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May 11, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, a bit involving hot chicks and underwear.

Right. Last chance.

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

Still here? Then let's spoil ho.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 1, 2009

Eric: On the Cusp of the Fool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I like April Fool's Day.

Let me say that more obnoxiously.

I like April Fool's Day!

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

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

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

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

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

Now that's comedy.

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

January 18, 2009

Eric: A truism from the grave.

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We remember.

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

November 5, 2008

Eric: A moment of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never, ever will be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 4, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

And honestly, writing mad science takes some brain work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of mad scientist mix tape creation.

Look, start small.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:18 PM | Comments (78)

August 28, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can critiques be critiqued? Can criticism be criticized?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 20, 2008

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He just has to trust it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:27 AM | Comments (26)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 19, 2008

Eric: Visit #3, Drilling #2

It was, in the end, a cheerful appointment.

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

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

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

"Good enough."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 18, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 15, 2008

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

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

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

And we just couldn't do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And many others, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 1, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is never a good idea. Ever.

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

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

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

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

In other words, they took them down.

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

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

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

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

Everyone got that?

Good. Let's move on.

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

The problem is one of credibility.

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

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

In other words, you come across as a hypocrite.

And that's not ever a good thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like I said. Credibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 17, 2008

Eric: I roll to disbelieve.

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

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

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

And that's something of a digression.

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

Third Edition wasn't like that for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading these rules, I am young.

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

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

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

May 22, 2008

Eric: Life can be wonderful sometimes.

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

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

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

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

Life is good.

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

April 21, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So... I did.

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

I reproduce the letter here.

To Whom it May Concern:

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Eric Alfred Burns
Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

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

Oh.

They also said "yes."

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

We won.

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

April 9, 2008

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

February 8, 2008

I was out of place.

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

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

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

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

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

Lions are very large, by the by.

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

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

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

April 7, 2008

"So, what's the matter?"

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

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

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

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

"1:30."

"You sure you shouldn't go sooner?"

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

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

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

February 8, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I assume the Casino de Lac Leamy hates us.

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

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

But, I was determined to have a good time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I blinked, and looked more closely at the screen.

I had cleared $295.

I looked at the number of the last bet.

23.

I had just hit on Roulette.

I was a winner.

April 7, 2008

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

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

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

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

"Absolutely."

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

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

I blinked. "Is there a problem?"

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

"Oh. But it's probably nothing?"

"Probably. But we want to make sure."

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

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

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

I began to get concerned.

February 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to play a hundred dollar slot machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it wasn't money I had expected.

And I would never have this chance again.

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

April 7, 2008

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

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

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

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

"And?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feburary 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 8, 2008

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

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

"So I'm okay?"

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

"Well, yeah."

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

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

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

"You bet." I grinned.

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

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

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

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

But then, I never took stupid chances, right?

February 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I closed my eyes, feeling silly for feeling nervous.

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

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

March 5, 2008

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

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

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

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

Gary Gygax was dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is where I entered the story.

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

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

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

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

And I also had the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.

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

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

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

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

God, so many memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest chunk of that section? Dungeons and Dragons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the Gary Gygax I actually had contact with.

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

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

I will admit to blowing my system shock roll.

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

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

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

I swear, I could have punched him.

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

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

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

And I'm going to miss him. Terribly.

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

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

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

Rest well, sir.

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

February 27, 2008

Eric: Requiescat In Pace: William F. Buckley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And William F. Buckley is dead.

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

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

January 10, 2008

Eric: In My World: Superheroes

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

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

"In my world, superheroes...."

with no ellipses afterward.

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

You can have as many entries as you like.

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

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

That's my world. What's yours?

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

January 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

But let's go back to that implicit covenant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manga.

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

But, as I so often do, I digress.

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

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

And now, that's not true any more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, let's not even go there.

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

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

But not in the Marvel universe.

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

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

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

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

January 3, 2008

Eric: Retconning: Just Another Day Like All The Others

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

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

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

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

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

As I said, the stupidest thing ever.

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

We're here to talk about retconning;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category Two: The Story You Thought You Knew!

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

All fine and dandy.

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

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

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

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

Okay, sometimes 'relevant vibe' is pushing it.

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

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

Category Three: The Real Story You Thought You Knew!

Hot on the heels of the last retconning, we have this little gem. It's not that there's more to the story you read that other time -- that story was wrong! Oh sure, everyone knows that Dirk Morgna was a young genius engineer locked in a reactor by the jealous Doctor Regulus, but that's all wrong! What really happened was Dirk Morgna was the plant manager's son and he got promoted and then he screwed up and Doctor Regulus who was innocent and the real genius got blamed and fired and he snapped and locked Dirk in that reactor, but no one really knows it except Regulus and Dirk! Honest! That's how it really happened.

This is where we get into the heavy minefield territory, as you can see from my somewhat biased accounting of one of Sun Boy's retcons, because this is where we're getting into actual story surgery. We're outside of value-adding into stories and into actual full on changing of stories, and like any plastic surgery it can leave some nasty looking scars and ultimately prevent Joan Rivers from ever changing her facial expression again. Some of the worst examples of this retcon style were found in the Keith Giffen/Tom and Mary Bierbaum version of the Legion (they're the ones who decided that Sun Boy needed to have an angst-filled origin, in the same issue his lover shot him in the head, I would add, so it's not like it did anything for him), and a good number of these retcons were designed to fit pet theories the Bierbaums had in their APA-participating days. For example, they'd believed Element Lad was gay, only Paul Levitz had him get involved with a hot redhead female science police officer named Shvaughn Erin. So Shvaughn Erin, was made a male-to-female transsexual specifically because Sean Erin had loved Element Lad from afar and wanted to appeal to him so that Element Lad could really have been involved with a man who later reverted to being male but they stayed together... sort of. Similarly, looking back at one of the seminal Legion moments -- where Proty sacrificed his life and life-force to allow a resurrection of Lightning Lad -- the Bierbaums became enamored of the notion that Lightning Lad really was Proty in Lightning Lad's body, with all Proty's memories and personality, and that his best friends and lover who was telepathic never noticed it.

These, as you can guess, didn't go over very well, because they came across exactly as they sound -- as ham-handed attempts to shoehorn in pet theories and fanfiction into 'real' continuity. We get away from trying to add depth to or invigorate the story with this style of retcon, and get more into the areas of 'putting one's mark on the series mythology,' which rarely goes well.

As a side note, Frank Miller did this about as well as anyone ever has, when he reworked a lot of Daredevil's origin (not to mention all kinds of stuff with Elektra). He combined the "lost tale," "thought you knew" and "what you know is wrong" retcons into a story that took a fairly average superhero and made him downright epic. So it's not that it can't work.

It's just that it almost never does work.

The major pitfall goes back to the core pitfalls of retconning in general. This is the territory where you're seriously fucking with established history -- which is to say you're fucking with the specific affections of your fanbase. Frank Miller got away with it in Daredevil for two reasons: almost no one gave a shit about Daredevil before the reworking, and he rolled a natural twenty in the execution of it. In the case of the Bierbaums, Legion history was revered by a gigantic pack of fans, and they alienated way more than they pleased with the changes -- leading to a full on reset button later on (though there were other problems with that, which we'll get to in a few minutes). People don't want to find out that they're wrong about the continuity they've been following.

It gets worse, of course, because they have all these issues of the comic that show a very natural and organic growth of the story they love, often handled by a plethora of creators. The retcon, on the other hand, is very artificially grafted over the top of it, and as a result there's a lot of scar tissue around it. It is nigh impossible to bring the same level of nuance that the originals had, and so even retcons that do make sense and improve the story end up sounding way weaker as a result.

And it's possible to go so far with a retcon of this kind that you out and out alienate people -- you can do serious damage to your fanbase if you're not careful, especially when you're trying to recast your comic (originally written for kids and teenagers) for an adult fanbase. Identity Crisis is the most egregious recent example of this -- the retcons put into place weren't simply to make Doctor Light more malevolent than he'd been for a while, it was to take the silver age Justice League -- a group of true heroes in the heroic mold of the time -- and make them "edgy." This largely had the effect of pissing people off, because no one wants the JLA of their childhoods screwed with. Having some punk tell us that the heroes we grew up revering weren't all that heroic just makes us set our jaw.

Like I said before -- messing with the affections of the reader base. Sometimes you can get away with it. A lot of the time you can't.

Category Four: The Story You Thought You Knew Was Right, But Now There's Been A Change!

While the last category was indeed a full on surgical retcon, there was generally no in-continuity reason for the retcon. Now we're into story-changing with a degree of awareness on the part of (at least some of) our heroes, and the trouble is really starting now.

In this case, the retcon is a full on in-story change, retroactively applied, for better or (generally) for worse. Often mandated editorially, this is the point where large chunks of your history get torn out and new bits get grafted in in their place, and you have to 'edit on the fly' to make it all work.

I've been pulling from Legion history for a lot of this, because... well, because they're kind of the perfect example. Moving from the Levitz version of the classic Legion to the Giffen/Bierbaum version of the retconned Legion and then the Post-Zero Hour Rebooted Legion gave us a chance to see almost all of these retcons in practice, and in the long run they were almost all disastrous.

Anyway, the In-Story Change happened because, ta-da, of editorial mandate. You see, Superman's history had had a Restart and Reboot (see below), which meant that there was no period of time where Superman was Superboy. At least at that point. Levitz had done a simple Category Three retcon to fix the issue -- Superboy, it turned out, came from a pocket universe that the Time Trapper had created, and this was the place the Legion had been traveling to all these years. That universe went pear-shaped and Superboy sacrificed his life to save his fellow Legionnaires.

Well, it was decided by editorial that this was insufficient. Superboy (and Supergirl) were too prominent and confusion could result. (Remember, kids. The reason for everything that followed was to avoid confusion. I swear I'm not making this up.) The decision was made to introduce a major retcon -- Superboy, the inspiration for the Legion itself, would be replaced by Mon-El -- now rechristened Valor -- in the history of the Legion. A major in-story event then took place where the revised history was written in and made 'real,' and everything we the readers knew had changed.

Only... remember way up above, when I said the urge to retcon more than is needed becomes overpowering in these situations? Yeah. Giffen and the Bierbaums went to town. Superboy became Valor, as we said. Then Supergirl became Laurel Gand, a Daxamite cousin/descendent/something of Valor. Then they replaced major villain the Time Trapper retroactively with Glorioth, a flunky and functionary of a single story -- and a very different character than the Time Trapper. Then they changed who the first Legionnaire to die was, and why he died. (This was Kid Quantum, who they wanted to do other things with). They added "Kent Shakespeare," the first 'Impulse,' to the Legion's history.

Then, things got worse, because see the Superman editorial team? They had used the pocket universe in Superman's history, including a point where he killed the pocket universe Phantom Zone criminals, an act that led to years of somewhat bad stories that culminated in Superman taking his solemn oath against killing. (I guess because the era where a hero would take an oath against killing as a matter of course was seen as hokey. See above RE timelessness vs. Flavor of the Week).

So, Editorial mandated that there had to be a pocket universe, which meant there had to be a Superboy who came from it. Supergirl (the Matrix version) also came from it, though she had nothing to do with the Legion. So, the Legion did travel back and Superboy joined 'briefly' to set up... um... yeah.

Then Dev-Em had his history retconned twice and then he blew up the moon. Because time had to... Superman could have stopped it but he couldn't be allowed to because... look, at this stage they were clearly huffing paint, okay?

Anyway. As it turns out, this amazing new take on the Legion didn't make people happy. Sales suffered. There were complaints. The Bierbaums insisted a lot of the fan mail was positive, which is interesting given how... sporadic letter columns became. And then they decided to try something to bring back the fans -- they actually created "Batch SW6" which was a whole recreation of the Adventure Era Legion. The idea was to give the fans back a recognizable Legion, while having the heroes we'd been following all these years continue to have their grown up adventures.

(The first thing they did after reestablishing the Adventure Era Legion, meant to fire our imaginations and return us to the days of heroism we pined for? They changed all their codenames and costumes. Interestingly, this was not a successful move.)

Category Four retcons seem to go this way. People just get annoyed at them, and it's nigh impossible -- no matter how good your storytelling might be -- to convince people they like the taste of your sandwich.

The Spider-Man retcon we mentioned at the start is a Category Four. History has been changed. And, like all these situations, they claim the changes are minimal, and that he had all the same adventures as he had before. Why, he's just not married! And he lives with Aunt May! And Harry Osborne is still alive. And he lost his organic webshooters. Oh, and he never revealed his identity to the world, which means the entire Spider-Man arc in Civil War was just dicking with us! And apparently this means Mary Jane conceived a child out of wedlock with Peter. And there are new characters!

But... it's back to the good old days where Peter has girl trouble and is single, and that'll be better, right?

Right?

Moving On.

Category Five: Meet the New Hero, Not The Same As The Old Hero Because That Never Happened

Finally, we have the major event. The big one. The big block of cheese in the White House lobby. The retcon that completely starts everything over. This retcon is often called a "reboot," because that's what it does. It starts from the very beginning, wiping clean all continuity so new readers can jump right in. Everything's up in the air because nothing's happened yet.

John Byrne loves these things. And the most famous Category Five was Superman, post-Crisis on Infinite Earths. They let Alan Moore write an "imaginary" story that tied up the Silver Age Superman, and then they started over, completely from scratch. Gone was the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superboy, Lex Luthor in Smallville and most of Superman's power. When he met the Toyman, it was for the first time. Lois's hair color changed. Jimmy became even stupider. And Lex Luthor stopped being a scientist and started being Donald Trump without hair.

It could have worked... had they had the balls to do the same thing to every other comic book in their stable. Unfortunately, they didn't. And that meant stress fractures began forming around the Man of Steel from the beginning. The Legion debacle above was just one of them -- also sacrificed was Superman's history in the Justice League. Which meant the whole "Superman was the first superhero" concept had to be junked too -- now there had been tons of heroes, stretching back to World War II. Add a complete reboot/Category Five of Wonder Woman into the mix, and... well, among other things, it became difficult to reconcile Batman's history (which was largely unchanged at first) with anyone else's.

The clusterfuck that was the Giffen/Bierbaum Category Four retcon led them to wipe the slate clean on that with a Category Five retcon. That in turn caused other problems so we've had another complete reboot of the series. Of course, we've had another Crisis come and go screwing with timelines and dimensions and Christ knows what else anyway. Honestly, the idea that there is any continuity between the current version of DC comics and previous ones is silly. If you're a current fan, let the past go and enjoy the ride. Here and there, there's some good stuff.

The major problem with reboots besides the above is it's a complete break with the past. Which means it's the ultimate break with the fan's investment. Take me -- I was a big-ass Legion fan. I held on through all the monumental pain that was the Giffen/Bierbaum era because... well, I loved the Legion. Even all the retcons wasn't enough to break me the rest of the way.

Tossing out the continuity and starting over? Was enough. I never got into the 'new' Legion. I can't cotton to the new new Legion. I was drawn into the current flirtation with variations of the original Legion that ran through JLA and JSA and now Superman, but they're clearly not really the Legion I knew.

Does that make them bad? No, not really. But I have no reason to reinvest in them. And every time we have retcons of any category some readers will be lost along the way -- and the Category Five shakes loose the largest numbers, because it's a full on starting over.

Interestingly, there is an entirely successful Category Five retcon on record. I'm serious. It absolutely worked, even though it was essentially unplanned and uncontrolled. That retcon is today called the Silver Age of Comics. They started over all the comics and continuities -- largely just ignoring the old stories and later giving them their own universe. And the essential proof of concept happened again in the nineties, when Batman: The Animated Series gave birth to the DC Animated Universe -- which held to a completely separate tight continuity over the course of a decade. In many ways, the DCAU has been the most successful superhero continuity artistically since it first appeared, and financially there's almost no contest. Certainly the DCAU brought in more direct cash to Warner Brothers than the DC Comics line has for quite some time.

One thing that highlights the problems that indiscriminate retconning breeds is complexity. A simple retcon turns into a series of more elaborate retcons to patch over broken pieces. Superman's reboot was at core simple -- it was an entirely new thing. But then all the other DC comics began showing problems and so they had to apply fixes and patches and retcon other things that bred new fissures and patches and retcons, until... well, until they had to take four odd years of "monumental events" to lead up to what sounds like one more complete reboot. And maybe this time it'll take.

Marvel's no better off -- Lost Tales and stories, especially around cash-cow X-Men have made it increasingly hard to know what's going on. And now they've introduced a monumental Category Four retcon into their flagship title, leading to problems the likes of which we won't know for five or six years, long after they've reverted back to the marriage because they're sick of this shit.

And they will. Just like Captain America will come back. Just like Supergirl came back all those times, and Earth-2 came back, and Power Girl's history came back, and a version of the original Legion came back. Because when you fuck with your fanbase's affections, you fuck with your livelihood, and eventually you pay a price for it. Check out the Retcon-fest that has been Green Lantern since Crisis on Infinite Earths, and notice that as of this point, pretty much all the dead Lanterns have come back to life, Hal Jordan never really went crackerdog and even Sinestro's doing just fine these days. Hey look -- Hal and Ollie and Kyle and Guy and John and Ice and everyone? They're all fine! Really! And they're having epic adventures! Please! Come back!

Please come back!

Please?

When Jesus makes Mary Jane and Peter married again (seriously. They're teasing Jesus as their cosmic parachute for this storyline), there will be great hopes that everything will be made all better. Only what will happen is people who invested in the post-infernal annulment will be pissed off by the restoration, and no one will be very happy, and eventually everyone will agree to stop talking about it. Sort of like the Clone War. And within a few years, Civil War. Which was all the fault of invading Skrulls anyway. No really. You thought you knew the real Civil War Story, but you were wrong.

The question is, what will the numbers be for a top selling book at that point?

And on DC's side... just what kind of Legion will be the new one then?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:54 PM | Comments (49)

December 6, 2007

Eric: A moment of history, a remembrance of heroism

Ninety years ago today, a man with a wife and children, a life and a future had a realization. A moment of clarity.

Ninety years ago today, the world was at war -- this was 1917, and the Central Powers were marching across Europe and the Allies were fighting them. U-Boats were trawling the shipping lanes sinking freighters to keep ammunition and munitions and arms out of the hands of the men they were fighting. The ships therefore took to running incognito, lacking the ensigns and markings that warned other ships that their cargos were volatile.

Ninety years ago today, the French civilian cargo ship S.S. Mont-Blanc was steaming from New York City to form up with a convey carrying munitions to the front. They were unmarked to avoid the U-Boats. The ship carried two hundred and fifty tons of TNT, two hundred and forty six tons of benzol, sixty two tons of guncotton, one thousand, seven hundred and sixty six tons of wet picric acid, six hundred tons of dry picric acid, forty-one sailors and one captain. They had been forced to spend the night before outside of Halifax Harbor, where they were going to form up with the rest of their convy, because the antisubmarine nets had already been raised. So they were late as they steamed into the harbor.

Ninety years ago today, the Norwegian supply ship the S.S. Ivo was steaming out of Halifax Harbor. It was going to be loading up with livestock as a part of a relief effort for Belgium, which was suffering the privations of War. At this time, it was running empty, and it was running behind as well. It had a crew of forty, including their own Captain.

A combination of events and other ships put the Imo and the Mont-Blanc on a collision course, both running at speed.

Both stayed their course, and both sent signals by whistle that they intended to stay the course. It was, perhaps, a grand game of Chicken, only with some sixty four hundred tons displacement worth of ships, one of which was carrying almost three thousand tons of explosives.

The problem with Chicken is it's only won when one side blinks. Someone has to decide that their lives are worth more than their right of way, even when they're convinced that they're right. It's reasonable to assume that the Captains of both ships knew they were right in this. It's also reasonable to assume neither captain wanted a collision.

The problem was, both the Imo and the Mont-Blanc blinked at the same time. They both simultaneously evaded, and they both evaded in the same direction. Which led, inexorably, to a collision.

A collision which set the Mont-Blanc on fire.

The French crew abandoned ship -- there was little else to be done. There wasn't enough time to try and put out the fire, and the Frenchmen knew the explosives would go up. They shouted to all that would hear that the ship was laden heavy with destructive power and was on fire, but being French they shouted in French, and as it turns out very few understood them.

The harbor responded as they normally would -- they sent assistance in, to rescue people and put the fire out.

The people of Halifax, having heard the collision, turned out in force on what was an unusually warm, almost Indian Summer like day, going out onto the docks to watch the show. Crowding down. Not understanding the crew that was fleeing for their lives. Not having any of the proper flags or warnings to tell everyone the ship was a munitions ship.

Ninety years ago today, the Mont Blanc exploded in Halifax Harbor.

The force was unimaginable at the time. No manmade explosion had ever come close to the magnitude of this blast. Indeed, until Hiroshima no explosion would come close. The blockbuster bombs and shelling of European targets throughout World War II didn't come close to the monumental explosion of the Mont-Blanc decades before. The shock wave devestated Halifax, slaughtering the crowds on the docks, shattering and damaging structures throughout, blowing in windows for miles around. The fireball from the Mont Blanc rose over a mile in the air, creating a full on mushroom cloud that could be seen for miles. They heard the explosion and felt tremors from it as far away as Cape Breton, over two hundred miles to the east.

All those people, crowded down by the docks. Caught in a wave of pure decimation. The power was so great it blew the harbor dry, creating a tsunami that washed through Halifax. As stated, it was a warm day -- but this was still December, which meant there were lamps and stoves going, fueled by fuel that burnt, with reserves stocked high against the winter. Which meant that in the aftermath of the blast and the tsunami, Halifax burned. On the other side of the harbor, the Mi'kmaq settlement in Tuft's Cove was completed, instantly destroyed. The settlement would be entirely abandoned after the disaster.

The devastation hampered rescue and relief efforts, and those efforts were made all the harder the next day, when a blizzard hit the still decimated city. Sixteen inches of snow came down, wind swept through, and people trapped in the wreckage couldn't be reached or died from exposure. Houses all over halifax had to be sealed with tar paper since the glass of so many windows was destroyed.

As many as sixteen hundred people died instantly in the explosion. Some four hundred or more died in the aftermath. Over nine thousand people were injured -- and more Nova Scotians died in the blast than died in all the rest of World War I combined. Many survivors were permanently disabled. In today's money, after adjusting for inflation, more than half a billion dollars worth of damage came from this blast

But we opened this gruesome remembrance by speaking not of the thousands killed or injured, but by speaking of one man. One man who had a moment of clarity. A realization.

The man's name was P. Vincent "Vince" Coleman, and he worked for the Railroad. He was a dispatcher, and his station was down in the trainyard, which itself was down by the docks. And as it turns out, he understood the danger. He heard what the sailors said. He knew -- he knew that the Mont Blanc was carrying munitions, and that it was on fire. And like any rational man he started to flee.

And then he stopped, because he was the train dispatcher, and he knew that the passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due any moment.

There were three hundred people on that train.

Vince Coleman had a family, and a life, and could almost certainly have escaped death, if not harm. But in that moment of clarity, he turned around, ran back into his office, and started tapping out morse code. A fast message. A desperate message, rendered into dots and dashes and sent down the line.

Stop trains. Munition ship on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye.

Vince Coleman did not make it out of his office. The Mont Blanc exploded. He was killed.

But the inbound from Saint John stopped, less than four miles from the station. Had the message not gone out, it almost certainly would have either entered the blast radius and been blown apart, the cars tossed like toys, or hit the twisted and destroyed track and derailed. Either way, many if not all of her crew and passengers would have been instantly killed.

There were other repercussions of this message. Because of it, news of the disaster spread like lightning down the wire, allowing for relief and rescue efforts to be immediately mobilized. Further, the train that Coleman had saved was immediately pressed into service, bringing survivors to safety where they could receive care and shelter. Almost certainly, Vince Coleman saved a lot more lives than the three hundred people on that train.

But that three hundred would be more than enough. Much more than enough.

It's always hard to say "what would I do," in situations like this. Our natural impulse is to say we'd have acted the way Vince Coleman did. Of course we would. Save three hundred people, including children? It seems like a no-brainer. But it's easy to say that when you're sitting at a desk typing. It seems far more likely that I'd have thought of my fiancee -- thought of my friends and family. Thought of people I knew that I could try to save. Thought of myself. And no one would think the less of me. We don't castigate those people who fled to save their own lives in Halifax that day. It was a natural reaction. A human reaction. It was no more cowardly an act than jumping out of the way of oncoming traffic. We are wired to survive -- to fight for survival.

It takes will and courage and dedication to overcome that impulse. It takes honest to God heroism. It takes something that we all hope we have, but we never know we have until the moment arrives.

Vince Coleman had it.

Ninety years ago today, a man named Vince Coleman made the stark, specific choice to die so that at least three hundred people could live. In the wake of one of the worst disasters to ever hit the North American continent, Vince Coleman chose the lives of three hundred strangers over his own life. He sacrificed himself. He sacrificed his continued presence with his family. He sacrificed his future.

But he became, in that moment, an icon. He became a hero.

On this, the ninetieth anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, I choose to remember Vince Coleman. For those who have not heard the story, I pass it to you. For those who have, I help remind you. Sometimes, heroism comes from choosing your duty over yourself.

And if you're out driving, and you see someone in your lane coming towards you, for Christ's sake stop well away from him and let him past. I don't care who has the right of way. It's not worth your life, much less everyone else's.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:46 PM | Comments (14)

December 3, 2007

Eric: Winter Storms, AntiNanowrimo and Christmas on the Satellite of Love: a stirring from the grave

There's a winter storm outside -- the first solid evidence of Winter in the first week of December for several years. The New Hampshire tourist industry -- by which I mean the ski industry, the snowmobile industry, the ski industry, the ATV industry, the ski industry and did I mention the ski industry -- is breathing a sigh of relief, as it looks like we might actually, y'know, have a ski season before February this year.

(Not that they were taking any chances, mind. I've driven by a bunch of phallic "look at our new snowmaking equipment" billboards since early September. By God they were going to be skiing this year whether we liked it or not! And, of course, I like it fine though I myself haven't gone skiing for at least fifteen years. Probably more like twenty, now that I think about it. Christ, I'm old.)

It is the Christmas season, though very few people seem to care this year. Including me, though I'm well ahead on my Christmas shopping for the first time... well, ever. (I am entirely in favor of fiancees who have well developed Amazon wishlists. I have a well developed Amazon wishlist too, but that's less for my fiancee and more for my family, who love me dearly and haven't a clue what sort of gizmos to buy me. I'd post a link for the curious but it would seem crass, and I like to wait at least four or five posts into a revival after a multiple week hiatus before I appear crass.)

For the most part, all is well. We wait patiently for the government to let Wednesday and I get married. (We could get word any day, or it could easily go into February with no word a'tall. We keep the lines of communication open to the single greatest immigration attorney in the world, and we check the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website, and we wait and we hope and I get up there whenever I can (she can't come down here until she comes down here to get married. That's just the way the law works.) and we talk every day, and that's what that is right now.

There's a winter storm outside, but the home fires are burning well. Having weathered financial issues aplenty over the Summer (as I'm sure you all remember), everything is fine now. I actually have some money in a savings account. Not a lot, but some, and that builds with every paycheck. There's always more unexpected events on the horizon, but barring the same kind of sudden, rapid smackdown of them that started the summer travails, things should just be okay.

I have it on good authority that the Month of November was, for me, essentially an anti-Nanowrimo. Which isn't to say I've gone negative on Nanowrimo. I've enjoyed it when I did it, and I enjoy seeing it when others do it. But for me, it was a month where I generated... well, essentially nothing, both here and on Banter Latte. Almost certainly I needed that. If you use your brain for writing too many days in a row without a break, it gets hot and eventually the RAM fails.

But it's December now, and it's the Christmas season, and we're heading to close the year out. There's things happening, in the world and on the web. The Russians own LiveJournal, the Primary is a month away in the state I live in, and Chuck Norris has embraced the meme in more ways than one. Halfpixel has become a full on online guild a la Dumbrella, bringing the Blank Label collective down to a tight six In Mystery Science Theater 3000 news. Rifftrax has started doing heavy advertising in targeted media, the Rifftrax crew has also formed "the Film Crew" which is doing the MST shuffle, which means the Mike Nelson/Kevin Murphy/Bill Corbett version of MST3K is fully back in production only minus the muppets and the SciFi network. At the same time, the original MST3K team of Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, and special bonus not-quite-original-but-still-seminal Frank Conniff have launched Cinematic Titanic, which somehow doesn't make any reference whatsoever to Rifftrax or the Film Crew (and vice versa) even though Mary Jo Pehl has done work now for both groups. And if that wasn't interesting enough, Best Brains, Inc., in the person of Jim Mallon (the original executive producer and the voice of Gypsy) has spun up some truly crap web cartoons 'continuing' the story of the Satellite of Love, alongside some old school folks like Paul Chapman, who we all remember as Pitch. Right?

Okay, the crappy webtoons are clearly just designed to get you buying DVDs, but still! It's... something....

That's right. Three entirely distinct entities of former MST3K folks, all cheerfully suckling at the teat of a show that went off the air in 1999. Three collectives of entertainers, writers, gadabouts town who all have legitimate claim to some of the MST3K legacy. Three separate performing troupes that are not acknowledging the other two's efforts in any way, shape or form, absent a brief mention on the Cinematic Titanic website that Josh Weinstein was the guy who actually hired Mike Nelson in the first place.

Yeah, there's no behind the scenes 'fun' going on there. None at all.

The interesting thing is, for all three of these groups... we're actually seeing models that the webcomics world pioneered in play. The MST3K site, with its free crappy Flash animations (seriously, guys, I know that the art is supposed to be 'stylized' but it looks... um... bad) is drawing eyeballs to sell videos. Rifftrax works off of -- I swear to Christ -- Micropayments, and from all accounts it's been monster successful. That's right. Someone made micropayments work. With, I would add, podcast technology and absolutely no DRM. It looks as though Cinematic Titanic may do the same, though we don't yet know. The Film Crew is straight online distribution -- they don't advertise in traditional places, their production facilities are essentially a minimal set possibly made in someone's garage, and they're clearly selling DVDs briskly.

Everyone still reading these words will recognize the models at play. And clearly everyone involved with MST3K has the advantage of a massive cult phenomenon from the 90's (probably the defining cult phenomenon among geek culture of the 90's, all apologies to Babylon 5 -- Buffy was transitional into the 21st century so nyah) to give them a continuing fanbase. But the simple truth is, it's not costing them much money to make Rifftrax. You or I could do it with scriptwriting time (and talent we might not possess, of course) and our personal computers. Admittedly, Nelson partnered with Legend Films who's shouldering the website costs, but come on.

Put yet another way? Other media besides comics have begun to figure out the whole web thing. Between that and the rise of direct-to-DVD stuff... and the fact that both Amazon.com and fucking Wal-Mart have come out as anti-DRM...

...well, it's an interesting time to be on the web.

But then, winter storms are always fun to watch from the inside.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:07 AM | Comments (16)

November 14, 2007

Eric: Service Disruption

It's nothing technical, you understand.

Seriously. As near as I can tell, everything's aces. The internet is working, the websites are up, and while I did migrate to Leopard, that was about as seamless an OS upgrade as I've done for a while. And Time Machine just plain works, for the record, which is staggeringly cool.

Well, all right. Upgrading led to some issues with my windows partition and I had to reinstall it, but honestly. It's the first time I've ever had to reinstall Windows in the era of Boot Camp, so how upset could I be?

So it's nothing technical. And yet, there has been an interruption of service.

It may have been my last trip to Ottawa. You can tell when it was -- it was the day my first Superguy post in years went up. And that was really cool, as it was on the heels of Gary posting, and there's been a flood after us so Gary started something. Apparently the collective Superguy writers have been waiting for someone to break the ice. And now they have.

But the day it went up, I drove to Ottawa, and spent a week up there. Up with Wednesday, kept by the government out of the United States until they get through processing the fiancee visa that will let her come down and let the two of us get married and on with our lives. This is the longest visit we've done for a long time, and it also featured a move to brighter surroundings for her. And time spent together. And time spent listening to a radio station with ten minute synopses of Ottawa in general. And time spent being on the weaker side of the dollar divide while in Canada for the first time in my life.

For the record? When they make the same jokes to you you made about them for your entire life? You don't get to be anything but gracious about it. Even when gasoline ends up costing five bucks a gallon after conversion. God damn it.

It may have been the change of time. I love love love love love the day we Fall Back. I am no fan of Daylight Savings Time. I think the system should have been abolished years ago. I am no farmer, and I like the day being an hour later in the morning, thank you kindly. But I am also of an age where the time change screws with me something fierce. It took a few days this year, as the trip back corresponded to it so I was exhausted enough to make it easy, but I'm in the throes of crappy sleep cycles right now.

It may have been work, which has been busier than November normally is, not the least of which was a day we had a power outage and the central core's backup generator didn't kick in. We managed to shut everything down before UPSes failed, but it's like doing work on someone's heart -- when you stop it from beating for a few minutes, it's gonna be a few days before they're feeling up to jogging and you have to do a lot of post-op stuff.

I've had people e-mail me. Just to make sure I wasn't dead. I appreciate that. I'm not dead.

I'm just not writing.

Which is weird.

I have ideas, mind. Tons of them. Banterable ideas. Websnarkish ideas. It's not that. It's not that at all.

But it's not actually going onto paper.

Maybe this notice of service disruption is the jolt I need. Maybe that'll get the big writing stone rolling down the hill.

I sort of plan on writing more Superguy today. I enjoyed that, and it too might spark things.

If it does, it'll go up sometime this week, and then a Myth will follow it, and Justice Wing will follow that.

And maybe somewhere in there I'll talk about the sale of City of Heroes and Issue 11 and dual blades and flashback and stuff. And talk about Zuda and how their interface (and their decision to downsample God damned cursive into it) makes the Baby Jesus cry and no one gives a shit about Zuda as a result.

And, you know. Stuff. Things.

I dunno.

But for now? I'm okay. I am.

We're just having a minor service disruption. Please stand by.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:31 AM | Comments (6)

September 18, 2007

Eric: Now, if *religious* people were upset, I could understand that. Of course, I'd have no sympathy, but I'd *understand* it.

(From Something Positive. Click on the thumbnail for full sized 'snap!')

There are a few strips out there that really nail geek culture. They understand geek culture, and when they satirize it, it is often spot on. Home on the Strange is one of the most prominent right now, and it's good -- it really is. But it's not brutal. It doesn't go for geek culture's fucking throat. It's sympathetic to geek culture. "Look how silly we can be," it says. "We don't talk about season five of Babylon 5! Hee hee!"

On the other side of the equation, you sometimes see... well, newspaper strips try to make fun of geek culture. Curtis goes there sometimes. But the problem with a lot of those strips are they come from non-geeks, so it's not that it's mean spirited -- it's that it's clueless. Like trying to buddy up to a pack of rabid Browncoats by saying how you really liked Captain Kirk and Han Solo, the best response you can hope for is pity.

No, to really savage geek culture you must be inside geek culture, but be willing to tear all pretension away from it.

Ladies and gentlemen, Randy Milholland.

Now, this is not a remembrance of Robert Jordan. I'm not really qualified to do a remembrance of Robert Jordan. I have a copy of The Eye of the World sitting on the bookshelf behind me in the office where I'm typing this, given to me by an associate going on ten years ago, but I haven't read it. I've never really done the whole Wheel of Time thing. In my defense, I've also only read one Harry Potter book.

That isn't the only Robert Jordan book I own, by the by. But that's getting ahead of the essay.

Regardless, Jordan has clearly done something remarkable. I mean, really really remarkable. And it may be the greatest testament to a writer I can conceive of. And I mean that exactly as it sounds -- there is no higher praise for a writer than I can think of than the one I'm about to give Robert Jordan.

Robert Jordan's work has so enthralled his fans, both hardcore and jaded, that with the announcement of his death, everyone -- in or out of the fandom -- thought "oh my god he's not going to finish Wheel of Time!" instead of "oh my God Robert Jordan is dead."

In part, this stems from the knowledge we've had of Jordan's illness. We've known he was sick, and we've known he was not likely to survive. I wrote an essay about that in 2006, entitled "There is life, and there is living. But they're best done together. In volume." I talked about his cardiomyopathy in that essay, and my own cardiomyopathy as well. And I mentioned I would buy his latest book the next day (as it turns out, I bought Crossroads of Twilight. I have no idea if that was his latest or not, but it was there. I haven't read it, but it's made me think of finally reading The Eye of the World.)

Well, here we are, a year later and he has succumbed. Whether it was to congestive heart failure or to complications in the chemotherapy or something else I don't know. Someone reading this probably does. And I am saddened by this. But even though I've never read any of his books, my immediate thought on hearing the news was "Oh Christ -- he didn't finish The Wheel of Time." When I told someone else, afterward -- someone else who to my knowledge has never read Robert Jordan either -- the response was, immediately, "did he publish that last book first?" We are both sympathetic people, with absolutely no investment in the series to date, and before sympathy or reflection or even the "oh, what a damn shame" response, we both immediately jumped to "aw, shit. He didn't make it. Now the series won't be finished."

I can think of exactly one other writer who would have provoked this reaction. If J.K. Rowling had been hit by a bus before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, the outpouring of grief would have been monumental, but it would have been eclipsed by the shrieks of "OH MY GOD SHE DIDN'T FINISH THE SERIES!"

Robert Jordan inspired that. He did it by creating a series that hooked enough people that it became a holy quest for them. As God was their witness, they were going to make it to the end of The Wheel of Time. When others gave up on Jordan, they hung in there. They kept the faith. And now....

And now.

Of course, they will in fact see the end of the story. Even as J.K. Rowling went on record that the end of Harry Potter had been fully outlined in case she did get hit by a bus, so Jordan went on the record that he had kept his family fully appraised of what needed to happen in this final book, so that it would be completed in case he died. This was a necessary precaution, given his health.

But, the argument will go, it won't be the same. And that's true. And a number of fans will vehemently boycott the book that "the family clearly put out to profit on his legacy," even though it's clear Jordan intended for this story to be finished.

In other words, Geek Culture is in full swing. And that brings us back to Something Positive.

Now, we know that God, in Something Positive, is a full on bastard. We've seen it before. He does horrific things to Davan just to see the look on his face. This is a foundation of the strip.

Therefore, it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Something Positive that God would cause Jordan's death purely to finally break Mike. Who, you will recall, is the face of Ugly Fandom, all the way to the present. He is Geek Culture at its least palatable, and even as he continues to walk the path of redemption he can backslide.

I know that there are Jordan fans who are pissed over this episode of Something Positive. For "belittling his death," apparently. To me, this validates the strip. Because this isn't about Robert Jordan, even as this essay isn't a remembrance of the man. This strip is about the fandom. About geek culture. About us. From Mike's innately selfish point of view, God did kill Robert Jordan just to make him snap. Freaking out at Milholland for this is A) missing the point of the strip, which is not about Robert Jordan but is about geeks, and B) making it clear you're exactly who he had in mind when he wrote it.

Does that deny the real pain people are feeling? No. But it is observing it, and it is not being gentle about it. That's the business Milholland is in, and business as always is good.

Robert Jordan was clearly a remarkable writer. He inspired passions and dedication and a general sense of his magnum opus that rivals Harry Potter. And we, as geeks, think first of that work -- and how it impacts us -- before even feeling grief for his death. Milholland nailed this one, and nailed us with it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:26 AM | Comments (26)

August 27, 2007

Eric: Ack-phhlpt.

(From Opus.)

Remember when Opus was going to save the Newspaper Comics Page. And through it newspapers themselves?

Oh yeah. There were announcements. Berkeley Breathed was coming back, and circulation was coming five steps behind him. And it was going to be a whole new era, both artistically for Breathed and commercially for the papers. Breathed was going Sundays only, a la Outland, and was going to get a half-newspaper page. And Breathed, having moved into the twenty first century (well, artistically, anyhow) was featuring a lush, painted palette on these new pieces.

And most of all, Opus was going to be a newspaper comic. No web presence, no sirree bob. If you wanted to see what had happened to Opus and Steve (and occasionally Bill) after all these years, you were going to have to buy yourself a paper! Because that's how it was supposed to be. The web was sucking the life out of comic strips, and it was time to take a stand. Here -- here's a bit from a 2003 Salon article about it:

But business is no place for nostalgia. When Breathed retired "Outland" in 1995, David Shearer of the Washington Post Writers Group -- Breathed's syndicate -- expressed some remorse over the fate of the strips' sizes. "I'd like to see comics displayed bigger. We all would. But that's not the reality of it," he said, pointing toward electronic media as a place for artists to experiment. Ironically, with Breathed's return, the WPWG is using that missed experimentation as a selling point. "The one and the only place to see 'Opus' will be in newspapers," Shearer says. "This is a tremendous opportunity to increase circulation."

And this was going to be a true sequel. This wasn't just "the return of Bloom County." This was "over a decade has passed, and these people are older and flabbier." In fact, several beloved characters -- like Binkley or Milo Bloom or Oliver Wendell Holmes -- were no-shows, because Breathed didn't want to depict them as teenagers (or older). He went on the record about this.

And it premiered to much ballyhoo. And it went into papers.

And then... nothing. No one cared.

Oh, I don't mean to say Opus didn't and doesn't have fans. It does. Heck, it makes me smile more weeks than it doesn't, and that's not always true of comics I read. But Opus's impact was essentially negligible, both on the comics world and on the world of newspaper circulation.

Do you need proof? Opus launched in 2003. It's a four year old comic now. Did you realize that? Had you realized that he had been around for four years? He's a full year older than Websnark is, and Websnark definitely lost its new blog smell a long time ago. (Note to self -- make mention of the anniversary sometime within a month of said anniversary. Jesus, Eric. Try a little, would you?)

In part, the problem was that glorious painted style. Ironically, it would have looked pretty sweet on the web, where the much deeper palette would show the gradations to good effect. Put onto the comics page it came across as dark and muddied, and subtleties were lost by bad LPI counts. It went away soon enough, replaced with essentially the same colors we saw in the Sunday Bloom County.

This was made worse as newspapers began to shrink the comic. The half-page thing didn't last long at all, really. When it was clear that Opus wasn't spiking numbers, there was no real impetus for editors to bow to the Washington Post Writer's Group's demands and strictures. Given the choice between letting them shrink Opus so they could fit more comic strips in or having them drop Opus entirely, they let them shrink it. Ultimately, that meant the painted style had to go, and a coloring style very very reminiscent of the 80's run went in.

Naturally, the "newspapers only" stance died next. The Washington Post -- the flagship paper for Opus -- began to run it on their virtual comics page, and gradually it moved into other online venues as well. It really didn't have much of a choice -- if it was going to start appealing to the comic strip fans out there, it had to go to where they were and do their best to draw them in,.

(Not that that strategy has been successful either. I mean, in several years of posting, Opus hasn't been covered by The Comics Curmudgeon even once. Now, while there's a case to be made that that means Opus is actually pretty good, so Josh Fruhlinger has little to say about it... not appearing at all suggests he just doesn't read it.)

How far have we come from launch? Well, recently Opus went to Salon, which will arguably be the best place to read it moving forward since they're going to maintain an archive. Sadly, the older strips aren't going up there, so we'll have to wait for the inevitable collection.

And also recently... Lola Granola showed up, and so did Binkley and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Binkley and Oliver... were the same age as when we last saw them, so everyone knows. This despite the presence of Steve's own son, who is now Binkley's age.

So what, one is tempted to think. These are the comic strips. Not every strip is Gasoline Alley (thank God), and real time aging is overdone. Which is true enough... if they hadn't made such a big deal about it, and about how if the kid characters came back, then they'd have to be teenagers and Breathed didn't want to draw them like that.

Hackwork? Not really. I mean, it's still funny and Christ, they're Breathed's characters. He can do whatever he likes. But it's been really, really interesting for me to track this experiment in revivals -- revivals of Berke Breathed, revivals of the newspaper comics, revivals of fortune. And to see the early stands taken -- admittedly, stands that were largely based in hubris, but also stands that meant something to Breathed and (it seemed) his editors -- give way to the painful economic necessities of publishing in the modern world.

And we have come full circle now, and it seems the last great threshold has been reached. From that same 2003 article/interview in Salon we see Breathed write:

As an end, controversy is a dead end. It's why TV shows tried to throw in nudity some years ago. I notice now that the ripples de jour are lesbian kisses. It's a sign of desperation, not good writing. Not to say that if I could figure out a way to throw in some hot lesbian action into "Opus," I wouldn't.

True enough. And in its own way, sad enough. Because hey -- guess what? We have controversy in Opus. And sadly, it's not lesbians making out.

You may have heard the story. Opus is running a series of strips where spiritually mercurial and flaky Lola Granola has been trying out different philosophies, theologies and spiritualisms in an effort to find herself. In the most recent strip, she has latched onto a new one -- terming herself a Radical Islamist. In her words, it's the hot new fad on the planet.

It's a pretty funny strip, truth be told. And it says something rather tame about radical Islam and something a bit more brutal about people who leap into new religious fads without thought or real, honest spiritual consideration.

That's not why I'm discussing it. I'm discussing it because newspapers have pulled the strip, because they're worried people will be offended.

That happens a lot in the newspaper world. It's kind of a boring story these days. Though in this case, it's clearly patently ridiculous. Lola is fully garbed (albeit more brightly than one might expect) and is certainly not tearing Islam down with her statements about it. Really, aside from one note about "a man's rightful place," it would probably be completely acceptable to any Muslim reading it, and almost certainly any American Muslim -- the ones most likely to read it -- would be sophisticated enough to take it in good faith. It sure as Hell doesn't come close to the Johnny Hart Islam Outhouse controversy of a few years back (or any number of controversies from B.C. before his death). But still -- comic strips get pulled. It's what happens.

Except... one of the papers pulling the strip is the Washington Post. In fact, that's almost certainly why it's getting airplay.

And it is getting airplay. Hell, Boing Boing took a stand on it, using the cheerful phrase "chickenshit" in it. Which is perfectly apropos. The move really is chickenshit, and dumb to boot. And lots of pundits are noting that in this time of declining readerships, pulling strips that might actually inspire some controversy is a stupid move at best.

I understand these feelings. And I agree with them, but not completely. Not because I think the strip should have been pulled -- it's patently absurd to have pulled this strip. No, I have reservations because I smell a Washington Post sized rat.

Remember, Opus is syndicated by the Washington Post Writer's Group. The same organization that owns and publishes the Post syndicates and distributes Opus. They're different divisions, and it's certainly possible that the Post editors decided they would pull potentially offensive (only not really) strips from the paper without consultation or connection to the editors of the syndicate... but it seems just as likely that if the Post's editors had a problem with the strips, so would the syndicate's editors -- and so would their mutual owners.

On the other hand... the Washington Post pulling a potentially offensive comic strip from their paper (but posting that strip to the web page) -- and that strip being Opus, by Berke Breathed, still considered by some outlets one of the great rock stars of the cartooning world?

Now that's a story.

And a story means people talking about it.

Publicity. Energy. Zazz.

Do I think this was all a master plan on the part of Breathed and his editors? Probably not. It seems more likely that these strips were sent out to papers, one or two pulled them, and someone at the syndicate thought "waaaaaait a minute..." But I do think that Breathed shifts with the wind. We saw it with Outland, which started off as the whimsical flights of fancy of a poor little girl named Roland Ann whose real life was miserable, so she needed a fantasy life she could escape to. By the end of it... it was Bloom County. Bill Watterson hit the nail on the head with a satirical cartoon he sent to Breathed, which Breathed published in one of the Outland collections or a treasury or something. It featured Breathed pouring money into the gas tank of a boat, kicking Roland Ann to the curb due to her innate unmerchandisabilty. Which may not actually be a word, but I digress.

I'm forced back to that Salon article/interview from 2003, where they were talking to Breathed about his intentions for Opus. Sadly, it's a burka instead of girl on girl action. (Man, consider the... er... artistic merits of a Bobbi Harlow/Lola Granola marriage.) But either way, we've got desperation sign in spades these days. And I wouldn't put it past the syndicate to even hang the newspapers out to dry if it meant getting Opus into the young demographic elite. They don't do those great Dakin Opus plush penguins any more, but they'll start churning them out in a heartbeat if there's a demand. And if the tee shirts are subversive this time and sold through Hot Topic instead of through Wal-Mart, I'm sure the money would still spend real nice like.

Really, if this wasn't some kind of publicity stunt, it should have been. It's the only thing that makes this ridiculous strip-pull seem even remotely sane. And if it was, it's been effective. The web's buzzing. People are talking. I wrote 2,200 words that should have gone into "Interviewing Leather" on it.

And lots more people saw this strip this week than saw last week's slice of theological cheesecake. And even more will see next week's banned strip. And a good number of those people will stick around for the week after that.

Maybe they'll be in time to see Cutter John and Portnoy's inevitable return. And maybe Dakin should start sourcing fabric and polyfill, just in case.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:53 PM | Comments (26)

August 26, 2007

Eric: Yay! Disgruntled election posting!

The United States Presidential primary elections and caucuses -- the system that the major parties use to determine their Presidential Candidates -- was created in large part to ensure that all states got a chance to nominate major candidates. Remember, for a very long time communication in this nation was at the same rate as speed of transport. This is why Paul Revere had to do a midnight ride instead of posting "D00ds, teh British ar cuming" to his MySpace page. Without some system to distribute the contest among the different states, many states would never get to see the candidates or have any opportunity to have some influence on that aspect of the election process.

However. We now live in an era of instantaneous communication. The Presidential primary elections and caucuses system is now officially just an extended, mind numbingly expensive parade, giving disproportionate power to a small number of states early on in the process. I am privileged to live at Ground Zero of this process, New Hampshire. As a result, I've had vastly better access to Presidential candidates in the last couple of elections than I ever had living in Maine, Upstate New York, or Washington State. They wanted me to like them, so they could leave New Hampshire with "momentum."

It's pretty cool, but that's hardly the point. And now, with various states in a January primary bidding war and a showdown with Florida where they're being threatened with having their Democratic delegates stripped because -- I swear I'm not making this up -- their Republican controlled state legislature violated the DNC's guidelines (because, see, they want to make it seem like the DNC is shafting Florida so the Republican candidate takes Florida in the general election), the current system is revealed as the creaking, cruft laden mess that it's been for a long time. All, of course, culminating in a Convention which has neither drama nor point other than being a week long commercial, which the networks no longer even provide major coverage to since, well, C.S.I. Miami gets better ratings.

So. How do you fix it? How do you make it possible for everyone to have impact on nominations, make conventions relevant again, and get everyone to shut the Hell up about all this?

Simple. Two primaries. Just two.

The first would be on Super Tuesday, and it would be held in all states that award 35 delegates or less to the convention. This would include states like Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware and the District of Columbia, and would be both a bellweather and give the smaller, less populous states a chance to shine to begin with.

The second would be on the first night of the Convention, and would include all the states with more than 35 delegates. So before the Convention, no one would have the nomination sewn up, while the also rans would be washed out in the initial run.

The Convention would become far more interesting, because there would be actual voting going on. Before ten p.m. at night, the smaller states would cast their votes and preparations would be made, and then past ten p.m. states would be reporting their results to their delegations, who would then cast their votes. It would be good television, full of poignancy, and it would pull eyeballs to the set. Then on Tuesday any needful wrangling would take place (entirely possible, since this system would make it once again possible for more than one candidate to be in position to be nominated). The results would be certified on Wednesday. On Thursday, the candidate accepts the nomination and a Vice Presidental candidate is announced.

We get drama back, all states have a voice in process, and no state is set before any other. Which would piss off my fellow New Hampshire residents, but hey -- they'd still be the in the first primary and would still have enough delegates that no candidate could ignore them.

And we could maybe, just maybe, shut the fuck up about the process and get onto the business of deciding who the best candidate is based on his opinions and record.

Ah, but now I'm just writing fairy tales again.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (17)

August 16, 2007

Eric: It would, however, be acceptable for April to end up Roadside.

So. We all know (well, everyone who cares even slightly knows) that For Better Or For Worse is going to be "ending" sometimes soon. We put "ending" in quotes because we also know it's not actually going to end. Instead, it's going to freeze time. The New Pattersons will become the focus, time will freeze, character development will stop, April will be forever trapped in the first trimester of pregnancy, the horror of marrying Anthony will forever be kept an inch away from Liz's brain....

...and so forth.

Fine. I can accept that. And I can accept and even honor the fact that Lynn Johnston -- until two years ago or so considered one of the most consistently awesome newspaper cartoonists and now reviled beyond rationality, all thanks to newly unmustachioed Anthony -- won't be handing off the comic to other creators, as syndicated artists have been doing since the beginning of time immemorial.

But. That doesn't mean we have to listen to her.

I swear to God. The day "For Better Or For Worse" goes into freeze-limbo? A new webcomic should start, continuing the story.

Oh, there would need to be mild changes. The Petersons instead of the Pattersons. Avril instead of April. Shit like that. And the character designs would have to change at least slightly.

But why couldn't a webcartoonist -- or a cabal of webcartoonists -- not continue the strip on... freed from Johnston's railroading and editorial concerns... bringing it back to its true roots, grounded in fallibility and a sense of reality.

Consider the chance to write about Liz's growing sense of ennui and even a trapped feeling stemming from this spineless passive-aggressive creature she's rebounded into bed with. Consider a chance to take teen star Rebecca and take her down a frightened Lindsey Lohan path. Consider just how elaborate a train layout you could give John. And consider the opportunity to actually have people slowly call Elly on her tureens of bullshit.

It wouldn't be hard. Assign an editor. Gather a number of talents. (Hell, David Willis and Aerie might get into bare fisted combat at the opportunity.) Go plotline by plotline, shaking up the creative team as you go so everyone gets a chance to play.

The rules would be simple: no radical changing of the fundamental underpinnings of the strip. FOOB is realistic. The only magic or fantasy is when one is considering the heartwarming sacrifice of a beloved and noble pet for a meanass ungrateful child. No satire -- this isn't "magnify the faults of FOOB for all to see," this is "pick up the story and actually get it back on track." And absolutely no animated gifs of the characters blinking, because that shit's creepy.

It would, of course, be necessary to continue to come up with patently ridiculous catchphrases and euphemisms for April and her peers.

Ideally, the people involved would be people who love -- really love -- For Better Or For Worse, but who can't stand seeing what's become of it in the name of wrapping it up in a nice big bow (and insuring that Liz Patterson is no career minded whore who marries someone she didn't go to elementary school with).

Who's in?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:46 PM | Comments (89)

August 6, 2007

Eric: For those playing along at home, I think the subject on this post broke the RSS feed.

Several weeks ago, suddenly and without warning, a swath of Livejournal accounts were suspended without notice, their materials taken down, over reports of depictions of child pornography and other violations of their Terms of Service. The methodology used by Six Apart to determine what constituted a violation of the terms of service was extremely suspect (in many cases, they apparently used the list of interests on someone's profile page, so for example a survivor of incest or pedophilia who was an activist in the abuse recovery scene might find their journal banned as promoting the activities they were most opposed to), and many, many people got really, really pissed off. It was a monumental public relations nightmare for Six Apart, which desperately tried to deal with the monumental fallout for several days. Many long time users of Livejournal got very upset, whether they were directly impacted or not. Several got accounts on other journaling communities that used similar code (sometimes the same codebase, as LJ's engine is open source). Places like Greatestjournal. Deadjournal, or Journalfen got a sudden boost in users.

But, Livejournal managed to come out from under it. "We're sorry," they said. "We did this all wrong. We have undeleted most of the deleted journals, so we can begin to do this properly. But please understand, this is a policy that we're going to implement, and many of the journals we've restored are going to be deleted again."

It's several weeks later. And now, a whole new block of journals have been deleted again. And people are very upset. They're upset because it's apparently the LJ Abuse team who decide what constitutes artistic merit in the case of depictions. They're upset because there's apparently no appeal, and protests that a given picture actually depicts eighteen year olds or otherwise consenting adults have no effect.

And I?

I find myself oddly apathetic. Because this is exactly what I expected would happen. And people should have known that after the last incident.

Six Apart is not the Federal Government. There is no right to Free Speech, or right to Freedom of Expression on Livejournal. There are terms of service -- particularly for those who have paid Six Apart money -- but those terms of service are subject to change, and those changes only need to be posted to the Paid Accounts community to represent appropriate notification. (And to my knowledge, most Paid account holders don't subscribe to that community. Christ knows I don't.) This is a private company, who owns private servers, and they have every right in the world to say "here's business we're not going to accept," or "here's content we're not going to host," or "here's a person who we don't want having a journal on our system."

Every. Right. In the world. Period. It's their ball, their bat, and their baseball diamond. And they made it absolutely crystal clear several weeks back that they really, really don't want to be in the slashfic or slashpic business.

Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the position of the folks on the other side of this equation. These are people who have used the community building tools that are Livejournal's stock in trade, sometimes for many, many years. They've paid money to Livejournal. They've built up significant online identity with Livejournal. Livejournal, they feel, is theirs. At least in part. They were there back when Brad Fitzpatrick owned the thing. They feel they've done nothing wrong and they've acted in good faith, and that this is total bull.

I sympathize. But they don't have a leg to stand on, here. It's Six Apart's playground, and they can tell anyone they like not to play any game they like. They can charge for access to the slide. They can tell any group they wish that the teeter totters are off limits. They can, in short, push my dumbass metaphor to the limit in any way they wish.

Now, the justification that Six Apart is using is, of course, protecting the children. Or restricting child pornography. Or whatever other buzzword is being used this week to make people react emotionally instead of rationally. Whatever. But what they really mean, to be frighteningly blunt, is we don't want slashfic here. This week, it's alleged depictions of pedophilia. Next week or next month, it'll be copyright infringement. Or any number of other legal grey areas that will let them quietly (well, let's be honest, loudly and hamhandedly) excise materials they don't like and don't want to be associated with.

This is entirely their right. And fanficcers, slashficcers, writers of sexually charged fiction and potentially even straight fiction writers should be taking strong notice -- because they could in fact be next. Because the one thing Six Apart can't do is promise something in their terms of service and then not deliver it -- which means that if person A has his work taken down as a violation, and he reports person B -- even if person B isn't violating it in the same way (or if there's question if person B is violating it at all), Six Apart, to try and avoid legal trouble, is going to ultimately take down Person B's work too.

What does this all mean? Am I happy that Livejournal's going down this path?

Not really. I'm not a slashficcer and I'm at best an occasional fanficcer, but I am a writer and I use Livejournal a lot. I use it as my RSS aggregator. I use it to keep in touch with friends. I use its social networking controls, at least in part because almost everyone I know is on it. And I don't want to see a massive exodus of the people in my life away from it because it can't be trusted.

But I have no control over that. SixApart gets to make that call. And Livejournal can't be trusted at this point.

So, I'm apathetic about the new round of deletions, because I saw it coming and I think everyone else should have, too. Which is a little mean of me, but that's the way it goes. People should have been moving to Journalfen or Greatestjournal to begin with. Or, someone with tech savvy who loves all of this stuff should be taking the open source code base, getting hosting or a server or whatever (and grabbing appropriate sponsorships), and making this into an LJ style system counterpart to fanfiction.net. Because this is the course Livejournal's on, and at this point there's no going back. You can't trust them with your slashfic or your NC-17 art. Period. And that's going to creep into fanfic in general, or erotica in general, or porn in general. And then from there, it may creep into regular fiction and writing. You don't know it won't, and it's clear they're not going to be on your side as this goes forward. That's what a loss of trust means. They're going to do what they feel is appropriate to make their business into the kind of business they think it should be.

I'm sad because it means the glory days of Livejournal as a place where people met and wrote and journaled and connected with one another are over, and Livejournal has passed zenith and is moving towards nadir. Which frankly, we knew. Other social networking sites passed it long ago. Which is the tragic side of this decision on Six Apart's part -- they're not in a position to be alienating large chunks of the user base they have left.They need those chunks of user base, because it's not just the pornographers who are going to leave. It's any number of people who think Six Apart's wrong in this. Or just folks who think this means Six Apart can't be trusted any more, and their journal is way, way too important to them to be in the hands of someone they can't trust.

Am I going to continue using Livejournal? Yes I am. Because I don't use it for those purposes. I use it to keep up with friends' journals. I use it to read RSS feeds. I use it because I like the mechanism of the Friends' List and there's no real way to replicate that Friends' List elsewhere yet. But if enough of my friends go somewhere else, I'll end up going there too in an effort to keep what I want in a site like this live.

At the same time? There was a time when I'd use a Livejournal community to put together fiction writing projects of certain kinds. I don't use it that way any more. Any of my creative work I'm going to have on a site where I'm paying for the hosting and can set up whatever I like -- and even then I'll keep robust backups in the unlikely event that Dreamhost catches a severe case of Dick.

And sadly, it's very unlikely this same community of users will come together anywhere else in a singular sense. Which means I'll need to follow several different communities to keep up with everyone, and I'll have to pick and choose where I'll post my own Livejournalish style posts. And ultimately, I'll end up only following one other journal service because dude, I have a life, and that means I'll lose some connection to folks. I'll fill in some of the gaps with RSS feeds and the like, but what was once a really cool thing will fade out of my life -- as Usenet, Listservs and the like did before it. And several years from now, when I'm reminiscing with several geeks of my generation, the talk will turn to Livejournal, and we will talk about what had been cool about it, and what ghastly mistakes will have been made on it. And someone will say "is it even still out there?" And someone else will say "yeah, I look at it every now and again. There's a few thousand die hards on it who refuse to go anywhere else. They're convinced everyone will come back." And there will be a few derisive snorts at these dinosaurs who won't let go of the past, and the kid geeks at the next table will have no idea what we're talking about.

Which, if you get right down to it, was an odd path for Six Apart to decide to walk down, but hey -- they walked down it.

And the folks who continue to walk down it with them shouldn't be surprised when it leads places they don't like.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:23 AM | Comments (20)

July 24, 2007

Eric: Requiescat in Pace: Tammy Faye Messner

Let us speak then of the dead. It's something we seem to do more and more of. The last time I spoke of the dead, I was speaking of Chris Benoit, and of the conflicted feelings I had as a man I respected and enjoyed as an entertainer had turned out or turned into a monster. This time, I speak of someone we all knew, once upon a time, was a shallow, bad and hypocritical person, and who I speak well of now as a kind and decent woman who, in the end, meant what she said.

A person I, and most of the people who know anything about the last twenty years of her life, mourn now the way we mourn any person who is essentially decent, kind and open, and who did her best to spread a message that on balance was a good and decent one -- far more so than many of the others of her kind and era did.

I speak, of course, of Tamara Faye LaValley, who was known professionally as Tammy Faye or Tammy Faye Messner at the end of her life, and who millions remembered (and mocked) as Tammy Faye Bakker, wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker.

I was a child in the 70's and 80's, living in rural Maine along the Northern Canadian border. I have never needed a Saturday Night Live sketch to tell me who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were. I had the PTL Club. And if it seems weird that I had watched it, you don't understand what television used to be like, especially in Northern Maine. Until the cable came, our television universe was CHSJ (the New Brunswick Television System) on Channel 6, WAGM on Channel 8, three French channels (two of which barely came in) after that, and MPBN (the PBS affiliate) on Channel 11. Period.

WAGM, in particular, was our gateway into the world. It was primarily a CBS affiliate, but officially it was an affiliate of all three networks. They would (usually) show CBS shows when they were supposed to air, and shows on ABC or NBC would show up at odd times -- the 7 o'clock hour, for example. Or on weekends. But despite this plethora of programming, there was never enough programming to fill the dial. Old, bad movies would play here and there, after Captain Kangaroo and the game shows and the soap operas. And weekends? Saturday morning was the CBS cartoon lineup, and then there was a long void all day. Sunday mornings there were various religious shows, then various crap, then they would pull in ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Why did I watch it? I was a kid living in the middle of nowhere. I had Canadian television, French television I couldn't understand, Public Television, and whatever cheap crap WAGM threw at me. You're damn right I watched it. All of it. I watched Jim McKay excitedly present ice barrel jumping. I must have seen every episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I watched Hee Haw. I watched It's The Law, Front Page Challenge and The Beachcombers on CHSJ. I watched To Tell The Truth and What's My Line, in the days when Soupy Sales was the high point of those shows. The high point.

And I watched The P-T-L Club.

My parents didn't. They had better things to do, and who could blame them? I don't know if my sister watched it or not, but I don't know how she could have avoided it -- she was even more of a child of the 70's than I was. But I did. I was young, and let's be blunt. This show was amazing. It had music (not like Lawrence Welk, another show I watched out of the 'there's nothing else to do' theory, but more exciting music), it had shouting and gesticulation and sobbing -- let's be blunt. It was a freak show. A spectacle. And kids love spectacle.

And it had Tammy Faye Bakker.

Tammy Faye Bakker seemed too over the top to be real. So heavily made up she seemed greasepainted, always laughing or sobbing at what seemed like near hysteria (for many years, mascara pouring down her face from tears was practically her trademark and calling card), she seemed like a clown. A literal clown. Especially when a kid like me was watching -- I knew from clowns, and I knew television wasn't real. And there was no way that freak was real.

But it wasn't just kids like me watching the show. There had been religious programming for a long, long time, but it was P-T-L (for PRAISE THE LORD! shouted enthusiastically) that inaugurated the television crusade. Billy Graham had been the closest we'd had to a public crusader and evangelist, as once a year WAGM would give over the To Tell The Truth/What's My Line block to him for a week of shouting and praying, but this was something else. This was up close and personal and in your face. Witnessing. Testifying. Exhorting!

And, as you all know, begging. Begging for money. Money to show your faith. Money to continue the faith. Every Church in America "passed the plate" and churchgoers understood that's what kept the church going and enabled them to help the poor and needy (this was a given in these somewhat simpler days -- churches helped the needy. It was most of what they did with their time in between sermons. At least, that's what people assumed back in the day). Well, they were passing the plate to America, and they expected to see it fill fast, brothers and sisters!

And they were a monumental success. They were the vanguard of a boom, informing and being informed by ministries and ministers like Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle!), and later on Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others of their ilk. They were so successful they launched a theme park. A theme park for Jesus. Heritage U.S.A. was another huge success, bringing in crowds of people to ride rides and have good family fun and obey Jesus.

Meanwhile, a few years later, cable done come to my town, bringing with it NBC and ABC on a regular feed, plus what was then called Superstation WTBS, and -- for a glorious twelve hours a day -- a mysterious and exciting new pay cable service called Home Box Office. And with these new, dramatic options, The P-T-L Club followed Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk into the department of "never watched, because damn, man. I have a life." WLBZ -- the NBC affiliate -- in particular held my attention. They still produced most of their own post-soap opera television. Sure, it was crappy movies just like WAGM had been, but they were slightly better crappy movies and they were introduced and presented by Eddie Driscoll, who rocked so hard you could measure him seismically. So I hadn't seen The P-T-L Club for quite some time when scandal rocked it. Jim Bakker had allegedly drugged and raped a church secretary, the ministry had paid her hush money and covered it up, and donations were going to support a lavish, decadent lifestyle for the Bakkers. (As a side-note, Jimmy Swaggart was the man who "broke" the story of Jim Bakker's transgressions, as well as another minster name of Marvin Gorman. This led Gorman to hire a private investigator to investigate this man who was purging "cancers in the body of Christ." That led to Swaggart's own habit of prostitutes coming out and his own fall from grace. I digress, but it's always fun to remember that taking joy in and promoting the fall of your rivals is a good way to fall yourself.)

Bakker's actions were reprehensible, and Tammy Faye was pulled in for the ride. It was just too easy to include her. She seemed at best incredibly naive -- and at this point, no one was ready to believe she could be anything but as venal as the rest of the defrocked. The P-T-L Club had preached prosperity theology and the Bakkers had lived a good life. Too good a life, as it turned out, as financial improprieties came to light and the IRS came a-calling. Jim Bakker went to prison. The pair got divorced. And Tammy Faye Bakker became a footnote and a joke. Just another scandal. Just another flim flam artist.

The thing is? She meant it.

She really did. Oh, she wasn't pure and innocent of all the goings on. There were rumors of prescription medicine and addiction. There was a clear opulent lifestyle she embraced. This is not to exonerate Tammy Faye Messner of the choices she made.

But when she said that God loved you? And loved me? And loved everyone? She meant that. She meant it with all her heart. And she felt that included everyone. The rich and the poor. Criminals and the innocent. The healthy and the sick. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of all creeds and races. Everyone. During the heyday of The P-T-L Club in the eighties, when AIDS was mysterious and homosexuality denounced by most evangelists as dirty and sinful -- with the implication that HIV was a divine judgement against them -- Tammy Faye Bakker had gay men and women on her show. She had AIDS victims appear. She exhorted her audience to pray for these people -- not to abandon their sinful lives, but to be healed of their illness, like any Christian should pray for any sick person.

After her divorce and remarriage, Tammy Faye slowly began to emerge. Her message was the same, even as she embraced her (admittedly freakish) public image. She launched a (secular) talk show with openly gay (and HIV positive) actor Jim J. Bullock. She appeared on programs and documentaries. (One notable documentary brought her back to Heritage U.S.A., long abandoned and falling apart. She broke into tears at the sight of it, wishing she could just spend some time painting things and making it look a little nicer).

And then she got sick. She got cancer. Colon cancer. She left the talk show, and worked on fighting it -- and seemed to win. It went into remission, and she stuck to the edges of popular culture. She traded on her image -- in a move almost stunning in its self-understanding, she appeared as a recurring guest star on The Drew Carey Show as the mother of an overweight, heavily made up caricature of a character named Mimi Bobek. And most famously (or infamously), she appeared on a season of VH-1's freakshow of the has-beens The Surreal Life, appearing alongside porn star Ron Jeremy and Vanilla Ice, among others.

And a whole new generation of people -- and an old generation of skeptics -- discovered they really liked this woman. She was honestly, truly kind to everyone. She was unafraid to espouse unpopular opinions but those opinions weren't ever exclusionary or mean spirited. She declined to accompany her castmates to see a psychic or attend a nudist resort, but she didn't condemn them for their choices. Co-star and Baywatch babe Traci Bingham described the experience of knowing her and hearing her speak on the show as life altering.

And then she got sick again.

She was seen undergoing treatments on her son's documentary series, One Punk Under God. She needed oxygen and had to stop making appearances for the most part. In telephone interviews, she described her hospice care and told people to never live their lives in fear but only feel hope. On July 19, she and her husband Ron Messner appeared on Larry King Live, and she was almost shockingly thin -- the woman parodied and known for being heavyset having dipped below seventy pounds, the skin loose on her skeletal body. It was known she was dying, but her appearance was hopeful and full of faith. From the transcript:

KING: Now you've always been so upbeat, the feeling of god being with you. Does that remain?

T.F. MESSNER: That remains consistent. I talk to God every single day. And I say, God, my life is in your hands and I trust you with me.

KING: We have an e-mail from Renee in Strongsville, Ohio: "I admire you for your unshakeable faith. Do you believe when you leave this Earth, you're going to go to a better place?"

T.F. MESSNER: I believe when I leave this earth -- because I love the Lord -- I am going straight to Heaven.

That was the tone. That, and excitement over having gained five pounds, and really looking forward to biting into a burger, which she had been craving. And expressing love and thanks to everyone who had spoken for her. She mentioned the gay community, who had "opened their arms to her" when the bad times had come and who she would always be thankful to. And she said she was mostly unafraid, thanks to her faith, but that she was afraid for her children and the sadness they would feel if she died. But that she continued to have hope.

That was July 19. On July 20, she was dead.

And with her dies a little bit of my childhood. And with her dies what might be the shining bright spot in the midst of a darkness that had spread over Christianity in the 80's, with cynicism and hypocrisy and avarice and scandal. In the decades since all that happened, Swaggart's been found with another prostitute (and unlike his first time, he flatly told his congregation that God told him it was none of their business) and said that if any gay man looked at him with lust, he'd kill him. And Jerry Falwell, who presided over the fall and the end of the P-T-L Club, though having brought a certain humor to his ministry, also brought intolerance and hatred and ignorance. Pat Robertson recently apparently called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez in God's name.

Tammy Faye? Just wanted everyone to love each other and accept each other and live without fear and in faith.

I'm not a Christian, but I suspect Tammy Faye -- though she would certainly have witnessed to me -- would have accepted me and been charitable and kind to me and assumed only the best and only had hope for me.

If there is a Heaven, I am confident Tamara Faye LaValley is in it. Very likely singing. And Earth is a slightly brighter place for her having lived, and a slightly sadder place for her having passed.

And that, in the end, is exactly what I think she would have hoped for.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:10 AM | Comments (17)

July 10, 2007

Eric: So, having written Saturday's essay, here's a long philosophical essay about the 600 pound webcomics gorilla who's just been sighted coming into town.

(From "Zudacomics.com." I swear, that's what it's called.)

It was inevitable.

In one sense, we can blame the Foglios. If blame is the right term. Other folks had crossed the digital divide both ways. Hell, Scott Kurtz had done okay for himself with his Image comic and his print collections, and DC themselves did the Megatokyo shuffle. But in those cases, it was an example of successful people on the web moving on into the print arena. The big companies understood that. That made sense to them.

And certainly other print creators had gone to the web before the Foglios. Others had decided that they could make a better run of it online, or that it would be a good supplement, or that it would grow their overall readership.All that made sense too.

But then the Foglios gave up comic books for the web. They said "look, printing a regular comic just isn't making us money. If we want to do this, we need a new system." And they put it into place. And it worked.

The Foglios were a known quantity. Phil Foglio had done work for DC in the past. If they could do well by moving to the web, there was something to this.

Seeing that, various folks at DC clearly started (or continued) to research webcomics and webcomics collectives. They researched what was working and what wasn't and they researched ways to monetize successfully. I promise you they've looked long and hard at the full on collectives like Keen or Modern Tales and at the guild-style associations like Dumbrella, Dayfree or Blank Label.

And it's finally happened. The shoe is dropping. DC Comics is launching a webcomics collective.

Not a portal. Not a gateway. A collective. There is a distinction, and it is an important one.

According to their press releases, intellectual property is going to be "shared." What that means, in the end, depends on their contracts. But that's the first thing to bear in mind. This is a professional site. If you become a cartoonist for Zuda (seriously -- Zuda?) you're going to be signing a contract with them. One that will say what rights you have and what rights they have. One that will, among other things, limit you to the "page" they've decided on. (Infinite canvas, scminfinite canvas. You're working on a 4:3 ratio and you'll bet your editor won't want something so large and detailed that it's not print friendly.) Which brings up something else: you will have editors. And those editors will be editing for content and quality. You will be expected to be on time and have a buffer ahead. If you decide to pitch Zuda and strike out on your own, you'd better make sure there's an escape clause in that contract first, and you'd better make certain you understand what your sharing of intellectual property means before you begin.

Does this sound doom and gloomish? Does this sound like I'm warning you off of Zuda or DC?

Well, I'm not.

Seriously.

I don't know what their terms are going to be, and I don't know how well they're going to pay, and I don't know whether or not "shared IP" is code for "work-for-hire but if we keep producing your hit webcomic after we leave we'll pay you a small percentage of ad revenues and put your name on the site under a 'created by' credit" or anything else. But it's entirely possible, from the standpoint of a comic reader, that Zuda could rock. Because it's doing a few things that no one else is right now. Things that should be red flags for creators, but could be boons for readers and fans: standardization and editorial control.

Back when Weds, Howard Tayler, Shaenon Garrity, Rich Burlew and I (with special guest Phil Khan) were at Swarthmore College, Shaenon and I gave a lecture on the importance of editors -- how the lack of an editor gave webcartoonists an almost unparalleled sense of freedom, but that carried with it the dangers of a lack of discipline. Editors are good things. They make you produce, on time and to spec. They tell you when you suck and they make you do bad work over again. They remind you that you're being paid to do this -- if indeed this is how you make your money -- and you god damned better not forget that or they'll stop paying you to do this. Editors provide a lot of good things for any creative endeavor, and a creative endeavor without one can suffer if it's not careful.

Well, Zudacomics.com will have all the disadvantages that strong editors entail. You're not going to be free to do whatever the Hell you want with your comic. You're going to have to produce. It will have to be of a given quality. It will have to conform to their standards. You are not going to radically shift directions in your comic without having a pretty significant discussion with the Zuda team first. And yes, you're going to have all of your comics fit in a 4:3 box. They've already come out and said that.

I'm not sure if animation's going to be acceptable or not. I seriously doubt they'll be Flash friendly. Unless the whole damn site is run in Flash to prevent bandwidth theft.

But. All the good sides of editors are going to come with this too. The stuff that comes out will in fact be of a certain level of quality. Possibly very good quality, especially if they pay well. They might in fact get some really good artists who know the form and can produce seriously good comics, because they're a steady paycheck instead of a hand-to-mouth operation. It's going to be far less likely that unexpected hiatuses will happen, because they're probably going to be working way ahead. (And yes, that means that "strips going up the same day that something happens" effect will be limited, which does have its down side.)

In short, Zudacomics might very well come out with a pack of really good webcomics. Webcomics with a lot more potential for print deals. Webcomics that are far more likely to show up at Barnes and Noble than going it alone will do. Webcomics that will have the attention of one of the large companies, which makes the chance to draw a story for Marvel or DC at least slightly less unlikely.

And, if Zudacomics is successful, then the other collectives and guilds are going to be in a weird position: they're going to become the Independent Webcomics Collectives, instead of the Webcomics Collectives. Especially if Zuda makes DC money, because you know Marvel will turn around and do their own, and probably so will some of the others. And they have money for major advertising in other media, designed to bring eyeballs to their web sites.

There's every chance, of course, that they'll do this wrong. Never underestimate the potential of a given company to make bad choices when moving into a new venture. But if they do do this right, they're going to become a major player on the web, and very possibly move into broader territory than any of the existing collectives.

So one thing that existing collectives, guilds and independent comics creators need to start doing is figuring out what it will mean, bottom line, if Zudacomics does well. Some will be fine. Blank Label and Dumbrella are largely made up of webcartoonists who produce day in and day out, building quality, and holding their audience through consistency, quality, and that same discipline I alluded to above. Scott Kurtz is likely going to be fine, for all the same reasons. Achewood is likely to be fine because of its idiosyncratic nature and its quality.

But Zuda can be bad news for Modern Tales, for Graphic Smash, for Girlamatic, and for Keenspot -- all of which have some rock solid comics but also have some random or fly by night ones -- and for the various guilds that don't have a solid core of artists producing with that same regularity. Not to mention various complete independents who go on long term hiatuses with no end in sight, because how hard is it to write and send a god damned script to your cowriter or update your damn static art comic anyway, Eric! We all know that the major collectives have some strips that produce like clockwork and some that just don't. That's going to have to change. Keenspot in particular is going to have to have a lot of internal discussions about this. If Zuda starts growing fast, producing a good number of strips that are considered high quality and a good sense of discipline, Keenspot's traditionally hands-off approach to the Spotted is going to come across as unprofessional, and the sense of 'arrival' that comes with being asked to join Keenspot is going to evaporate. And, of course, if Zuda ends up paying better than Keenspot (or Modern Tales) do, there's going to be a certain number of artists who will take the concept of paychecks and security and run with it, even if it means sharing their intellectual property, locking their stuff into a single publisher, and going back to a model that any number of artists went to the web to get away from.

Back in my acting days, we called that "working for Disney." A lot of what we were doing on the Renaissance Festival circuit was in high demand down at Disney World. Actors who could hold a sense of character, work the street and interact with the public all at the same time fit the Magic Kingdom (and more to the point, Disney/MGM) like a white glove. And a good number of folks took that deal, because it meant becoming an employee instead of an independent contractor. It meant health insurance, and a 401k, and the chance to get a real apartment and develop a normal life.

However, it also meant that you weren't doing the actor's life any more. You weren't moving from one show to the next, one town to the next, shifting gears and shifting lifestyles at the drop of a hat. You were going to work for Disney instead, performing the same role day in and day out, holding to a specific line and quality, following the Disney Handbook in all ways (including -- in the case of a guy hired to be a pirate -- having his beautiful pirate's beard shaven off, because Disney Employees at least at that time had to be clean shaven, only to have a fake one applied to his face every day so he could play his part. Honest to Christ.)

So, even though we were all derisive and dismissive of the Disney option (most of the time Disney World was referred to as "Mauschwicz" on the circuit) everyone was tempted by it and a lot of good actors took it, because a steady paycheck and the chance to build a life without scrabbling for money and that next role every minute was really, really attractive.

And those folks who really, really want to make their webcomic their day job but who aren't good at the merchandising or the rest of the things that make it hard to survive as a professional independent artist may well sign on Zuda's dotted line and go to work for DC. If they pay enough to make it feasible, it will really appeal to some people. Including some really, really talented people.

So, yeah. There's lots to be wary of. And yeah, the whole "contest for a slot" thing has strong echoes of Platinum. (Though I'll tell you, I'd die laughing if D.J. Coffman came up with a strip for this and got it through. And don't pretend he couldn't -- Coffman's got the chops.) And there's going to be lots of "hah hah -- DC's pretending it invented the webcomics collective" and busting on the man.

But if DC does this right, there's going to be some seriously good webcomics out there as a result.

And if that happens, things are going to change.

As a reader and aficionado of comic strips, I'm looking forward to Zuda. I'm looking forward to what might be some really cool comics. As an observer of the industry, I'm interested to see what they're going to bring to the table, pro and anti. But as someone who spent some time (brief, but existent) helming a webcomics collective and who knows a lot of folks for whom webcomics are their bread and butter, I think this is a time to be paying close attention to what's happening, and what it could mean for everyone else.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:31 AM | Comments (46)

July 7, 2007

Eric: Apropos of nothing, it's Heinleinmas. To celebrate, I didn't eat a free lunch.

So what happened?

This is what's being asked. People have noticed that while I don't eschew webcomics these days (I've done three webcomics related posts since spinning back up), I'm not anywhere near as focused on them as I used to be. And I do almost no posts about the bigger issues, the trends, the controversies, or whoever's pissed off at whoever else any more.

This is true.

So what happened?

Honestly?

I still love comic strips. I still love reading them on the web. I read dozens a day (though I've cut back from the hundreds I used to read). And sometimes I'll see something I think is really cool and want to talk about it, or see some point I want to make in another, or see some trend or technique or what have you and I'll want to write about it.

But the rest of that stuff? Somewhere along the line I stopped giving a shit.

The question is, of course, why. And there's a lot of reasons for it, but I think the primary one around them all is this: we're talking about a distribution method, here.

That's all.

The difference between webcomics and newspaper comics is distribution.

Now, there's a lot of baggage which goes with that. Newspapers tend to get their comics from syndicates, for example, and there's lots of stuff to be said about editorial mandate and syndication rights and merchandising and all the rest, and the ultimate freedom of the web and the ability to sink or swim on your own yadda yadda yadda. There's tons to be written about that. I know. I've written tons about it.

And I really don't have much more to say on the subject.

Seriously.

I think the situation's improved over the three years I've been writing for Websnark. I also think that improvement had absolutely nothing to do with my writing, so please don't take that as me taking credit. When Diesel Sweeties got the syndication deal they did, and when Girl Genius went out of the pamphlet business over to web distribution (but always with an eye to selling collections), we really saw how the world had changed since, say, 2002. Even back in 2004, those folks who had quit their day job to make comics were vanishingly rare. These days, there's quite a few of them, and there are at least a few methods of doing it (merchandising a la Dumbrella or Questionable Content being probably the most prominent) that have been reproducible.

Once you have a good number of people who base their living around their comic strip in a series of business models that are reproducible, the method of distribution becomes less a revolution and more a factor in how you see that business model through. These days, the web is a dirt cheap way to get your comic in front of the eyes of people who might give you money, and it's being used to that effect.

Which brings up the question of innovation on the web. The evolution of illustration, using the tools set before us to new and exciting effect.

Yeah, there's some of that.

Seriously, I like some of what the Tarquin Engine and similar things have done. I really do. And I've seen stuff with protoanimation (or actual animation) that's really cool. Though a good amount of 'animation in webcomics' is really 'Flash based cartoons,' and I don't see the need to lump them together. I'm still digging PvP's online cartoons -- I think they've matured well as the months have passed and I'm glad I subscribed, but I don't see those as 'comic strips that are moving,' I see them as cartoons and judge them accordingly. That they're based on a comic strip doesn't change that, beyond (once again) the comic strip's popularity has made it possible for Kurtz, Straub and the folks at Blind Ferret to make some money. And that's all to the good.

On the other side of the question, the real, lasting and powerful innovations that have happened out there -- the ones we see the most use of right now -- are content management systems. Ways of presenting and distributing and archiving the comic strips. Not innovations in the comic strips themselves. Look at the most popular webcomics, and you tend to see very straightforward illustrations in sequence, without multimedia, movement or the like. You also tend to see good reference materials (like a cast page) and archives (by date and storyline, generally, although not always). Sometimes you see search engines (Ryan North, take a bow out there) or the like. That's something books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets -- all the other ways of distributing comics to the public -- can't compete with. And people have done some amazing things with it. And we've talked a lot about it. But again, it comes to distribution.

Some of you are decrying the definition of success with either popularity or financial gain. And I'm with you. A comic strip is successful if it meets its goals, and often those goals can be artistic. A strip with eight readers might be beautiful and poignant and wonderful and absolutely successful. And it might use techniques and skills and tricks that you couldn't reproduce on paper. All true. Just like someone could do the same thing with a photocopied minicomic that did things on paper that to date we just can't replicate on the screen. C'est bien. Mea culpa. I'm not arguing that.

But that's not how most of the comics I've encountered on the web have proceeded. Most of them have been sticking with the same toolset and visual language as comics in the paper, in books or graphic novels, or in magazines or pamphlets. And that's okay with me, because I tend to like that sort of thing.

Which, by the by, is why I read comics on the web. They're delivered to me automatically, by my selecting a single tabset in Firefox. (Well, one of five tabsets, but I digress.) It's useful and convenient for me to read them this way, whereas I don't have any interest in buying a newspaper to read them, and I only rarely get comics or graphic novels. (I do get them, sometimes. But it's rare. And I don't get them from Marvel these days, but I digress again.)

All well, all true, and all good. And I've talked a lot about all of it in the past.

And I'm not sure how to say much more on a lot of it without just repeating myself, again. Filling up space without saying anything new. And I'm not sure why I would want to do that.

Which brings us to the meat of the subject. I'm not talking about the Webcomics community much these days. I'm not talking about who hates John Solomon or Joey Manley or Scott Kurtz or Penny Arcade or Robert A. Howard and who's defending any of that list to others or who's doing anything like that. I'm not diving into the fray giving my two cents on it or talking about who's being mean or who's being thin skinned or who's right or who's wrong or any of that stuff. And the core reason why is, as stated above, I just don't give a shit any more.

Seriously.

For one thing, there is no webcomics community.

None.

It doesn't exist.

If you think you're in it, you're wrong.

There are comics on the web, and they have fans. And those fans are sometimes fans of more than one comic on the web. But are they a community? No, not really.

I have met and talked to passionate fans of Questionable Content who have never heard of Penny Arcade.

Seriously. They know Questionable Content. But they don't know Penny Arcade.

And there are no doubt tons of Penny Arcade fans who've never heard of Questionable Content.

Almost everyone I've asked tells me they don't currently read Megatokyo. But thousands upon thousands of people do read Megatokyo, and power to them. I read a bunch of shit you don't. I promise you that. I'm a huge fan of some pretty obscure webcomics. But you read a bunch of shit I don't read. I promise you that. And I keep running into comic strips that are celebrating their five hundredth strip with a fanbase in the tens of thousands that I've never seen the slightest reference to before.

And that makes perfect sense, in the end, because the only thing many webcomics have in common is their distribution method. And distribution methods are a piss-poor means of tying a community together.

Now, webcartoonists can and I think are a community. They have common interests, common ties, common problems and common challenges, and to a degree they form a community both to help with them and because mankind is a social beast. But "webcomics fans" are almost always fans of certain webcomics who have then defined themselves as "webcomics fans." But webcomics ain't a genre. Not like science fiction or fantasy or anthropomorphic or detective stories or any of the rest. Hell, "comics" ain't a genre either.

Comics -- comic strips, comic books, sequential art, illustration, call it what you will -- is a medium. A means by which stories are told. Some of the more outre comics out there on the web might constitute a different medium than all the rest of the comics, but for the most part they don't. For the most part Nukees and For Better and For Worse tell stories using similar tools and similar visual language techniques, operating in the same medium.

For Better and For Worse, by the by, is on the web. It updates every day on the web.

In other words, it's a webcomic. Just like Nukees is. And all the rest.

So. Fans of certain webcomics get upset at other fans of other webcomics (or even the same ones) sometimes. Cliques of webcartoonists gather -- naturally enough -- and sometimes get pissed off at other cliques of webcartoonists. Somewhere in all this, someone calls Scott Kurtz something mean and William G gets people mad at him.

I'm sorry. I used to care. I really did. I cared for a long time. I passionately cared.

But these days? I just. Don't. Give. A Shit. It's webcomics drama, and it'll pass soon enough.

"But wait!" you shout. Well, some of you shout. Look, give me my illusions. "What about the discourse! You said you liked the discourse!"

I do. I enjoy literary criticism. I enjoy making points about the things I read or see, and having others debate them.

That's not what any of that shit's about. It's just not. Look, John Solomon can be very funny, but he's not trying to encourage a debate over the finer points of Dominic Deegan. He's entertaining a fanbase, either by making them laugh their asses off, by giving them sharp relief by saying something they wish someone would say, or by enraging them by saying things they find hideous and hurtful. They all seem to work -- people are certainly entertained. And if you take any of the other 'controversies' running around, they're almost never about actual criticism -- about actual critique. They're either about "X sucks!/No X rocks and YOU suck!" or they're about something tangential.

When I see something in a comic on the web I like, I'll talk about it. When I see a point I want to make, or I get inspired to write a thesis on anything from a character arc to a storytelling technique I'll write it, but I've never had any interest in writing reviews and if I had interest in diving into the whole mudslinging match I've gotten over it with time. Mostly, I want to write shit I find interesting over here, or try to write something new over at Banter Latte. And with luck, the essays over here will inspire some discussion -- that discourse I like so much -- saying why I'm right or wrong. Without luck I'll still have fun writing them, which is after all the real reason I'm doing it.

(As for Banter Latte -- that's not really discourse-related. I mean, you'll like it or you won't.)

There's plenty of people out there who do like doing reviews, and power to them. And others who like doing rants or diving into controversy (or creating it). And power to them. And if that's your thing, power to you too. I do read some of those sites too, you know. There's nothing wrong with enjoying them.

But I just can't bring myself to care any more about the gigantic, titanic debates of a nonexistent community whose definition comes from a fucking means of distribution. I used to, but I don't any more. And I don't feel badly for not caring any more. That's the kind of thing that happens over time. The things you used to think were amazingly important stop seeming important. Or even interesting.

If you find them important or interesting? Cool. Power to you. I have no doubt but that there's going to be plenty of chances to weigh in on them.

As for me? There is other stuff catching my interest these days. I'll do my best to write about it. If what catches my interest also catches yours, I hope you'll read about it. If not, I thank you kindly for your attention and support.

Oh, and Feral Chicken has been spending like twelve bucks a day advertising his comic for over a week. Given that, I can't just snark him and not have it look like quid pro quo, but damn man. I felt like I should say something. That's a lot of gas money.

Peace.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 7:15 PM | Comments (51)

July 4, 2007

Eric: Because sometimes we need to remember harsher times in 1776 on this day....

THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but "to bind us in all cases whatsoever," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Whether the independence of the continent was declared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had it been eight months earlier, it would have been much better.

We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in a dependent state.

However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own*; we have none to blame but ourselves.

But no great deal is lost yet.

All that Howe has been doing for this month past, is rather a ravage than a conquest, which the spirit of the Jerseys, a year ago, would have quickly repulsed, and which time and a little resolution will soon recover.

• The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil; and there is no punishment that man does not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country.

All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc.

Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!

Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt.

Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before.

But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.

Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.

As I was with the troops at Fort Lee, and marched with them to the edge of Pennsylvania, I am well acquainted with many circumstances, which those who live at a distance know but little or nothing of.

Our situation there was exceedingly cramped, the place being a narrow neck of land between the North River and the Hackensack. Our force was inconsiderable, being not one-fourth so great as Howe could bring against us.

We had no army at hand to have relieved the garrison, had we shut ourselves up and stood on our defence. Our ammunition, light artillery, and the best part of our stores, had been removed, on the apprehension that Howe would endeavor to penetrate the Jerseys, in which case Fort Lee could be of no use to us; for it must occur to every thinking man, whether in the army or not, that these kind of field forts are only for temporary purposes, and last in use no longer than the enemy directs his force against the particular object which such forts are raised to defend.

Such was our situation and condition at Fort Lee on the morning of the 20th of November, when an officer arrived with information that the enemy with 200 boats had landed about seven miles above; Major General Green, who commanded the garrison, immediately ordered them under arms, and sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry = six miles.

Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack, which laid up the river between the enemy and us, about six miles from us, and three from them.

General Washington arrived in about three-quarters of an hour, and marched at the head of the troops towards the bridge, which place I expected we should have a brush for; however, they did not choose to dispute it with us, and the greatest part of our troops went over the bridge, the rest over the ferry, except some which passed at a mill on a small creek, between the bridge and the ferry, and made their way through some marshy grounds up to the town of Hackensack, and there passed the river.

We brought off as much baggage as the wagons could contain, the rest was lost.

The simple object was to bring off the garrison, and march them on till they could be strengthened by the Jersey or Pennsylvania militia, so as to be enabled to make a stand.

We staid four days at Newark, collected our out-posts with some of the Jersey militia, and marched out twice to meet the enemy, on being informed that they were advancing, though our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs.

Howe, in my little opinion, committed a great error in generalship in not throwing a body of forces off from Staten Island through Amboy, by which means he might have seized all our stores at Brunswick, and intercepted our march into Pennsylvania; but if we believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control.

I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice it for the present to say, that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit.

All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back. Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him.

There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude; and I reckon it among those kind of public blessings, which we do not immediately see, that God hath blessed him with uninterrupted health, and given him a mind that can even flourish upon care.

I shall conclude this paper with some miscellaneous remarks on the state of our affairs; and shall begin with asking the following question, Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces, and made these middle ones the seat of war?

The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

And what is a Tory?

Good God! what is he?

I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: Your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe is as much deceived by you as the American cause is injured by you.

He expects you will all take up arms, and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him, unless you support him personally, for 'tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants.

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day."

Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.

A man can distinguish himself between temper and principle, and I am as confident, as I am that God governs the world, that America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign dominion.

Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives, and the continent must in the end be conqueror; for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

America did not, nor does not want force; but she wanted a proper application of that force.

Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off.

From an excess of tenderness, we were unwilling to raise an army, and trusted our cause to the temporary defence of a well-meaning militia. A summer's experience has now taught us better; yet with those troops, while they were collected, we were able to set bounds to the progress of the enemy, and, thank God! they are again assembling.

I always considered militia as the best troops in the world for a sudden exertion, but they will not do for a long campaign. Howe, it is probable, will make an attempt on this city [Philadelphia]; should he fail on this side the Delaware, he is ruined.

If he succeeds, our cause is not ruined.

He stakes all on his side against a part on ours; admitting he succeeds, the consequence will be, that armies from both ends of the continent will march to assist their suffering friends in the middle states; for he cannot go everywhere, it is impossible.

I consider Howe as the greatest enemy the Tories have; he is bringing a war into their country, which, had it not been for him and partly for themselves, they had been clear of.

Should he now be expelled, I wish with all the devotion of a Christian, that the names of Whig and Tory may never more be mentioned; but should the Tories give him encouragement to come, or assistance if he come, I as sincerely wish that our next year's arms may expel them from the continent, and the Congress appropriate their possessions to the relief of those who have suffered in well-doing.

A single successful battle next year will settle the whole.

America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event.

Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.

Quitting this class of men, I turn with the warm ardor of a friend to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out: I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake.

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.

Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but "show your faith by your works," that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ' Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it. While our army was collected, Howe dared not risk a battle; and it is no credit to him that he decamped from the White Plains, and waited a mean opportunity to ravage the defenceless Jerseys; but it is great credit to us, that, with a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near an hundred miles, brought off our ammunition, all our field pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to pass. None can say that our retreat was precipitate, for we were near three weeks in performing it, that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy, and remained out till dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp, and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabitants spread false alarms through the country, the Jerseys had never been ravaged. Once more we are again collected and collecting; our new army at both ends of the continent is recruiting fast, and we shall be able to open the next campaign with sixty thousand men, well armed and clothed. This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils- a ravaged country- a depopulated city- habitations without safety, and slavery without hope- our homes turned into barracks and bawdy-houses for Hessians, and a future race to provide for, whose fathers we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it! and if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unlamented.

Common Sense.

December 23, 1776.

--Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, "The Crisis No. I"

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:00 AM | Comments (13)

July 3, 2007

Eric: Meanwhile, not far away....

So. I've been trying to work out... well, things. As folks know. And the writing is a part of what I've been trying to work out, because....

...well, because. I'm a happier person when I'm writing lots of stuff, and being a happier person is pretty much a good goal in and of itself.

And that brings me to trying to find the best way to actually do more of it, and to fire the writing spirit, and all that. Because... well, because I want to, and because I want momentum, and because that's all a cool thing.

Let me begin by saying that Websnark isn't ending. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. I like this place. I like all of you. I like the outlet. I like the chance to write on any topic or any subject, at any time. It's amazingly cool, and you guys make me happy.

However, it's worth noting that Websnark, in the end, is an outlet for nonfiction. There have been exceptions, here and there, but this is primarily a blog for commentaries and essays. Critiques, or just me talking 'bout stuff. And that's been amazingly cool, but it's also been limiting. In the nearly three years this thing's been a part of my life there's been a couple million words between Wednesday and I, but my fiction output has crashed through the floor. And that has created an imbalance in my humors, increasing bile and phlegm and requiring an infusion of foods higher in fire and air.

Now, I could change Websnark if I wanted. I could add in fiction, poetry, a wet bar -- whatever I felt like, at least as far as Weds would be comfortable -- and Weds is, at heart, desirous of my being content. But that doesn't seem like the right reaction to me. Folks who come here and who have been coming here have been doing so for very specific reasons. They'll indulge the odd Sestina or the occasional bedtime story, but for the most part they'd rather there not be a monumental shift in tone.

And honestly, I don't want to change what Websnark is. I like what Websnark is.

The solution, in the end, is to expand.

Which brings me to Banter Latte.

Banter Latte is a new blog, chock full of that new blog smell. It was born in the weekend following my existential writing crisis. It is dedicated to fiction, to poetry, to whimsy -- to all the stuff that Websnark isn't. It has a bunch of new bits of writing, some old writing that's been sitting on my hard drive -- sometimes for years -- and locked posts designed to let me put up chapters of novels I'm working on.

That this will hopefully also force me to, you know, finish and refine those novels is a side benefit.

The protected posts, mind, are still meant to be accessible. See, part of the problem of the publishing world adapting to new electronic distribution is the question of what "previous publication" means. By locking the posts, I can skirt the edge between publishing my novel on the web and providing a place for fans of my work and interested parties to read drafts of the posts without actually releasing it. And keeping it out of search engines at the same time.

So. What is Banter Latte?

Banter Latte is a place for me to write. Just like Websnark. They're meant to compliment each other. Folks who like reading what I write will want to head on over there and see what there is to see. Folks who like my essays but can't imagine enduring my fiction can avoid it. (Though I'll post regular links over here to the stuff going on over there -- mostly because I don't want this place going quiet again.)

Though quiet isn't as likely. As I've said before, when I'm writing regularly, I'm usually writing prolifically. You'll notice I've written more on Websnark in the time since I started beta testing Banter Latte than in the three months before. That's likely to continue.

Why "Banter Latte?" Because as has been mentioned, I have a love of dialogues taking place while my characters are drinking beverages. Nothing more or less. Also, I tend to drink a lot of coffee or tea while writing.

There is a schedule to Banter Latte, in hopes of building an audience and (paradoxically) making things easier on me. Mondays are "The Mythology of the modern world," when I tell whimsical stories about the myths behind everyday life. Post beta period, we have two entries up right now: Introductions and Coffee, and Why Does Starbucks Drip Coffee Taste Like Crotch? These are generally going to be written new for the site, which should keep me doing a few hundred or thousand words in a week, all to keep the pump primed. Wednesdays are "Storytelling" days -- vignettes, scenes, stories, past stuff and new stuff all blended. Some of the more serious stuff will go here, though I don't promise that. Right now, we have a short story set in the greater Gossamer Commons universe -- the first entry of Gossamer Reflections, called Whisperdance.

Fridays are when the protected chapters of novels in progress go up. One of the state goals -- born of a conversation I had with my father -- is that I'm going to write one chapter of a novel each and every week, thus making the completion of said novels far more likely. Right now we are in the semi-hard science fiction novel Theftworld, which is password protected (though right up in the nav bar or also on the sidebar you'll see a link to a form for requesting it -- it's not exactly hard to get access to the password if you want it.) We have two chapters plus a prologue and a bit of preface material up.

Thtree days a week with three types of content. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Random days. Any day I feel like doing something that doesn't fit one of those categories, I'll throw something into a Tuesday or a Thursday. That's where poetry will go, fan-fiction if I've a yen to write it, bits of other stories, or whatever. Or nothing at all. Those aren't officially scheduled days, but right now it looks like there's plenty of stuff for them. We have a couple of related stories in them right now: the first part of Interviewing Leather -- meant to be a Rolling Stoneesque interview of a minor supervillain, and we have On Call, a slice of life story about a doctor who specializes in superhumans, played more for laughs.

Finally, on the weekends we'll have very basic open topic posts, for people to shout out comments or make dook dook noises or do whatever it is you kids do.

And, of course, there's a chance to buy ad space if you want. Right now, it's going for like two cents, so it's a bargain!

In the end, all of this is meant to stimulate my doing what I like to do most outside of spending time with Weds or sleeping: writing. And I'm really excited about it. I hope you guys enjoy it. And I hope this helps keep the writing stream -- in Websnark and out of Websnark -- more regular than it's been.

Thanks all. And enjoy.

Oh -- bear in mind the site is still new. There may be functionality changes, and there almost certainly will be look and feel changes. So, you know. Be warned.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:46 AM | Comments (10)

July 2, 2007

Eric: Man, I used to write *happy* posts....

We all have our heroes. Sometimes they're real people. Sometimes they're fictional. And sometimes the line between the two blurs, at least somewhat.

When I was quite young, I knew who my heroes were. The Legion of Superheroes. Green Lantern. The Justice League. The Avengers. The X-Men. Good guys against bad guys, and all very, very exciting.

But above all of them, there were the Micronauts. The first major comic book company book to feature a toy license, the Micronauts were much more than the story of my favorite plastic and die cast metal toys (seriously, I had hundreds of those things) -- it was a grand saga. A full on space opera. A legend. A fantasy. An epic. And I was into it. Commander Arcturus Rann -- the legendary Space Glider and leader of the Micronauts. The beautiful, powerful Marionette -- the Princess Mari, dedicating her life to saving Homeworld from Baron Karza. The wily, canny, laughing Bug -- barely a pastiche of Galactic Warrior, but mostly unique to the series, bringing roguishness and humor to the darkest of situations. The taciturn Acroyear, named for his race, prince and exile, mighty warrior. Biotron, faithful servant for a thousand years and his counterpart Microtron, yang to his yin. Force Commander, Prince Pharoid, the beautiful Slug (don't ask), the mysterious Time Travellers and their Shadow Priests, the evil of Baron Karza, the might of the Worldmind, Captain Universe -- the hero who could be you! And so, so many more....

They were my heroes, and my friends. And through the grace of the Enigma Force, I will never forget them. I owned all their comics -- a complete run. Plus the unfortunate crossover with the X-Men. Plus the trades.

Now, a lesser hero but still one I greatly enjoyed was ROM, Spaceknight! Another toy based line, but this one far more integrated into the Marvel Universe (including a universe-wide crossover where the Dire wraiths attacked), ROM was the story of Rom, a Galadoran who was the first to volunteer to be remade into a cyborg in plandanium armor, who spans the galaxy fighting to protect those who would fall.

Heroes.

They weren't real, of course. I might have had a nine year old's crush on Princess Mari, but she didn't exist any more than Brandy Clark did. Yes, there is a Steve Jackson in the world, but he's not the man who was at once a friend and a rival to Rom (I always wondered if the real Steve Jackson was amused at his Marvel counterpart). But they felt real to me. They helped me to dream of broader things, to believe in the most noble of ideals, to let my imagination run wild.

Behind them, however, there was a real hero. A man who was incredibly formative to my childhood and to the man I would grow into. His name was Bill Mantlo, and he wrote comic books.

A lot of comic books.

Really, there was a time when he worked on almost every comic in Marvel's stable. He had a memorable run on the Hulk (a run where the heroes of Earth had banished the Hulk to other dimensions because he was so dangerous -- a plotline that should sound familiar since they ripped it off for World War Hulk's setup). He worked on Thor, and Iron Man, and even Howard the Duck. He worked on the Avengers, Captain America, Ghost Rider, and he even wrote a few X-Men comics here and there. When John Byrne's star was on the ascendence and his Alpha Flight was still a major comic, it was Bill Mantlo who took it over when Byrne left. He created Cloak and Dagger, for God's sake.

You know what? I'm going to steal a list of his work from the Howling Curmudgeons -- it's easier than trying to explain just how heavily he was involved in the work of this era of Marvel:

Alpha Flight, Amazing Adventures, Amazing Spider-Man, Astonishing Tales, The Avengers, Battlestar Galactica, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Cloak & Dagger, Daredevil, Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu, The Defenders, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Hero for Hire, Heroes For Hope Starring the X-Men, Howard the Duck, The Human Fly, The Incredible Hulk, Invasion, Iron Man, Jack of Hearts, Journey Into Mystery/Thor, The Mighty Thor, Ka-Zar, Marvel Age, Marvel Chillers, Marvel Fanfare, Marvel Premiere, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions, Marvel Tales (Marvel Tales Starring Spider-man), Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Treasury Edition, Marvel Two-In-One, Micronauts, Rawhide Kid, Rocket Raccoon, ROM, Sectaurs, Spectacular Spider-Man (Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man), Spider-Man and Daredevil, Strange Tales (2nd series), Super-Villain Team-Up, Swords of the Swashbucklers, Tales of Suspense (Captain America/Captain America and the Falcon/Steve Rogers: Captain America), Team America, Transformers, The Vision and The Scarlet Witch (the entire miniseries), Web of Spider-Man, Werewolf by Night, What If..., X-Men, and X-men and the Micronauts.

Seriously, dude.

Mantlo had an incredible sense of character voice and motivation. His series featured grand themes, but explored them in sophisticated ways. Relationships were passionate but never simple -- there was pain and joy in equal measure, and his heroes had to walk heroic journeys -- trawling the depths of despair before they could once again find hope. They were incredible.

And Mantlo wasn't afraid to take risks. He subverted the heroic and sympathetic Force Commander, turning him into a villain before killing him off to return Baron Karza to the universe. He killed every living thing on Homeworld -- a horrible, terrible loss -- without losing the idealism that held the Micronauts together. After setting the town of Clairton, West Virginia as the home of pretty much all of Rom the Spaceknight's human friends and secondary characters, he had the entire town killed off and replaced with Dire Wraiths in an effort to kill Rom and Brandy Clark. You couldn't take anything for granted in a Mantlo story -- except that in the end, after terrific pain and sacrifice, good would triumph. But would forever wonder at the cost....

Oh, over at DC he also wrote the Invasion miniseries. Yeah. He actually did one of the monumental crosssovers they did in the eighties, and it was one of the ones that actually did have impact and didn't suck. Who knew?

I can't overestimate the impact Bill Mantlo's writing had on me. I really can't. And it was a very sad day for me when he decided to move on from comics, and enter the legal profession. And even there, he was a hero. He became a public defender, apparently a very good and dedicated one.

And then came tragedy. In 1992, Mantlo was rollerblading when he was hit by a car. He had massive head trauma that led to a coma for more than a year. When he emerged, he had brain damage that he has never (and will never) recover from, needing constant care. Expensive care, I would add. His capacities are diminished at best and will never recover.

When I learned this... all the breath just left me for a while. It was so unfair. It was so wrong. Bill Mantlo deserved so, so much better.

But if there was one thing Mantlo wrote about, it's that being a good guy -- and deserving good things --was no guarantee that you would get them. Bad things happened to good people in Mantlo's stories.

The point, in the end, was what you did with the things you've received. Bill Mantlo needs us.

He needs me.

And he needs you.

Fortunately, there's an easy thing you can do.

Writer/Illustrator David Yurkovich has produced Mantlo: A Life in Comics, a tribute and benefit book that includes fiction, history, and interviews with everyone from Marve Wolfman to Jackson Guice. It costs seven dollars and fifty cents, and all the profits -- all the profits -- are going to help insure Mantlo's care now and into the future.

You can order it here.

My own circumstances aren't good right now (though thanks to you incredible people, they're vastly, vastly better), but on my next paycheck my order for this book is going in. And I pass it forward to all of you. If you were of the era I was, and you liked Marvel Comics at all, you know Bill Mantlo's work. If not, but you like comic books of any stripe, you're a recipient of his legacy.

When tragedy comes, it falls upon all of us to bring hope back into the light, to take off the cloak of the Shadow Priest and reveal the shining embodiment of idealism given form.

Put simply, he needs us.

That's reason enough, and probably all I would ever need to say.

Dallan and Sepsis preserve you all.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:49 PM | Comments (6)

June 28, 2007

Eric: I wonder if everyone feels this crappy doing this.

(Stolen cheerfully from RPG World!. And check out the ultracool animation nockFORCE, by Ian Jones-Quartey and Jim Gisriel!)

I don't much care for this, but it's clear I have to do it. For a couple of months now, a series of bad breaks have kept me pretty low, financially. And people have bought of things and some folks have donated, and that's helped tons. Just absolute tons. But I can't seem to get ahead of it. It's not like I'm, y'know, spending money. And it's not like I don't have a job that pays me in money. But I just can't get in front of things, and trouble keeps pressing, harder than I'd like. And I need to get ahead of it once and for all.

So. I'm doing the auction thing, yet again. And I'll admit I'm going to miss these. First off, there is a five book collection of Nephilim -- the long out of print Chaosium occult RPG of the children of Angels and Man. This role playing game -- with lots of supplemental material by the staggeringly talented Kenneth Hite, I would add -- is one of those that RPG developers continue to cite as an influence today. Myself included. And this one auction -- this one auction -- includes the core rulebook, Secret Societies, Serpent Moon, Chronicle of the Awakening, and Major Arcana. This is a big deal listing.

Also in terms of "historic," "influential" and "well written" I have a second listing of multiple books: in this case, a listing of both The Primal Order and TPO: Pawns: The Opening Move. These were absolutely brilliant supplements, written by Peter Adkison, which took the rather lackluster support most RPGs had for gods and deities and the like in those days (Deities and Demigods listed tons of Gods, but made them into relatively standard monsters to be beaten, at least as far as their stats were concerned, as an example), and made them into something that could be quantified and used in a campaign effectively while still making them freaking GODS. There was also a brouhaha over what was a pretty clear case of copyright and trademark infringement in the games (Adkison had somewhat naively put in conversion rules for pretty much all the major and a frightening number of minor role playing games in the supplement, intending it to be a capstone to be used for other systems rather than a system in its own. Palladium, most notably, took exception to this). And what might be most interesting is these were the flagship products of a very small RPG company in the pacific Northwest which, while they sorted all this out, licensed a card game designed to be collectible from a guy named Richard Garfield.

That company's name? Wizards of the Coast. And on the backs of Magic and later Pokemon they absolutely conquered the planet. Sadly, leaving supplements like The Primal Order behind in the process. These books really are good. And this auction gives you both of them.

Thirdly, and most prosaically, there's d20 Modern. It's, you know. d20 Modern.

Finally... and I'll admit that while I hardly need the book for the rules (I have several other copies, including a legal PDF), I'm going to actively miss this one... I have the ultra-rare, first (limited) edition Black Hardcover edition of the In Nomine core rules. This was the last copy of the core rules I found -- the last version I didn't have. And it's by far the hardest to find and buy.

But, I don't need it. Not even for In Nomine. And it's got to go. They all have to go.

And I'll admit it. If you haven't donated but you've considered? Today's the day. Honestly.

(If you have donated, then I thank you.)

This isn't a threat. This isn't a "do this or Websnark goes away" or anything like that.

It's just... it's been a month. Of one thing after another after another.

Times are tough. So this is what I need to do.

If you can't spare change? Don't sweat it. I'll still be here. We'll still be friends.

Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (8)

Eric: How does someone even come up with a title for a post like this one?

Wrestling, to me, is something I associate with my big friend Frank.

Who, you will recall, I always refer to as "my big friend Frank." And have ever since the day he military pressed me over his head. Never being small myself, I became impressed with his massive muscularity. Frank is a refined man. An intelligent man. A gentle man. But a very physical and powerful man, as befits an alumnus of the South Philly streets.

It was on those streets, and at the Philadelphia Spectrum, that Frank developed his lifelong love of professional wrestling. At the Spectrum, Frank would see then-road agent Gorilla Monsoon at the gate. Gorilla -- with a keen eye for business and for building relationships -- remembered the Philly kid and would talk to him on the way in. "You still mad about what the Sheik did to Bruno?" Gorilla would ask. "You watch tonight, kid. I bet you'll go home happy. Bruno's mad."

And Frank did go home happy.

By the late eighties and early nineties, when Frank and I shared a couple of apartments in the Ithaca area, wrestling was one of those Things Frank Did. And for several months I mocked him mercilessly over it. This was stupid. This was asinine and ridiculous. Why do you watch this stuff.

Until Wrestlemania V, anyway, and a match between Curt "Mr. Perfect" Hennig, and Owen "The Blue Blazer" Hart. A match that was a stunning display of mat skills, of hardcore technical wrestling instead of brawling. I was blown away as I watched them go. And for months, I was glued to my set whenever a mat technician was on the screen.

Frank, being my best friend and being sensitive, mocked me with twice the energy I mocked him before. "Seems like my friend Eric's a rasslin' fan," he'd say, snickering. And he was right.

The gigantic guys didn't usually interest me, though. There were exceptions. We liked the Road Warriors in their prime. In a later era I marked out hard for Bill Goldberg. But you needed a certain charisma to be a big guy and still engage my interest in the ring.

Not so for the mat wrestlers. What another era called the technical wrestlers. Not the high fliers -- the crusierweights or luchadores, though I enjoy that style too. No, these were the mid-sized guys, who could wrestle an hour match and make a story out of it.

Owen Hart was great at it. But now he's dead -- fallen from the top of an arena during a pay per view. Curt Hennig was great at it, but he's dead too. Bret Hart was one of the best at it in his generation, but a concussion followed by a stroke put him out of the game. Dean Malenko, the iceman, was one of my favorites. He was a "crusierweight" who didn't go to the top rope. His gimmick was he knew every damn mat hold on the planet, and he could chain them together in an amazingly interesting story. He's not dead, but he's retired -- working as a road agent now, just like the Gorilla, once upon a time.

Eddie Guerrero was great at it. Really freaking great. But then he died of heart failure, years after he kicked his substance abuse problems, but still paying the price for the damages he'd wreaked on his internal organs.

And Chris Benoit was great at it.

This is a hard essay to write.

It's hard because I liked Chris Benoit. I liked him a lot. He was everything that I watched wrestling for. He was tough and smart in the ring, a good "ring general," who could take anyone, with any physique, and build a good match out of him. Like the Nature Boy Ric Flair, Benoit could have a sixty minute match with a broom and take your breath away the whole time.

I liked his personality. Benoit didn't have the kind of charisma a lot of wrestlers had. He could cut an okay promo, but in the end he let his ring work speak for him. And it held him back for a lot of years. He was the best damn wrestler in the building, but he didn't have the size that made you a top star without needing mike skills, and he didn't have the sheer mike skills that made you a star without needing the size. He was the darling of wrestling critics and serious fans of the form, though. Fans who were pissed that he kept being passed over for the top of the card.

This is a hard essay to like, because I liked Chris Benoit. He was a hard worker, and utterly unselfish in the ring. If he was booked to win, he still made his opponent look good. If he was booked to lose in a hard fight, he made his opponent look either superhuman or like a total bastard (depending on what was needed). If he needed to be destroyed for a storyline, he laid the fuck down without whining.

When Bret Hart wrestled a match for the first time in the arena his brother Owen died, the WCW management let him do an old style mat match -- a full length match, taking out all the stops. A match style almost unheard of during the height of the Monday Night Wars.

Bret chose to wrestle it with Chris Benoit. And it stands out as one of the best wrestling matches I've ever seen.

I liked Chris Benoit.

So did Frank. Frank liked him a lot. Benoit was of the old school. He's one of those guys who'd have fit in during the days of Gorilla and the Philadelphia Spectrum. If you were a serious fan, you wanted him to do well.

And ultimately, he did. He took titles. He took tag championships in ECW. He got the WCW World Heavyweight belt, the World Tag belts, the World Television Title, and the United States Heavyweight Championship. And in WWE, he took the tag belts, the United States Championship, the Intercontinental championship, the World Heavyweight Championship and he won the God damned Royal Rumble. Belts could come and go, but you only had one Royal Rumble winner in a year, and that winner had to carry storylines for the first quarter to third of the year. A Royal Rumble winner was expected to headline at Wrestlemania, and there's nothing bigger in a wrestling promotion.

Benoit did it by being a damn good wrestler. Nothing more, nothing less.

I liked him. Frank liked him. A lot of people liked him. And Hell, I don't know anyone who hated him.

Well, Kevin Sullivan wasn't his biggest fan. Sullivan was a wrestler and promoter, and one of the last bookers of WCW. Sullivan booked his wife, Nancy Daus, into a romantic triangle with Benoit. One that became real -- Benoit ultimately married her. And when Sullivan got the book in WCW, he actually booked Benoit to become champion. And the same night that Benoit won the belt for the first time in WCW was the night that Benoit and his friends in the "Revolution" made the jump to the WWE. A jump made in large part because even as a champion, Benoit couldn't see himself wrestling under Sullivan's book. And without a doubt Benoit flourished in the WWE.

A note, before we go on, about Nancy Daus. This was a woman I remembered fondly from her days as a heel manager in WCW, her era as "Woman," as one of the real prototypes of the modern wrestling diva. Nancy Daus could play a face, switch to a heel, and sell both roles and the transition. It's a damn hard skill, much prized in the modern era, and she's one of the pioneers of it. She was beautiful, a good actress, able to take a bump (a prized skill in women managers of her era) and able to sell both that bump and her 'interference' in matches. She was good at what she did, and deserves mention.

God, she deserves mention. Writing an essay about Chris Benoit without writing about Nancy Daus would be unthinkable now, because Benoit....

Man, I don't want to write this.

Last week, as near as we can tell, Chris Benoit suffocated his 7 year old mentally handicapped child to death. One of the current prevailing theories is he actually applied a wrestling choke hold to his seven year old son until his son died. He bound the hands and feet of Nancy Daus, his wife, and then asphyxiated her. And then, probably a day or two later, Chris Benoit set bibles next to the corpses of his wife and child, went down to his gym/basement, and hung himself with the cord off one of his weight machines.

A brutal crime. A horrific double murder followed by a suicide. The man killed his wife and seven year old son. And then hung around with the bodies for a couple of days.

When I heard the news that Chris Benoit was dead, it hurt. Another wrestler I really liked was dead way too soon.

When I heard that he died after killing his wife and son....

It is horrifying. It is monstrous. It is the kind of crime you can't easily put into words, no matter how much you want to or need to.

And it made all the worse because I liked Chris Benoit. I rooted for him. I enjoyed watching him wrestle. He seemed like a decent guy. A stand up joe. And he killed his mentally retarded seven year old son.

It's not just me. Frank described himself as stunned. And the wrestling world went into shock. The day that the tragedy was announced, the WWE canceled Monday Night Raw and aired a tribute to Chris Benoit. They've taken some heat for that since, now that we know that Benoit killed his wife and son, but at the time I don't think the WWE could have truly known that. And I know that they weren't thinking clearly. Benoit was liked in the company. In the locker room. And they've become sadly good at putting together tributes and retrospectives of "superstars" who die way too god damned early.

They have apologized, of course, though any number of wrestlers still can't get their heads around it. The death of young Daniel Benoit in particular horrifies everyone. Bret Hart mentioned how Chris Benoit worshipped his son -- a popular refrain.

The son he killed. Very possibly using a wrestling hold.

WWE's made some errors since then. They've published a vehement defense against the idea that Benoit was suffering from "roid rage." Unfortunately, such a defense, coming after the tribute episode, makes the company seem like it's doing damage control -- like the last thing they wanted was steroid use by a wrestler conflated with the murder of a defenseless child. That's the worst thing they can do, because now people are going to conflate those two things -- and question whether or not the WWE had pressured Chris Benoit to take steroids.

This is not an accusation on my part. I hope to God they didn't, because if they did, with a child dead now? As a publicly traded company? That could mean the end of the WWE in its current form. Honestly. You don't mess with the SEC with a child lying dead.

And Nancy Daus. The beautiful, talented, saavy Nancy Daus. Who once started divorce proceedings against Benoit but later retracted them.

She's dead.

Daniel Benoit is dead.

Chris Benoit is dead.

God help me, I don't know how to feel. I don't know what to do. I liked Chris Benoit.

It's going to be awfully hard to despise him. But would anything else be appropriate? Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit are dead. And he did it.

He did it.

Somehow, that match in tribute to Owen Hart? Seems less impressive now. Everything seems less impressive now.

I don't know. This sucks.

All my thoughts and hopes with those left behind. With a family in shock. With friends who are feeling a thousand times worse than I am. With the hardcore fans who are feeling just as conflicted now. With the coworkers who are dealing with their grief over Chris Benoit at the same time as they are trying to reconcile their horror at the terrible thing he did.

Hell, I feel badly for Vince McMahon right now. No matter what sketchy things he's done in the past, he would never, ever want a seven year old child to die. I believe that with all my heart. And he's going to be the only man in all of this to have to show accountability. Because this is a monstrous crime -- as black and dark and horrible a crime as we can imagine, the murder of one's helpless disabled child, the binding up of one's wife to make her helpless and then murdering her, and then committing suicide after it is done -- and people will want resolution. They will want to know why this happened, and what would make Chris Benoit, this guy we all liked, into a hideous monster.

And they're going to look at McMahon, because he plays a bad guy on television, and he's done sketchy things in real life in the past. And because we don't have anyone else to look at. Because the man who killed Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit is dead, so we can't get any resolution there.

It's not fair. I think McMahon would be repulsed by the very thought of a father killing his son. But the best case scenario will now focus on the schedule that Benoit was working -- all those days on the road in the year, the lack of an "off-season" either in television terms or in sports terms. All the physical stress of wrestling. The need, sometimes, to use steroids just to recover, without even using them to bulk up.

Right now, all those questions are going to be asked of WWE management. Shareholders are going to want answers. And because WWE is a publicly traded company, so is the SEC and possibly other federal investigators. Because a seven year old boy is dead, and so is a woman who was tied up first. And it's their father who did it. Their father, who was missing a pay per view wrestling event at the time. An event he was going to headline.

So yeah. I feel really badly for Vince McMahon right now. This is a dark day.

Most of all?

I feel badly for Frank. Because deep inside Frank is the kid who used to talk to Gorilla at the Spectrum.

And that kid isn't going to understand this. Because the next time the WWE comes to town, no one's going to make it better. No one's going to get revenge. No one's going to redeem the darkness or beat the evil.

We're all just going to have to live with it.

And that sucks.

Rest in peace, Nancy Daus and Daniel Benoit.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:00 AM | Comments (22)

June 21, 2007

Eric: State of the Burns

The question is, what now?

Websnark is going on three years of age, and obviously for the last couple of months it's been at best "quiet." Which is to say I haven't written jack shit for it.

On the other side of the equation, there's the rest of my writing life, where....

...hm. "Not. Jack and Shit."

Nothing of consequence to livejournal. Little to nothing in fiction. Little to nothing in essays or e-mails. Little to nothing... well, anywhere.

My general accessibility has also been much much restricted. I don't e-mail folks. I connect to favored chat hangouts and say nothing all night.

It's not that I'm a complete hermit. I see people at work. I talk to Weds daily, including videoconferencing. (The greatest boon to long distance dating since [inset Mail order Bride joke here].) I speak to my folks.

But I've largely withdrawn into myself. Which happens to me on occasion. My activities become solitary. I just kind of... recharge for a while. Go into a cocoon.

I've had a lot of troubles the past couple of months to boot. Some health. Some financial. Some annoying. (For the record? Losing your driver's license is a pain in the fucking ass and I don't recommend it to anyone.) Some USPS related. I really need to get another major eBay campaign going to start pulling myself up out of some of this shit, but I've been avoiding it, largely because I can't imagine cheerfully announcing more eBay auctions on here without having written anything lately. It seems ungracious, even though I'm not soliciting donations when I do it. "Hi! I'm not entertaining you right now, but feel free to buy some of my old RPG shit!"

Yeah, not so much.

I can tell this one's serious though. because both my father and my fiancée have mentioned that... you know, Eric, you haven't been doing very much writing lately, have you?

Which makes some sense. They all know that writing is kind of my mental checksum. It's what keeps me on keel. And I like to do it. I like it a lot.

So the question is "what now?"

I've thought "I should write about...." for Websnark about two hundred and fourteen times in the last couple of weeks. But I don't have anything ending that sentence just yet. I mean, there's lots of Webcomics out there and I read a bunch, but what can I say about any of them that I haven't already said a dozen times or more. The same with video games or pop culture or political science or what have you. What is there for me to say?

Dad and I discussed my beginning a "chapter a week" fiction writing program, where I do one chapter in a seven day period. It's a good plan. It might get The Recluse done. Or Theftworld. Which is still one of my favorite titles. Hell, I could write Adjusted League Unimpeachable for freaking Superguy if it would get me back on writing track.

But that doesn't help here. And I admit it. I'm selfish. I'm not ready to surrender Websnark. This is a part of my writing landscape. My writing life. My psyche.

It got me engaged for Christ's sake.

And you folks have been awfully good to me. I like you guys. And it seems like that's an important thing too.

So the question is, what should I write about. What can get the spark going? What can get the ball rolling. And make no mistake, when I write (and your milage may vary) there's momentum and inertia involved. It's way easier for me to write five thousand words on day nine of regular writing than three hundred words on day one after time off.

One friend suggested I combine my poverty with my typing skill and auction off topics for me to write about. That's something I've generally been against except for charity, though there does reach a point where it becomes appealing. Though there is generally a feeling of 'payola' involved that makes me quail. "Hi! I just spent five hundred and twelve dollars buying an essay from you. Please write about my webcomic Anime Treacle. Just tell me what you think, okay? No pressure to give me any preferential treatment. Did I mention that five hundred and twelve dollars was my food money for July? No pressure."

...uh... yeah.

So I could solicit for topics. That's always fun. Which, assuming anyone's still reading this (and as of the moment I'm typing this the freaking site's down anyway) means there'll be some comments with suggestions. I'm down with that, but then there's a potential backlog which might seem insurmountable. Or ungracious.

Man, I'm concerned with seeming gracious, aren't I?

Or maybe... maybe I could accept X amount of money to write short vignettes or fiction bits. Do something improv style. Give me a setting, a genre and characters and see what you can come up with, writer boy.

Or would that seem weird?

I dunno.

All I do know is this. I haven't forgotten you guys. I haven't forgotten Websnark, or writing.

Things are just... odd, right now.

Oh, before I forget? Howard Tayler hit seven years like a week ago, over at Schlock Mercenary, and Cheshire Crossing put up issue three in all this, too. Both topics deserve more, but at the absolute minimum, they deserve mention.

EDIT: Just to make things crystal clear, this is not, not, not! a donation solicitation. Some of you guys are amazingly generous and I appreciate that, but dude. I haven't written jack shit for two months. When I'm producing that's one thing, and thank you for your support. When I'm not, your generosity should be turned to the places that are producing. In my humble opinion. Don't make me stop this car and come back there. Don't think for one minute I won't turn around and go right back home. And I'll speed, and I don't have a license on me so if I get pulled over they'll take me to jail! Is that what you want? Well is it?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:13 PM | Comments (34)

May 25, 2007

Eric: Jesus. He's away for a solid month, and his second post is on frigging City of Heroes. God damn rip off....

Eleanor regained consciousness slowly, a feeling like a thousand ants crawling over her skin filling her senses as she regained some sense of herself. She had blacked out on her way to her Founders Falls apartment, and awakened just outside of Louis Forest. To her horror, she realized she was suspended six feet off the ground, held by an unseen force, while a baleful green fire surrounded her. Dimly, through the flames that seemed to burn her soul but not her flesh, she could see red robed cultists chanting, a blue robed wizard with burning green eyes leading them, and some kind of spectral horror floating above them.

"Stop!" she shouted. "Don't do this!"

"You have a destiny!" the mage cried out. "Your sacrifice will open the gateway to a new kind of darkness through the world as we know it!"

"Noooo!" Eleanor cried.

There was the sound of a whip-crack, as inky darkness seemed to swell all around the Circle of Thorns. A vapor-wreathed fist slammed out of the blackness, driving into the stomach of the mage. It was followed by a flurry of blows from phantom arms and a twisting assault. The green fires faded, and Eleanor dropped to the ground. To her shock and joy, a woman in a black and white camouflage jumpsuit was beating the cultists senseless. First one, and then another, and then with a titanic series of darkness-fueled blows, the spirit itself was driven from the plane.

"Why -- Umbral Lass! You saved me!" Eleanor said, leaping to her feet even as Umbral Lass crouched and searched the fallen cultists.

"Yeah, yeah," the heroine said, rifling the mage's pockets.

"I never thought I'd actually meet a hero," Eleanor said. "Especially one who just--"

"Oh shut up, you cow!" Umbral Lass snapped. "Six cultists taken out and not one of them was carrying Spell Ink? I have regenerative powers! I need to boost them with unholy superscience and that means SPELL INK! Get out of my sight! I have to go find more Thorns!"

"But--" But the darkness dynamo was gone, leaving Eleanor to make her way home, just one more speed bump on the heroine's quest to build healing inventions.

Crafting had come to Paragon City.

In the last month, after Weds had returned to Canada... I found myself... well, unmotivated. It was the kind of thing where you're recovering. It's like grief, I suppose. The apartment seemed empty, the days seemed routine. The chemicals didn't make things more than 'okay.'

In such a situation, I turn to City of Heroes. That's most of where I was during the month of not being here. Heck, I've got a character in the middle 40's now, and I'm in striking distance of the elusive 50th level.

For those of you who remember I've been playing since launch, having preordered the game more than three years ago, the fact that I'm just now getting close to 50th level should amuse you. To you I say "screw you. I have a life! Really! Stop laughing!" But regardless, this meant I was doing some heavy punching of Malta operatives and Carnival Psychics right about the time that Issue 9 hit City of Heroes, and with it brought a full fledged crafting system to the game.

Crafting, for those who don't know, is a staple of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft used it to flesh out their worlds, giving the heroes something to do besides punch evil. It was addictive in its own right -- the first time you find yourself playing your Dwarf Hunter for sixteen hours at a time, all on one island, killing off six legged alligators you can skin and turn into pants... you realize you're in this for more than Orc punching.

City of Heroes didn't have crafting. It had been looking into ways of doing it for years, but in one sense the genre doesn't really fit it. Super heroes don't take fallen supervillains and skin them for jackets. (Though admittedly if they did crime rates would fall.) With the Ninth Issue of free content updating (well, eight of free content -- one of those issues was City of Villains), they finally rolled out the brand spanking new Invention system.

In the invention system, you get salvage from defeated enemies. You can also find (or buy) recipes to combine that salvage into inventions. Most of those inventions work the same as other Enhancements -- little add-ons that improve your powers, which fit into one to six slots on each power. For instance, a couple of damage enhancements and a couple of accuracy enhancements make your power more likely to hit and increases the damage the power does. Makes sense? Sure it does!

On the normal enhancements system, you can only use enhancements within three levels of your own. So, if you're thirtieth level, you can use anything from L27 to L33.With invention enhancements, you can still slot one in that's up to three levels higher than your own, but lower level ones never lose effectiveness. Among other things, this means that three L25 Invention enhancements slotted into a power will give you roughly as much of that benefit as any other levels, which means you never have to upgrade them again. (The reasons why get into Enhancement Diversification and diminishing returns and the nature of Single Origin Enhancements versus Invention origin enhancements and whatnot, but for all practical purposes three L25 Damage Invention Enhancements will top that power's damage out straight through to L50, for example). Of course, different enhancements require different salvage -- some of it rarer than others, so the hunt for Stuff is on!

There are also other, more specialized Inventions. You can Invent temporary powers -- say, the ability to become intangible five times. And you can Invent costume pieces which you can redeem at the taylor. Say, winged boots, or wings made out of bone, or fairy gossamer wings..

Finally, there are also Invention sets -- rarer invention enhancements designed to all work together inside a specific power. On their own, they give bonuses to one or more of your powers. But when you get more than once Invention Enhancement from a given set into a single power, you get "set bonuses" that can be significant -- like a 10% bonus to your regeneration, or greater maximum health, or having all your powers recover more quickly, or getting various defenses. A hero who doesn't normally get defenses against things like knockback, being put to sleep or immobilized or the like can use these set bonuses to great effect. My own Dark/Regen scrapper now has obscene regeneration rates, a lot of speed, recovery times for both endurance and recharging powers like no one's buisness, and psi defense. Anyone who's played a non-Dark Armor scrapper in this game knows the joy of Psi Defense.

To facilitate getting your grubby hands on rare invention recipes and the salvage needed to build them, the game has added Consignment Houses. These are places where you can put up your unneeded salvage, recipes, enhancements and the like for other people to bid on. Someone beats your bid? Someone gets your stuff. In a truly cool move, the Consigment Houses are cross server -- both American and European -- so if someone out in Estonia has bid four million influence on Hamidon Goo, and you put Hamidon Goo up in the consignment house with a 3.5 million influence minimum bid, you get some sweet Estonian influence and he gets the chance to build Ghost Widow's Embrace Invention Set Enhancements. Or roll around in mitochondrial jello. Whatever makes Estonian superheroes happy, I suppose.

The system, mechanically, works and works well. It's easy to do, easy to work with, and everyone starts spending time in consignment houses selling off crap and jockeying for bits and pieces of salvage to make their own Inventions. (Though I'm not sure "invention" is the right word -- you're not inventing the stuff, you're following 'recipes' you buy. I'm impressed by anyone who buys a DIY book on building a deck and builds it, but I don't generally credit him with inventing the deck.) Badges spice things up as well, and it's possible to ignore the system entirely if you don't want to do this stuff. (Though if you're a PvPer -- and you still play City of Heroes in the first place -- not going for Set bonuses while your opposition tunes around them is asking to lose a lot of fight. But honestly, how many people are playing City of Heroes for PvP and not using the Invention system?)

Conceptually, it's a little harder to justify. I mean, the system rests on the idea that after beating up criminals, you get to take their stuff. Including things like bars of gold, silver and platinum. Or high tech gear. Last time I knew, that's called 'mugging.' Even police officers don't get to rifle the pockets of downed drug dealers for paraphernalia they can use to build better nightsticks or sell on eBay. It just seems weird that the superheroic invention system rests entirely on petty theft, coercion and armed assault.

Of course, that makes it perfect for City of Villains. (In City of Villains, the consignment houses are called the Black Market, and they look like trucks that the stuff "fell off of.")

Would I make it any differently? Well, maybe. I've always felt City of Heroes needed a secret identity system, and it seems to me this would work for that -- have criminals 'drop' clues or secrets that someone with a detective Secret Identity can convert into influence or Arrest Warrants or manufacture into special missions... while someone with 'reporter' could turn them into stories which go for influence, or for Exposes, or manufacture into special missions... an 'occultist' could turn arcane secrets and clues into arcane powers or missions, techs could do the same to technical secrets and clues... and so on and so forth.

But, it's not for us to say what we would do differently. It is for us to assess what they have done. And in my estimation, the invention system works. It adds a new layer to the game -- one I find fun and engaging and useful. One that's helped distract me from the loneliness of the apartment.

I'll keep it up. Heck, it's six months at the least before my Canadian Fiancee magically is allowed by Immigration and Naturalization Services to become my Living-with-me-wife, and that's a lot of loneliness to defer into experience points. L50's around the corner, and various forms of almighty squid follow that....

In the meantime, excuse me. I have to go mug criminals for their spell ink. And would it kill people to sell off a few more Numina's Convalescence recipes?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:31 AM | Comments (29)

May 24, 2007

Eric: On the other hand, Black Scorpion did get made into a television show briefly... maybe that's where they're taking this brand!

(Image number one of this article originated -- for some value of Originated -- over at the Newsarama article where Adam Hughes discusses all this. Which isn't really what I'm talking about here, but you should know where it came frome. Credit. It's what's for dinner. So, you know, have a big lunch.)

So let's have a conversation about brand management, shall we?

I know there's been a lot -- I mean a lot -- of discussion on a recent Sideshow Collectibles Mary Jane Watson Comiquette statue designed by Adam Hughes. A statue where Mary Jane is wearing a stripper thong, is in the full on "presenting" bent-over pose, and who seems sexily servile. There's been significant 'discussion' on the intent of the statue, on the apparent sexism and/or misogyny of the statue, of the almost absurdly 'skanky' dimension of the statue. About the anatomy of the statue -- hell, lots of discussion. Pretty much all of it deserved. I was stunned at the sheer blatentness of the statue.

But I wasn't surprised by all of it, mind. I mean, the collectibles market is laden down with sexualized depictions of comics characters. This was a particularly egregious example of the form, but it's hardly unique. I mean, this market's what made Todd McFarlane a millionaire -- toys of grotesques and of hot chicks (and of hot chick-grotesque hybrids) are big business, and plenty of comic book stores are laden down with them. This was just one more on the pile, as sad as that pile was. The outrage was heartening, as it's outrage that leads inexorably to change, but that's still not what I'm here to talk about today.

No, today I'm here to talk, as I said at the top, about brand management.

Brand management is a key component to success in the comics industry today -- particularly at the big two publishers. At DC and Marvel, comic books don't really pay the bills. They don't sell nearly enough comics to do that, these days. This ain't the eighties any more. Instead, brand exploitation pays the bills. Options by studios to produce properties based on your intellectual property. The actual licensing fees paid as part of those produced television, theatrical or other adaptations. Licensed merchandise -- from the statue we see at the top of the page to the girls' backpacks with the hot pink and sparkly Superman/girl symbol on the back. Tee shirts. Action figures. DVD sales. The characters at DC and Marvel bring in the long green, and more often than not they're not bringing it in sequential art form.

So, when one's brand makes the money, one needs that brand to be out in the public eye. They need it to appeal broadly. And they need to manage that brand. They need to carefully ensure that the brand isn't damaged, that it's not inappropriately applied. They want it to continue to make money for decades to come.

That's brand management. It's not just ensuring the brands are known and available for sale in many forms, bringing in cash. It's ensuring that the brands aren't significantly damaged by those sales and licensing, thus killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. And part of brand management is timing.

Let's be blunt -- overly sexualized and even misogynistic depictions of Mary Jane Watson Parker are themselves a brand, and they have been for a long time. Mary Jane originated as Peter's new supermodel hot girlfriend. She was a media figure. Hell, she first appeared in the comics with the phrase "face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" In fact, the original dichotomy Mary Jane's presence set up was between herself -- aggressive, sexual, superhot -- and Gwen Stacy, who was more passive, more virginal, more 'girl next door' (despite the fact that Mary Jane actually lived next door to Peter). It was Betty and Veronica, with our man Pete as Archie. And, you know, a complete absence of the Lodge millions. So it was almost certain, when Marvel began licensing Series eight hundred and sixty four thousand of "our hot comics characters done in pressure treated plastic," that one of them would be of Mary Jane and would pay particular attention to the fact that her breasts are made out of solidified helium. We might not like that fact, but it was still true, and from a purely cynical capitalistic standpoint, it makes economic sense. Mary Jane is a brand, her sexuality is part of that brand, and people will buy it. Ergo -- it will be made available for them to buy at a hundred twenty-five bucks a pop. Face it Tiger, the brand management team just hit the jackpot.

But the timing of the announcement... was horrible brand management. I mean it couldn't have been worse. Because all of this hit right as Spider-Man 3 hit the theaters.

Spider-Man 3 is also the leveraging of a brand for money, pure and simple. The intellectual property has been adapted and packaged so that millions of people can shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to watch Tobey Maguire beat the living Hell out of Topher Grace. And it worked. As of today, according to our friends at Box Office Mojo, Spider-Man 3 has taken in $286,385,002 domestically and $466,984,781 in non-American markets. That's over three quarters of a billion dollars, or almost half a billion dollars more than the reported production costs of the movie.

Stop and consider this for a moment. After paying for the movie's production costs, Spider-Man 3 has taken in half a billion dollars of profit.

At the moment, Spider-Man 3 -- and the other movies in the series -- are by far the most important expressions of the brand on the market. Vastly more important, in brand management terms, than the comics. And the people going in and shelling out three quarters of a billion dollars to see the movie are vastly, vastly, vastly more important to the brand right now than the few hundred or thousand who might buy the statue we're talking about. To the overall health of the brand, the Kirsten Dunst depiction of Mary Jane Watson is vastly more important and more strongly perceived than any of the Supermodel versions of the character.

I saw Spider-Man 3. Unlike a lot of my peers, I actually enjoyed it a lot. And I was surprised at how much I liked Kirsten Dunst and the evolution of Mary Jane in it. She was very real, very human in a superhuman world. I found her story compelling.

And she mostly wore stylish clothing. I can't remember any examples of her wearing clothes that didn't involve a full dress. (EDIT: I've been reminded that for a while, she also wears a white blouse buttoned up to the neck, plus a short black skirt and very conservative black hose, a la an upscale waitstaff uniform. Oh baby. Oh baby. Oh.) I know she didn't wear any brown midriff baring scoop neck babydoll tee, jeans with strategic tears in them, and the kind of thong that only strippers wear (for the record? "Sexy" thongs in today's fashion market at most barely peek over the edge of the jeans. They don't wrap above the hips like some kind of harness for parachutes that anchor on the crotch.) And she sure as Hell doesn't have 44FF breasts displayed like cantaloupe.

Whether or not this kind of sexist depiction is ever appropriate, it's certainly lucrative and therefore Marvel is going to license it. However, in an era where Mary Jane Watson's brand is vastly more lucrative when it ties back to what the people who shelled out three quarters of a billion dollars in the last twenty days have seen, this aggressively sexist depiction isn't cute and it isn't pin-up art -- it's confusion in the marketplace. People who seek out examples of Mary Jane based on the movie will run into it and be turned off. It hurts the overall brand of Mary Jane Watson. And it damages the potential profit that brand can make.

That is a catastrophic failure of brand management. In the wake of these millions of movie dollars being spent, the absolute last thing you want on the mainstream media is a debate about the inappropriateness of your pissant limited edition sex statue. Sure, it's good advertising for the sex statue. And indeed, the statue has sold out in preorder. But the damage isn't to the statue or its sales, it is to the brand, and is of the variety that causes highly paid brand managers to lose their jobs. Saucy Mary Janes would be fine in this climate. Naughty, coy Mary Janes wouldn't hurt the brand even if they annoyed some of the fans. This thing? Hurts the brand.

And it underscores the thing Marvel is worst at right now. Stop and consider. On June 17 of this year, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer will be released. And yet, the past year's comics have depicted Reed as a particularly weak supervillain whose actions, directly or indirectly, led to Captain America getting shot. We can debate the quality of the comics (and we have), but from a brand management standpoint they're horrible. You don't poison core fanbases of your franchise just before releasing a movie that cost a hundred and thirty million dollars to make. That's just stupid. Next year, they're going to try to launch a new Iron Man movie and franchise, and that same year of comic books put Tony Stark not only into a supervillain's position, but conflated him with the Bush administration and Halliburton.

See also: a future Spider-Man killing Mary-Jane with horrific cancer caused by his radioactive sperm two months before his movie comes out.

Now, as a writer and a fan of superheroes (though admittedly not a fan of what Marvel's done to superheroes in the last few years), I wouldn't want to have storylines dictated by the brand management team either. But this is the business that Marvel is in now. This is the business they've been in for years, and it's vastly better business than the comics side stuff. And in corporate America, you follow where the money's flowing. And right now Marvel's doing a terrible job at that.

As one last example, I give you the cover to Heroes for Hire #13, a comic rated by Marvel for teenagers. This would seem to be something entirely different than what I was talking about -- there are no burgeoning merchandise deals for this new version of the Heroes for Hire. There are no movie deals in the offing. One could debate whether or not they really want teenagers to pick up comics featuring highly sexualized victimized women on the cover (including one who apparently had her costume unzipped nearly to her bellybutton by a tentacle creature), but does it really belong here in my nice cynical essay about brand management?

In short? You bet it does. Heroes for Hire is clearly designed to go after a specific market segment. From the promotion it's received and most of the cover art to date, that market segment is clear: Birds of Prey fans. Over at DC, there's a highly acclaimed and clearly successful comic book series starring several strong women who do the superhero thing. It's smart, fun writing in an excellent comic book that manages to prove that you can have (mostly) equal -- even feminist -- takes on superheroes and make them really good superhero stories.

The comics were successful enough, in fact, that they got their own WB series. Now, the television show failed, but that doesn't change the fact that Birds of Prey is a successful comic with enough penetration in culture that they successfully optioned it. Brand Management 101 says there's money to be made off of Oracle, Huntress, Power Girl, Black Canary and Other.

Marvel, of course, can't make money off those characters. They don't own them. But they can assemble their own thematic versions and build a brand based on them. Comics 101 -- if Superman is successful, here's twelve guys just like him at other companies!

So. They're after the Birds of Prey audience, both for short term comics sales and for longer term critical acclaim and brand building.

The Birds of Prey audience is, to be blunt, feminist. At the very least, they're comfortable with superheroines being depicted in a strong, well defined character way. At most, they're solidly feminist, believing in all that "superheroines should be strong figures who aren't needlessly sexualized for male readers." A significant portion of the Birds' audience is female, at least judging by the commentary around it.

So. Brand Management is simple in this case: strong women. They can be attractive and even sexual, but they have to be strong and capable.

Here, we have a cover with five people bound, about to be... er... attacked by tentacles. One of them is male. That's Shang Chi, and he's aggressive, fighting the horror, not giving in.

The rest are female, and they're docile, almost drugged, not resisting at all. With... er... evidence of arousal. And Colleen's being apparently partially stripped by an octopus.

If your brand management plan was to go after Femforce's demographic, you're well on your way. But if you're going after the Birds of Prey audience you just failed your brand management skill roll critically. It will be many, many issues before a lot of Birds of Prey fans will even consider picking up your comic. They sure as Hell won't be blogging about it in a positive way. They sure as Hell won't be extolling it or pushing it to their friends.

In other words, it won't be penetrating the culture as anything more than another example of comics-for-35-year-old-guys-check-out-Misty-Knight's-Rack.

That's a failure of brand management. Oh, and for those who have pointed out that a woman was the cover artist who depicted it? Sorry, the point remains -- this cover will alienate the market segment the comic was designed to appeal to.

Bad brand manager. No paycheck.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:32 AM | Comments (56)

April 24, 2007

Eric: Because I am still alive, some fast facts!

It has been a busy few weeks, storms and all.

Part of the reason for the busyness has been practical. Wednesday is in town. More to the point, Wednesday is in town for the last time for at least six months. Why? Because we will have specific forms filed immediately after she leaves town, and those forms will lead inexorably to her being back here permanently (and married to me, which makes me a very happy person), but while they're in process the government will not let her return to the country. And they will take six months to process. If we're lucky.) So it's important to us to, among other things, consume every waking minute with each other to its fullest. Which has meant sitting and typing on almost anything non-work-related has fallen by the wayside.

I assume all of you would forgive me for that, of course. Because Dude.

We're feeling very very good about the byzantine process of securing Governmental Approval For American Burns to Marry Canadian White thanks to our lawyer -- the startlingly kickass Virginia "Gini" Judd, esq. (EDIT: The link now works! Yay!) Mlle. Judd is someone we know and trust -- she's the wife of Ferrett Steinmetz, author of Home on the Strange -- she, Ferrett and Weds had a great time hanging out in England before she made it back onto this continent. She's already made a process which seems alien and frightening seem much easier to deal with, and we're excited to have her helping us.

(As a side note -- if you or yours are looking into family law, bankruptcy, immigration issues of any form, or just general civil legal stuff, I heartily recommend her. She Knows Her Stuff.)

A few things have happened. I haven't talked about Vonnegut, and it's likely the statue of limitations for writing a remembrance has passed. So let us just remember that the man was willing to appear as himself in a Rodney Dangerfield movie where he writes a term paper for a student on his own work, which gets an F because "clearly whoever wrote this knows nothing about Kurt Vonnegut." Which at once revealed his opinion of such things, as well as denoted something about the man himself.

More germane to my life, my Microsoft Explorer Thinks We're a Phishing Site experiences have been collected into a Help Desk plotline that was seriously funny. Among other things, it actually featured a Wednesday-Day-Of-The-Week joke that actually made Weds laugh -- and very few of those make Weds laugh these days. (For the record? That's not a challenge. Seriously. I've had enough date puns made about Weds's name that I'm ready to never hear another one. Weds has lived with them.) At the time I wanted to push it, but things were just -- well, see above. But by god, you should go look at it.

Also, I've had some other project just go up on some site. It slips my mind right now, however.

Things are well. Weds is well. Oh, and my car seems to be okay -- some gum-out seems to have fixed it right up.

(One last bout of eBay will be going up in the next day or two, for those who have wondered. But obviously the storm has passed, and thank you all for your generosity and cheer. I hope everyone loves their Stuff.)

I'll try to be around more often than I've been in the past month, though... well. I have her for another nine days, and then just when I can sneak to Canada, and you'll understand that I'm going to miss her, so for now....

Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:20 PM | Comments (31)

April 17, 2007

Eric: The road falls away

Time slips away from you.

Time slips away from you and around you and past you. There was a storm here, a few days ago -- a Nor'easter, they called it, which seems weird since the same storm dumped snow on the Midwest before it reached us, but what the heck. Weds and I went driving last night, with an intention to go down south to Manchester. On the way, we found closed roads because the water, running down hills, had undercut and collapsed the roads.

Being enterprising folks, we circled around and tried to go another way. That way led down a road where there were collapsed sides, and we finally came to a point where there was absolutely no way to move forward. A river had sprung up, cut the road down the middle for a good three hundred feet, and then vanished, leaving only the clear signs of water and an abject lack of passable roadway.

Wednesday stepped out of the car and moved off to a safe distance, to tell me when to stop the car as I slowly backed up, moved forward, backed up and inched around to go back the way we came. The reason for this was simple: the ditch on one side of the car was now a good twelve feet deep, and if I inadvertently backed over it the car would have been swallowed up and very possibly rendered undrivable. Which would have been inconvenient. Also, the car might have fallen backwards, landed on the roof, and potentially done me a mischief. Which would have been painful.

Slow and steady got the car turned around, and we drove back up the road, deciding that there was nothing in Manchester worth adrenalin. As we drove back, slowly, we came upon a wild turkey, running down the center of the road in a certain degree of panic. We tried to get a picture of it, but it got into the woods and hid from direct view of us. Which, given that a turkey doesn't know the difference between a camera and a rifle and doesn't know that Thanksgiving won't be for seven more months shows admirable wisdom on his part.

We came back home, driving into town and going out for dinner at the Wolfe's Tavern. The place was practically deserted -- there may have been two other couples in the whole place, and the bar section was empty except for one guy watching Bill O'Reilly speaking on the Virginia Tech shootings. I watched about ten seconds as we headed to the salad bar. It was restrained and respectful -- two words I don't normally associate with Mr. O'Reilly. And I considered how ruined roadways and the weather were unpleasant, but far worse things had been happening in the world.

This is a Sarah Vowell attitude -- one best laid out in her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot -- she goes to the sites of American tragedy and generally has a lot of fun at them. She thinks it's a way she gains perspective. Yeah, it's a bummer that the movie was sold out, but at least she's not being slowly crushed to death under the weight of stones because she's being accused as a witch. They Might Be Giants did a song about it called "It Could Be Worse" on the audiobook version of the book, and it's now my ringtone for when work calls me. Yeah, it's 11 at night and someone's calling to tell me I have to shlep across the street and reboot a few servers and get things working, but at least we're not being forced to march two thousand, two hundred miles in a forced relocation where four thousand of our number died of disease, fatigue, starvation or dehydration, ultimately being forced to live in Oklahoma.

Yeah, there was a bad storm. And as it turns out, routes not just to Manchester and Concord but to Maine, to Rochester, to Portsmouth and to Conway were closed yesterday, some just washed away. But it's not like a madman loaded a couple of nine millimeters and started killing people on my school's campus. Wolfeboro might be an island today, but no one died and we have plenty of toilet paper and twinkies. Perspective is a good thing to have, here.

Reactions to the tragedy have been varied but predictable. Some people are calling for stricter security on our college campuses. Some people are calling for stricter gun control laws. And the blaring of 24 hour news channels which are providing live, up to the minute reports on an event that ended yesterday with horror and death but which is not now ongoing will only magnify the tragedy and make it all the more tragic through reactions. Now, I'm a liberal, and I have a solid set of opinions on gun control laws and on the culture of firearms that's emerged in this country, but as with Columbine before it Virginia Tech does not change that opinion. Nor does it validate it. We are discussing the actions of a madman, doing something unthinkable on a campus where people live. There is little to be done to prevent the actions of madmen, because they have all the time in the world to plan for the things you haven't prepared for. This man would have caused mayhem, horror and death one way or another. Perhaps stricter controls or security would have saved some lives. Or perhaps it would have caused the madman to build crude incendiary devices instead and potentially killed more. We cannot predict the actions of madmen, and we must not overreact when they happen. We must consider the pain, the horror, and what legitimate lessons can be learned from tragedy. We must do so soberly, away from the passions that tragedy evoke. And as we learn more about why Cho Seung-Hui went on a murderous rampage at the college he had attended for years, we must try to learn what we can to identify where the system did fail, without surrendering ourselves to fear of what unknown things might happen. That way leads to xenophobia, to armed guards on college campuses, to a police state being locked down further, and to no promise that someone else won't kill a bunch of kids somewhere else anyway. We have defined much of the Twenty-First Century as a reaction to horror and terror, and few today would claim those reactions ended up being wise or correct. This time, we have to learn from those mistakes and horrors the same as we must learn from the tragedy in Virginia.

The waters recede slowly, but the damage is left in their wake. I have no idea when the roads connecting my town to the rest of the world will be repaired. It's not like my town is the only one to have damage done in what was after all a pretty major storm. There is much to be discussed -- I've been away for a little while, and as I said at the top of the essay, time has a habit of slipping away from you, like water. I'll try to be better, and more here. I'll try to comment on things left uncommented on. I'll try to add something to the dialogue or the day.

But if I miss it, I won't overly stress. It could always be worse. This is minor in comparison to so many things in life.

Be good to each other and to everyone you meet.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:20 AM | Comments (28)

March 27, 2007

Eric: For all the fifteen year olds out there? Yes, you can summon succubi in the game. Yeesh

The thing about Sorcerer is it's short.

Seriously. A hundred and thirty one pages in an attractive hardback that itself is six and a half by ten. It's a tiny little thing. The size of a hardcover comic book, really. And at least three of the pages is an essay elaborating Edwards's GNS Theory. (Said theory has since been deprecated and incorporated into the Big Model. Speaking as a literary and critical theorist, the GNS and Big Model theories are fascinating reading, if a hair structural for my taste. At some point, I should really codify my own theories of collaborative roleplaying as improvisational performance art, but -- as happens so often -- I digress.)

And yet, despite the economy of text, Sorcerer is dynamite. It really is. You read through the pages and it blows your preconceptions out of the water. That shows real economy of text.

The way Edwards accomplishes this is twofold: first, there is economy of text. Edwards is a master of using four words the way a more florid writer (me, say) would use twelve.

Secondly, Sorcerer is a book of concepts. Thematic concepts, practical concepts, mechanical concepts all alike, but concepts. Many if not most RPGs or sourcebooks to come out in the last fifteen years -- certainly since the heyday of White Wolf -- have been executions of concept. If you read Vampire: The Masquerade, to use a now-outdated but classic and well known example, you are reading a book about a realized world. The mechanics woven through the text highlight and derive inexorably from the specifics of the campaign world that the system is modeling, and as a result that system is altered contextually when it's woven through a different role playing game. This is even true of the modern World of Darkness game -- it is more streamlined and "universal," but Vampire: The Requiem doesn't simply add on to the World of Darkness rules -- it recontextualizes them.

Not so with Sorcerer. This is a very specific book, but it is not a book of execution. The core mechanics elaborated so simply and clearly here suggest a plethora of different possible executions. Edwards gives some suggestions and examples, but you find yourself coming up with different paradigms the system works for just naturally. What is left unsaid is as interesting and evocative as what is said.

This isn't to say Sorcerer lacks assumptions. You can't develop a realized role-playing game without assumptions. Even the bare bones System Reference Document that is the cornerstone of d20 -- perhaps the polar opposite of Sorcerer -- is chock full of assumptions. And the most basic assumption of any role playing game are the words "what if."

Seriously. Think about it.

"What if Vampires were real, and were quietly moving behind the scenes, eking out an existence and forming a society within our society."

"What if superheroes really existed, in a world that conformed to the four color adventures of the comics of our youth?"

"What if brave adventurers in a pseudo-medival society crawled through underground passages, killing everything they find, sacking ancient burial mounds and catacombs for their treasure?"

The Role Playing Game is an attempt to answer that question -- preferably having fun while you do it.

Well, Sorcerer's "what if" is pretty simple. "What if the only paranormal power in the world came from intentionally summoning demons?"

That's it.

Note that "what if" doesn't encode what demons are. It might be the Abrahamic demons of the major current world religions. It might be the original Greek ideal of the dæmon -- a creature between a mortal and a god, possessing wisdom or knowledge, possibly petty, possibly noble. It might be a computer daemon given form. It might be a Ferengi ship captain, and man -- would the price of power be worth it?

As I said -- this is a game of concepts, not executions. The concept is simple. The execution is up to the gamemaster.

Which is how these games used to be presented, back in the days of mimeographed and hobbyist roleplayers building and presenting games. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was incredibly detailed and complex -- it was all about the execution -- but the details of the world were entirely left up to the Dungeon Master. Hell, even buying the sprawling original World of Greyhawk product gave you a pile of names, a hex map, and a few very general comments about places like Blackmoor, but the specifics were left up to the the Dungeon Master's discretion. The Dungeon Master filled in the core gaps in the theory, and the players drove the execution in practice. Compare that with the next generation's Seattle Sourcebook for Shadowrun (which is still one of my favorite products, it's worth noting). This was an incredibly detailed Sixth World retelling of the greater Metropolitan Seattle area in a magipunk universe, right down to where you could get Ork food in Puyallup -- with the additional layer of actual Shadowrunners hacking into the files and leaving their own comments about what you'd really find in these places.

Not so with Sorcerer. It's got all the rules you need to create a sorcerer, to go through the process of contacting, summoning, binding and commanding the spirits, to create the statistics for those demons and to elaborate the powers innate to those demons. But it has no assumptions as to what those demons are, what kind of people the sorcerers are, how this has impacted society, or anything else. The rules exist as a theory. It's up to the gamemaster and the player to figure out the execution.

And the player does get to participate. One of the cooler (and more eminently stealable) concepts of the game is the kicker. This is the final part of character creation, and it is essentially a player authored upturning of the character's anthill. One of the core elements of the English novel is the establishment of the norm and the introduction of something that breaks the norm, introducing conflict. That's the kicker. From before you start playing, there's something that has the character out of his happy place... and it's something the player brings to the table instead of the gamemaster.

That's cool.

I've been turning these things over in my brain for a few days. I've been bouncing them off my usual gaming cohorts. I've had story ideas burble up -- it's a fertile field. There's lots of little touches I like (the total and intentional lack of telepathy or "magic evil detection vision" for one. You never realize what a crutch such effects are until you take them out of your game world entirely), but they're all designed to make me think about what kind of world I would make out of these concepts.

None of this is new insight. Sorcerer has been making the rounds for years. Ron Edwards received the Diana Jones Award -- perhaps the most prestigious (and certainly the most difficult to receive) award in the RPG Design community -- largely on the strength of Sorcerer back in 2002. Five years is an eternity in these terms, and Sorcerer's been sitting on my shelf for most of that five years. Hell, it looks like actually buying the game is difficult at the moment -- it's still listed as 'in print,' but it's out of stock. And unlike most modern RPGs -- especially from independent and small press publishers -- it's not available in PDF form.

As a side note -- I am a total RPG PDF junkie now. Give me a way to put my collection on my laptop hard drive and carry it with me? Yes please thank you. Make it searchable to boot and I will be your absolute best friend.

But that's as may be. Right now, I'm turning Sorcerer over and over in my brain, and coming up with things and thoughts, of which this is just a few.

And isn't that a cool thing for a role playing game?

(Auction updates -- most are ended or ending, and it's gone really well! I'm going to put some more things up later today or tomorrow, to keep the cycle moving forward as money is very helpful and I'd like to get ahead on things I've gotten behind on, but for the most part thank you everyone for bidding and participating. And man who thought Amber would go for almost seventy dollars?)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:26 AM | Comments (21)

March 6, 2007

Eric: Seriously. Old *Jimmy Olsen* comics used to sell over seven hundred thousand issues a month. Not Superman -- *Jimmy Olsen.*

I was watching a show on the History Channel, called How William Shatner Changed the World. It was one of those shows that tracked the people who actually made things like ion propulsion drives for NASA unmanned spacecraft and the cellular telephone and had them saying "well, yeah. I was watching Star Trek and hey -- Data was listening to music on his computer so I went down to my job at Apple and then I wrote Quicktime and then we invented the iPod."

You know, a fluffy show, but fun. This one featured some of Shatner's trademark (for this decade) self-deprecating humor.

But... they made an interesting contention in this show.

See, Star Trek was low rated, but then snowballed. And was huge. And Star Trek: The Next Generation was even bigger. (And if you haven't been playing along at home... we're reaching the point where Star Trek: The Next Generation was as long ago as the original Star Trek was when TNG first came out. Feel old yet? But I digress.)

And then Deep Space Nine came out. Which was my favorite of the series. And it did okay... but it was significantly lower rated than Next Generation which was on at the same time.

And then Voyager was lower rated still.

And then Enterprise was lower rated enough that it tanked.

We all know these things. And we all know the justifications. "People were burned out on Star Trek. Competition from cable and the internet killed them." Et cetera. But that's not what they were saying on here.

No, their contention -- and it was a throwaway -- was simple. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation were Roddenberry's vision of a future where humanity's problems were solved and technology was a good thing that made life a paradise and allowed humanity, who had matured, grown together and embraced that paradise, to develop themselves and explore the galaxy. Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise were darker shows where there were interpersonal conflicts between the crew, a more "realistic" approach to technology (which often failed) was adopted, and there were universal wars, terrorism, and lots of bad things and tense moments. And the millions of people who loved Next Generation didn't love these darker shows in such great numbers, despite their critical acclaim (the critics loved Deep Space Nine -- and so, for that matter did I). They loved the overall sense of optimism that Roddenberry had brought and people like Braga, Berman, and Behr eschewed as hokey.

Now, I don't know if this is right or not. I don't have demographics or interviews or statistical data. But it was an interesting contention for me, because it goes hand in hand with where I think comic books are dying.

See, comics used to be bright. They were optimistic. The good guys were good guys. The bad guys were bad guys. And the good guys eventually won. This was true at DC, where generally the heroes were stalwart and upright, and this was true at Marvel where the heroes were flawed and had problems. But it was still true.

Over the last several decades, comics have "grown up." They've become more realistic. And we ultimately had things like Zero Hour and Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis and Civil War. And some of those series have been popular and everything, but comic books have been in major decline. The most popular books today get the kinds of numbers that middle of the road-to-unpopular books got in the seventies (and let's not even think about the forties or fifties. Superman used to sell many millions of issues a month.) Hell, over on Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics site (which is always good fun), an entire essay was devoted to pointing out that back when comics were stupid they vastly outsold the most popular comics of today. Even Little Dot.

And I've wondered for some time when the comic book companies became ashamed of superheroes. When did Realism, and "secret identities are bad" and "goofy heroes like Ralph and Sue Dibney need to die" and "the government needs to regulate all super heroes in a clear nod to Guantanamo Bay" and "hey, let's show Hank Pym immediately after employing the potential kinky sex acts that shrinking your body to the size of a dildo imply on his ex wife and former abuse victim Janet in our flagship team comic!" take the place of "Captain America beats up Hydra so they can't conquer the world" and "Iron Man is a good guy who fights bad people who want to take over the world."

I mean... what if the William Shatner documentary was right? What if the reason Enterprise tanked was because they'd lost the clear, clean message of the original series and Next Generation. What if the reason comic books are a niche item (and Manga outsells them in bookstores) is people liked the clear cut good versus evil stuff more than the 'popular' depressing 'realistic' stuff?

It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:04 PM | Comments (53)

February 21, 2007

Eric: And now, literature.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around On the Banks of Lethe. It's not easy. But James Grant does that to my brain.

I think I probably got into Grant's stuff thanks to Randy Milholland. When Grant's original webcomics magnum opus, the Jay Storyline, was in full flower over at FLEM Comics!, Randy did small cameos in Something Positive. Jay was one of the people Davan knew back in Texas. Simple enough. That led me to FLEM, which later on led me to Two Lumps. I loved it.

I loved it because Grant is a sick fuck. Which is really the only way to describe him. Except he