How would his hygiene stack up? Did he have any scars? What color was his hair? What color was his eyes.

Hell, how did I even know he was male? I've know girls -- especially in technical fields -- who adopt masculine identities online to ensure their gender wouldn't color others' opinions. It seemed fantastic to consider, but jeez louise, we live in a culture where Gender Bending comedies came out of the Shakespearean tradition and show up on a yearly basis often starring a Wayans brother.

It hit me, as I watched more people walk in -- in a lot of ways, right that moment, Clive was like Schrödinger's cat. He was Schrödinger's friend. He could literally be anyone. The only boundary was there was only so young he could be. I knew he had a Ph.D. I'd read the thesis. I knew he had been at least adult in attitude going back to '93. Beyond that, it was a clean slate.

I watched a man as heavy as I was walk in, in green shorts and a "Git'r'done" tee shirt. I dismissed him -- Clive wasn't the "Larry the Cable Guy" type. Or so I believed. I watched a handsome black man in a suit come in. It was a professorial suit. I weighed possibilities. I could see that, I thought. I watched a well tanned guy come in -- a real "Used Car Salesman" type. White trash. Young Republicans. Guys in Sears clothes. Guys in Abercrombie and Fitch.

It was like a game. And a puzzle. Would I know this man? Would he somehow feel disappointing to me? Would I be ashamed for not knowing more about him? And more to the point... would I recognize him? Would my complete and utter lack of identifying information mean he would seem anonymous to me, or would somehow our hours upon hours of conversation, of discussing, of argument and revelation somehow impart an ineffable sense of recognition upon me? Would I know Clive Staples on sight?

I wasn't worried we wouldn't find each other. As incognito as Clive has been online, I have not. Hell, he saw the same picture of me in a purple polyester kimono you all have. He knew what I looked like, at least well enough that I wasn't worried we'd pass in the night.

But it was a profoundly strange experience -- like no meeting of an internet friend in real life had been, up until that point. I didn't consider this meeting Clive. I knew Clive. This was just having dinner with someone I knew. It just happened that I had never encountered any means of identifying him in a police lineup before now.

More teenagers. More Future Farmers. Beautiful women in tube tops, sauntering to the Hospitality Desk to get tickets to meet Mickey Mouse. Powerful looking men. Small, humble men. Bent and sickly men, coming to vacation with their families. And me, sititng with a book I wasn't even looking at any more, trying to discern some clue, some magical mark that would scream "Clive" to me.

"Eric?"

I looked.

I considered.

Yeah.

"Hey," I said, and shook Clive's hand. I looked my friend in the eye. And whether or not I could have picked him out of a police lineup, I could see the man I knew back behind those eyes somewhere. "Hungry?"

"Starved," he said. And we headed to the door.

"You're in long sleeves and a jacket," I said. "Aren't you unbearably hot?"

He shrugged. "You get used to it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:38 AM | Comments (15)

May 17, 2006

Eric: Dude.

Here's the thing. I'm a writer. I write.

I do it because I love writing. I do it because I'm not happy when I'm not writing. I do it because... well because it's what I do.

Sometimes, I get paid for it. And that rocks.

Getting my copies of books with my name on the cover rocks too. Smelling the paper, smelling the ink.

People reading what I write rocks. You all rock.

And I have had any number of moments. Thresholds. Moments that are seminal. Moments where my world rocks a little, but in a very good way.

I had one of those tonight.

I've been honored and privileged to write a few introductions and forewards for comic and cartoon collections. It always humbles me to have someone whose work I respect ask me to contribute something to one of their collected works -- I mean, this is one of the high points of their lives we're discussing. To be asked to be a part of that is an honor and a privilege. It is, in the end, fun.

And it's a blast to see them offered online. And those rare moments I go to a comic book store and see them there, it is amazingly cool. It is just as cool as it is to walk to the RPG section of those stores and see one of my books over there as well. I like RPG stores. They're good for my ego.

Well. Ever since I've sold stuff professionally, I've haunted Barnes and Noble, Borders and all of their ilk. Because while I've known that the likelihood that Sidewinder: Wild West Adventures or something from In Nomine would be sitting on a Barnes and Noble shelf was small, it wasn't zero. (I thought I'd have that moment with Star Trek: Worlds. And then it went PDF only. Sometimes, the Gods enjoy laughing at us.) I still do it to this day.

And I look through the graphic novel section. But not for anything of mine. I look there to see if folks from the webcomics world have made the jump. It happens on occasion, and I think that's really cool.

Well. So, tonight, I was looking over the graphic novels, and my heart stopped. Because the Image Comics collections of Scott Kurtz's PvP were there. And well they should be.

More to the point, volume 3 is there.

I should have expected it. PvP is big enough to make the jump to bookstores -- more than big enough. And Scott Kurtz has worked hard, and Image ain't small potatoes. Of course the Image PvP collections are there.

So I picked up Volume 3. And I opened the cover. And I read the opening words of the foreward.

I get a certain amount of e-mail about webcomics these days. A good number of those e-mails center on webcomics the writer loves. They extol the virtues of their favorite webcomics. They talk about the art, the writing, the characterization and the jokes. They are enthusiastic about webcomics and they want to share their enthusiasm with others.

I'm not going to write about those letters in this introduction.

I skipped ahead, to the very end.

Specifically, to the part that said "Eric Alfred Burns, New Hampshire" and had a picture of the Ursula Vernon 'Snarky' you see in the corner of the web site's pages.

And I knew, right then, that it was highly unlikely that a Barnes and Noble in New Hampshire was atypical in its ordering. It's better than even odds that the other Barnes and Nobles in the region carry similar selections.

And pretty darn likely the same is true throughout this half of the country. Or maybe even the full country.

And that the same is probably true of Powell's. Or Borders. Or the Elliot Bay Bookstore. Or Tattered Cover.

For the first time in my life, I can walk into any given large chain bookstore in the country and there's at least even odds I can put a hand on my book that has my fucking words in it.

I'm astoundingly grateful to Scott Kurtz for the opportunity. And I'm just blown away. This is one of those moments that just throws me. I literally have to adjust my world view to fit this fact.

I'm a writer.

I write.

The proof can likely be found at your friendly local bookstore.

Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:08 PM | Comments (24)

May 16, 2006

Eric: In other news, Marmaduke endures.

(From Peanuts, of course.)

For the second time recently we've got a Peanuts cartoon up on the old site for you to have a look at. And given the topic of this quick essay, this one's somewhat apropos. Loneliness in a crowd is one thing, but it's something else entirely when you're all alone.

On Sunday, the Winston-Salem Journal announced that it was dropping Peanuts from its comic page. It's kind of amazing that this is as significant as it is. After all, Peanuts by definition has been in reruns for years. And yet, it is in fact news when a major paper drops it.

In the words of Tim Clodfelter, the reporter who drew the short straw and had to write an article justifying dropping Peanuts (and whose surname is now my new favorite word):

Now, don't go sending the Red Baron after us. Just hear us out. We love Peanuts. It was a terrific comic strip, arguably the best in comics history. But the truth is, it ended more than six years ago when Charles Schulz died. Schulz was adamant that no one else would do the strip after him, an admirable sentiment in an industry where some long-running strips become little more than cartoon mills run by ghost artists and writers.

The Journal has been running repeats of the strip since 2000 because no one wanted to be the person who put Snoopy to sleep.

But the fact of the matter is, the strip is taking up a spot on our comics page that could be handed over to a newcomer. One reader wrote to us back in February 2000, when Peanuts ended, saying that he felt that Schulz would have wanted us to give the space to a younger cartoonist, to give the next generation a chance. That sentiment stuck in our heads, but change is hard, and changing something as fundamental as Peanuts on the comics page is even harder.

Clodfelter (seriously. Say it out loud. Clooooodfelter.) is right, of course. Charles Schulz didn't stipulate that no one follow him on the comic strip so that his own strips would continue being rerun forever and a day. He meant for Peanuts to end. And ultimately for other strips to come along behind. He deliberately eschewed the tactic that has Blondie, Dick Tracy, and that loveable acid trip Annie in the comics section to this day. It had a monumental run, but that run was over.

That run is over.

And yet, dropping the strip is problematic for the editors. Who indeed wanted to "put Snoopy to sleep," even if we were really just looking at Snoopy's home movies from an increasingly long time ago. And it's worrying to his successor, Mark Tatulli, who writes and draws a comic strip called Lio. Lio is itself a dramatically different strip than we've come to expect on the newspaper page. In a world of talking heads and situations, Lio is a comic that is all art, no dialogue, using a sense of wit and whimsy to convey visual humor. In a way, Lio is as unexpected as... well, Peanuts itself was back in 1953. (Yes, once upon a time Peanuts was considered edgy and innovative). I look forward to adding Lio to my own daily habit the minute they get on the web like every comic that actually wants an audience.

(You laugh. Opus was the big dramatic holdout. You can see how that holdout's doing right here if you like.)

Tatulli is understandably thrilled about the reception his new comic is receiving, but chagrined about who he's replacing in a major market:

Tatulli was a bit shell shocked to hear that his strip would be taking Peanuts' place.

"Oh, jeez, oh my God, you made me the bad guy," he said. He recalled a previous incident in the late 1990s when he was in a bar talking with someone about his other comic strip, Heart of the City. Another patron overheard their conversation and angrily declared "You replaced Calvin and Hobbes!"

Technically, that was true; Bill Watterson, the Calvin cartoonist, retired from the business, leaving a hole that newspapers had to fill.

"Like I had anything to do with it, but people immediately blame me," Tatulli said. "It's a real Catch-22: People don't want to change, but then there are other people complaining that the comics aren't relevant anymore. I'm trying to walk that line, make comics relevant but at the same time not make the people angry who have loved Blondie and Peanuts."

Look. I love Peanuts. I'm thrilled to see the growing library of Fantagraphics Peanuts books on my shelf. I'm thrilled to read through the strips. I will always, always love Peanuts.

But it doesn't need the increasingly small newspaper space any more. And I don't think it's bringing people to the paper -- or at least, not in the numbers necessary to reverse the decline of the newspaper subscription. It's time to let Peanuts move on... and for newspapers to move ahead.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:36 PM | Comments (21)

Eric: On Net Neutrality

It is worth noting two things. First off, if you happen to be an American and you're reading these words, you've already been bombarded with information about Net Neutrality and Saving the Internet. And, you know. I'm on that side of all of it, too. Save the Internet, and all that.

If you're not an American, but you live in some sort of representative governmental system, you ought to be contacting your own legislators, representatives, Ministers of Parliament or the like as well. After all, the Internet isn't American, per se, and legislation that makes deep seated changes in the United States will have impact on all of you. I would think the European Union would be sending quiet messages across saying "screw with the Internet, and we're going to start talking about trade sanctions." Or some such.

That's not really what I'm writing about, here.

I want to write about what happens if this legislation passes.

Specifically, I want to write about what happens to the companies that actually start trying to throttle the internet based upon their premium service.

Simply put? If you work for one of those companies? Keeping that resume up to date is in order.

See, I may be a liberal, but I'm a liberal who actually believes that the Market forces really do exist and really do correct mind numbingly stupid mistakes. And the day that COPE and such legislation passes... the day that telecoms start insisting people charge fees for 'premium access...' is the day that smart companies will absolutely decimate those telecoms in the marketplace.

Think of it. Google, Intel, Microsoft, Skype, Vonage, eBay, Earthlink, Amazon.com and Yahoo are all proponents of Net Neutrality. And of course they are -- they have no interest in paying premium fees to companies they don't even do business with. You think they won't throw their massive support behind backbone companies that pledge to "stay net neutral?" You think Earthlink and other ISPs won't start advertising that their DSL service "doesn't come with a toll booth?" You think hosting companies won't flock to those backbones that agree to provide broad service without 'tiers,' and you think that new backbone companies won't spring up to provide new routes free of this kind of interference?

Of course they will. Hell, I halfway expect Google to announce "Google Net" the week after this thing passes.

Remember America Online and CompuServe, and how they had huge amounts of premium content? These days, AOL's biggest selling point is a messenger service anyone on Earth can use. And as for CompuServe?

Is anyone reading these words a member of CompuServe? Anyone?

Didn't think so.

By the same token, if the only people out there who have trouble getting to Google, eBay or Amazon.com -- or small mom and pop websites, for that matter -- are Verizon or Comcast broadband customers... do you honestly think Earthlink won't make a huge deal about that in their advertisements? I do. And if the hosting companies that connect to Verizon or Comcast or AT&T's backbones directly abandon them for backbones that won't require additional fees for 'premium' access, I can see a lot of corporate boardrooms with a lot of unhappy managers in them.

Am I saying we shouldn't fight to defeat COPE and its ilk? Not hardly. Passage would be inconvenient at best, and there would be Trouble. I signed the petition and I contacted my representatives beyond that. But if it passes, do I think that it would devastate the Internet? No, I really don't. I don't because there's way too many companies out there who would be more than happy to take Verizon and Comcast's lunch money and give them swirlies in the bathroom if those companies were stupid enough to give them such an obvious and powerful selling point.

Capitalism. It's a rampaging heartless beast. And sometimes that's a good thing.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:26 AM | Comments (28)

Eric: You know what's cool? The Emergency Broadcast System. It's so cool when it's actually really an emergency.

It is a sodden day, in our State of Emergency.

For those of you unconcerned about the daily lives of your cheerful blogging cadre beyond what you see crop up in your RSS aggregator, Livejournal Friendslist or web site link, one of the cheerful writers for this site lives in New Hampshire. New Hampshire, which is currently in day 12 of 40 of Noah's Flood 2006 Brought To You By Pepsi. Large chunks of this state, of Massachusetts and of Maine are under water, with dams straining, sewers overflowing and backing into the rivers that have surged, and water tables saturating all over.

Interestingly enough, even though I live essentially next to a lake, I'm fine. My home is on high ground, my workplace is up a sloping hill. Lake Winnepausakee would have to rise like 20 meters before it became an issue, and if we had a sixty foot high wave of water come into town, we're officially into Waterworld territory.

But, there is impact. For one thing, there have been power flickers and even outages, which is to be expected since much of the electrical grid is now being exposed to our buddy water. For another, there are weird troubles with the internet -- which might have something to do with several of our backbones running through places like Manchester, which is among the hardest hit areas in New Hampshire. (Not to mention places like Peabody and Haverhill, in Massachusetts, which as near as we can tell are now lakes.)

Walking in to work, I noticed the ground was one big sponge now, though, and torrents of water sheet down every road and walkway, pooling wherever the ground bowls slightly. The earth is saturated here, and there is no where for the water to go except on the surface or sheeting down any incline. My feet are still wet.

And still the rain falls. It falls steadily. It falls hard.

Dover, where friends of mine live and good coffee can be had, is flooded. Roadways crumble under the onslaught of overflowed rivers. Rochester, the "Lilac City," is essentially drowned right now. And having been in Maine on Sunday (Mother's Day, don't you know), I'm at least somewhat surprised my trip home didn't involve driving through the Saco River. As it is, I assume my town is an island, cut off on all sides by roadways obscured by water.

And yet, life goes on. Though the state is in a State of Emergency, that emergency hasn't really hit my town, where things are pretty much normal. I'm at work today, and have no reason to think I won't stay at work the normal hours. Really, the new 13" MacBooks are a bigger deal in the office than the floodwaters. I have light and comfort, shelter and hot coffee, and after work I have to go buy cat food. When the biggest issue facing you in a State of Emergency is remembering you need a bag of Iams for Adult Cats, life is officially going on.

Still, there is some indication we should get used to such things. There have been rumblings that this year's wildcat hurricane season might trawl up the Atlantic and nail the Northeast. I'm certain readers in the Southeastern United States will think it's our turn, God Damn It, and they might be right. Certainly, it seems that when an area gets hit with extreme weather these days, that extreme weather comes in waves, not in isolated incidents. And the Nationwide (and Worldwide) incidence of extreme weather seems to be spiking higher, not leveling off.

So.

Stay dry. Have some coffee. Sit back. Look at the new MacBooks. And relax.

It's just a State of Emergency, after all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:00 AM | Comments (18)

May 15, 2006

Eric: Also, Survivor ended. But I didn't care.

Two shows, radically different and yet in weird ways similar, had their finales this weekend. They're both shows on my list of favorites. I'm going to miss them both, in very different ways, and both have 'sequels' in the pipelines, even though neither sequel is direct.

And that has me wistful.

The first, of course, is The West Wing, which ended its seven year run last night. The second, of course, is Justice League Unlimited, which ended its five year run (if we count Justice League before it) and closed out the DC Animated Universe as envisioned by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini.

There will be spoilers for both shows. I invite you not to read on if you've a problem with that, because... well, because. That's the way of things.

Justice League Unlimited, on one level, was almost a disappointment. We had a full season of shows building up to the climactic confrontation between the Justice League and a revitalized Secret Society of Supervillains, initially created by Gorilla Grodd and then subverted by Lex Luthor, in a clear pastiche on the old Challenge of the Superfriends series that pitted the Super Friends against the Legion of Doom. The Society's swamp headquarters was clearly an updated Hall of Doom for example, and the new Justice League Metro Tower's base was clearly evocative of the Hall of Justice.

Well, we never actually got that confrontation. We built to it, but at the literal last second, when it looked like Luthor would regain Brainiac and ascend to near Godhood with a full army equal in power and numbers to the expanded Justice League... we suddenly had a war against Darkseid, who was coming to shatter Earth, and the League and Society ended up needing to join forces to beat them back. And in the end, it wasn't the League but Lex Luthor who defeated Darkseid. What's up with that?

Well, I figured it out. Justice League Unlimited actually ended last year.

No, seriously. We had the JLU finale last year. The show built around the conflict with Cadmus, came to a beautifully orchestrated end after a fantastic two year run, and paid off both the general leaguers and the Power Seven of the original League. It was then followed by a coda that closed out the entire Timm/Dini 'verse. It was glorious.

And people went nuts for it. For all intents and purposes we were standing on our chairs, clapping and wooting and waving lighters. There was a last minute reprieve -- the show was renewed.

Guys, this fifth season of JLU? Was an encore. This was the band coming out and playing one last set of their hits. This was the extended curtain call. And looked at that way, it was brilliant. Over the course of the season, we had some loose ends tied up, and others left to dangle. We had groundwork laid and other groundwork paid off. And this last show, the series finale, was one long, extended geekfest. This was an episode designed to make fans go squee, over and over and over again. And it did that very well.

Setting aside the Significant Moments for our major characters (though Superman finally truly being Superman for one brief shining moment was wonderful), there were all the little touches. The little homages. Especially the two Marvel nods. (Commander Steel -- a character who I think never even had lines in the show -- was the most patriotically costumed character except for Stargirl. And he had a chance to grab a circular parademon shield and hurl it, knocking aside two parademons who threatened Hawkgirl, in an absolute and clear nod to Captain America. And even more than that, Fire and Ice had a truly great double-fan service moment. On the one hand, they were in bikinis, so. You know. Fan service. But on the other, Ice sealed herself in a block of ice to get into costume, and Fire tossed her hair and costumed up in a halo of flame... exactly the way that Iceman and Firestar used to get into costume on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends).

And, in my absolutely favorite moment, we saw an old, distinctive (and, to a certain type of comic book fan, recognizable) heavy set man walk up to parademons and batter them about, so well that Wonder Woman herself was stunned. ("Hera," she murmured, staring. It was great.) Now, it turned out to be J'onn J'onzz, and that's cool enough on its own level. They didn't telegraph the reveal at all.

But that doesn't change the fact that for one moment, Jack Kirby was punching 4th World parademons. I mean, dude.

The final moments featured a pastiche on the opening of Challenge of the Superfriends, with the heroes descending from the Hall of Justice Metrotower and leaping through the screen. But that pastiche was itself a fantastic nod to the true fans and to the seventy year history of DC Comics and a superteam we called the Justice League in this series. For the record, we opened with B'Wana Beast, Metamorpho and the Creeper, along with Steel -- slightly eclectic, but three of them (all but Steel) were backup features in The Brave and the Bold. This was followed by the Question, Hawk and Dove and Captain Atom, who along with the Creeper were all created by Steve Ditko. (Which was the only creator nod in the final curtain call, but as it gave them an excuse to have the Question -- undoubtedly the breakout star from relative obscurity of JLU -- I'll take it.) Followed by the Crimson Avenger, the Shining Knight, Vigilante and Stargirl and STRIPE, who were (versions of) the Seven Soldiers of Victory (minus Green Arrow and Speedy, admittedly). They were followed by Wildcat, Doctor Mid-Nite, Doctor Fate and Hourman -- modern versions, perhaps, but still the four characters most directly tied back to the original version of the League, the Justice Society of America. Followed then by Commander Steel, Vibe, Gypsy and Vixen, who were the 1980's version of the Justice League of America (an era often forgotten, so that they were remembers and Vixen even had a major character arc in the series is wonderful, to my mind). Followed then by Booster Gold, Fire, Ice and the Elongated Man -- seminal members of the 90's version of the Justice League International. (They could have put Crimson Fox in there too, and gotten a Justice League Europe nod, but I'll take it.) Followed then by Zatanna, Red Tornado, Black Canary and Green Arrow -- core members of the 70's version of the Justice League of America. Spaced out, I would add, so that Green Arrow and Black Canary had almost a solo bow run through the screen, which is appropriate given how significant Green Arrow was to the development of the series.

And finally, of course, we had the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The stars of our show. The Justice League. Ending on a shot of Batman, who launched the Timm/Diniverse so many years ago.

We got a full season as a curtain call, and then they had their moment. And now we close the curtain. Next up, their "sequel" is a series that is dear to my heart: The Legion of Super Heroes. But, even though JLU set the series up, they've gone with all new, very un-Bruce Timm designs (sort of troglodyteish, really). They have intentionally said it's meant to break away from the past and move forward, so it's not the next edition of the DC Animated Universe. Not really. It's something new, and we just... move on, in the end.

Which brings us to The West Wing. Which was a finale.

If JLU seemed like a disappointment that turned out to be a celebration and curtain call... The West Wing came across as a celebration and curtain call that ended up as a disappointment. We knew it would be something of a downer -- they had to convey the essence of life moving on, of the President we've had for seven seasons leaving office and a new President coming in. And they did that, and it was effective. The quiet scene where we hear Santos taking the oath of office in the background while the White House Head Usher's staff sweeps into the Oval Office, packs everything up in a whirlwind, leaving the place bare for the new President's things to come in, and the photograph of Bartlet is taken down in the outer office and replaced with Santos was astoundingly effective.

But, one of the hallmarks of transitions like this is a sense of anticlimax. The new President set to governing immediately, and three of our cast members -- Charlie, Will and Kate -- are standing in the entryway to the West Wing. "Hey," Charlie says. "Wanna go see a movie?" "It's two p.m.," Will says. "You got something better to do?"

And of course, they don't. Oh, Charlie's heading to law school, Kate will no doubt reenter public service in some capacity (she's career military. She'll have a job, though she was denied the National Security Advisor position she wanted). And Will Bailey we know from the beginning of the season is destined to become a United States Congressman in two years. But for now, they got nothing to do. They're done.

And so it was with all our heroes. They're leaving. Their service is done. Of our major cast, only Josh and a returning Sam still work for the President. Donna -- in a plot arc almost as unrealistic as the White House Press Secretary with no previous Washington experience being tapped to replace Leo McGarry as Chief of Staff, no matter how asskicking Allison Janney is) -- has risen from being a cubicle dwelling secretary in only her third real job after dropping out of college to being the First Lady's Chief of Staff, which makes Josh and Donna one Hell of a Power Couple. And whatsername with the mind numbingly abrasive voice is now the First Lady's communications director.

Everyone else is out. Gone.

The loss of John Spencer -- the man who played Leo McGarry -- was keenly felt in this episode. They showed the pilot of the West Wing in the hour before this finale, reminding all of us that Leo was the first character seen on screen, walking into work in the White House in the morning. In Sorkin's original pitch, the President would barely be seen -- instead, the ensemble lead would really be Leo. (Rob Lowe's ego notwithstanding). And thematically, this last show should have ended not with Bartlet in Air Force One flying home to New Hampshire, but Leo walking out of the White House for the last time (I'm convinced that thematically, had Spencer not had his untimely death, Vinick would have won. Things the producers have said seem to bear that out.) Instead, we had C.J. do that walk, followed by the new President and Josh saying "what's next" in a clear echo to the end of that first episode of the West Wing, followed by Bartlet flying out of public service once and for all.

And... well, maybe it was (somewhat) realistic, as the succession takes place. But it in the end was sad, more than anything else. There was no sense of triumph -- of eight solid, good years and a torch being passed. There was instead a sense that there was more to do. Too much left by the wayside.

Which I think was intentional. Right at the beginning, the first lady said "Jed -- you did a lot of good. You did a lot of good," to a President who is staring out a window in the Residence, clearly seeing all the good he never got around to.

The one arc of real substance left to this last episode was the fate of Toby Zeigler, exiled in disgrace after he outed National Security secrets to save the lives of several astronauts. The question right up until the end was whether or not Bartlet would use one of those infamous 11th hour pardons to pardon him. Now, we knew from that same first episode of the season where we saw Will Bailey was a Congressman, at the opening of the Bartlet Presidential Library, that Toby was not in jail. He was at Columbia. But that could have been a deal or an early release or who knows what.

But yes, Bartlet pardoned him, as we knew he would from the moment that we learned he was considering it. And in what I think was the worst omission of the show, Richard Schiff didn't even appear on this final episode. Leo couldn't be there, because John Spencer died. Toby should have at least been shown at home, watching the Inauguration he could no longer attend.

In short, and in the end, life goes on. The West Wing is over. The "sequel" to it doesn't have anything to do with it, except a couple of actors in common (most notably Bradley Whitford). However, the show -- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip -- marks the return of West Wing and Sports Night creator Aaron Sorkin to television. Sorkin was forced out of the West Wing due to a drug scandal and softening ratings (and the abandonment of Lowe over what amounts to a hissy fit because he wasn't at the center of everything, leading to a staggering series of professional failures on Lowe's part). The show never really recovered from Sorkin's loss, as it went from being policy porn to ER style shocking moments of the week (in the Sorkin years, we could be made to feel the emotions behind farm subsidies and the movement to abolish the penny. In the post-Sorkin era, there were wars, explosions, peace in the Middle East, heart attacks and lots of Gigantic Moments, minus the dialogue that made us care in the first place). Sorkin returning with a show that is bar none the most anticipated thing on NBC's schedule while the West Wing limps to an end is no doubt the sweetest kind of revenge for him, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

But it's not the same, any more than The West Wing really replaced Sports Night.

So. Two shows I always looked forward to, both gone. One an anticlimactic climax that turned out to be a startlingly effective celebration and curtain call, the other a celebration and curtain call that turned out anticlimactic and bittersweet. Two sequels that aren't really sequels, to give me some hope for next year. Endings, and beginnings.

Life goes on.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:27 PM | Comments (33)

Eric: The Super Secret All Powerful Method To Protect Our Children From The Dangers Of The Internet

Hi all.

There's tons of things, actually, I want to write about. Tons. American legislation that affects us. Cultural events. JLU and West Wing. A crisis of faith I've been muddling through. Some kickass writing I've been doing. Many things. Lots of things.

However, there's something more important to write about. You see, there has been a tremendous amount of emphasis put in my nation and around the world on the massive and overpowering need to protect our children from predation online, from horrific and dangerous imagery online, from immoral and unethical websites that challenge the values that parents wish to instill in them or otherwise simply don't want them to have access to.

It is a natural impulse. It is a correct impulse. I honestly believe that children do need protecting.

So, as a good citizen of my town, state, nation and world, I would like to give you all the super secret method to protect your children from the dangers and images on the internet. From pornography and predation. From immorality and immodesty. From distraction and diseased minds. It is not 100% accurate, but it is vastly closer than any law, any technology, and any censorship that has yet to be developed.

And it is free.

First. Go into your son or daughter's room.

Second. Disconnect the computer. Be careful to note where the cables connect, if you're not familiar with them.

Third. Bring the computer downstairs.

Fourth. Go back to your son or daughter's room. Take the desk the computer was on.

Fifth. Set the computer and desk up in your living room. It should be angled so that wherever you sit when you're watching television, you have a view of the screen. Make certain the child cannot easily block the screen with their body.

Sixth. Verify everything is working.

Now, you're probably going to want to invest in two good pairs of noise canceling headphones. The first should be set up at your child's computer, so they can listen to their music, do their homework or play their games without being distracted by your television watching or other downstairs activities.

The second is for you, so you can watch TV while they're screaming at you for being such a heartless monster -- don't you trust them? Don't you care? I hate you!

You should post rules, stating that at any point, you have the right to walk up behind them without them knowing it and read over their shoulder, and that they have no right to say you can't. When they're using the headphones, this will be easy, so insist that they use them. After all, you don't want to hear their machine squawking all the time when they're using it.

You can use this as an opportunity, by the by, to set reasonable limits for things like gameplay and Instant Messaging. Have them verify their homework is done before they use anything like that, and when bedtime comes, they have to head upstairs.

If they say they can't possibly study down in the living room, even with the headphones, hand them a notebook and their textbooks and wish them well. If they need the internet, e-mail or word processing to complete their assignments, tell them that they're able to use a computer in a classroom without a problem, so they can use a computer in their living room the same way. If necessary, block their view of the TV and once again insist on the headphones.

You might think this is a pain in the ass -- you don't want to have to watch your child like a hawk. You don't want to have to tailor your evening activities around monitoring them. You don't want to be put in that role.

Welcome to parenthood.

Do I sound glib? Maybe so.

But I'm an adult, using the internet. And I'm sick to God of being told all the ways we have to change the Internet to protect the children. Protecting the children is important, but nothing Congress or Parliament (any of them) or SurfControl or any of the rest can possibly do will come anywhere near keeping your child's computer in a public area and not letting them use it in private. Ever.

The power of embarrassment and self-consciousness will work vastly better than all the filter software and censorship in the world. I promise you that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:12 AM | Comments (84)

March 28, 2006

Eric: There is life, and there is living. But they're best done together. In volume.

Robert Jordan is the pen name of a man named James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He is a science fiction and fantasy author, best known for his epic length The Wheel of Time. He also wrote a number of popular books starring Robert E. Howard's Conan. I have friends who adore his books. I have other friends who... well, don't. And one or two who adored his books until they felt they were unending.

Now, I suspect those friends hope they are unending.

In a letter dated March 23rd and published by Locus online, Robert Jordan disclosed that he has been diagnosed with amyloidosis -- a rare blood disease that can take many forms. In his case, the form it is taking is an accretion of misshapen proteins which are accumulating in his heart's cardiac muscle, producing a condition called cardiomyopathy. In his case, said cardiomyopathy refers to a stiffening of his heart muscle, leading ultimately to death, likely from a form of congestive heart failure. He has been told that untreated, he has a median life expectancy of one year. With aggressive treatment -- which in this case means chemotherapy that will destroy all his bone marrow, followed by a reseeding of his bone marrow through stem cells harvested from his own blood (so the Bush administration has nothing to fear in its use). If it works, his median life expectancy quadruples.

Which, of course, means four years.

This has had something of an impact on me, as you might imagine. It would have an impact on any of us. But it has more meaning for me than most.

Not because of Jordan's work, mind. I actually never read the Wheel of Time, though I own a copy of the first omnibus edition, and I've meant to get around to it. No, it's his situation that has resonance for me.

In late November and early December of 1999, I saw my doctor, complaining of feeling frighteningly out of shape. I got winded so easily, which I ascribed to how painfully fat I was. I couldn't go two hundred yards without stopping to catch my breath. I needed to lose weight, and I needed a doctor's help in doing it.

Only my breathlessness wasn't my being out of shape. As it turned out, I was in congestive heart failure. The habit I had of coughing my lungs out when I laid down wasn't a lingering cold or allergies, it was fluid flowing into my lungs because my body was hoarding it, thinking (because my heart rate had been steadily speeding up, which the kidneys interpret as low blood volume) I was dehydrated. I was in danger of drowning on dry land.

The cause was an enlargement of the left ventricle and atrium of my heart, causing it to lose cohesion and become unresponsive. The diagnosis was idiopathic cardiomyopathy. I, like the Grinch, had a heart that grew three sizes too large one day. And because it's not designed to do that, my ejection fraction -- the percentage of the blood in my heart that gets squeezed out with every beat -- was 12%. That instead of the 50% or so you should have. To compensate, my heart beat faster and faster to force the trickle of blood out. My blood pressure went up as my body tried to deal with the reduced blood flow. And of course, my kidneys overreacted and here we were.

Now, had this happened in 1989, my option would have been a heart transplant. Period. As it was, there were medicines I could take. Blood thinners, to help prevent clotting (you're in huge danger of having a stroke in those conditions). Beta Blockers and ACE inhibitors, to flog my heart back into normal operation. Diuretics, to get the fluid out of my body. (And sharp restrictions on sodium and daily fluid intake -- drinking too much could kill me.) And the clear, certain knowledge that I was fighting for my life.

The medication was horrible. I would lose days to fatigue and nausea. I would wrestle with incapacity -- I was on exercise restriction to, to the point that I had to drive to work (a walk of six minutes, tops). I had a handicap placard for my car. I got dizzy and lightheaded easily. And I was fatalistic at best.

It is 2006. My cardiomyopathy is in remission, at least for the moment. I'm vastly healthier than I was.

But I'm sickly. My health is fragile, at best. It takes me time to recover from things, and new things hit me very easily. I've had people say that my situation sucks.

But I know it doesn't.

My situation is great.

I'm not dead.

Each and every day I'm not dead is a precious gift. Being able to think in terms of my eventual retirement, as opposed to thinking I'm going to be dead by forty, is a gift beyond price. Between managing my heart condition and the gastric bypass, I am stunned at how bright and beautiful the simple joy of prospect is.

I don't think about my heart failure or cardiomyopathy, much. Not any more. It's still a part of me, but it's remote. But reading about Robert Jordan's cardiomyopathy... about his staring down at a death so close you feel like you should offer it tea like a good host... that resonates with me. That means something to me. I've been there.

And then reading his reactions to it meant even more to me:

In any case, I intend to live considerably longer than [four years]. Everybody knows or has heard of someone who was told they had five years to live, only that was twenty years ago and here they guy is, still around and kicking. I mean to beat him. I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I'm fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don't care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

[...]

If I get less than full remission, my doctor already, she says, has several therapies in mind, though I suspect we will heading into experimental territory. If that is where this takes me, however, so be it. I have thirty more years worth of books to write even if I can keep from thinking of any more, and I don't intend to let this thing get in my way.

And I thought Hell yeah! You tell them! You do it!

I was feeling my own mortality today, anyhow. One of my best friends spent the morning in surgery. (It was that best friend -- a guy named The Mason Kramer -- who (without telling me ahead of time) sent Scott Kurtz an e-mail saying "hey, this guy named Burns is writing about your strip in his blog." The reason any of you have ever heard of me is because of Mason Kramer.) He's come through it all right, but one thinks about such things.

Somehow, reading about Jordan's struggle -- and his sheer determination to live, because he has to get things done, means the world to me.

I haven't read him yet. But I'm going to. I have to make a trip down to Portsmouth tomorrow, and I'm going to buy his latest book while I'm down there.

And when it comes out, I'm going to buy his next, damn it.

And thirty years from now?

I'll make him a deal. He live to write and publish it? I'll live long enough to read it.

And then I'll loan it to Mason.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 7:26 PM | Comments (47)

March 17, 2006

Eric: Also, don't pat them on the head and say 'aren't you clever?' They *hate* that.

One thing that always amazes me is the kind of questions Weds and I get -- especially when we both get asked things in the same e-mail or letter or communique.

I get a lot of questions about blogging. About webcomics. About payment systems. About content management. About the role of the editor in the process. About editorial freedom. About critical discourse. About stuff.

Weds, on the other hand, generally gets "what is it like to be a woman in webcomics," and "what issues do you think women face in webcomics," and "how do we get more women in webcomics."

We get these from both men and women. It's happened many times, now. I have an opinion. Wednesday has a vagina.

Let me pause, and put forth a few names for your consideration.

Aeire, Donna Barr, Jennie Breeden, Vera Brosgol, Maritza Campos, Kelly J. Cooper, Danielle Corsetto, Leigh Dragoon, Barb Fischer, Kaja Foglio, K. Sandra Fuhr, Lisa R. Jonté, Dorothy Gambrell, Shaenon Garrity, Anne Gibson, Meredith Gran, Amber "Glych" Greenlee, Emily Halifax, Rachel Hartman, Lea Hernandez, Starline Hodge, Mel Hynes, Gisele Lagace, Jenn Manley Lee, Meaghan Quinn, Nitrozac, Veronica Pare, Tiffany Ross, Ryuko, Indigo Skynet, Ping Teo, Ursula Vernon, Wednesday White, Jin Wicked

Please note, this is not a comprehensive list. Nor is it a researched list. These are the women I could think up off the top of my head who do webcomics, webcomics commentary, or both. If I've forgotten you, it's because I have a small brain and besides, I didn't devote much time to it. I just typed.

Look at that list. Thirty odd names worth. Including some of the best webcomics on the web. Including some of the most successful creators in comics.

I'm not posting those names so we can say "gosh, look at those plucky chicks go." I'm posting those names because the idea that webcomics has the same kind of glass ceiling that society is struggling with on every level is laughable. Think about the last block of comics Keenspot took. Jennie Breeden, Starline Hodge, Mel Hynes. New Keenspot strips only trickle in, bear in mind. Look at Shaenon Garrity. Shaenon writes for fucking Marvel. Fucking Marvel. Nitrozac was contemporary with User Friendly's Illiad, made a living solely from her art before Penny Arcade or PvP did, and got guest of honor credits at Linux expos back in the 90's.

There are people up in that list above who are relatively new, building an audience. There are people in that who have a solid audience. There are people in that list who have absolutely rabid fucking fans. (Trust me. I've gotten e-mail from Aeire's fanbase before, when they haven't been happy with me.) They have absolutely the same capacity to build a webcomic, create a readership, develop an audience and influence and make a living as anyone else. It's the web. It doesn't fucking matter what kind of genitals they have. We can't see them.

And yet... if you read interviews with them, or questions posed to them, they continually come back to "so, you have breasts. How is it you draw webcomics? How can we get more people with breasts to draw webcomics? Would you mind showing us your breasts?"

Or it's about sex. Because if they're women, they must all be about the sex. Hell, Fleen just added a female columnist. Fine and dandy. Only, her column is This Week in Webcomics Boning, and it's done pseduo-Wonkette style.

Guys? One of the reasons I got into writing about webcomics is because I was reading some really exciting stuff on the web. Both comic strips and commentary. One of the people who most excited me, commentary wise, was Wednesday White. She predated me in this field. She knows at least as much as I do about it. And I fact check and reality check with her constantly.

But, see, she has a vagina. Therefore, her field of expertise must be women's issues.

It especially frustrates her because she can't actually write about women's issues when they do come up. Not comfortably, at least. When she does, it becomes "them womens complaining about them womens things." Or it becomes invisible. Or it becomes what she's known for. As an example -- Weds wrote two of the first, most comprehensive primers on RSS feeds for webcomics (here and here), as an example. These are issues people are still wrestling with with their webcomics today. (Didn't Keen just get RSS functionality?) But when people talk about Weds's pre-Websnark writing, they talk about her essay on Geek Women in webcomics. When they ask her about webcomics or popular culture, they ask her about women's issues, not Jack Chick or religion in comics or any of the myriad of subjects she's written about for Websnark.

And at the same time, no one ever asks me about women or men in webcomics. Now, I should be an expert in men and men's issues in webcomics because I have a penis. But for some reason, I get general questions or critical questions or questions about the field, that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with what sex I was born.

Which is weird, because I actually have an answer to the question.

How do we encourage women to draw and participate and read webcomics?

Let them.

Seriously. Women find out about webcomics the same way men do -- through word of mouth or occasionally through advertising on sites they read. When they find out about webcomics and like them, they read them. Sometimes just one, sometimes a bunch. If they're artistic in temperament, they might get a yen to give this a try. Absolutely nothing stops them.

Nothing, that is, except a prevailing attitude. An implicit sexism, that comes not from what they can or can't achieve, but instead comes from the assumptions that get laid upon them.

In other words, if you really want to encourage women to be involved in webcomics? Stop defining them as women in webcomics. Talk about their art, talk about their stories. Talk about their criticism or their commentary. Talk about what's being done.

And if you recognize them as being significant enough to interview in the first place, put their vaginas out of your head and ask them about the webcomics field itself.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:29 PM | Comments (120)

March 12, 2006

Eric: Channel markers.

Webcomics criticism has grown, since the days we first started putting pen to virtual ink over here at the 'Snark. We weren't the first to talk about webcomics, we're far from the last, we're not the best (unless you think we are -- and if you do... well, thank you!), but we're among the better known.

One sign of growing, in any critical field, is when the field begins to turn on each other and devour each other's sweet, sweet flesh. And we've kind of moved into that realm. There is rending and gnashing and pain. We have reached the point where Webcomics Criticism has Drama of its own. Drama between critics. Drama and hatred and bile.

The great thing about Critical Drama, as opposed to, say, Webcomics Drama, is no one gives a shit except other critics.

Seriously. Oh, a few Webcartoonists stare and shake their head and say things like "what in God's name are you people doing?" But for the most part, the only people who care about internecine warfare between critics are other critics. And, as has been pointed out, it is this very internecine warfare between critics that is the foundation of literary criticism from at least the 19th Century onward.

As a side note, as has often been mentioned, Harold Bloom is insane. But I digress.

Well, I'm not going to add fuel to the fires. For one thing, I have a hard time caring about them. In the words of Wednesday White, I'm going back to bed, blearily eating saltines, and watching Doctor Who. For one thing, Doctor Who is really good, these days. And for another, the arguments hardly need me.

However, I do recognize that, for whatever reason, folks read what we have to say. So, it seems appropriate to offer some advice to the prospective webcomics critic, blogger, journalist or what have you. This is my advice, as opposed to The Websnark Style Guide. I don't necessarily speak for Weds here.

Consider this some channel markers. These aren't rules, because... well, honestly, who the fuck am I to set rules? But these can help keep new critics and bloggers out of the shallows.

If you think I'm specifically writing about you... I probably am. But let's pretend I'm not. This isn't meant to be personal. It's just advice.

Be up front and consistent about what you're writing. Some people write because they really enjoy writing. They don't really care if they get an audience or not -- they just want to put words on the internet. Others really like having people read their stuff -- they want an audience. They crave it. And they're going to shape their writing to that audience. Some people want to be vicious and mean, tearing into the banal and substandard with a vicious glee. Others want to support and promote the things they actually like.

The important thing is to understand what it is you want to do, to be up front about what you're doing, and to be consistent about it. If you're a webcomics review site, wanting to render your opinions (be they positive or negative) about webcomics, and rate them according to your scale, that's fine. But you should make it clear that's what you're doing. If you hate all webcomics and want to take webcartoonists down several pegs, be clear about that. (And if you hate all webcomics and want to take webcartoonists down several pegs, admit it to yourself and others -- don't claim to be a general review site.)

This, by the by, is why Weds and I so firmly say Websnark isn't a webcomics blog. It's not that we don't write about webcomics. We do write about webcomics. But we write about other stuff, too. We write about Bibleman and video games and Jack Chick and my cat. We get to do that because we're up front about it.

If you're not up front about your intentions, people will castigate you. They will call your motives into question, and use it to undermine your credibility. And some people will believe them. If you are up front about your motives and intentions, some people will still castigate them, of course, but you'll remain credible through it all. And credibility is coin of the realm for any kind of critic.

Accept that not everyone is going to agree with you. This one should be highlighted, underlined and circled in your notebook. Not everyone is going to agree with what you say. Your opinions aren't natural laws. You may think something is great. Someone else is going to think it sucks. Accept that. Don't worry about converting them to your opinion. Express your opinion as clearly as possible, accept that some folks will disagree with it, and move on.

Support your thesis. It's easy to write "the webcomic Anime Treacle sucks donkey." Heck, I just wrote it, and it took less than five seconds. However, declaring that Anime Treacle sucks donkey doesn't do anyone any good if you don't support what you're saying. You need to demonstrate why it sucks donkey. You need examples. You need evidence.

Now, you might not understand why this is important. "It's just my opinion," you say. "No one can claim it isn't my opinion." And that's true. No one can.

However, if someone who likes the webcomic Anime Treacle reads that, all they can say is "wow, what an asshole." And then they'll never believe anything else you ever write. They'll assume you're stupid. If you weren't stupid, you'd agree with them about Anime Treacle. They'll tell all their friends "wow, this guy is stupid." The word will spread. The word "stupid" will appear in many peoples' descriptions of you.

And people who agree with you that Anime Treacle sucks won't come to your defense, because there's not enough there to defend. All they can say is "well, I think it sucks too!" And sooner or later, you'll post that one of their favorite webcomics sucks too, and you'll lose them. Ultimately, every person on the planet -- including various people in the third world who have no electricity, will think you're stupid.

Which honestly isn't the point of blogging, now is it?

On the other hand, if you explain why you think Anime Treacle sucks, and give examples, you give people a chance to see where you're coming from. You'll convince some of them. Others will disagree, but they'll have a sense of why you came up with that opinion. And yes, a couple of people will disagree and say you're stupid, but it will be easy for other folks to come to your defense. You will begin to build a reputation as not being stupid. Life will be better.

As a side note -- saying that Anime Treacle sucks, and then linking to a particularly suckful example strip? Doesn't much help if you don't go into why that strip is an example of sucking. Any time you figure it's self evident? It's not.

Don't argue your point on that webcomic's forums. It's absolutely natural. You post a well thought out essay that makes a solid point about a webcomic. You support your thesis. You try to be as fair as possible to your subject. You make it clear you know your subject and you're not doing this out of hate. This is honestly what you felt, and you just hope that -- if it's negative -- it doesn't hurt the cartoonist's feelings as much as it helps him improve.

What's the first thing you do after posting? You go to that webcomic's forums, to see if they're talking about your essay.

Don't lie. We all do it.

And at first, we get upset because no one seemed to notice. "Where the Hell are they," you think. "Someone on this forum must read my site too!"

As a side-note? No. No, that's not true. I don't care how many people you've got reading. We've got a frighteningly large audience over here on Websnark, but that audience pales in comparison to the internet in general. There are vastly more people out there who've never heard of Websnark than those who have, and it's entirely plausible that the majority of a given webcomic's audience would be among those who've never heard of us.

And it's also true of you.

Anyhow. You become tempted to post a pointer yourself. Don't. Let them find it, or not find it.

If they do find it, and they start a discussion, go ahead and read that discussion. Like I said, we all do. We want to feel like we've had impact. We want to feel like our words have been read.

Well, you start reading, and you begin to realize that these people didn't get the point. They're reading things into your essay that you didn't mean. They're accusing you of things that you didn't feel. And some of their responses are clearly wrong. They clearly didn't even read the essay -- you address the very things they're accusing you of! They're lying or they're wrong. And no one's taking your side. No one's explaining just how wrong they are.

You will have an overpowering urge to post your response. To say "no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying Anime Treacle is pornography. I'm saying that Anime Treacle's use of nudity can be off-putting to the potential audience." You want to reasonably show them what you meant.

Don't. Walk away. Take deep breaths. Go read Wil Wheaton's blog for a while. But don't go to their turf and try to get them to "understand." They're not going to. And you'll get a reputation for being a defensive hothead who can dish it out but can't take it. And no one will ever -- ever -- take anything you write seriously.

Yeah, they're going to get it wrong. Guess what? That's okay. These are the hardcore fans of the comic strip you just said mean things about. They're not going to kiss you for it. They're going to hate you. Let them. This is their place. The place where Anime Treacle is the coolest damn strip on the web. You've posted your opinion. Let them froth all they like over there.

If you see something you honestly didn't think of -- a clarification of your essay you honestly feel must be made? Do it on your blog. That's your place. If they want to get into it, let them come to you.

But be sparing on those responses, even then. See "defensive hothead who can dish it out but can't take it" above.

Don't take yourself too seriously. Writing is largely ego-driven. We all know it. We want to believe we're carving our words into the living rock of history and the Critical Discourse®. We want to feel that the things we say will be remembered for the decades to come, will bring men and women to tears, will change lives, will out-Oprah Oprah. And in our heart of hearts, we believe that will come to pass, one day.

Leave those sentiments in your heart of hearts. Jesus, guy. It's just blogging. When you see people dismissing you, shrug and move on. Let what you've written speak for itself. If someone makes fun of you, laugh and try to see their side of it.

And don't lose your sense of perspective. Some people really love criticism. Or bloggers. Occasionally, you might get groupies. Enjoy it. (Though, you know. Use a condom.) However, most people who read webcomics criticism are fans of webcomics. They're interested in what you have to say because they're interested in webcomics, and they think it's neat someone's writing about them. Never confuse that with being more important than your subject matter. A hell of a lot more people read Penny Arcade than read your critical site. The minute it seems like you consider yourself the starmaker, the filter through which webcomics fans will see all their work, the person who stands as Editor To Webcomics who must be appeased lest you bring your wrath against the apostates? Your audience will start laughing at you. And then most of them will leave. If you're really lucky, someone will write something making fun of you. Truly lucky people might get a webcomic's daily strip devoted to mocking you.

Hand in hand with that is learning to accept the criticisms made against you, whether they're fair or not. If you get any sort of audience at all, you're going to get some responses to your work. And if you're like most of us, you're going to obsessively look for them. You'll surf Technorati and your site statistics for links, google your site name, and otherwise haunt the halls of fora and blog to find what people are saying.

Well, some of them are going to say some pretty brutal things about you. They're going to accuse you of things, rightly or wrongly. Some of them will be young enough (at least emotionally) to think they're pretty cool if they call you various words that mean "homosexual." Some of the things they say will be very, very hurtful.

And, worse yet... sometimes they'll be right. Sometimes their criticisms will be well thought out, whether they're being reasonable or inflammatory. Sometimes, they'll actually be pointing out your flaws.

The best thing you can do is ignore the idiots and try to learn from the smart people. I don't mean you need to change to suit your own critics -- sometimes they're going to fail to understand where you're actually coming from. Sometimes they're going to be right, but you're going to decide to continue anyway, because it's what you want to do.

Most of all, you should only rarely respond to them. If part of their criticism involves the now infamous phrase "they've lost me as a reader," it's fine to post a polite note thanking them for reading up until now. Don't try to defend yourself. It can't go well. It won't go well. And if they said hurtful things... well, try to get over it, and when you're writing your own stuff, remember what it felt like and try not to dish it out to others.

Unless, of course, that's your bag.

(And for God's Sakes, don't make every conversation you're in be about you. If you're in a forum or comments section of a blog, discussing something, don't phrase every comment to be a thinly disguised self-advertisement. Self-promotion is just fine in moderation. But if you're finding a way to relate a debate folks are having about an essay someone wrote about Anime Treacle, don't use it as an excuse to pimp your own recent essay on Manga Saccharine. That way lies people yearning to have you skinned as a rug.)

Be confident. The flip side of the last point, however, is a need for confidence. You have to be confident in what you write. You have to stand by your words. If you participate in a forum discussion or a comments section of your or another blog, you need to have the courage of your convictions.

Does that seem self evident? It's not. It's not because it's very, very easy to discount yourself. After all, you're talking about webcomics, and that means you're talking about webcartoonists. You're talking about Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub. You're talking about Gabe and Tycho. You're talking about Jon Rosenberg and R. Stevens. You're talking about people who tens of thousands of people read every day. (Sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes millions.)

Hell, even in the critical community there's folks everyone's heard of with loud voices and loud opinions. There are Phil Kahns, William Gs, Fleen Folks, and yes, Eric Burnses and Wednesday Whites. People who've been in any number of screaming matches with each other and with the aforementioned webcartoonists.

And here you are. Thirty people read your blog. You have no street cred. Who the Hell are you? No one.

Weirdly, it's a safe place to be in. "No one's going to give a damn what I have to say, because I'm nobody." It's a way of posting opinions which you can then disavow. And, it's a way to fish for affirmation -- if you say "no one gives a damn about me -- I'm just a guy with a blog," it's an opportunity for people to post back "of course you're someone."

The problem is? It doesn't work. At all.

Trust me. I've been there. "I'm just a guy with a blog" was my rallying cry for the first nine months of Websnark's existence. And the best thing I ever got for it was an eyeroll. It was a mistake, because what it really says is "I'm not important enough to take seriously."

Well, if you're not important enough to take seriously, why are you wasting everyone's time by posting essays and comments in the first place?

You know that list of names I put up above? Kurtz, Straub, Tycho, Gabe, Rosenberg, Stevens, G, Kahn and the like? They play streetball. They go full on balls to the wall. When they show up, they show up to play, and they will tear your throat out if you pull that "I'm nobody" shit on them. I know. I've seen it. I've been it. If you want to participate, participate. It doesn't matter if they've never heard of you -- make your points, support your points, and have faith in your points. And if you're wrong, you're wrong. But at least you brought your A game.

Don't try to rewrite history. Look, we make mistakes. We all do. Sometimes we post an essay and we get stuff wrong in it. Sometimes that stuff makes the whole essay wrong. Sometimes, we put up an essay innocently and it turns into a firestorm of controversy we never meant. Sometimes, we find ourselves in a crucible on all sides.

The temptation is to go back. Revise. Reword what we said. Take the essay down entirely.

It is never a good idea. Ever.

For better or for worse, we live in an ephemeral medium. It's dirt simple to pull down posts, delete comments, go through and re-edit after the fact. One of the truisms of creative writing is "writing is rewriting," and it's so simple to go ahead and edit edit edit.

The problem is, people have responded to what you wrote. If you go and change what they responded to, they're going to remember that fact. Even if you have the best of intentions, any editing or rewriting you do is going to come across as self-serving -- an unwillingness to admit to your mistakes. An attempt to make the record show you made no mistakes, so your critics must be wrong.

Have you ever seen the glee someone takes in posting a Google Cache copy of an original post you've since changed? It's particularly savage glee. And boom -- you have no credibility left. At all. In anything. Congratulations. You have just been demoted to punkass bitch.

And then, there's the deleted post. Or comment. Or whatever. You know the one. You made a mistake. You took a ton of heat for it. A controversy has brewed. It's not what you meant, at all. So you pull the post down. Maybe you post an apology as well, but you get the mistake out of the record.

Well. The people who hated your post don't forget it because you deleted it. They remember it. Only now, they remember their version of it. And their version of it is vastly worse than what you actually wrote. And they're more than happy to tell the world about this horrible version of what you wrote, and here you are completely unable to refute them, because you took down the evidence. Even if you put it back up, it's trivial for your critics to say "hey, they rewrote that while it was down!" You have absolutely no way to win if you do this. And all too often, you seem like a coward when you do it.

It's not right. It's not fair. But that's how it is.

The best thing -- the only thing -- you can do is post a correction. "I said this in my last essay. I was wrong. I didn't mean for it to go where it went. I'm sorry." If you want to absolutely make certain you acknowledge the areas you were wrong, add html strikethroughs to highlight the areas you were mistaken in. If you need to add a correction to the essay itself, put it at the bottom next to a clearly marked edit marker.

We all make mistakes. Sometimes, you have to own your mistakes, in order to keep your credibility.

Everything counts, and your audience has a memory. This goes with the very first point. Remember how I said to be up front? Well, the reason for that is over time your intentions -- your real intentions -- will become clear.

If you start your blog claiming loudly that you're going to be a critic who's highlighting the problems and issues you see in sequential art today, that's fine. If, however, you spend the next four weeks trashing Anime Treacle or Manga Saccharine, over and over and over again? No one is going to believe you're trying to make sequential art better. They're going to believe you have a vendetta against Anime Treacle and Manga Saccharine. They're going to believe this because they're right.

I'm not saying your vendetta against Anime Treacle or Magna Saccharine are wrong, mind. I haven't even read your vendetta yet. However, the simple fact is, you have a hate on for those webcomics and that hate is eclipsing everything else you do. And people aren't going to look at you as a reasonable webcomics critic with good credentials in the field and credibility in various matters. They're going to look at you as the guy who hates Anime Treacle and Manga Saccharine. They're going to see everything you do through that filter. Even if you end your blog and launch a new one where you never, ever talk about Anime Treacle or Manga Saccharine, a core group of people will dismiss everything as being part of your vendetta. Or will remind people of your vendetta. You will be seen as having an agenda.

Understand, this has nothing to do with whether you are right or wrong. This has everything to do with credibility. I've said before that there's no such thing as objective criticism. This is true. However, there is still a capacity to be deceptive in your criticism. When you're seen as having an agenda, people become suspicious of your work, regardless of that work's intention. They'll question whether you're being selective, to build support against the objects of your vendetta. And even if there's no evidence of that, they'll bring that bias to whatever you write.

The same thing can happen when you cut a swath across broad sections of webcomics. If you rail against gamer comics, or sprite comics, or furry comics, or Keenspot comics, or any group... and if you do it often enough... then you stop being seen as a critic and you start being seen as "anti-gamer" or "anti-sprite" or "anti-furry" or "anti-Keenspot." Or whatever. And again, what happens is that then defines you. You can post about how much you like Sluggy Freelance, and they'll come back at you and say "but Bun Bun and Kiki are talking animals, and you hate furry comics. So either you're lying now or you were lying then! Which is it? Huh? Which is it, Skin Boy?"

Remember, you'll get back what you give out. A couple of times up above, I made mention of "being able to dish it out but not take it." That's actually a rhetorical fallacy. Our capacity to gracefully accept criticism has no bearing at all on whether or not our own criticisms are valid.

But, remember that word I keep using? "Credibility?" Credibility doesn't care if we're discussing a fallacy or not. If you're giving a sense that you don't have as thick a skin as you're expecting your own targets to have, you're going to lose credibility. It's not fair, but it's true. And that's mostly true when you're posting vitriol.

It's a simple relationship. If you post reasonable essays, with well thought out points that are well supported, you'll get back comments that engage those points in a reasonable way. (With, admittedly, a few people flinging feces against the walls. It is the internet.) If, on the other hand, you mock people, you're going to get back anger and mockery of your own.

If you give your audience the capacity to comment, understand that means you're going to get comments in kind. (You'll also sometimes get purely dickish comments, because sometimes people can be dicks, but I digress.) If you're not emotionally ready to be torn to shreds every time you post... don't tear into other people with your posts.

Be prepared for thunderous silence. Sometimes, we put a lot of work into our essays. We really, really research them. We bring our A game writing wise. We make it entertaining. We have just the right touches of humor. We make them accessible. We do all the things that we're supposed to do. And we post, and we read the post, and we know... we know we hit that one right out of the park.

And we wait for comments to arrive.

And we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And sleep on it.

And check in the morning.

And where the fuck is everyone?

It happens.

Sometimes it happens because you didn't resonate with people as much as you thought you had. It's sad, but true. Sometimes, we don't actually do as well as we think we have. Sometimes we do nail a given essay, but no one cares about the subject matter.

And sometimes it's just as good as we thought, and everyone loves it... but no one has anything to say. It's easier, sometimes, to comment when you disagree than it is when you agree. If you get it absolutely one hundred percent right, persuading everyone who sees it... sometimes that leaves no room for anyone to provide feedback.

It can drive you completely insane. But there it is. Sometimes people are just going to be quiet. Anything you do to drum up discussion will only weaken the original essay. You're stuck.

It sucks. But as there's nothing to be done for it, we move on.

Finally, no one is under any obligation to you. This might be the hardest one for people to admit. Remember above, when I said not to take this stuff too seriously? This is why.

No one is under any obligation to you.

They're under no obligation to agree with you.

They're under no obligation to respond to you.

They're under no obligation to link to you.

They're under no obligation to acknowledge you.

The subject of your essay is under no obligation to listen, to change their ways, to acknowledge, to point their audience in your essay's direction or to in any way make any indication they know who you are.

Your audience is under no obligation to give you feedback, to agree with you, to get the point of your essay, to understand you, or to come back for more, tomorrow.

Your peers are under no obligation to consider you a peer.

No one is under any obligation to take you seriously.

No one is under any obligation to you whatsoever.

If you spend time, and energy, and have a little luck, you will build up a reputation... you will slowly build credibility. You will get return visitors. You will get people agreeing with you, and arguing with you. You will get linked. You will get influence. You will get acknowledgment. You will get an audience. Whether that audience is 30 people or 30,000 doesn't matter. You will get them.

But you don't get them for free, just by showing up. It takes time, and work, and effort. It takes accepting when people misunderstand you, and being thick-skinned when they insult you. It takes working damn hard to get your facts straight and admitting when you get it wrong. It means being honest about what you're doing and accepting that not everyone will agree with you. And it means having a sense of humor about yourself, but also standing by your work.

It can be pretty damn cool. It can also suck. And it can be hard. How do I know those points above are channel markers? I've screwed them all up at some time or other. If you go through the past, you can see where.

So. Maybe these will help others as they move along their way. In the meantime, I'm not going to trash any other critic right now. Not when there's a bed, and crackers, and Doctor Who.

Good luck. And if you run aground, mean to.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:05 PM | Comments (82)

March 6, 2006

Eric: From an e-mail sent about my last post

The following got sent to me by a fellow named Dale. Or, I suppose, a woman named Dale. Either way, Dale says:

Tell me something. How much of your unhappiness with City of Heroes came from little new content? And how much of it came from multiple waves of forced re-specification for "balance" purposes, and "enhancement diversity" (which wasn't), and "here's how we're changing everything again?" without any real reward to go with it?

Dale's a smart person.

There was a ton of rules changes, power changes, and "balance" issues in and around there. To the point where we were begging and pleading for them to just stop. They already had us. We were playing. Please please please stop messing with it.

Well, they've stopped messing with it... but they also haven't really ever given the Heroes something really, really cool to bring them back. Special events have been Hero and Villain events, not just Hero events.

So, yeah. I think that is a big part of why I just feel "meh" towards Paragon City these days.

The Rogue Islands, on the other hand, haven't been nerfed yet. Right now, I can solo to 21 with a Necromancy Mastermind -- and have a blast doing it. Right now, Brutes can lay waste all around themselves. It's fun. We feel eeeeeeevil. In a good way.

Maybe next year we'll be screaming about nerfs again and begging them not to "balance" us once more. And maybe not. Maybe they'll just leave well enough alone for a while.

Because in the end, they really did lose the war for the sake of a few battles, when it comes to their flagship.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:13 PM | Comments (14)

Eric: It's been a long time, so here's a City of Something post. Just accept it and move on.

It seemed like the love affair was over.

Oh, I still liked super heroes. I liked the conventions. The spandex. The pummeling evil. The defeating of evil with glowing green rays coming out of my character's eyes.

However, sometime back in November, I got busy. Very busy. And then Christmas was busy. And January was staggeringly busy. And so I stopped logging in. Days between sessions of punching became weeks. And then months. It seemed like I just no longer cared.

I had fallen out of love with City of Heroes.

I went back to it, finally. Got back together with my cadre of hero pals. But it just wasn't the same. They were still full on synchronized in their banter. They still cared. They still wanted it. But I was running along behind, and kind of yawning.

Maybe it was because all the development love for many months now is going to City of Villains. And the next Issue of free content updates ("Destiny Manifest") is almost all Villain content as well. So going back and trying things out was very much the same old same old.

I thought about canceling. I mean, I wasn't that interested in City of Villains. Oh, I had playtested it. And I knew it was worthy. I knew it was good. But it wasn't for me. I liked playing heroes.

And besides, they were really, really pushing the City of Villains PvP content, and I detest PvP. At least in part because I suck on toast at it.

Hey, I'm honest. Give me that much.

Well. I got together with my friends during the "Valentine's Event," but it seemed like a last hurrah.

And then last week, I made a new City of Villains character. Somewhat randomly, mind. In fact, the whole reason I did it was because I wanted to make a character wearing a lab coat. That's all. So I made a doctor, and decided to make that doctor a Mastermind. Masterminds, you see, control henchmen. They control ninjas. Or robotic minions. Or soldiers. I've played them before, during the playtesting, and they're fun.

Well, I decided to give this character a backstory. I always give my characters backstories. I'm into the whole "role play" thing. I know, I know, you can steal my lunch money later. Anyhow, I decided my character had been a medical student who was badly injured. Said medical student was then reshaped by the vivisectionist known as Doctor Vahzilok -- an archvillain from City of Heroes known for his Frankensteinian monsters and the reanimated flesh he sends out as waves of cadaverous zombies of death. Because my character had a decent amount of money for his "treatments," the character wasn't used as spare parts for an abomination of nature, but instead had organs largely replaced and flesh remade into a super powered wielder of darkness -- what in the game is called a Murk Eidolon.

Well, when Doctor Eidolon broke away from Vahzilok, the knowledge for reanimating and vivisecting flesh went along with. And so Doctor Eidolon commands not only the powers of darkness... but zombies! Better than zombies, even. Science zombies! Mu hu hah hah hah!

You get the idea. It's a role playing game.

Anyway, I started playing the character as a lark. Soloing, instead of teaming. In fact, I'm not even playing this Doctor Eidolon on my normal server.

And I discovered something.

City of Villains is a good game.

City of Villains is a really good game.

First off, I discovered I was able to solo, in a practical way. See, "soloing" is exactly what it sounds like. You're not gathering together with other players, teaming against the forces of... well, whatever. No, you're going it solo.

City of Heroes didn't do soloing well. At all. It could be done, with just the right build... but it was far too onerous. Level advancement, for someone who took missions instead of just hunting the streets and grinding out levels, took too long and didn't give enough rewards. The missions didn't chain together well -- there were "plot arcs," but they were relatively few and far between.

City of Villains, on the other hand, has a vastly more mature system of mission chaining. First off, thanks to the "newspaper" system, you're never without a mission if you want one. After all, we're supervillains. We don't wait to be given a mission. Sometimes, we flip open a newspaper, learn that Doctor Aeon's built a cool new thingammie, and realize "hey, I could steal that and get a ton of money for it on the black market." Or a psychologist releases a new book claiming your antisocial behavior stems from an unhappy childhood, and you get astoundingly pissed off and go kidnap her. Or you just decide to break some heads because you just like breaking peoples' heads.

Do enough newspaper missions, and you get to knock over a bank or a casino or the like. Knock over said bank, and you get a contact, who'll almost always put you into a full plot arc -- sometimes chaining you to other contacts who do further plot arcs.

And the contacts are brilliant this time. In City of Heroes, the contacts are almost cyphers. Sure, they're written in character... but there's only so many upstanding young environmental reporters or public defenders or taciturn men in black you can deal with before they all seem the same. The fight for justice is never ending, but it's also dull.

The contacts in City of Villains, on the other hand, are all over the freaking map. One of them doesn't like to be seen, so your contact is actually his car. His gigantic solid gold Cadillac, to be exact -- you can practically hear Isaac Hayes music in the background when you see him. (His "contact picture" in your list is his hood ornament.") And then there's the radio. See... one of your contacts is a radio. And when you listen to it... it almost sounds like... like they're talking about you. Giving you suggestions. Giving you hints. Passing you messages.

In other words? City of Villains has an entire mission chain being given to you via delusion of reference.

The missions themselves are delightfully villainous -- in a "high villain" style. You're not killing schoolchildren or selling peoples' daughters on the street for drugs. This isn't real evil. This is supervillain evil. You're taking nasty peoples' money and shutting down the generators to the television station before they can broadcast their exposé. You're picking sides and factions and playing them off each other. You're sneaking off to Paragon City and destroying their efforts to rebuild the war-torn sections of town so the "city of heroes" has to stay on the defensive. You're going back to Paragon City and blowing up some of their freaking superhero statues just to wipe the smug look off their smarmy little hero faces.

In City of Heroes, after a solid week of solo play, you'd be lucky if you had four or five plot arc "souvenirs" of your heroic exploits. And there's only so high a level you can become without teaming up with other folks or being really good at soloing.

In City of Villains, I and my undead horde of science zombies have been soloing for a week. And I've broken level 21. And I have twelve souvenirs of my exploits. Including a hat from when I went back to Paragon City's prison (which you break out of to start the game) and busted out a bunch more villains. And a report faking my own death and falsifying my involvement in an affair where one of the leaders of the corrupt military used me as a freelancer to take down some of his rivals. And a drawing of me from the future, that implies that the true horror of that future was born in my bloody, bloody hands. And a golden hub cap. Because everyone should have a golden hubcap on the wall of his trophy room.

I'm having fun. In a way, with my solid pack of zombies, I'm teaming by myself -- acting in a support role for my own characters. The zombies are freaking cuisinarts, too -- whirling dervishes of total death, though squishy enough that I have to stay close to heal them and weaken their enemies or else they'll be cut down and said enemies will want to eat my head, instead. I just recently got the power to take a dead zombie -- well, a zombie that's been hacked up. I mean, it was reanimated flesh to begin with -- and tear out his very soul and put it against my enemies. Think about it. Not only am I taking a dead man and making him do my twisted bidding... but even after that dead man is hacked to pieces, I'm ripping its spirit back out of its eternal reward and shouting "Hey! Get back to work! Being killed twice is no damn excuse!"

The graphics are lush and only get better. The ambient sound is a quantum leap ahead of City of Heroes. The opposition -- whether other villains, the horrific result of villainous activity gone awry, the police, superheroic paramilitaries or superheroes themselves -- is well designed and thought out. Clearly it would scale well if I were in fact teaming with other villains, but soloing is a joy, straight through past the current half-way point in levelling.

And I look back at City of Heroes, and I sigh a bit. It's showing its age now. It got some graphics tweaks when City of Villains went online, but that's not the same thing. And of course, all the new content has been going to City of Villains, so it hasn't really had anything exciting added to it since the "Forest of Dread" update (issue 5) last August or so. Really, at some point they're going to need to do a heavy overhaul of the mission trees and chains, to bring it up close to the level of City of Villains, and to be honest, it would probably make more sense to do a full on City of Heroes 2 instead.

I don't know.

City of Villains isn't perfect. For one thing, their constant drumming on the PvP bandwagon has gotten a small contingent of PvPers who've appeared, and who level up to the point where they can PvP, and then go do that -- PvPers who make the low level zones less pleasant than we're used to from City of Heroes, and not in a grand villain way. (I remember one particularly odious player stood next to the Quartermaster in Port Oakes and literally said "joing team]" over and over and over again, so anyone who showed up to buy or sell something got flooded out with requests to have someone pick him up and powerlevel him. (And why wouldn't he want to powerlevel. He was clearly just trying to get to the point where he could jump in the PvP zones. Man, I wish they had their own server or something.) For another thing, while the missions are meaty and fun, a lot of the time you really are just fighting other villain groups. I'd like a lot more bank heists and followup contacts -- maybe even a place where you can sell ill gotten loot. (There's a salvage system for bases, but there's no pawnbroker where you can buy and sell pieces of salvage, so you lose that chance to fence your goods.) And, weirdly enough, the NPC citizens of the Rogue Isles can be snarky to your face and you don't get to send your zombie hoard out to eat their sassy little brains before your eyes.

But that's minor. All I know is, I may have fallen out of love with City of Heroes, but there's a new obsession in my life. And that makes me very, very happy.

My girlfriend? Somewhat less happy. For the record.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:25 PM | Comments (16)

March 3, 2006

Eric: A random moment of conversation, about the whole thing from today.

"You know what I think the cover should be? Zig-Zag. Showing her tits! Now that's the history of webcomics!"

It is worth noting alcohol was involved.

I'm not going to tell you who actually said it, either.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:19 AM | Comments (39)

March 2, 2006

Eric: On History, Spin and Advertising: or drama.

My e-mail program has developed an aversion to webcomics drama, apparently.

Seriously. Wednesday just mentioned the current ongoing Webcomics Fracas, and was surprised to find I hadn't heard anything about it. In part, that's my own fault. It's been busy around these parts, so I'm behind on blog reading and rant-scoping. That apparently includes seeing the rant on PvP's front page. Perhaps I was distracted by Francis's new hair style. (And I like the new hairstyle, for the record. Though now I'm wondering if he still uses troll snot as 'product.' But I digress.)

Anyhow, as happens when there is Drama, I got several e-mails about it. As has not happened, just yet... every last one of those e-mails ended up in my spam filter. Every last one. I got other e-mails about other things, but anything to do with T Campbell, Scott Kurtz, Rodney Caston, The History of Webcomics, Antarctic Press or Previews magazine found its way into my spam filter, and there it sat, lurking.

Clearly, my e-mail spam filter took one look at the drama and said "oh, no fucking way. If I give this to Eric, he'll just write a post. And no matter what he says in that post, it'll angry up the blood of countless people. And when their blood is angried up they'll write hundreds of e-mails, and I'll have to sort through them. Fuck that. Fuck that in the ear. I declare this argument spam."

Sadly, for my e-mail program, it doesn't get to make those decisions. That's falling on my shoulders.

So. Here we are. Hi there.

You might have heard that T Campbell has a book coming out.

A caveat. I have not actually read The History of Webcomics. This is not due to lack of opportunity. Campbell solicited opinions and the like from a number of people, and I was one of them. If I remember correctly, I did have some input on a section from several months back, and I'm vain enough to be pleased that Websnark is covered in the book and Campbell asked permission to reproduce a Gossamer Commons strip for the book. However, with everything else that's been going on, I simply didn't have time to actually read the book itself. As such, I can't weigh in on the core of the arguments about it. I do know that Scott Kurtz actively dislikes a number of points about the book, and he elaborates on them well in a rant on PvP's front page. Rodney Caston also had some harsh words when he saw Campbell's depiction of the end of Caston's involvement with Megatokyo. And T Campbell responded, most notably in two posts on his blog (entitled Why You Weren't Interviewed and Wow, I'm Famous, respectively).

Those will give you a precis of what Kurtz, Caston and Campbell have to say about the content of the book. I encourage folks who have any interest at all to read and judge for yourselves.

However, I can comment on a couple of the core areas of contention, one of which I can comment on because I can see it for myself, and the other of which I can comment on as an issue of methodology, without speaking directly to execution.

Don't worry. I'll explain myself better than that when I get to it.

However, I'm going to start with the area that Campbell has, to his credit, acknowledged is problematic. An area that I can see for myself and, to be blunt, I think Scott Kurtz is completely right about. And that's the solicitation that Antarctic Press did in Previews for the book proper. You can click on the thumbnail over to the left if you wish, and it will do this javascript thing that will pop up and be, like, full sized. Or you can just click here and see it without the rigamarole.

"Rigamarole" is a fun word to type.

Now, have a look at the ad. You see a cover for the book, featuring characters from Argon Zark, Penny Arcade, Suck.com, Megatokyo and the avatar Scott McCloud used in his books Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. You see a splash bullet at the top announcing that "millions upon millions of readers can't be wrong!" And you see 48 point text announcing "PvP! Megatokyo! Penny Arcade!" And then they go on to talk about "world renowned historian web comic historian T. Campbell."

Well, setting aside the fact that Campbell doesn't put a period after the letter T (apparently it's his first name, now -- or at least the first name he uses -- which puts him in the same category as "5" from 60's Peanuts comics. But I again digress), there's something disingenuous about calling him "world renowned." I mean, I suppose if someone in England and/or Canada said something nice about him, it could be called accurate, but that's splitting hairs. There isn't anyone -- not Jerry Holkins, Scott Kurtz himself, Fred Gallagher, or Scott McCloud -- in webcomics who constitutes "world-renowned." To then go to the far more removed niche of "webcomics historians" and give Campbell that title is to border on the ridiculous. (Which Campbell agrees with -- remember, he didn't write the ad copy.)

More than that, however, we have those three examples in big text. PvP, Penny Arcade and Megatokyo. Those are indeed three of the very biggest webcomics out there, and no doubt are heavily referenced in the book. However, any casual reader would take their placement in the ad as both endorsement of and heavy participation in the book -- that the book was by Campbell, Kurtz, Holkins, Krahulik and Gallagher. As this isn't the case -- and as Kurtz at the very least emphatically does not endorse the book -- it doesn't just deceive. It creates potential rancor. Why wouldn't the webcartoonists in question look at that ad, furrow their brows, say "wait a second -- why is my comic in this ad?" and write annoyed stuff on their comic's front page.

The adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is a lie. If you manage to piss off the fanbases of three of the largest webcomics for your book about webcomics? You're not going to sell more books than you were before. Just putting it out there.

To me, that's just made worse with the bullet splash above it. "Millions upon millions of readers can't be wrong!" Well, first off -- of course they can. Millions upon millions of people read The Bridges of Madison County, and I'm here to say they were to a man, woman and child wrong. I mean, seriously -- that book was turgid. I never saw the movie, but since Clint Eastwood was in it, I figure they threw in a few gunfights just to raise the level a bit.

However, the other side is, it's a lie. Millions upon millions of people haven't rendered any kind of judgement on The History of Webcomics. You could almost get away with making a claim like this if this were The Webcomics Experience or The T Campbell Field Guide To The North American Webcomic or something -- then, you're describing a cultural phenomenon, and it's something close to fair to invoke the fans of that phenomenon.

This isn't a book about a phenomenon, however. It's a history book. And so the only possible reading of that splash point is that seven figures of readers agree with this history's interpretation and have signed off on it. And that, to use the industry term, is horse shit.

None of which is T Campbell's fault. He didn't write or lay out this advertisement. However, it's creating the initial conditions for what "buzz" the book is going to get, and that buzz right now is pretty harsh.

The cover? The cover's in Campbell's court, and that brings up the next aspect of this little adventure.

You see, we have folks like Piro and Scott McCloud hanging out, looking for all the world like the Breakfast Club, with Argon Zark taking the place of Judd Nelson in the ceiling tiles. Makes sense, right? A group picture of some of the seminal figures in webcomics identified in the book proper.

Well, there are two problems with this particular interpretation. One is composition-based, and the other is... well, etiquette based. The etiquette based problem has gotten some play -- Campbell didn't think to ask permission to use the characters on the cover.

Scott Kurtz covered his in a PvP strip, yesterday. (Click on the thumbnail to see it, as always.) It's not that Campbell needed permission to use these characters -- there are fair use issues involved, of course. It's that not getting permission was... well, dickish. It takes liberties with the webcartoonists and their property. In Kurtz's words, it's asking forgiveness instead of permission.

Campbell has acknowledged it was a mistake, and sought permission of the involved parties -- and indicated a willingness to replace the cover if they said no. The parties agreed. So hey -- that makes it better. Life is good, right?

Well... I dunno.

See, looking at that cover, I don't see a montage of webcomics characters crossing the spectra of the webcomics experience. I see a group picture of webcomics characters who are apparently about to go off on an exciting adventure, during which Argon Zark is going to nail Molly Ringwald in a supply closet. Once again, the feeling of the cover art -- to me -- is less one of subject matter and more one of endorsement. "Join Gabe, Piro, and some chick from Suck.com as they go on an action packed adventure through the history of webcomics." I'd rather see a montage of actual strips by the actual artists, laid out in some way that conveys the sense that we're talking about a history book here.

(And for that matter, all apologies to Terry Colon, but why Suck.com and not, say, User Friendly. Or AfterY2K -- a strip that was astoundingly popular in 1998-1999. Or GPF or Superosity. Or Fans for that matter? But that's a matter of taste, on my part.)

This creates a condition where people feel pissed off. Pissed off because they have expectations raised that then aren't followed through. ("Hey -- wait! There's not really any Piro in this book! It's all just words!") Pissed off because their characters or brand are being used to imply an endorsement they may not actually feel. Pissed off because they perceive a violation on the behalf of the webcomics they love. Pissed off because... well, because that's what happens in Webcomics when things come out.

And we haven't even gotten into the book itself yet. We're just talking about an advertisement and the cover.

Fasten your seatbelts, kids. This really is going to be a bumpy flight.

The other thing I can speak to, that I alluded to all the way back up in the paragraph laying out what I was going to talk about? Is methodology. Specifically, the method that Campbell has said he used to gather information for his webcomical historical.

You see, the core of Caston's complaint is that apparently Campbell discussed the breakup of Caston and Gallagher ("Piro" and "Largo") in Megatokyo. In so doing, he quoted statements of Gallagher's. Statements Caston disputes. He feels that Campbell should have solicited responses or interviewed him, and by failing to do so he has permitted a skewed interpretation of the events to be entered into what, after all, purports to be the historical record.

(Much like 'rigamarole,' I have to admit I like using the word 'purports' in a sentence. It's so... woody. But I digress.)

Campbell responded that he restricted the total number of interviews he did for the book to around 50 -- which is actually a pretty small number when you consider the breadth of webcomics. Hell, I personally read several hundred webcomics a day, each with their own set of webcartoonists and the like. Instead, he researched what was actually said online at the time of the events he laid forth. In his own words:

I had reasons. I started distrusting the interview process after a while. When somebody's asking you to sum up five to ten years in comics for posterity the temptation to "spin" your answer has to be overwhelming.

Some of my interview subjects seemed to resist the pull, but I still found myself preferring to consult the typed word, because:

a) there was no shortage of written words on ALMOST every topic that related to webcomics,
b) typed words were often composed in the past, not in the present about the past,
c) words in cyberspace could be contradicted by other interested parties or the general public and
d) if the words had been typed instead of spoken, there was a greater chance they were words the author stood by.

There is validity to this method. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. However, it is less valid than Campbell might believe, in part because it believes it's drawing off primary sources, when it isn't.

Let me go into the theory of research, for just a moment.

When you're doing research on an academic subject -- be that history, English, or what have you -- there are several kinds of sources you can draw off of. Primary sources are just what they sound like -- the specific materials in being interpreted. If you're writing about a book, quoting from that actual book is using a primary source. Using a piece of videotape of an event is using a primary source. A well researched piece of journalism, reporting the facts of an event with a strong effort towards objectivity, can be seen as primary, though it's a fine line sometimes.

Eyewitness accounts, interviews and the like, on the other hand, are secondary sources. You're getting your facts put through the filter of another mind -- through "spin," as Campbell said on his blog. You're getting an interpretation of events, not actual events.

This can be tremendously valuable, especially when doing historical research. In many cases, secondary sources are all we have. However, to get anything approximating an accurate picture, you need to gather as many points of view as you humanly can, picking and sifting through conflicting stories and interpretations until you can find a set of facts that can be verified... or simply highlighting the controversy and presenting a summation of the different viewpoints when a single course of events can't be demonstrated indisputably.

Campbell made the conscious choice to work from primary sources -- or as close as he could get -- in researching this book. This was the reason, along with sheer considerations of time, why he didn't interview eight or nine times as many people as he ended up interviewing. Rather than interview, say, Gallagher and Caston over their professional breakup, he found what was on the record from the time and drew off of that.

The problem is? Those quotes, and posts, and writings from the time? Weren't primary sources either.

We have almost no solid primary sources for news and information about webcomics right now. Comixpedia does all it can in that regard, but a tremendous number of its news items come, essentially, from press releases put out by the webcartoonists themselves. Newsarama, Comicon.com, the Comics Reporter and the like all do some webcomics coverage, but it's hardly comprehensive.

And websites like The Webcomics Examiner, I'm Just Saying, Fleen, Tangents, and, yes indeed, Websnark are one step removed from standard secondary sources. Websnark isn't news -- it's analysis. There isn't a thing that appears on this site that hasn't been filtered and altered by my or Weds's opinions and interpretation.

Now, the breakup of the professional relationship between Rodney Caston and Fred Gallagher is a watershed moment in the history of webcomics. Let's not pretend otherwise. There is a standard by which we can say Megatokyo is the single most successful webcomic to date. Simply put, it's the one that's in every major bookstore in America. It charts among the top selling manga titles in America (and the top selling Manga collections significantly outsell the top selling "pamphlet" style comic books, these days). Before Caston left, Megatokyo was a very specific kind of comedy. After he left, it was far more centered on Gallagher's storytelling and shounen romantic plot points. And while many people -- myself included -- preferred the Caston era Megatokyo, the simple fact is the post-Caston Megatokyo exploded into the mainstream, and had tremendous impact both on the Webcomics form and on sequential art in general. This breakup had impact. It was, in fact, a historical event, in a field that hasn't had many of them.

And in the end, the only two people who were in the room for it were Rodney Caston and Fred Gallagher. And the two of them currently dispute how it took place.

So, when Campbell quotes Gallagher from the time, he's not getting an objective accounting. He's getting Gallagher's interpretation. Because Caston elected to not go on the public record in the wake of his leaving Megatokyo, his interpretation of the event is being left out of the historical record. That reduces the accuracy of the work, and ultimately codifies disputed events into accepted ones.

And that is a significant problem of methodology. Because if I read the section on Megatokyo in this book, not knowing the above, I'm sure I'd accept it as given. That's the nature of writing down history. It becomes History, capital-H, and errors get written in ink. If that's indicative -- if Campbell sifted through reams and reams of forum postings, rants, blog posts and the like in putting together his history, in the end we're only getting his interpretation of others interpretations. By not getting fresh 'takes' on these things by as many of the involved parties as he possibly could, he is ultimately getting spun far more thoroughly than if he'd conducted the interviews in the first place.

Of course, if he had done the interviews in the first place, I doubt he'd be a quarter of the way through the book. But that might not be a bad thing.

I haven't read this book. One day, of course, I will. And I expect it will be a standard reference for some time to come. But the book says "Version One" on the cover, and that's good -- because I suspect Version Two will be significantly different.

When it comes out, I hope the advertising doesn't make peoples' blood boil before they ever see the book. Because if there's real issues to discuss with Campbell's methodology, having PR that makes people mad before they ever consider it just adds gasoline to a grease fire.

On second thought, maybe my spam filter had the right idea.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:19 PM | Comments (142)

February 6, 2006

Eric: For those who never tire of debating the experimental...

...you can now find Gunfight at the Experimental Webcomics Corral (or the Shroud of Tarquin) at the Webcomics Examiner.

For the record? I was responsible for the "shroud of Tarquin" part of the title.

This was a sometimes spirited roundtable discussing webcomics experimentation, past and present, including bright and fun people. Besides myself, there was also Neal Von Flue (who also conducted and edited the Roundtable), Alexander Danner, Cat Garza, Eric Milliken, Tym Godek, T Campbell, Philip Sandifer and Bob Stevenson.

Have a look -- if nothing else, so you can see how I contend that at least once upon a time both Megatokyo and Penny Arcade were full on experimental webcomics -- and feel free to leap into the comments over there and have it out. The purpose of roundtables is debate, after all, and there's a lot of fuel for debate in this one.

Also? Eric Milliken has a kickass piece of cover art for it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:51 PM | Comments (16)

Eric: Put another way, calling an e-mail server a "digital courier" doesn't change the nature of e-mail -- it just confuses people. Which may be the point. Damn, my titles are getting long.

So, every so often, you read something that makes you squint at the monitor and think "people have actually devoted time and effort to this?"

I had one of those tonight, via Boing Boing.

You see, in the latest Wired... or at least on Wired.com, they had an article declaring that the term "Cyberspace" was dead. Which I think we'd all figured out some time ago. And they had a roundtable to figure out a better word... a more twenty-first century word for what Cyberspace used to mean. And they consulted William Gibson (who came up with the term in the first place), other authors, venture capitalists, futurists, university people.. all kinds of folks to coin the next term for this, our shared electronic identity.

Well, way back in my first post on Websnark, I suggested that "Websurfing" should be replaced with "Powerslacking," since that's what we were doing. And so naturally I considered the question of what magical Word described our electronic infotastic webnetular universe.

And realized, almost immediately, that the whole concept is stupid.

When Neuromancer came out, it made perfect sense that Gibson would find a term for this shared universe of electronic virtuality he had posited. Especially since he didn't understand Information Technology of the time to begin with, so it was more shamanic higher spaces than information sharing. But in case you came in late, that was 1984 when that was published. Since then, we've had entire generations of people born, raised and developed inside of the electronic world. We are no longer discussing science fiction. The digital lifestyle is already here. And we have a word.

Not Cyberspace. And not the terms Gibson and the others came up with (like "Global Brain," "Infosphere," or Cory Doctorow's "Chattergoods"). No, we have a term that means "reading my electronic mail," "peer-to-peer filesharing," "bittorrent," "blogging," "googling for stuff," "surfing," "powerslacking," "buying shit from Amazon.com" and "checking out sweet alt-porn chicks" all at once. And it's a term pretty much every person with any exposure to that thing we used to call the Information Superhighway understands implicitly.

What is that term?

Online.

Online.

My father is a wise man. A good man. A learned man. He is a retired professor and dean. He has a Ph.D. And he has the computer skills of a rutabaga. I say this with love. He can learn, but it takes him time and effort, and it will never come naturally to him.

And yet, he says "all right, I'm going Online. Now--" when he describes a problem he's having. He gets the difference between online and offline.

When we play City of Heroes or World of Warcraft, we're generally not checking our mail or surfing the web. But we know each and every one of those activities is Online. We know that Google is an Online Resource we can use to search all the stuff Online and find what we need. And the things we do Online are many and varied, and exist right now.

Hell -- I have Voice over IP Telephony. I get my phone calls Online now.

This isn't science fiction. This isn't the future. This isn't (God help us) a brave new world Venture Capitalists can fund. This is today. We're already here. And we know what we mean when we use the word "Online."

I'm sorry. I'm sorry it's not as romantic as "Cyberspace" was, back in 1984. I'm sorry it doesn't excite the blood and found a new digital revolution. The thing is? We had the digital revolution. All apologies to "Web 2.0," but that revolution is over. The Online world is a part of the overall world now, and people have both expectations of and for it.

There will come new technologies that will blow us out of the water. I'm sure of that fact. There always are. But those technologies won't be a new kind of "Cyberspace" that will change everything, because we've already done that. Coming up with a new term for "Cyberspace" won't renew that sense of excitement and mystery for the digital world. It just sounds like people can't get over the dot com bust, and Jesus people that was how many years ago?

People get it. They know what Online means. They go Online right now, to do all kinds of shit. When you come up with more shit for them to do Online, they'll do it. But the sheer fact that this is Online won't excite them any more.

Still, I think Powerslacking can have legs. Don't you?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:03 PM | Comments (51)

December 30, 2005

Eric: I'm torn between a serene "here's some news that might interest you" and "OMGWTFLOLBBQ" for a title to this post. I think I'll just go with "wow."

So, in the last twenty four hours, a really big thing has happened in my life. A monumental thing. A huge thing.

Weirdly enough, it could also be construed as a big deal in webcomics.

And, among other things, it means some things over here at Websnark are going to change. At least where my involvement is... er... involved.

Yesterday, after my various posts, I received an offer. I have now accepted that offer.

Over the next month or so, I am going to be the new editor of Modern Tales.

Joey Manley is not going to the sea, mind. And bear in mind, this is Modern Tales, we're talking about. Not "The Modern Tales Family." I'm not taking over Graphic Smash, Serializer.net, or Girlamatic. However, things have been changing in the Manley empire for some time. Webcomics Nation has launched, and done well. Manley's priorities are changing.

And at the same time, Webcomics on the internet have also changed and evolved. We're not where we were in 2002. And so sites like Modern Tales have to evolve and change. Manley has some really, really good ideas for doing that change.

And he wants me to be part of it.

As editor, I'll be doing all the fun whip cracking. I'll also have a chance to shape the forward evolution. Part of my responsibilities will be submissions, acquisition and recruitment. My tastes and my biases will help shape the site as a whole, and what you will read there. And I sincerely hope you will be there.

Plus, you know, I'm getting paid. Which means I'm getting paid to edit.

Which means I'm getting paid in my degree. Which is like hitting the lottery for a guy with an English degree.

I'm thrilled. I'm excited. I'm astounded. And I'm a little scared.

In part, because this means things over here will have to change.

Oh, I know what I'm supposed to write, over here. "Don't worry, True Believers! Websnark's not going away! We're going to keep doing what we're doing! This is just something else I'm doing with my time." And yeah, Websnark isn't going away. I'm going to keep writing. Weds is going to keep writing. Stuff. Things.

But of course things are going to change. If there's one truth that came out of the Fleen debate from earlier, it's that we need to understand what biases and influences are going to shape a critic's opinions. As of this moment, I can't write anything about a Modern Tales comic without you knowing that I'm the editor. It's unethical to do otherwise. And you have to balance my thesis with the knowledge that I have a direct stake in the success of that strip.

Further, a number of webcomics creators are going to submit strips to me, in hopes of making it to Modern Tales. And, well, I'm not going to say "yes" to all of them. Or, reasonably, to most of them. If you think for one New York Minute that's not going to influence how those creators look at me, you've never gotten a rejection slip.

And, some people are going to declare I've sold out and gone to the devil. Others are going to declare that Modern Tales has gone to Hell and I'm the gatekeeper. There will be Drama.

I have credibility right now. The only way I can maintain that credibility is if I be straight with all of you. This is literally the first post I've made since accepting this position, and I'm letting all of you know what's going on. And I'm really, really thrilled. I hope most of you are happy for me. And those who aren't, I hope will still be cheerful.

As for things moving forward, MT wise? Watch for announcements. Comixpedia's a good place for that. I really don't intend to make Websnark an organ for distributing Modern Tales stuff. This site is remaining independent of MT. Wednesday's status isn't changing. (And I had to discuss this with her first, among other reasons because it would have a direct impact on Websnark, and I needed her okay before I could move forward.)

This also means some of my online habits need to change. I mean, I'm becoming an editor. A submissions editor. Naturally, some people are going to want to take any in they can find to... well, submit things. I can't be quite as open and accepting of stuff this way.

For the record? Submissions will be open soon, but are not open yet. I just got the job. I haven't sharpened my pencils yet. More news as events warrant. Watch MT for details.

Finally, I'm excited and a bit daunted on another level. See, I've been doing the Op/Ed thing for a year and a half. I've had my theories and my theses. I've put forth my opinions.

And now? I get to put up or shut up. I've talked the talk. Now I have the walk in front of me. That's frightening. It's also thrilling. I can't wait to get started.

To sum up?

Wow.

Wow.

Thank you, and good night.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:48 PM | Comments (82)

December 29, 2005

Eric: Angels sang out, in an immaculate chorus. Down from the heavens descended Chuck Norris.

I don't often do this.

However, the movie of The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny might be among the six greatest things of awesomeness, ever.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:12 PM | Comments (22)

Eric: In very brief:

Alpha Shade is gorgeous, and the story is gripping. I am a huge fan already, even if I'm just slightly confused.

Putting Alpha Shade through unnecessary Flash interfaces for no good reason? Makes the baby Jesus cry.

Fortunately, I was able, thanks to the low bandwidth version, to find the folder where the pages lived, and read them manually, page by page. Thus, my sanity was not crushed in an attempt to make it look like, oh hey, no -- I'm reading a comic book!

Massive time and effort, coupled with confusing and unnecessary interface engineering, all to make it look like 1938 technology.

Only significantly less convenient.

That is all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:45 PM | Comments (33)

Eric: Man, pretentious much?

This is the day I rectify the things I have not read. The day I update. The day I break through the barriers of habit and expose myself to the things everyone is reading.

Everyone but me.

I have consumed all of A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible. People I trust said I would adore it, and so I have. It runs through my head now. It's too large. I can't encapsulate it. I can't make it have appropriate size or meaning.

Not yet. But I will. At least, enough meaning for me.

I have read all of Perry Bible Fellowship now. I had sworn I never would, for reasons that weren't very good. But that vow proved weak and untenable, and now I have read it. I have sampled its glory. I have laughed my fucking ass off. And now I pass it to you, to keep.

I have started Alpha Shade. I have not gotten far in it yet. But I will. Work is slow, and this is the day I rectify the things I have not read. And after that there is Dicebox, and after Dicebox there is Killroy and Tina.

I know both Applegeeks and Mac Hall have adherents who praise them to the stars. I know Little Gamers is considered by some to be sublime and brilliant. But I do not know these things for myself. I have started all three before. Now, I will read them through.

There are forty comic strips I have queued up, in all. I won't tell you all of them. Many will make you say "wait -- you don't read that?" Others will make you say "why on Earth are you giving that a chance?" Some are famous, some obscure.

I have read two. There are forty that remain. I have started the third.

Today is the day I rectify the things I have not read.

Pray for Bobo.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:08 PM | Comments (24)

December 28, 2005

Eric: Prospecting perspective.

So, let's revisit Jon Rosenberg and Fleen, shall we? Because since the last post on the subject, there's been a development or three -- most notably a followup post on Rosenberg's site.

You remember the kerfluffle, I trust. If not, you can see my response to it, here. And from there, you can backtrack back to Rosenberg's original post. And so, the cycle of critical life is complete. I knew while I was writing that post -- and several other critics, pundits and what-have-yous were doing the same -- that Rosenberg would more than likely have something further to say.

What I didn't expect is that he would apologize. I mean, this is the Internet. What are the odds?

But, apologize he did. He explained that the post was meant to stir the shit up, get people talking, get people looking at Fleen, but direct their ire to him. This was successful, but he found that he was feeling badly about it. People were taking it rather more personally than he expected. People were taking it significantly more seriously than he expected.

And, perhaps worst of all, people were arguing his outrageous position, rather than the core thesis that had led him to found Fleen in the first place. And as a result, the discussion he actually wanted to have wasn't being had. The debate had become "can creators have a critical voice." Which, quite honestly, was tangential at best to Fleen.

So, he apologized. He said he had been, respectively: mean, hyperbolic, and incorrect. He said that he had done a disservice to his thesis. And he felt badly about it.

And after apologizing, he restated his core thesis, in hopes that would be the launching point for the next step of the dialogue. For convenience's sake, I'll reproduce it here:

Doing these things did a disservice to my thesis, which is that having a creator-only press is potentially unhealthy and damaging to webcomics in general and the webcomics press in specific. Doing these things buried the legitimate reasons for something like Fleen to exist (which by the way, is not for objective reporting -- objectivity and criticism don't mix. I never used the word objectivity once in my post). What I was trying to say was that there may be a conflict of interest in having the only souce of information come from creators. But all the bile-spewing turned the discussion from "is it healthy to have an all-creator press?" to "should people who are creators also be allowed to have a critical voice separate from their work?" These are two very different discussions, and I think that they likely have different answers.

So. The question before the house has been moved away from whether or not creators should have critical voices, and over to whether or not it's healthy when only creators have critical voices. And that, quite honestly, is a worthy discussion to have.

Though it's also a short discussion, honestly. Because for my money Jon Rosenberg is absolutely right -- not because there's any superiority to a non-creator's perspective over a creator's perspective, but because the two in fact have different perspectives. And differences of perspective are absolutely vital for a robust critical environment.

If one looks at Critical Theory, the absolute zeniths of criticism come when there are several different schools of criticism attacking similar subjects from radically different perspectives. When you have New Critics and Aesthetics and Historicists and Structuralists and Post-Structuralists and Marxists and Feminists and Platonic Scholars and Jungians and Campbellians and Christians all screaming at each other, united only by a passion for literature and a sneaking suspicion that Harold Bloom is insane, you have a critical environment that is burgeoning with growth and insight. Something new about the works being study comes out of this environment. Something new about the study of literature itself comes out of this environment.

On the other hand, when a specific school of criticism emerges and comes to dominate the discussion, what happens is less an elaboration on literature and critical thought, and more an example of naval-gazing. Deconstructionism at its height was so pervasive in critical thought that adherents to other schools of criticism were completely shut out of the dialogue. What resulted from that wasn't robust deconstructionism but a monumental contraction of the discourse. Non-deconstructionists and casual readers alike simply walked away, muttering dark things.

Well, we don't yet have codified schools of webcomics criticism (though we can see the beginnings of them growing out of the criticial tradition). However, we do have multiple perspectives and theories on the work. If you read my stuff and Joe Zabel's stuff, you'll see differences between our respective understandings of criticism. Move over to Scott Kurtz's critical essays (and he's written some, over on his site, and they're good.) and you get a different perspective than either Zabel or I have. And so on, and so on, and so on.

But, the thing is? I write webcomics. And long before I ever registered Websnark.com, I'd failed at being a Webcartoonist. Joe Zabel's been in comics for years, and he's in webcomics now. Scott Kurtz even puts together a little strip you might have heard of. Our perspectives are different, but we have that common element in all of them. We've all sat in front of the page and thought "how am I going to dirty this up with pictures and words?"

Rosenberg maintains that there's a value in having a critical organ on the web that lacks that common element. He's trying to recruit a number of writers, all of whom will have differences of opinion and background -- different perspectives, in other words -- but with the common element that while they are fans of webcomics, they are not webcartoonists. He thinks it will improve the discourse to have that voice out there.

And I agree. I honestly do. I think the more perspectives you get out there, the better we're all going to be. This is why I get annoyed when people trash the Webcomics Examiner, or Comixpedia. Or Websnark, for that matter. (All right, I might have other reasons to be annoyed when they trash Websnark.) All too often, people see a perspective that's not the same as their own and reject it outright. Often with colorful language and assertions about the critics' mothers.

Not me, though. I think the more people out there we have trying something different in the critical discourse, the stronger and healthier that discourse will become.

So, here's to Fleen. And here's to the Examiner, to Comixpedia, to McCloud and Zabel, to Tangents and I'm Just Saying, to Kurtz and Gabe and Tycho, to Blank Label and Dumbrella and Checkerboard Nightmare hitting people with shovels.

Here's to perspective.

And here's to not losing it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:50 PM | Comments (40)

December 27, 2005

Eric: The Long, Dark Night of Steve Troop

(From Melonpool.)

There reaches a point where the question becomes "how long is too long?" How long should a cartoonist keep writing and drawing his strip? How long should he keep plugging away? How many times does he keep grabbing for the brass ring before he kind of gives up?

As of this morning, Steve Troop is the latest big name cartoonist out of the Daily Grind. He had been doing a "phoning it in" riff where the images were static, and making a relatively snarky commentary about static image comics in the process, but the last one was last Friday, and today is Tuesday, which means we missed Monday, and that's the Grind.

More to the point, however, we're beginning to see a pattern.

Troop did an amazingly gutsy thing this year. Recognizing that his strip is choked with backstory and archives and all the rest, he decided to reboot the strip as a whole (eliminating his online archives in the process). He also went to a full page format, which means he was also increasing his workload. The whole design was meant to make it easy for people to leap right in, while maintaining the fun for long time readers.

(As both a long time reader and a follower of the new strip, I've enjoyed this greatly, though he may have been just slightly too In Media Res about how he did things. Since we lack backstory on who everyone is with the reboot, there's at least some sense of "who are these people and what are they doing?" that might be a touch difficult for folks. But I digress.)

Here's the thing. In a lot of ways, Melonpool's starting over. And Steve Troop's going for new readers, hard.

And that means that in a lot of ways, we have to treat Melonpool like a whole new strip. And that includes finding an audience.

Audiences take time, it's sad to say. Very few people get to launch with sizable numbers. In a way, Troop has an advantage -- he has rabid fans and the respect of many of his fellow creators. Both of those help. But, there's also the disadvantage that those folks who aren't reading still need to be brought in, and the situation is just odd enough that it takes time.

There's also some folks who simply don't like change -- even in a strip as anarchic as Melonpool, there are going to be some folks who don't want the multiple timelines and futurecasts and time travel and....

Yeah.

It reaches a point where a person feels pretty dark. And Troop -- who's coming off of illness -- is feeling that way now. In fact, in a recent forum post, he said that if he didn't get his readership to 5,000 daily unique IP numbers by the end of March, he would punch out entirely. (There was at least some feeling that he was pressing a gun to Mayberry's head and saying 'one wrong move and the Melotian gets it!') He then revised that statement to just be "growth by March," which seems healthier, but still....

And then we had Christmas, and several strips done in a parody of static art style a la Dinosaur Comics. Clearly, meant to keep Troop in the Grind while he took a break. Except we saw a real darkness underneath those sentiments... and a real sense of bitterness at Dinosaur Comics's success. They were put into Ralph's mouth, where bitterness is in character, but because they were breaking the fourth wall so firmly, they came across as... well, meaning every word of it. "He can't just plug in dialogue to stay in the Grind -- he has standards." "Too bad people ignore his work most of the time. When he tries, it's worth it!"

And in the accompanying newspost, he talks about how he's feeling, and what impact it's having on him:

It's starting to feel like I'm investing a lot of time into something that isn't really what I want to be doing. I've made no secret that I get no real joy from cartooning ... I haven't for years. The only real joy I get is from crafting stories and the comic always felt like the best way for me to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Maybe it still is, but I'm so jaded right now, it's hard to really think straight.

I don't know, man.

I like Melonpool. I always have. If I can help push people over to it, so much the better. But I don't know that this is the way to go about "saving it." Ryan North's comic is innovative not because the art is static, but because his writing is strong enough to transcend the art's limitation. And people talk it up because it's good.

But then, the question is -- is Troop truly angry at Dinosaur Comics? I don't think so.

I think he sees a comic strip he's been working on, in various formats, since the early nineties. I think he sees years and years and years of investment, of reinvention, of effort, of work. I think he sees tremendous risks taken this year to shake it up, to give people a route in, to reinvigorate everything. And I think seeing the slow process he now has to go through, slogging along, doing the daily strip drawing and working without "gimmicks" or "shortcuts" is exhausting.

I think Melonpool is on an ascent right now. Creatively and artistically, I think it's stronger than it's been in a long time. I think it's interesting and exciting, and I'm looking forward to where Troop takes it.

However, I also think that we need to get a solid storyline or two behind us before the new fans are going to jump on board, and I think it's going to be a slog getting there, and I think that has Troop feeling morbid. If Melonpool is ascending, Steve Troop himself is at nadir. He sees flashes in the pan and wonders what more he can do.

He seems, more than anything else, tired.

Well, I hope things pick up. I hope he gets his legs underneath him. I hope he gets some traction and some readership. From a selfish standpoint, I hope he gets whatever he needs to keep drawing Melonpool, because I enjoy it.

But most of all, I hope he swings up in mood. I hope he gets some hope back.

I hope he starts liking it again.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:42 PM | Comments (93)

December 22, 2005

Eric: The Snarkographia Webcomicka

My field of study, for those who don't know, is literature. And, within said literature, literary criticism and critical theory. I've logged a lot of hours learning the ins and outs of it. I've cut my eyeteeth on it. I've done the criticism thing.

Well, one of the foundational works in literary criticism -- required reading if you want to graduate -- is the Biographia Literaria. Published in 1817, it was an absolute landmark in the study of literature, in the study of poetry, in the study of imagery and composition. It delved deeply into critical theory, but also deeply into the study of poetry itself -- most prominently the Lyrical Ballads, which itself was an exercise by Wordsworth and Coleridge to overturn what they felt was the priggish, lackadaisical, overly formal, underly emotive state of poetry in English Literature at the time.

(In this, they succeeded. Wordsworth and Coleridge -- along with Blake and in a sense Robert Burns (and echoing the work of Milton in a previous generation) -- launched what today we see as the Romantic movement in poetry. Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth collectively formed the first generation of Romantics, followed closely by Keats, Shelley and Byron in the "second generation." Though, ironically, all of the second generation of Romantic poets died before any of the first generation did. But I digress.)

The author of the Biographia Literaria? Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poet himself.

To Coleridge, a true poet was also a critic of poetry. He had to be willing to delve deep, to break the surface, to tear the living guts of poetry out. He had to figure out how one took nature and reflected it in words, in a way as true to the nature as was possible, but even more importantly true to the poetry. As he said in the Biographia Literaria itself (ch.15):

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

And the philosophy of literature and of the aesthetic is critical theory. Indeed, Coleridge believed that the critical faculty -- the philosophical outlook -- that formed the perspective necessary to produce art of any kind had to be applied to the world. One had to examine all things with a sense of the critical, before they could produce art. And that most especially applied to the works of other artists, writers, and poets. One could not glean truth or beauty from a work -- truth that could be used in one's own art -- until one had applied the full extent of their critical prowess to that work. "Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding," he wrote in Chapter 12, and he meant every word of it.

This was hardly a controversial position, however. At this stage in history, poets, writers and artists were presumed to also be critics and philosophers. A poet who didn't also write essays was seen as something of a lightweight at best. An artist who didn't also examine the art of others was less a genius and more a dabbler. Fair or not, proper or not, the bias existed.

Robert Heinlein, who remains one of my favorite writers, expressed similar but more extreme opinions. He held literary criticism in disdain, because so many critics weren't writers. Who but a 20th Century American Poet was qualified to critique 20th Century American Poetry. What were philosophers and pedants and critics doing interpreting and breaking down the work of writers and artists? If they were any damn good at it, why weren't they writing literature?

This is, of course, fallacious. Of course a person might be better at interpreting literature than writing it himself. Likewise, a bad critic might be a brilliant poet. But some folks are driven to both write literature and criticism, even if it's not simply a given in today's day and age.

However, in recent years we've had an interesting reversal of these positions. More and more, you hear critics of criticism (now there's a recursion for you) decrying writers who also write criticism. The charge -- one that remains almost hysterical to me -- is generally the same: a writer cannot be a critic, because a writer cannot separate his own work from his critique. He cannot be objective.

Guys, if I never, ever manage to do anything else, let me manage to do this. Let me manage to teach this one, ineffable truth of criticism:

There is no such thing as objective criticism.

All criticism reflects the opinions and interpretation of the critic. That is the innate distinction between journalism (the reporting and analysis of fact) and criticism (the rendering of interpretation and opinion). That is what criticism -- whether we're discussing the critique, the critical essay, or the review -- is. It is opinion. Thesis, in our terminology.

Good criticism is well written, and supports its thesis with example. Citation is the coin of the realm.

Bad criticism is badly written, or fails to support its thesis, or supports its thesis fallaciously (quoting out of context in such a way that a statement appears to be in support of a point, when the larger work contradicts that point, for example.)

Well. In Jon Rosenberg's latest blog entry, over at the (as always, excellent) Goats, he announces the revivification of the Fleen name. It's not the Fleen of old, but a webcomics blog. Specifically, it's a webcomics blog writ by critics who explicitly are not now, nor have ever been webcartoonists or webcomics creators. It is Rosenberg's thesis that the critic of webcomics who is also a webcartoonist is innately flawed. His writings are tainted by his hopes, his own work, his own thesis. He will advance his own works and those of his friends and like minded people. He will not be objective enough to produce either criticism or webcomics with veracity. In his own words:

The one thing that is unforgiveable is that, almost without exception, all of these sites are run by and staffed by webcomic creators. They all have agendas, they all have friends they want to promote, they all have their own approaches to the artform that they want to see vindicated. These people are biased from the get-go. In the worst cases, webcomics bloggers have used their bully pulpit to launch their own nascent webcomics initiatives. This is the worst kind of journalism, the most terrible kind of comics crticism. It is the same sort of cronyism that has corrupted larger organizations like Fox News.

If these sites hope to have any sort of journalistic integrity, we must establish a divide between the creators and the people writing about them. The new Fleen is the first webcomics blog to attempt this.

Check it out. Biased. Agenda. They all have their own approaches to the art form they want to see vindicated<