Websnark

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 at 1:55 PM | Comments (44)

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 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 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 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 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 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, amo