Websnark

November 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me repeat that.

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

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

Let me repeat that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We remember.

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

November 5, 2008

Eric: A moment of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never, ever will be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 4, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

And honestly, writing mad science takes some brain work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of mad scientist mix tape creation.

Look, start small.

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

August 25, 2008

Eric: The painful death throes of a shiny thing.

Bruce Baugh's one of the better people I know, both in general and from my RPG developer's days. These days, he's covering Roleplaying Games and other such stuff at the shiny, new Tor.com blog, which means... well, y'know. He's a blogger now. About cool things. Kickass.

Well, Mr. Baugh done pinged me last week over a new thing on Facebook -- Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures. And it's sweeping Facebook like a hungry fire, desperately burning through profiles hungry for time sinks and glitter in the wake of the death of Scrabulous. He's blogged about it himself, with a more formal review than I'm going to give it. I'll just try to hit the high points.

Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures is a Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro designed app, meant to be advertising for the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. And I'll be honest -- it's shiny and cute, and proves once again that you don't need monumental graphics or even true interactivity to make a compelling game. In Tiny Adventures, you create a character -- a Dwarf Warlord, say, or a Half-Elf Paladin, or a cross section of others. There's no questions of alignment or stuff like that. You name your character. You get starting equipment. And then you send your character out on a quest.

And I mean the above, by the way. You don't go out on a quest. You send your character out on a quest. And every few minutes -- anything from five minutes to fifteen depending on server load, on average -- you get a report back of one of his encounters. An encounter, for the record, seems to be defined as "any situation where you roll a d20." It might be a strength check, or a wisdom check, or an attack, or defending against being attack. Your character has a given difficulty number he has to roll over, he has his d20 roll, and he has any applicable bonuses due to statistics, magical effects, or other. He either makes or fails that roll, and either way, you get a brief paragraph or two describing what the situation was and what happened in it. Either way, he either gets some experience and/or some gold, and sometimes he finds equipment or a magical item or two. Adventures seem to run anywhere from six to fifteen encounters, which gives you a nice little synopsis of the adventure he had. And a given adventure will therefore take somewhere from a half hour to three hours when everything's running properly.

That's it. You don't actually do any of the dice rolling. You don't make any decisions in the encounters. Your relationship to your character is less role playing and more a sponsorship like the Christian Children's Fund. ("For just 2 silver pieces a day, you can adopt this Dragonborn Ranger, and make sure he has enough food to eat and healing potions to drink.") In between encounters you can use one of the two potions you've chosen for him to equip for the adventure. You can buy and sell magical items, and equip any of the non-potion ones. But otherwise, you're pretty much running on automatic.

Sounds dull, right?

It's not.

One of the things is -- when you send your character on his adventure, he goes through to the end. If you leave your computer and go do actual things, he continues plucking away -- you might find he's gone unconscious and failed the adventure when you come back, or he might be a conquering hero with a Dragon's head in his hand. But either way, it's a wonderfully light sense of engagement. You do the things you can do, and you wait for the timer to count down, but otherwise you don't have to monofocus on the game. You can go ahead and do all your normal online activities.

And, like the best Facebook apps -- especially when those apps are really thinly disguised advertisements -- there is the networking aspect.

You see, one of your tabs says "Friends," and when you click on it, every one of your Facebook friends who's also playing the game has his or her character appear in the list, along with their name. You can see their level, what adventure they're running, how many encounters they're into it, how much experience they need for the next level, and how many hit points they have left. And you can affect their character. If the character is in between adventures and is injured, you can send their character healing, making them ready to go back out all the faster. If they're actually involved in an adventure, you can send a 'buff' to them, giving them up to +2 on all their ability checks for three encounters. If you have a good number of friends playing, and you're all on at once, you can spend a good amount of that ten minutes counting down just clicking on buff and heal icons. It costs you nothing. And you have a list of all your friends who've sent you healing or buffs.

And that's genius. It creates a sense of camaraderie without actually requiring actual contact. You can be feeling entirely antisocial and still buff your college buddies' characters, and you can see a list of people who've actually sent you just the tiniest bit of goodwill. That's the kind of app that succeeds -- low investment, good emotional reward. That's using Facebook well, and this tiny little app is one of the best expressions of Facebook's innate capability for connection and advertising to come out recently.

That is the blessing of Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures. It is also its curse.

You see if this was just a game where you had a character who went off and had adventures without you but couldn't put on a pair of gloves without your say so, you could just call it "Developmentally Disabled Adventures" and call it a day. This would scale up immeasurably, because each transaction could be queued up. There might sometimes be moderately high system load, but it wouldn't be any big deal. Just databases and algorithms, after all.

But, consider this. The database has to track every person on your friends list, and note which one's signed up for the app. When someone new signs up for the app, it has to flag every one he's friends with at the same time all his friends are checked for flags. When you hit the Friends tab, it has to query the status of all your friends' characters, indicate who can be healed, who can be buffed, who has been healed or buffed, and who's healed or buffed you. In real time. And refresh it every time you click an icon.

Since this game came out, it has grown exponentially -- and it has followed a viral pattern of friendslists. Which means that system load and bandwidth requirements have just exploded. The first day of the game the player base melted the server that Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures runs on into slag. They upgraded bandwidth, servers, and ultimately providers. And that got us into the weekend.

By Sunday, their new much more robust server was -- you guessed it -- melted into slag. And according to the front page of the currently non-functional app, there is a strong possibility that all character data will need to be rolled back to Friday. Which means tens of thousands of characters and millions of encounters with their attendant experience, items and gold will just vanish. My own Dwarf Warlord will probably drop from fifth level to second, and have hard won buffs and magical items melt into the aether.

They promised to get the server back by noon P.S.T. They're now saying six P.S.T. It wouldn't shock me if it was later still. And I have no idea how they're going to ultimately fix this. They've clearly had to rewrite half the game optimizing it, but so long as there is the hope that the game will return and be stable, then the game's population will mushroom, and despite the fact that we're discussing a tiny little text based game where turns only trigger every fifteen minutes with as little direct interactivity as possible, the only thing this game can do is swell up beyond the bandwidth and processor capacity of whatever server it's running on and whatever provider has been contracted for it. It's the kind of problem we saw a lot of in the nineties, and it's the exact same kind of problem that makes Twitter so infamously unreliable now -- as users join the game, they represent a lot more processor activity than one more user on the system, and systems can only scale so much.

In the meantime, when Tiny Adventures comes back, I'll play it again, even though I'll probably need to rebuild my character back up. Worse things have happened to me, after all, and as I'm going into the Ohmygodbusy part of my year (ah, September at a school), a game where I can click a few icons, then walk away from it for fifteen minutes or longer and still have it doing stuff is appealing.

But, unless it becomes so unreliable that it gets a reputation and becomes largely abandoned, Tiny Adventures is going to have a rocky road of it. Time will tell if the potential advertising benefit of millions of people seeing the D&D 4th Edition logo and learning some of the basic terms and concepts outweighs the hosting costs and developer time required to keep it from exploding again.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:13 PM | Comments (11)

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)

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)

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)

March 7, 2007

Eric: Right. That's it.

This is a spoiler. For Civil War, which just won't die. So if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read this.

Or CNN. Or any major news outlet, because congratulations, Marvel. You did it. You popped the rating. You have your fifteen minutes of fame, which is all you give a damn about any more.

Anyway. Here it is.

In an upcoming issue, Captain America, walking up the courthouse steps (because, see, he turned himself in for defying the Superhero Registration Act) is shot in the head by a sniper and killed.

When contacted, Joe Quesada -- Marvel's head -- said that Captain America "didn't live in the modern world," which is of course why he had to die. He went on to say:

"What happens with the costume? And what happens to the characters that are friends and enemies of Cap?" Quesada said with a smile. "You're going to have to read the books to find out."

Yeah.

Fuck you, Quesada.

I don't care what you do with Captain America's uniform. You've already pissed away his legacy. I don't know who you write comic books for, but it's not me.

I'm sure you don't care about that at all. After all, sales are high right now. They're peaking. And you have huge media buzz going on.

However, I remember when that was true of Superman, after they had him beaten to death. And then after they changed his costume. And when they made Hal Jordan a mass murderer and psychotic. I remember when they actually did do something significant and enduring to the Superman legend by marrying him to Lois Lane, and almost no one cared because they had cheap popped ratings stunts burn them out. I remember when the Green Lantern editors were pissed off at Comic Con because people were outraged at what they did to Jordan, and his response was "sorry for making the book popular."

It took over ten years before they brought Jordan back. It took less than one for them to bring Superman back. And it's not because their "stories lacked impact," like you said. It's because those were fucking stupid moves. And even Jordan's return hasn't really improved things for Green Lantern at DC -- it's just pissed off the Kyle Rayner fans. All they managed to do was damage the long term viability of Green Lantern as a brand and icon for a short term spike in interest which didn't pan out in story terms.

But hey. You don't care. You're smiling. This is just another comic book story, and we'll have to tune in next time to see what you do with a uniform that clearly doesn't mean anything to your company.

Well, my friend Mason Kramer said it best:

I mean, sure. Bucky was brought back, so he'll take up the shield. The Punisher has the mask, so he'll put it on. And then there'll be the guy in armor and the cyborg.

Fuck you, Marvel. I'm done. I no longer give a damn what you do in your comic books. Which is just fine, because you no longer give a damn about people like me anyway.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:27 AM | Comments (74)

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)

December 19, 2006

Eric: Download this book! Right now! Before it stops being free!

I am not in the habit of repeating things I see on boing boing. It's not because I have anything against boing boing. I don't. I enjoy pop culture tidbits, Cory Doctorow losing his shit about copyright, and Xeni Jardin writing about sex as the next person. However, typically I figure I don't need to repeat it. Most of you will have seen it anyway.

Well, I'm not taking it this time. For a limited time, John Hodgman's brilliant book, The Areas of My Expertise, is available on iTunes as an audiobook for free.

For free.

Guys, I paid for this audiobook on Audible.com, and it was worth every penny. It's one of the audiobooks I've listened to as I drive from New England to Ottawa and back, as I do every couple of weeks now that Weds lives up there. To see that it's free now is to say to me "Eric, you must tell the people of this glorious thing."

For those who don't know John Hodgman, shut up. Yes you do. He's the PC on the "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads. He's on the Daily Show. He's brilliant and funny and the audiobook is wonderful. But it doesn't have to be wonderful right now because it's God damn fucking free so download it already.

Whew.

In other news, read today's Something Positive, because holy Fuck.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:36 PM | Comments (42)

December 17, 2006

Eric: Script Format is kind of fun.

I'm not entirely sure what this post is.

It was born out of a couple of Aaron Sorkin parodies I'd seen, like Mad TV's Studio 69 on Van Nuys Boulevard or Kevin Levine's brilliant If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball. I was laughing about it with Weds, and said "I should write a script where Aaron Sorkin was writing about a webcomics collective."

And, since this has been a week where I've needed a diversion or two, I did.

Only I'm not sure what it is, in the end.

It's not a parody of Studio 60. If anything, it's a Sorkin satire. Only I caught myself trying to really catch his cadences. I caught myself trying to invoke what I really like about Sorkin.

Because despite everything, I do like Aaron Sorkin. On a recent episode, he had a subplot featuring two freshmen writers and the staggeringly brilliant Mark McKinney, and whenever they were on the screen, it was electric. It gave me hope. (There was also this subplot where we learn Harriet Hayes might be the most brilliant comedienne ever according to the show, but despite the fact that she does their Weekend Update pastiche -- an entire sequence where she does nothing but joke setup-punchline -- she is incapable of actually telling even the simplest knock knock joke in the world. It was a subplot meant to make Harriet endearing and instead makes us think she's got neurological damage and would never in a million years be hired for a comedy show, but I digress).

So... I'm not sure what the resulting three scene script is.

And as a result, I'm going to post it here. Behind a cut, as it's... well, huge.

Please enjoy Aaron Sorkin's Comicsense.com.

(Oh, and yeah -- I'm fully aware no actual webcomics collective would be organized like this. Cut me some slack. Sorkin writes about workplaces.)

AARON SORKIN'S

COMICSENSE.COM

[SCENE ONE: The metropolitan offices of Comicsense.com -- a webcomics collective fighting its way up the pack. The offices are full of desks and piles of clutter, made all the more chaotic by the lack of cubicles, walls or offices for the most part. There are several winding paths around the desks, drawing tables and production equipment. As we fade into the scene we see DANNY WALSH, Executive Producer in charge of web content. He is looking over a messy pile of printouts. Near him, two Administrative Assistants, CAROL and SHELLY, are waiting on his words.]

DANNY

Eight months Bobby's been drawing this thing and Hell if I understand what this strip is about.

CAROL

It's about a robot pirate captain.

SHELLY

I thought it was about the talking dog.

CAROL

The talking dog is comic relief.

SHELLY

The talking dog is comic relief?

CAROL

The talking dog is comic relief.

SHELLY

But he did that whole plotline where the talking dog met his parents.

CAROL

Did you notice the parents were talking dogs too?

SHELLY

Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

CAROL

I'm just saying -- they make such a big deal over the talking dog--

SHELLY

Well, it's not like you see them every day.

CAROL

But when his parents show up, everyone just accepts that they're also talking dogs.

SHELLY

What kind of parents would you expect a talking dog to have?

CAROL

My point is--

SHELLY

I mean, is it that they talk or they're dogs that has you in a tizzy.

CAROL

I'm not in a 'tizzy.'

SHELLY

You seem a little tizzed out.

CAROL

I just think that if they're surprised at one talking dog, they should be three times as surprised when they meet three.

SHELLY

Is the surprise cumulative?

CAROL

It seems like it should be.

SHELLY

Because after the first talking dog, I'd think you'd get jaded.

CAROL

I think I'd always be pretty impressed by dogs that talk.

SHELLY

The talking dog really isn't the main character?

CAROL

He's the comic relief.

DANNY

You two keep talking and talking but I still don't have any idea what this strip is about.

CAROL

A robot pirate captain.

SHELLY

With a talking dog.

DANNY

See, this is how wars break out.

[Danny hands the paper pile to Carol and begins to WALK TOWARDS CAMERA on a Steadicam shot. He is joined almost immediately by JAKE PARSONS, Editorial Director and writer of the hit Comicsense.com webcomic COFFEE SHOPPE. They WALK AND TALK as they weave between the desks.]

JAKE

I've lost it.

DANNY

You've lost it.

JAKE

I've lost it.

DANNY

You had it?

JAKE

Oh, I had it.

DANNY

But now?

JAKE

Not so much.

DANNY

What's the problem?

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

DANNY

You can't find the funny?

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

DANNY

How's the plot coming?

JAKE

I'm not doing plot today.

DANNY

You're taking a break from the plot?

JAKE

It's been plot heavy. I need a couple days.

DANNY

Away from the plot.

JAKE

I'm giving the readers a break.

DANNY

Easing back on the heavy.

JAKE

My audience likes to laugh.

DANNY

Everyone likes a few yuks at the end of the day.

JAKE

It's what makes me at the top of my game.

DANNY

Fifty thousand readers.

JAKE

Fifty thousand unique IPs.

DANNY

People from around the world.

JAKE

I get hits from Dubai.

DANNY

I've seen the webalizer stats.

JAKE

Presidential suite of the Burj al-Arab, they're trolling the archives.

DANNY

Sunnis like to laugh.

JAKE

That's a problem, though.

DANNY

'Cause you can't find the funny.

JAKE

I can't find the funny.

[The pair are joined by systems administrator SIMON FISHER, a somewhat geeky but oddly compelling figure. He is played by Joshua Malina.]

SIMON

I'm hearing an interesting buzz around the building.

DANNY

Yeah, that's the lights. We're having maintenance look at it.

SIMON

You're so funny! I have a hard time believing United Press Syndicate let you go.

DANNY

Well, you know. No one likes to laugh while wearing ties.

SIMON

The buzz is we're courting Pennyfarthing.

DANNY (snorts)

Yeah, and while we're wishing I'd like that Baron Karza I asked for when I was seven.

JAKE

I was more a Force Commander kind of guy.

DANNY

Force Commander was lame. He had handles on his cheeks.

JAKE

Those were air hoses. He had to breath in that helmet, you know.

SIMON

This is fascinating but let's get back to the subject at hand, shall we?

DANNY

Pennyfarthing.

SIMON

You know how many readers they have?

DANNY

Seven and a half million.

SIMON

Seven and a half million readers, Danny.

DANNY

Jokes about Super Mario Brothers never go out of style, do they?

SIMON

If you seriously court these guys, I gotta know about it, Danny.

DANNY

It's not gonna happen, Simon.

SIMON

Seriously. I have to know.

DANNY

Seriously, it's not gonna happen, Simon.

SIMON

I don't care how much of an ad buyer's dream they are. They're an IT nightmare waiting to happen.

DANNY

It won't happen in a million years, Simon.

SIMON

They update spot on at 11:27 in the morning three days a week.

JAKE

You can set your watch by them.

SIMON

By noon they've had millions of hits. They make servers sob like schoolchildren just by showing up on time.

DANNY

We're not getting them, Simon.

SIMON

They link to a website and it crashes, guys.

JAKE

Wait, what do they call that? They have a name for it--

DANNY

Sporking.

JAKE

Right! Because they did all those strips early on--

DANNY

The ones with the sporks, right.

SIMON

I'm serious, guys. We get these people they're gonna need a dedicated server. They might need dedicated bandwidth. We try to put them on our existing servers and our whole three-day lineup's going to hemmorage.

DANNY

Simon, listen to the words I'm saying. We're not going to get the Pennyfarthing guys. It's not gonna happen. There is no way in Hell Pennyfarthing is coming to Comicsense.com.

SIMON

I need a heads up if they're coming.

DANNY

They're not.

JAKE

I lost it, Simon.

SIMON

You lost it?

DANNY

Jake has just four hours to get a script to Dale or Dale won't have time to draw it and then half the United Arab Emirates won't have their morning Funny.

SIMON

Yeah, they're big comic strip fans over there.

[SIMON splits off from the pair as they continue WALKING AND TALKING.]

JAKE

We're getting Pennyfarthing, aren't we?

DANNY

I need to talk to Jubal about it.

[The pair are joined by MIRANDA CLAUSS, reporter for The Comics Informant.]

MIRANDA

You've been ducking me, Walsh.

DANNY

I wouldn't call it ducking you, Miranda.

MIRANDA

What would you call it?

DANNY

More of a sidestep, really.

MIRANDA

Joke all you want. The word on the street is--

JAKE

Wait, they're talking about us on the street?

DANNY

Actually, I think they actually draw the words on the street. Like, with chalk.

MIRANDA

You had seven cartoonists walk.

DANNY

It's the most exercise they've had in months.

MIRANDA

Laugh all you want, Danny. You lost Hinterlands, Sirocco, Furbridge Heights--

DANNY

Yeah, we "lost" Furbridge Heights.

MIRANDA

It's got a solid readership, Danny.

DANNY

And that fact scares me more and more every day.

MIRANDA

The furry community thinks you guys hate anthro comics.

DANNY

We... have that talking dog in Bobby's strip.

JAKE

Doesn't he just play second banana to the Robot Pirate Captain?

DANNY

There's some debate.

MIRANDA

Danny--

DANNY

His main character is a skunk/beaver crossbreed stripper, Miranda. This wasn't The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell. The only reason Furbridge Heights wasn't porn is because we told him we'd lose our Paypal rights if he crossed the line.

MIRANDA

And if you had The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell, Furries wouldn't care, but you don't. So they just know that you had a solidly read Furry comic, and he walked. Along with six other people.

DANNY

It happens. We have churn.

MIRANDA

You're not upset?

DANNY

Why should I be upset?

MIRANDA

The Alexa stats on Hinterlands alone--

DANNY

Oh, don't tell me you buy into Alexa rankings.

MIRANDA

It's an independent website that gives you a solid indicator of--

DANNY

It's a sham, Miranda. Pure and simple. It's not a representative sample of anything. It doesn't use statistical modeling or selection criteria or anything else. It only includes those people who actually download the Alexa toolbar. It doesn't include Mac users or Linux users because it's for Windows only. It doesn't even include Firefox users. If you want to measure impact on the web, use Google PageRank. Or Technorati. Hell, check Bloglines but don't shove an artificial "ranking" down my throat because it sounds good.

MIRANDA

So. You're saying Hinterlands wasn't a popular webcomic?

DANNY

...it was popular enough.

MIRANDA

So. You're not upset that seven popular comics left, regardless of whether or not you liked them.

DANNY

Jesus and Mary Chain, Miranda -- of course we're upset. Of course we want those strips. Of course we want their audiences looking at our ads and going to our online store. But they felt they could do better on their own, and I'm not going to trash them in your magazine just because of that. I hope they do better on their own.

MIRANDA

Commendable.

DANNY

We try.

MIRANDA

Will you be that philosophical if Debbie takes Fishtails to the Houghton/Wilkes Syndicate?

[JAKE stops walking, prompting the other two to follow suit.]

JAKE

Debbie's doing what?

DANNY

Oh, Hell.

JAKE

Debbie's considering a newspaper jump?

DANNY

Thank you, Miranda. Like Jake wasn't heading to a nervous breakdown to begin with.

[JAKE crosses OFF stage left]

JAKE

Excuse me.

DANNY (shouted after Jake)

Don't lose focus! Fifty thousand expatriate Iranians need their Funny!

JAKE (shouted from off camera)

Whatever!

MIRANDA

I thought those two broke up.

DANNY

You'd actually have to start dating before you could break up.

MIRANDA

Are you guys getting Pennyfarthing?

DANNY (crossing off)

Oh, leave me alone.

[SCENE 2: One of several art studios in the building. This is DEBBIE DAWSON'S space. The area is cluttered with art supplies of all varieties -- pencils and pens and easels, of course, but also brushes and paints and watercolors. A powerful Apple computer sits on the desk, silently earning us product placement money. DEBBIE DAWSON is there -- a twenty-eight something perky artist with cascading blond hair and a cheerful attitude. As she sits and painstakingly draws a line, her door is slammed open and JAKE storms in, causing her pencil to skid.]

JAKE

Are you out of your mind?

DEBBIE

That was two hours of work, Jake!

JAKE

Are you out of your mind?!

DEBBIE

Two hours I can't get back! I have deadlines too, you know.

JAKE

When were you going to tell me about this?

DEBBIE

Some of us actually draw our own strips, you know? We don't spend all day frittering away--

JAKE

When were you going to tell me about this?!

[DEBBIE turns away, uncomfortable]

DEBBIE

...I don't know what you're talking about.

JAKE

Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?!

DEBBIE

Yes, Jake. Houghton/Wilkes. The Houghton/Wilkes Newspaper Syndicate. I'm having discussions--

JAKE

You're doing a newspaper jump.

DEBBIE

I'm having discussions with their editorial board.

JAKE

You're not going to do this.

DEBBIE

I think that's my decision to make, Jake.

[JAKE stares at DEBBIE a long moment, then walks to one side, looking at a framed strip on the wall.]

DEBBIE

You know, some of us didn't start all this out of some dream of redefining the world of online distribution, Jake. Some of us fell in love with comic strips in the newspaper. We read Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes and fell in love with the form. And we dreamed about the day when we could open the newspaper and see our strip there.

JAKE

Sandwiched at 40 LPI between Beetle Bailey and Hagar the Horrible.

DEBBIE

Not all newspaper comics are Beetle Bailey or Hagar the Horrible.

JAKE

And none of Houghton/Wilkes's strips are Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

We have a responsibility, Debbie. In fact, more than we, you have a responsibility--

DEBBIE

A responsibility to who, Jake? Fishtails is a good strip. I want people reading it. Houghton/Wilkes is going to put it in a hundred papers to begin with. They're talking about print collections. Collections sold in Barnes and Noble, not just on the Comicsense.com website.

JAKE

Where they can sit between fourteen Garfield collections and seven Foxtrot collections.

DEBBIE

Alphabetically they would come before Foxtrot.

JAKE

Trust me. Bill Amend trumps the alphabet.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

You have a responsibility to those who came before us, Debbie. To Al Capp and Walt Kelly. To Charles Schulz and Chester Gould.

[JAKE turns to face DEBBIE, slowly advancing as he speaks.]

JAKE

Comic strips used to be epic, Debbie. They used to be the playground of Windsor McKay and Segar and Hal Foster. Flash Gordon wasn't a movie or a movie serial, Debbie -- it was a comic strip. This is the form of Terry and the Pirates. Look at Blondie in the thirties and then look at it last week, and you tell me you want to be in the newspaper.

[The pair lean close, suggesting a kiss.]

JAKE

You're a foot more talented than any of us, Debbie. Fishtails is the real deal. Of course Houghton/Wilkes wants it. But they don't really want it, Debbie. They don't want your grand stories or your edge. They want a family friendly version of it. They want the version that would come after their editorial board gets done with it. Your gay characters would lose their teeth. Your wit would be blunted. You'd be just another flash in the pan strip that they'd announce and trumpet and then would vanish. You'd appear in a hundred newspapers and then you'd be in fifteen papers after people complained that Luann got cut to make room.

DEBBIE

For Better or For Worse has edge. The Boondocks has edge.

JAKE

They're not Houghton/Wilkes either.

[DEBBIE looks away, at the wall of cartoons.]

DEBBIE

Bloom County was in a thousand newspapers, Jake.

JAKE

Opus is in two hundred, and you're not Berke Breathed.

[DEBBIE turns back to face JAKE.]

DEBBIE

So I spin my wheels here?

JAKE

You're not spinning your wheels.

DEBBIE

Jake--

JAKE

You're not spinning your wheels. You have three hundred and fifty thousand people show up to read you every day. You quit your day job to do this. You have a rabid fanbase. You have awards. And you're going places. You're going to break through. There's going to be animated specials. There's going to be collections in Barnes and Noble. Collections where you get the lion's share of the royalties -- not a syndicate and not even ComicSense. And one day you will be in newspapers, but you'll hold onto your web rights and your merchandising rights and your control over your own property. You're going to do it. Don't grab a third rate newspaper syndicate with a fourth rate deal. Don't give up your merchandise and your freedom. Not for these guys.

[The two look at each other for a long moment.]

DEBBIE

I hate you.

JAKE

I'm comfortable with that.

DEBBIE

I have a deadline.

JAKE

Me too. People in Dubai are yearning for my wit.

DEBBIE

Someone would have to be.

[JAKE turns and walks out. DEBBIE watches him go, then slowly smiles, very slightly.]

[SCENE THREE: Musical cue: "Take a walk on the wild side." The office of JUBAL GREEN, elder statesman of comics and the principal investor and chairman of ComicSense.com. He is gruff, but speaks with wisdom. DANNY enters through the door, knocking on the frame.]

DANNY

Are you aware that they're reading Coffee Shoppe in Dubai?

JUBAL

I suppose that explains all the burka related fan mail Jake and Dale get.

DANNY

Seriously. The webalizer stats--

JUBAL

Webalizer tracks location based on domain name. The domain name for the United Arab Emirates is dot ae. What happened is someone, probably in America, came up with a domain name that dot ae suits, and they registered with whoever owns the rights to dot ae. Some firm in Qatar gets twenty bucks, some guy on the web owns the rights to 'titan.ae,' and Jake--

DANNY

--has readers in Dubai.

JUBAL

That's right.

DANNY

Only not really.

JUBAL

That's right.

DANNY

Okay.

JUBAL

You didn't come into my office to talk about Jake's stats.

DANNY

No.

JUBAL

Mind telling me why you did come into my office?

[DANNY looks off to the side.]

DANNY

Pennyfarthing.

JUBAL

I've been hearing rumors.

DANNY

You and everyone else.

JUBAL

You made them an offer?

DANNY

They made us an offer.

JUBAL

They made us an offer.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

Pennyfarthing made us an offer.

DANNY

Pennyfarthing made us an offer.

JUBAL

I'm listening.

DANNY

They're sick of bandwidth bills, their sysadmin is in the extended process of flaking on them... they want to get out of the business of running a comics website and into the business of exploiting their brand.

JUBAL

What's the deal on the table?

DANNY

Eighty percent of ad buys, reduced Comicsense.com branding on the site -- though we can do the linkbox -- merchandise in our store but book collections through their guy. And they would comp us nine designed banner ads, so we could get their look and feel in targeted advertising.

JUBAL

Have you talked with Simon about this?

DANNY

He caught me in the hall. We'd need a dedicated server. Probably manage the bandwidth. He says it's an IT nightmare but you know Simon. He kind of lives for IT nightmares.

JUBAL

So what needs to be done?

DANNY

Nothing.

JUBAL

Nothing?

DANNY

Nothing.

JUBAL

Everything's been done?

DANNY

Nothing's been done. I'm passing on the deal.

[JUBAL leans back. He doesn't look surprised. DANNY is slightly nervous, not looking directly at JUBAL.]

JUBAL

The most popular webcomic in the history of webcomics offers to come over to our website, and you're passing on the deal.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

And that's why you came to my office.

DANNY

No, I came to your office so you could fire me.

JUBAL

For passing on Pennyfarthing.

DANNY

Yeah.

JUBAL

Why?

DANNY

'Cause Pennyfarthing is a slam dunk. We get them, we shoot past Keenspot and Modern Tales. We reverse the trend away from online syndicates and towards online guilds. We wipe the bad press for losing seven creators in the last week, and we replace a contentious furry fanbase for Furbridge Heights with seven and a half million gamers. Of course you need to fire me for saying no.

JUBAL

No. I mean why did you pass on Pennyfarthing?

DANNY

For the same reason Debbie needs to pass on Houghton/Wilkes. It's a dream deal but it's not a good deal.

JUBAL

I'm listening.

DANNY

We bring in Pennyfarthing, and they become the eight hundred pound gorilla. We have to rededicate a majority of our press and advertising to them. Getting the message that they're part of Comicsense.com. Their deal would be better than what we give anyone else, which would breed discontent in the creator pool. Discontent that would only be increased by the staggering degree to which Pennyfarthing would overshadow everyone else on the site.

JUBAL

We could manage that.

DANNY

Maybe, but that's not the whole of it. Editorially, they're just not a good fit.

[DANNY turns to face JUBAL, walking towards the desk.]

Pennyfarthing reaches gamers. It's a niche we barely scratch, and on one level getting them would be good. We'd get some percentage of them reading our comics. But on another level, most of them wouldn't be interested in Coffee Shoppe or Hybrid Deal. Pennyfarthing just isn't like our lineup, and we can't expect a huge crossover appeal from their readers.

JUBAL

We would get some of them. And some of seven and a half million--

DANNY

Sure, but there's a downside to that. We'd also get buried under an avalanche of trolls and dicks. Fractions of men who hide behind an internet login and spew over everything they see.

JUBAL

Danny, I don't care what their rep is. The vast majority of Pennyfarthing readers are perfectly nice and responsible internet citizens.

DANNY

Yeah, but a certain percentage of all internet fandoms are mouth breathers who think this whole thing is a video game and that winning comes through slash and burn. Apply that percentage to Pennyfarthing's readership and you get a number close to Comicsense.com's whole current readership. All people who take delight in hitting forums and messageboards for webcomics they hate and turning them into steaming piles of crap. And they'd hate most of our comics.

JUBAL

And you figure all this means I should fire you?

DANNY

Seems like it.

JUBAL

Is that why United Press Syndicate canned your ass?

DANNY

It... might have something to do with it, yeah.

JUBAL

And you don't credit me with being smarter than United Press Syndicate? Danny -- what was the most significant comic strip to come out of the thirties and forties?

DANNY

Li'l Abner.

JUBAL

What about the fifties?

DANNY

Peanuts.

JUBAL

The sixties?

DANNY

Pogo.

JUBAL

The seventies?

DANNY

Doonesbury.

JUBAL

The eighties?

DANNY

Lemme jump ahead here. The eighties was Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side, in kind of a three way race. And the nineties was Dilbert. Why?

JUBAL

Just this. What's the most significant newspaper comic strip of the past six years, Danny?

DANNY

I... don't really know. I'm not sure it's been figured out, yet.

JUBAL

We're six years into the decade, and you're an expert in comic strips, and you don't know which comic strip is the most significant of the decade?

DANNY

Well... yeah. I mean, the Boondocks got a deal at Adult Swim, but--

JUBAL

But nothing. The newspapers are dying, Danny. It'll take decades, but they're going the way of eighteenth century pamphlets. For a while, the only reason half the newspapers in this country were being sold was the comics page. Now, that's not a compelling reason any more. We're in the wild times now, Danny. It's chaos. And if comic strips cling to newspapers, the form will die with them.

DANNY

Comic strips aren't dying, Jubal. There's... like a billion of them right now.

JUBAL

That's right. On the web. Where we are. It's a crazy time. An exciting time. An explosive time. But it's fragmented, right now. No one webcomic -- not Pennyfarthing, not PvP, not Something Positive or anything else has taken the cultural place of a Li'l Abner in America, because no one knows where to go. No one knows where the really good webcomics are. The independents thrive on word of mouth. The first generation of online syndicates grabbed every strip with an audience they could get. Or they went the other way, and went so idiosyncratic only the intellectuals or the gamers wanted to read them. The one way an online syndicate can really thrive and flourish is through editorial standards, Danny. If they grab strips with the broadest appeal, that fit together into a cohesive comics page, representing the spectrum of comics while remaining consistent in quality, the word will get out. People will begin to gravitate to that syndicate. The publishing world will see them as professionals. The reading public will ee them as a gateway to good comics.

[JUBAL leans forward.]

JUBAL

That's where we're headed, Danny. I don't know if Comicsense.com will become that portal. I do know that the only chance we have is if we make hard decisions. Professional decisions. We need to say 'this is a good strip, but it doesn't fit our site, and we pass.' That's why I hired you, Danny. I need someone who can look the single most popular webcomic's creators in the eye and say "I'm sorry. You don't fit."

[DANNY looks away, smiling a hint.]

JUBAL

What's the PR fallout look like?

DANNY

The rumors are out there. I'm saying there's no chance Pennyfarthing would come to our site.

JUBAL

What are the Pennyfarthing guys going to do?

DANNY

They're going to have to address the rumors, and keep their street cred. I expect they're gonna make fun of us.

JUBAL

Sooner rather than later?

DANNY

I'd bank on it.

JUBAL

And they'll link to us in the bargain?

DANNY

Seems like they generally do.

JUBAL (smiling)

Then you might want to let Simon know that at 11:27 tomorrow, we're going to be having a few hundred thousand guests show up.

DANNY

Seems likely.

JUBAL

Now get the Hell out of my office. Some of us have work to do.

[The camera pulls back. The music swells up, taking center stage, in time for Lou Reed to sing: Jackie is just speeding away/Thought she was James Dean for a day/Then I guess she had to crash/Valium would have helped that bash/Said, Hey babe,Take a walk on the wild side.]

[Fade to black and EXEC. CREDITS, as the song continues: I said, Hey honey/Take a walk on the wild side/and the coloured girls say/doo do doo do doo do do doo....]

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:22 PM | Comments (61)

November 27, 2006

Eric: On history and the future, without much on the subject of pay-for-play

So let's talk web animation.

I'm one of those folks who isn't sure about pay-for models when it comes to web animation. I had little to say when Ctrl-Alt-Del did it, because I don't read Ctrl-Alt-Del, so I didn't have to decide if I was willing to shell out the cash to watch animations or not.

Well, as you almost certainly already know, PvP is releasing a pay-for animation series. So now it's something I have to consider, because I do read PvP. I like PvP. And so here we are.

Now, unlike many critics of the model (critics who most famously include the Penny Arcade guys and... well, Scott Kurtz himself), I've never had an innate problem with pay-for content. I was and am a Modern Tales, Graphic Smash, Girlamatic and American Elf subscriber, for example. The biggest problem with the model (as Gabe and Tycho included in their Webcomics Manifesto at the back of their reissued/remastered/new-take-on their first book) is it creates a barrier to creating and holding an audience. Well, PvP already has an audience -- a substantial one. So, in one sense this is a new experiment -- will all those monthly unique visitors turn into the few thousand subscribers needed to enable Blind Ferret to at least pay off their production costs? The quality of the first teaser is pretty damn good, with strong (and well engineered) voice acting. (Though there are intriguing differences between this setup and the strip -- the cubicle environment for one. C'est la guerre. Different media, different choices. Kurtz (and Kris Straub -- Kurtz's most prolific collaborator) are apparently both writing and executive producing the series, and succeed or fail, it's clear they're putting their all into it.

That's not why I'm here. I'm going to subscribe, but then I would, wouldn't I.

I'm here to talk about Dino Andrade.

Dino Andrade is one of those names that you'd only know if you were anal about things like voice acting. Which I'll admit I am. I'm the sort of person who pauses the Tivo so I can read the voice actor credits at the ends of things like Justice League Unlimited and Legion of Superheroes, because voice acting can make or break a project. It's damned hard to voice a character and have it work -- you're doing an entire performance with inflection, minus your hands, your eyes, your face, and everything all actors in other media work with all the time. You don't even have the advantages of radio drama -- in radio drama, your voice is in a vacuum which the listener can build a scene around using imagination. In animation, you're distracted by the visual. We actively listen to radio. We passively watch television. It's a huge transition, and as a result voice actors tend to slide by us.

Dino Andrade is not a world famous voice actor. That would be one thing, and easy to explain. Dino Andrade is instead an engineer, a producer, a voice coach, a voice teacher -- and one of the strongest and most significant elements of one of the most significant voice actresses of the past twenty years. An actress who happened to be his wife.

Her name was Mary Kay Bergman, and she passed away in 1999.

If you don't recognize that name, you're not alone. A lot of people don't recognize that name. But there's a lot of names you would recognize. Let me quote myself, from a remembrance I wrote for her back in my old online journal, at the time:

For those of you saying "who's that...?" Mary Kay Bergman was the voice of every female character on South Park. From Wendy Testeberger to Mrs. Brofloski to Mrs. Cartman to the Nurse with the Fetus on her face. Every one of them.

She was, for all intents and purposes, most of the movie in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. She sang the entire of the Blame Canada song in four different voices. "What what whaaaaaaaat?" was her. Mrs. Cartman jovially explaining what a rim-job was was her. She also played the role credited only as "Female Body Part," which has to be the greatest mystical vision sequence of all time.

She, of course, didn't get as much attention or as high a billing as Minnie Driver, who was the voice of Brooke Shields for one stinking line.

Mary Kay Bergman was more than South Park, though. Unlike Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman was a voice actress for years. She was the current voice of Daphne, in Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and Scooby Doo and the Witches' Ghost. She was the animated version of Batgirl. She was significantly involved with Beauty and the Beast, the animated Disney Hercules movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan and The Iron Giant. She was a villain on The Tick. She was Mrs. Butterworth in the commercials where the bottle talked. She was the official voice of Snow White in Disneyland, Disney World and any Disney productions where it came up. She was six different voices in Star Wars: Episode One. She was the female vocalist in Weird Al Yankovic's "Pretty Fly (For a Rabbi)."

When I mentioned her passing to some fellow killer geeks, all of whom were respectful, one of them said "I think I've heard of her." He didn't mean it to be an insult. It was the level I was at before I noticed she was dead and went websurfing.

A star on one of the most popular TV shows currently out there commits suicide. She was also in both the South Park movie and The Phantom Menace for Christ's sake. And the people who most consumed the shows she did most of her work on vaguely knew of her name from somewhere.

She clearly did more voices and work on The Iron Giant than Jennifer Aniston, who voiced Hogarth's mother. But Mary Kay Bergman's name didn't appear above the title, even though Jennifer Aniston's voicing was the weakest in the movie. But Jennifer Aniston is a star, you see. For reasons that escape me at the moment, but give me time....

One of the sites I did research on had a picture of her. She was a strikingly attractive red haired woman. She was close to forty at death, and looked it, but she could have played Daphne at forty with no trouble at all, it seems. Her husband posted a message to her fans on her own website. And she did have fans who left condolences. And, as it was in an open guestbook, there were some morons too. I fear for the species sometimes.

This seems deeply wrong to me. Voice acting isn't simple. Animation isn't simple. We should have enough respect to mourn when someone who's brought a lot of joy into the lives of others dies tragically early.

Well, I mourned -- at least as much as I mourned any television and movie actress whose work I really liked. And I pass that on to you.

And if you like a cartoon, from The Powerpuff Girls to The Simpsons to South Park, get to know who the voice actors are. So, when one dies, you won't have to wonder why you feel badly.

It was almost exactly seven years ago I wrote that, but it still sticks with me. It's a lesson I learned then, and I've tried to live by it. I track the voice actors and actresses I like, and I treat them with the same significance I treat other actors. More, really, because these are people who have to endure hotshot 'stars' walking onto their turf and getting better billing for generally weaker performances. It was a happy day for me when Peter Cullen was given the gig for voicing Optimus Prime in the live action Transformers movie -- almost certainly the studios would have preferred the voice of Clint Eastwood or Bill Paxton or someone like that, in hopes of drawing in a crowd even if it meant a substantially weaker performance.

These things mean something to me. They should mean something, damn it.

And after all this time, Mary Kay Bergman still means something to me. Jesus -- Batgirl, Daphne Blake, Snow White and Sheila Brofloski? How could she not mean something to me. That's a huge part of our culture at the times she lived in.

And so I feel a kinship with her widower, who has continued since then to teach, to support voice acting, and most of all to keep the memory of his wife alive.

I've seen some people online say they didn't like Skull's voice -- basing that on the one minute we've seen, so far. And I can understand that. But the one thing I'm certain of is Dino Andrade knows voice acting. He knows how to build a character, make it expressive, and give it a soul. And if it continues to kindle the flame that Mary Kay Bergman sparked, I'm entirely behind that.

It's likely I would subscribe to PvP on the basis of Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub.

It's certain I'm going to subscribe if Dino Andrade is involved with it.

Besides, the little dinosaur 'grab-handle thing' Skull handed Brent the coffee with absolutely sealed the deal. "Gnram gnram!" indeed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:55 PM | Comments (25)

Eric: Another damn Sorkin essay. It's like the buildup to the GPF snark, only not about webcomics.

Way too much to write about, but I'll be quick about this one. It's yet another comment on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

In my earlier comments, I made mention that Aaron Sorkin needed to let go of all the axes he wants to grind in his own life and let the life of the characters of the show take shape. I had a few people disagree -- in particular, they said that if one didn't know about Sorkin's various references, but took the show on face value, it worked a lot better than I was giving him credit for.

And you know, I was willing to entertain that possibility.

Well, last week's show was particularly disappointing, in my estimation. And here's a simple spoiler warning, for those who... well, care.

Last week's show just fell flat in so many places. All the Jordan and Danny scenes lacked conviction, passion or sympathy for the characters. Cal was at least vaguely unbelievable (why wasn't Cal going to the party? He didn't need to hang around watching basketball -- and why did he think it would be appropriate to wander in and interrupt meetings between the show runners and the network president? I'm not comfortable interrupting my supervisor when she's talking to the front desk worker in her office, much less the Head of School). Requisite preaching point A -- the evils of product placement -- just rang false given the plethora of obvious product placements on the show. (What, you didn't notice the top of the line 17" MacBook Pro being slid back and forth between the Brit and Ricky, open and then closed and then open again? Not to mention Final Draft being mentioned by name?) There was no electricity anywhere in the piece, with the obvious and specific exception of the scenes between Matt, Ricky and Ron. Those were electric, with actual, engaging conflict and a real sense of character. Those scenes were real, the dialogue was sparkling and potent, no one was in the right and everyone was in the wrong -- it was fantastic.

And then Ricky and Ron left the show (and all of Studio 60, as near as I can tell). It was like watching the last canteen of water pour out into the desert sand.

But most of all, there was an extended scene where Tom, Simon and ultimately Matt were arguing over Harriet "changing her mind" and deciding to do a lingerie spread for a magazine. It was at best creepy (all three men talked about how desperately they loved naked women and trashy magazines, but Harriet was a good Christian Girl and should be above all that -- which came across as thinly disguised Madonna/Whore syndrome). But even worse than that, it was out of nowhere. This was the third show surrounding one episode of the show-within-a-show (This episode was "The Option," and it took place immediately following the episode that the cast was rushing to get back to during "Nevada Day" parts one and two.) Why didn't we hear word one about this until now, in and around the pervasive Harriet plotlines of those earlier episodes? It was way too weak a B plot to simply be a B plot -- so what's the deal? Why was it here? And why was it so creepy?

Well.

The Matt Albie/Harriet Hayes relationship is a very very thinly disguised pastiche on Aaron Sorkin's ex-relationship with Christian Broadway Star, Comedianne and annoying-voiced girl Kristin Chenoweth. It's been mentioned before that this was Sorkin's chance to "win" arguments with his ex on national television.

As it turns out? Kristin Chenoweth did an FHM bikini shoot.

Before I knew that, I literally couldn't work out why this B plot had shown up. It seemed clunky, moderately out of character, and clumsy. It didn't work for me -- it flat out failed in terms of characterization and the actors had difficulty playing it and having it work. (Say what you like about D.L. Hughley -- the man can take anything and make it work as dialogue. And even he had a harder time with this week's script than with two solid weeks of breaking in on a judge to insist a joint was his.)

After I knew that, it made perfect sense. Aaron Sorkin was taking his ex to task again. Sure, he doesn't like Christianity and he doesn't believe in Christianity, but good Christian Girls don't take their clothes off, Kristin!

I thought the Madonna/Whore overtones of the B plot were creepy before. Now, they're cringe-worthy. And worse than that, they were ham handedly forced in without setup, contradicted characterizations as we've seen them, and boring to boot. And they were clearly there purely so Aaron Sorkin could snot to an ex-girlfriend about her choice to wear a bikini in a Men's magazine.

I keep hoping. I really do. I keep hoping that astronomically bad ratings will force Sorkin to wake up, to get story help, to stop grinding his axes and start doing the stellar storytelling that has always been a hallmark of his career. That's why I'm still there. It's faith. I have faith that the man who wrote A Few Good Men and The American President and "Two Cathedrals" on The West Wing and the wonderful verbal tango between Dana and Casey on Sports Night will pull it out.

But faith is finite. For me and a lot of the faithful. And the faithful is all Studio 60 has left.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:10 PM | Comments (21)

November 6, 2006

Eric: Four words that have me very hopeful for tonight's episode of Studio 60.

"Story by Mark McKinney."

Crush their heads, Darrell. More after I actually see it. Or not. But still. Dude.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:13 PM | Comments (24)

October 10, 2006

Eric: Apropos of nothing, she looks good in my green turtleneck.

(From Narbonic! Click on the thumbnail for full sized... well, you know.)

I am in Ottawa, Canada. It is very nice. I have met Frank Cormier and Meaghan Quinn in the flesh. They are both awesome.

Before that, we were in Ithaca. I showed Wednesday many places significant to Gossamer Commons.

In both places, I had alcohol.

I will tell you of these things in more detail another time. I have little time now. All I can say is this.

There was water in the swimming pool.

Was this the time? Does he need to <em>re</em>fill it? I dunno. But there was water in the pool today.

God, I love Narbonic.

Back later. I have to go tear my arm off.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:20 AM | Comments (34)

September 25, 2006

Eric: Requiescat In Pace: John M. Ford

And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me,
'Now you shall die,
Now none shall know.'
And the fool, looking down, believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulders, the naked stars,
Each one remembering.
--John M. Ford, The Final Reflection

I have a report from the truly wonderful weekend Weds and I had in Pennsylvania to write, but sometimes (all too often) life gets in the way. And then it's time to write another one of these damn things.

You may recall I'm part of a certain fraternity in the Role Playing Game developers community: guys who've written for Star Trek's officially licensed role playing game. That's an astoundingly cool thing -- a chance to play in the ultimate geek playground. But as neat as it is, the chances of actually influencing Star Trek that way are negligible. Sure, I can dream that someone will read my writeup on Mudd, decide it makes sense, and make reference to it in a later movie, but it's so astronomically unlikely that I might as well go back to hoping I win the lottery or spontaneous evolve superpowers: either of those is more likely. Even Kenneth Hite, arguably the finest Star Trek RPG developer in any system or game, hasn't had measurable effect on the universe we played in.

But one man did. One man hit the lottery. The same man who went on two write two Star Trek tie-in novels which rank among the best written, most popular, most commonly cited and most influential of the Star Trek tie in novels of all time.

His name was John M. Ford.

Ford's RPG work, over in Star Trek, was largely centered on Klingons. Back in those pre-Next Generation days, Klingons were an ill-defined metaphor for the Soviet Union -- a totalitarian race who enslaved peace loving worlds and turned them into fodder for their own empire. The closest we came to sympathetic Klingons was in Day of the Dove, and even that didn't make them into a fleshed out race. And in the plethora of Star Trek tie in novels, Klingons were adversaries and enemies at best. Barbarians and cruel sadists at worst.

Until John M. Ford came along.

Ford wrote several seminal products for the original Star Trek Roleplaying Game, published by FASA. He wrote The Klingons, Klingons: Star Trek Intelligence Manual, and Klingons: Game Operations Manual. He went from the then radical idea that Klingons shouldn't just be adversaries -- they should be a complete and fleshed out race. In fact, his work was designed to actually let players and GMs run entire Klingon-based campaigns -- campaigns that didn't need to focus on killing and torment, but actually were set in a consistent, workable, and above all alien empire.

Such things have been done before, and they've also been done since. But Ford pulled off something even more amazing. He (alongside editors and publishers at FASA) convinced Pocket Books and Paramount to let Ford also write a Klingon Star Trek-tie in novel. And that novel was entirely set in Ford's Klingon Empire, with the same terminology and assumptions he made for the role playing game being reflected in the novel.

That itself would be staggering. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in Star Trek. It would be many years and people like J. Michael Straczynski (with Babylon 5), Joss Whedon (with both Buffy and Firefly) and most significantly George Lucas (with Star Wars) before we would see tie-in literature and media incorporated into the official canon of their properties. Paramount has always been extremely chary about letting anything into the canon (including the entire Star Trek: The Animated Series). They sure as Hell never let two different license holders collaborate. That way lies chaos, and possibly even dancing.

But, they let Ford write his book. All by itself, that would be remarkable.

The book he wrote was The Final Reflection.

"It's not whether or not the bear dances well, but that it dances at all," or so they say. Well, this bear knew how to dance.

The Final Reflection is a serious and somber book about an extremely sympathetic protagonist who happens to be a Klingon. As we follow his life and times, we also learn about an empire where the strong grow, the weak fall into decline, and all others are kuve -- Servitor races, sometimes mistranslated as "slaves" (or even "meat"). There is even an analogue television program in the Klingon Empire -- Battlecruiser Vengence -- which culturally fits the same kind of roles for Klingons that a show like Star Trek (or, say, Galaxy Quest) would have fit for the Federation. There is the deeply significant chesslike game klin'zha. There is a heavy tradition of song, of music, of dreams. And of the stars in the sky above watching the deeds that brave men do and remembering them. There is an afterlife -- the Black Fleet, where brave warriors go to fight and spar for all eternity, killing their enemies a thousand times, laughing, and perhaps dying at their hands as well, for honor and glory.

Klin'zha is especially interesting. Our protagonist's foster father is a grand master of the game, and many Klingons believe that all of existence is itself an extended game of klin'zha (the Perpetual Game, as they call it). Fitting, perhaps, for a race that was itself largely defined (in this way, at least) as part of a Role Playing Game.

The Final Reflection sent a shockwave through Trek fandom. Back in those days, before any of us had ever even heard of Captain Picard, the Star Trek novels and the very rare movies (this was the same year that Star Trek III came out), the novels were what the faithful had to keep going. This novel stood out as one of the best -- it was serious, hardcore science fiction even if one cut out "Star Trek" from it entirely. It was even distinctive in that the original crew -- who had been in every other novel to come out, most of the time at the center of it -- were relegated to a wrapping device at the very beginning and very end of the book. This was a book almost entirely devoid of Kirk, and while both Spock and McCoy had some influence in the book, it was entirely different than we had come to expect.

Most of all, it was good. And it managed to make Klingons not just respectable, but sympathetic. People began to like the Klingons as more than brutes or enemies (or as more than a simple reaction against the Federation). While some folks (primarily Star Fleet Battles players, at least in my experience) enjoyed Klingons before that, it was always through the lens of their opposition to the Federation -- their antagonistic role. Now, Klingons could be protagonists.

Ford then followed this novel up with a second Klingon centered novel. It was a musical comedy.

Seriously.

The printed book was a musical comedy.

It was called How Much For Just the Planet and it was hysterical. From Scotty and a Klingon Engineer meeting and dueling on the field of honor (a golf course) to full sized inflatable starships, to an honest-to-Christ pie fight. And yet, the characters remained strong (and true to themselves) throughout. This was definitely the crew of the Enterprise from The Trouble with Tribbles and I, Mudd, but it was still the crew of the Enterprise.

While How Much For Just the Planet wasn't the same kind of epic transformation that The Final Reflection was, it was popular. Usenet sig files became full of quotes from it (my personal favorite being "Blueberry," Kirk thought instead of ducking. WHAM! Blueberry it was, which appeared quite often for a while in those sigs.) This was good old fashioned anarchic fun.

It was also a reaction against Paramount, who had explicitly kiboshed Ford's true sequel book to The Final Reflection. Their reasons became apparent quickly, when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, with a Klingon on the bridge. Paramount had begun to tighten their grip on Pocket Books's continuity, which in turn tightened their grip on the authors. Which Ford mocked in the book (at one point, Scotty looks at a distant mountain, notes its crown of stars, and makes mention of the comfort he feels in some higher power arranging them -- a clear reference to the Paramount logo).

Regardless, How Much for Just the Planet represented the end of Ford's involvement with the Star Trek license. But not his influence.

Klingons in The Next Generation and beyond are not Ford's Klingon's. For one thing, they're nowhere near as feasible, well developed, sustainable, rational, or alien. They are far more simplistic. And they're almost unreconcilable with the Klingons of the original series. In fact, the only way one could reconcile the two visions of the Klingon empire were through John M. Ford's eyes -- his Klingon Empire could support the original series and the far less sophisticated Next Generation model. However, even though Paramount went with other writers to create their House Klingons in Canon, you could see lots of places where the serial numbers have been filed off from Ford's version. The much mocked (and much celebrated) tradition of Klingon Opera comes from Ford, admitted or not. The three legendary Klingon captains from the Original Series to appear on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were named "Dahar masters," in echo of the foster father of Captain Krenn from The Final Reflection, an undrawn Grand Master of klin'zha.

And then there was "Heart of Glory."

"Heart of Glory" was the first Klingon-centered episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It featured Worf (the first episode to really put Worf front and center) meeting with renegade Klingon warriors. And it was clearly heavily influenced by The Final Reflection. Korris, one of the renegades, cries out "you have betrayed Kling!" in clear echo of the concept of klin from The Final Reflection. They make note of Worf's name (which he said was because he was fostered to humans before the "Age of Inclusion") in clear echo of the tradition of Klingons in Ford's work to change the first letter of their given name to K if they join the navy or M if they join the Marines. (All of the warriors' names began with K in the episode.) At one point, it looks like the Klingons were going to take a hostage, only to surrender the child in question. Worf is dismissive at Yar's concerns. ("Cowards take hostages. Klingons do not.") This was in direct echo of The Final Reflection:

Orion pirates take hostages for ransom. Kuve in desperation take hostages for their lives. And now the Federation shows us more rules than a Vulcan would make, about selling hostages! I will tell you what the Klingon law of hostages is: a dead thing is without value.

The only thing "Heart of Glory" lacked was Ford's name. It was a significant lack.

Ford has done much more than write about Klingons, of course. He wrote about elements of what would later be called Cyberpunk in 1980's Web of Angels, a full four years before William Gibson's Neuromancer and two years before the redefinition of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into Blade Runner. His book Growing Up Weightless won the Philip K. Dick award. He published poetry. And his RPG work was significant and broad: he did some of the seminal work on GURPS (including the GURPS 4th edition Characters section) as part of a long and fruitful association with Steve Jackson Games. He wrote some of the finest GURPS supplements, including GURPS Infinite Worlds and GURPS Time Travel. And he wrote The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, perhaps the single most significant work ever done for the Paranoia game.

Most of all, he was accessible. He was a notorious and fully forum gadfly. I had more than one conversation with him on the Steve Jackson Games forums. He was largely recognizable for his signature file, which was hysterical and which he changed at least daily (and sometimes it seemed for every post). He was also recognizable, of course, for being a funny and friendly and above all easy to talk to correspondent. Mike Ford (as he was called when not being formal) made any online home he was part of better by his presence.

And now he's dead.

Making Light broke the story. Neil Gaiman quoted the last e-mail he received from John M. Ford, just a few days ago. My friend Mason, who used to roleplay with him back in the days of the original pre-Seizure Illuminator BBS, is in shock. And everywhere I turn, people are sad, and so am I.

But not sad for Mike Ford himself. Because unlike so many of us, he had impact. He wrote good things people read and loved. He touched lives, he was always funny (even during some horrible health issues including a kidney transplant), he was always kind.

And I turn my eyes back to that improbable event that essentially no other RPG writer has done -- his Klingons, which actually reached up from his FASA products through truly great novels to help shape the course of Star Trek itself.

I said above that the one thing that "Heart of Glory" lacked was Ford's name. And it is true and it is wrong, not just because Ford's word deserved to be commemorated, but because Ford's work was better than what they ultimately went with. No episode of a future Star Trek will be dedicated to Ford's memory -- that's not the way Paramount works.

But his impact was still there. And in the poem I quoted at the top of this piece he pointed out an essential component of his Klingon culture. The stars see our actions. The naked stars know what we have done. It doesn't matter if the millions of fans of Star Trek know his name or not, if they know the things he did or not. John M. Ford's fans know what he did. His readers know what he did.

The naked stars saw his deeds, and each one remembers.

And so will I.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:46 PM | Comments (23)

August 31, 2006

Eric: Excelsior!

We are into the last week of Who Wants to Be A Superhero. This is a reality show that is cheesy, too compressed, obviously staged in places, bordering the line between competition and straight entertainment. It has terrible production values. It lacks many of the elements that have made other reality programs hits in the past. The ways in which this show suffers compared to even syndicated reality shows is obvious and clear.

I love this god damned show so god damned much.

Spoilers ahead, so you know. If you care.

For those who came in late, Who Wants To Be A Superhero is a competition reality show. People put together costumes and character concepts, auditioned (in an abbreviated version of the humiliationfest that are the American Idol auditons, though very little "laughing-at" was done). The figurehead and host of the show is Stan Lee, who is well known throughout the comics buying world for his bombast, his showmanship (often bordering on used-car-salesmanship), his enthusiasm, his ego... oh, and the fact that he was the co-creator of some of the most popular and evocative superheroes of all time. (Though it is debatable how much of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and so forth were his versus Jack Kirby or Steve Dikto, it is unquestionable that Lee's focus and his writing style -- most especially the more "realistic" writing style that so strongly differentiated Marvel from DC or other comics at the time -- was one of the most important keys to Marvel's early success.) The competition is simple -- the contestants play their heroes, and run them through a series of challenges "not to test if you can fly," in Lee's words, but testing for the core values that superheroes should embody.

Now, right there they had my attention. I've made no bones about the fact that I'm disillusioned pretty hardcore with the world of Superheroes these days. With DC run to rape, to Wonder Woman snapping the neck of one of her enemies, to Uncle Sam lying face down in a pool of his own blood, to essentially all the fun loving heroes of the universe driven mad, depressed or to death... and with Marvel's entire superhero population in a fratricidal battle that serves as nothing so much as a harsh repudiation of the core principles of the whole costumed spandex genre, having a high profile (surprisingly high profile, as it works out) television program open with "there are certain expectations superheroes are supposed to live up to, and this is what you're going to win or lose this competition over" is going to make me a happy person.

> And over the course of the last six weeks, they've lived up to this. Of the eleven contestants, the first nine were eliminated for avarice (rather unfairly, Levity was singled out because he makes custom action figures -- calling into question whether he intended to be a real superhero or if he intended to sell toys. I think Levity was probably there to be a hero, but still), lack of compassion (Nitro G was one of several heroes who completed his core challenge of running through an area and hitting a finish line as quickly as possible, but missed the hidden challenge of helping a lost girl who was loudly crying, completing his mission but not acting heroically), lack of courage (Cell Phone Girl was the fastest to cry uncle in a challenge where she was being savagely attacked by trained guard dogs -- you know, I'm not saying I would do better), essential heroism (Iron Enforcer -- an almost certain plant -- was a pastiche of all the modern brutal murderous superheroes, and did essentially everything wrong despite being huge. He then was "recruited" by Stan Lee to turn evil and become the Dark Enforcer -- the show's Supervillain.), commitment and temptation (sent to go buy lunch in what looked like a camera free zone, the heroes were tempted to giving up their secret identities by cute members of the opposite sex. Monkey Woman volunteered her name instantly without being prompted, and went on to describe herself as an actress. The actor thing was dodgy, since several of the Heroes have acting backgrounds, but she was the most egregious of the folks who failed the test), a failure in self sacrifice (the heroes were invited to nominate someone else for elimination. Most of the heroes nominated themselves, but Ty'Veculus nominated Lemuria for somewhat dodgy reasons and was eliminated for it), hypocrisy (Creature broke the law in one of the challenges), failure (Lemuria was the only one to fail a given challenge -- sometimes it's not so hard), and finally not taking heroism seriously (Major Victory, in a stunning upset -- though both he and Fat Momma are comedic superheroes, Fat Momma has a core message to her character, whereas Major Victory is more of a pure comedy character.)

Through the whole competition, the conventional wisdom of reality shows has been flouted. On most reality shows, lip services is given to integrity and "winning the right way," but backbiting and cunning are generally shown to be as effective or more effective, and many times at the end of the game the most machiavellian players are rewarded for "playing the game well." But on Who Wants To Be A Superhero, integrity and honor are everything. The reasons for doing things are more important than the tasks themselves. In several situations, the players who completed the stated task most quickly or securely (Nitro G on the race challenge, for example, or Major Victory on the Citywalk) get eliminated because they failed to act like true superheroes in the process, while some of the weakest or slowest players (Fat Momma on the Citywalk, Monkey Woman in the dog challenge) are rewarded.

A fast note about Monkey Woman and the dog challenge. Monkey Woman had the slowest time of those who completed the challenge, but she absolutely refused to quit. This is a woman who let herself be dragged all over a yard by dogs, and spent the whole time struggling to complete her task. It was really astoundingly cool, and it was even cooler that at the end, she was the one extolled as a success.

There are some significant flaws to Who Wants To Be A Superhero. For one thing, some tacit confirmation that Iron Enforcer was a plant all along would be nice. For another, we're given almost no opportunity to get to know the people in question -- we don't see very much of the heroes living in the Lair, interacting, getting along with each other. When Ty'Veculus was eliminated, for the first time we saw all the heroes crowding around him, clearly strongly affected by his leaving -- but we hadn't gotten a chance to see Ty'Veculus connecting with them on a human level. We know the heroes all sleep in the same room, but we don't see any of those pressures or discomforts. That's a part of what makes reality television a total train wreck so much fun to watch.

Well, we're down to the last two. Fat Momma is a comedic hero, but one with a solid message (take self esteem in yourself -- if you need to make a change, make that change, but don't let bullies hurt you). Feedback is an almost frighteningly earnest fan of superheroes (in the Dog Challenge, he spent the entire time saying "Must... reach... goal.... it... will... not... end... like... this!") which you will spend the whole time saying "one of us, one of us" about. I'm okay with either one of them winning, though at this point I'm solidly in Feedback's corner.

I just hope that the people currently writing super heroes are watching this show, because these guys? These are superheroes. And Stan Lee's pronouncements have been spot on in my book. "Heroes don't kill people," he bombasted. "Heroes save people. Children look up to heroes." Unlike most of the current comics companies, Stan Lee and this television program aren't ashamed of superheroes or what they traditionally represent, and for that reason alone I would watch this show.

But more than that, I want to see the next episode. I'm excited to see the finale. Who will win? How will our heroes face their next challenges? What happens next?

Aces. Be a winner, gang. Not a wiener!

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:38 AM | Comments (39)

August 16, 2006

Eric: In Memorium: Bruno Kirby

One of the breakout television shows of the 1990's was The Larry Sanders Show. It was good on the one hand because it was funny, well performed and well developed. Garry Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor and (most especially) Rip Torn were hysterical as the host, co-host and producer (respectively) of a late night talk show in the Johnny Carson Tonight Show vein. But even better was the plethora of guest stars they would get. Men and women of the Hollywood elite willing not just to show up and plug their latest projects but viciously satirize themselves. I first gained serious respect for Jim Carrey when he appeared as himself. He did his usual Jim Carreyisms at the opening of the show-within-a-show segment, then sat down as the show went to commercial, and quietly (and very cynically) made it clear to Larry Sanders that he despised him for any number of jokes Sanders made about "Ace Ventura," but right now it was worth it to come on his podunk show and plug).

It was that kind of thing all over. Sharon Stone was distant and self-important. David Duchovny developed a strange, quasisexual fixation on Sanders. Burt Reynolds was dismissive until he learned there was money involved (this was immediately after the divorce from Loni Anderson), and then he was all for it. Warren Zevon bitched incessantly about having to play "Werewolves of London" again. One by one, major celebrities would come on the show and be absolutely vicious in satirizing themselves. It was hysterical and it was amazing.

My favorite guest star, however, had to be Bruno Kirby. Kirby was nice enough, and a truly fantastic guest. They made mention of that fact every time he was on -- he was exactly what Larry needed in a guest for the show. But Bruno Kirby was always the first person bumped for someone "more important." No matter how many times Arthur (Rip Torn's character -- the producer of the show) assured Kirby that he was a valued and beloved friend of the show's, Kirby would be the first one out the door when someone less talented but more famous showed up. And Kirby got upset and stormed off, but you knew he'd come back and try again.

It culminated on the very last episode, which was also the last episode of the show-within-a-show. Walk-ons by celebrities and well wishers had dominated the hour, so in the last minutes, while Sanders was being serenaded before the show ended. Kirby walked up to Arthur, steaming mad. "Am I getting on the show or not?" he demanded.

"We're running long," Arthur murmured, clearly barely paying attention to Kirby. "But we'll have you on real soon."

"What?" Kirby demanded. "You idiot! Listen to yourself! This is the last show!" And he stormed off, furious, leaving Arthur to truly understand, in his heart, that this was it. The show was over.

It was a perfect use of Bruno Kirby, who had the acting chops to pull it off and make the moment both bittersweet and funny. And it was a perfect way to satirize Bruno Kirby, who spent a career being the best damn thing on the screen... and always second fiddle to the less talented "real stars" around him.

Think about it. Kirby was by far the best thing in the City Slickers movies, but he didn't get the Academy Award for it. Jack Palance did. And Billy Crystal, who didn't do a really good job in a movie until Mister Saturday Night, got top billing and the best paychecks. The man was memorable and engaging both in The Godfather Part II and This is Spinal Tap, for Christ's sake. Like many truly good character actors, he worked constantly, usually in three or four projects a year, spanning from television to voice work to major motion pictures. He worked well in comedy (he had fantastic timing) and drama alike. He was good enough to steal Good Morning Vietnam from Robin Williams (and actually play a character instead of himself while doing it) and professional enough that when he got a role involving horses -- which he was seriously, life threateningly allergic to -- he got powerful allergy medicine shots once or twice a day and just dealt with it.

Most of all, Kirby was the perfect actor to play a certain kind of New Yorker -- one full of bravado, but extremely funny all the while. When I watched the documentary Super Size Me, and Morgan Spurlock interviewed a blowhard New Yorker who ranted at length on how people were screwing the fast food companies, I had to pause and verify I wasn't watching Bruno Kirby. It didn't look like Kirby, but that didn't mean anything. Sadly, any number of people who saw Bruno Kirby (and loved him) walked away thinking he was Joe Pesci.

But Bruno Kirby wasn't Joe Pesci. for one thing, he was funnier. For another, he was more versatile. And for a third, Kirby actually was in the Godfather trilogy, not the endless stream of movies that wanted to be the Godfather Trilogy.

Bruno Kirby passed away of complications related to Leukemia on Monday. Checking CNN.com, we see he is the second headline under "Entertainment," significantly lower down the page than "Britney Spears burps, munches on camera." I swear to Christ I'm not making this up. Over at E! Online, Kirby's death tracks lower than David Hasslehoff paying a pest control bill for his ex-wife.

The thing that made Larry Sanders so funny was how willing it was to satirize true things.

The thing that makes Bruno Kirby's passing so sad is how little mark it's made on the world of media. Because the mark Bruno Kirby made was phenomenal, and whether people realize it or not, he will be missed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:25 PM | Comments (6)

July 28, 2006

Eric: Because reading can be so darn hard....

It's safe to say that things are very, very....

...they're very. I've had an interesting few weeks, and by interesting I mean busy, and by busy I mean oh my God. Plus recurrent and very painful gout. Plus my car was rearended. In a parking lot. For a pharmacy. Where I was getting medicine to treat my gout. Said meds are also not without side effects.

I am also drinking pure black cherry juice, which is supposed to help with the gout. Which depresses me, because black cherry juice is horrible. It's like drinking cherry flavored kero syrup.

But we do it. And we try to survive.

Now, one of the things I've been tasked to do at work is work out methodologies and techniques for curricular podcasting. Because... well, because I'm a geek, and that's what geeks do at schools. So I haven't had the time to write here, between everything, and exhaustion.

But, as part of my job, I have had to jump through the proper hoops to Podcast.

And so, I would like to direct you one and all to Websnark Annotations Podcast.

You knew it was coming. Admit it.

This first one is from me. Weds is kicking some ideas around, too, and we're also going to do some joint ones. Note that I'm being driven more by radio drama, radio humor, and This American Life than other things, so WAP's not going to be much of a news or commentary site.

How often will podcasts come out? I'm hoping for weekly, but to be honest, I'm so overworked right now I'll consider it a win if I reopen Garageband before the end of August.

The first episode, Long Drives and Match Games, is now up. You can also load feed://podcasts.websnark.com/?feed=rss2 into your podcastery reader... um... thingy... of choice and get new episodes as they come out. iTunes is coming, I'm sure.

I hope you like it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:09 AM | Comments (23)

May 28, 2006

Wednesday: A love note written two hours before Penn Jillette is actually supposed to come on.

Dear band that was on the radio a couple minutes ago:

I'm so sorry. I kinda forgot to listen to American radio for about ten years, so I didn't realize you were there. It's cool, though. There's this guy on FreeFM playing a nineties retro set. I'm afraid I didn't realize it was a nineties retro set until he also played "Machinehead" by Bush, though. See, a bunch of Christian rock just caught up with 1996, and there was all that weird genre-fragmentation paralysis and the big trousers and stuff, so it's hard to tell. I'm not actually sure when that song just now came out. Are you okay with that?

Anyhow! That's not important right now.

I see you like to do the catchy, hooky music with the broody lyrics. Great! We need more of that, what with the international shortage and the embargo and all. But I think your delivery mechanism's a bit broken. You know, you could totally ditch that Eddie-Vedder-by-way-of-Cookie-Monster singer. I mean, you were totally ripped off. These days, you can get a nice mopey Brit for about half what you paid for that Vedder Monster.

From there, all it would take is a nice Moog and some cute doo-wop girls. You could do something pretty swell with that. Keep the lyrics, though. We need more doo-wop girls doing that whole angsty rar thing. Seriously.

Also, can you put Penn on now, please? I like him better, and he isn't all with the chains on his pants.^* Thanks!

Love and outside-the-demographic kisses,
-- Pretty Pony Sugar Princess Wedsie.

^* Not British pants. For all I know, Penn has chains on his British pants. It's none of my business, really.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:41 PM | Comments (34)

May 15, 2006

Eric: Also, Survivor ended. But I didn't care.

Two shows, radically different and yet in weird ways similar, had their finales this weekend. They're both shows on my list of favorites. I'm going to miss them both, in very different ways, and both have 'sequels' in the pipelines, even though neither sequel is direct.

And that has me wistful.

The first, of course, is The West Wing, which ended its seven year run last night. The second, of course, is Justice League Unlimited, which ended its five year run (if we count Justice League before it) and closed out the DC Animated Universe as envisioned by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini.

There will be spoilers for both shows. I invite you not to read on if you've a problem with that, because... well, because. That's the way of things.

Justice League Unlimited, on one level, was almost a disappointment. We had a full season of shows building up to the climactic confrontation between the Justice League and a revitalized Secret Society of Supervillains, initially created by Gorilla Grodd and then subverted by Lex Luthor, in a clear pastiche on the old Challenge of the Superfriends series that pitted the Super Friends against the Legion of Doom. The Society's swamp headquarters was clearly an updated Hall of Doom for example, and the new Justice League Metro Tower's base was clearly evocative of the Hall of Justice.

Well, we never actually got that confrontation. We built to it, but at the literal last second, when it looked like Luthor would regain Brainiac and ascend to near Godhood with a full army equal in power and numbers to the expanded Justice League... we suddenly had a war against Darkseid, who was coming to shatter Earth, and the League and Society ended up needing to join forces to beat them back. And in the end, it wasn't the League but Lex Luthor who defeated Darkseid. What's up with that?

Well, I figured it out. Justice League Unlimited actually ended last year.

No, seriously. We had the JLU finale last year. The show built around the conflict with Cadmus, came to a beautifully orchestrated end after a fantastic two year run, and paid off both the general leaguers and the Power Seven of the original League. It was then followed by a coda that closed out the entire Timm/Dini 'verse. It was glorious.

And people went nuts for it. For all intents and purposes we were standing on our chairs, clapping and wooting and waving lighters. There was a last minute reprieve -- the show was renewed.

Guys, this fifth season of JLU? Was an encore. This was the band coming out and playing one last set of their hits. This was the extended curtain call. And looked at that way, it was brilliant. Over the course of the season, we had some loose ends tied up, and others left to dangle. We had groundwork laid and other groundwork paid off. And this last show, the series finale, was one long, extended geekfest. This was an episode designed to make fans go squee, over and over and over again. And it did that very well.

Setting aside the Significant Moments for our major characters (though Superman finally truly being Superman for one brief shining moment was wonderful), there were all the little touches. The little homages. Especially the two Marvel nods. (Commander Steel -- a character who I think never even had lines in the show -- was the most patriotically costumed character except for Stargirl. And he had a chance to grab a circular parademon shield and hurl it, knocking aside two parademons who threatened Hawkgirl, in an absolute and clear nod to Captain America. And even more than that, Fire and Ice had a truly great double-fan service moment. On the one hand, they were in bikinis, so. You know. Fan service. But on the other, Ice sealed herself in a block of ice to get into costume, and Fire tossed her hair and costumed up in a halo of flame... exactly the way that Iceman and Firestar used to get into costume on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends).

And, in my absolutely favorite moment, we saw an old, distinctive (and, to a certain type of comic book fan, recognizable) heavy set man walk up to parademons and batter them about, so well that Wonder Woman herself was stunned. ("Hera," she murmured, staring. It was great.) Now, it turned out to be J'onn J'onzz, and that's cool enough on its own level. They didn't telegraph the reveal at all.

But that doesn't change the fact that for one moment, Jack Kirby was punching 4th World parademons. I mean, dude.

The final moments featured a pastiche on the opening of Challenge of the Superfriends, with the heroes descending from the Hall of Justice Metrotower and leaping through the screen. But that pastiche was itself a fantastic nod to the true fans and to the seventy year history of DC Comics and a superteam we called the Justice League in this series. For the record, we opened with B'Wana Beast, Metamorpho and the Creeper, along with Steel -- slightly eclectic, but three of them (all but Steel) were backup features in The Brave and the Bold. This was followed by the Question, Hawk and Dove and Captain Atom, who along with the Creeper were all created by Steve Ditko. (Which was the only creator nod in the final curtain call, but as it gave them an excuse to have the Question -- undoubtedly the breakout star from relative obscurity of JLU -- I'll take it.) Followed by the Crimson Avenger, the Shining Knight, Vigilante and Stargirl and STRIPE, who were (versions of) the Seven Soldiers of Victory (minus Green Arrow and Speedy, admittedly). They were followed by Wildcat, Doctor Mid-Nite, Doctor Fate and Hourman -- modern versions, perhaps, but still the four characters most directly tied back to the original version of the League, the Justice Society of America. Followed then by Commander Steel, Vibe, Gypsy and Vixen, who were the 1980's version of the Justice League of America (an era often forgotten, so that they were remembers and Vixen even had a major character arc in the series is wonderful, to my mind). Followed then by Booster Gold, Fire, Ice and the Elongated Man -- seminal members of the 90's version of the Justice League International. (They could have put Crimson Fox in there too, and gotten a Justice League Europe nod, but I'll take it.) Followed then by Zatanna, Red Tornado, Black Canary and Green Arrow -- core members of the 70's version of the Justice League of America. Spaced out, I would add, so that Green Arrow and Black Canary had almost a solo bow run through the screen, which is appropriate given how significant Green Arrow was to the development of the series.

And finally, of course, we had the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The stars of our show. The Justice League. Ending on a shot of Batman, who launched the Timm/Diniverse so many years ago.

We got a full season as a curtain call, and then they had their moment. And now we close the curtain. Next up, their "sequel" is a series that is dear to my heart: The Legion of Super Heroes. But, even though JLU set the series up, they've gone with all new, very un-Bruce Timm designs (sort of troglodyteish, really). They have intentionally said it's meant to break away from the past and move forward, so it's not the next edition of the DC Animated Universe. Not really. It's something new, and we just... move on, in the end.

Which brings us to The West Wing. Which was a finale.

If JLU seemed like a disappointment that turned out to be a celebration and curtain call... The West Wing came across as a celebration and curtain call that ended up as a disappointment. We knew it would be something of a downer -- they had to convey the essence of life moving on, of the President we've had for seven seasons leaving office and a new President coming in. And they did that, and it was effective. The quiet scene where we hear Santos taking the oath of office in the background while the White House Head Usher's staff sweeps into the Oval Office, packs everything up in a whirlwind, leaving the place bare for the new President's things to come in, and the photograph of Bartlet is taken down in the outer office and replaced with Santos was astoundingly effective.

But, one of the hallmarks of transitions like this is a sense of anticlimax. The new President set to governing immediately, and three of our cast members -- Charlie, Will and Kate -- are standing in the entryway to the West Wing. "Hey," Charlie says. "Wanna go see a movie?" "It's two p.m.," Will says. "You got something better to do?"

And of course, they don't. Oh, Charlie's heading to law school, Kate will no doubt reenter public service in some capacity (she's career military. She'll have a job, though she was denied the National Security Advisor position she wanted). And Will Bailey we know from the beginning of the season is destined to become a United States Congressman in two years. But for now, they got nothing to do. They're done.

And so it was with all our heroes. They're leaving. Their service is done. Of our major cast, only Josh and a returning Sam still work for the President. Donna -- in a plot arc almost as unrealistic as the White House Press Secretary with no previous Washington experience being tapped to replace Leo McGarry as Chief of Staff, no matter how asskicking Allison Janney is) -- has risen from being a cubicle dwelling secretary in only her third real job after dropping out of college to being the First Lady's Chief of Staff, which makes Josh and Donna one Hell of a Power Couple. And whatsername with the mind numbingly abrasive voice is now the First Lady's communications director.

Everyone else is out. Gone.

The loss of John Spencer -- the man who played Leo McGarry -- was keenly felt in this episode. They showed the pilot of the West Wing in the hour before this finale, reminding all of us that Leo was the first character seen on screen, walking into work in the White House in the morning. In Sorkin's original pitch, the President would barely be seen -- instead, the ensemble lead would really be Leo. (Rob Lowe's ego notwithstanding). And thematically, this last show should have ended not with Bartlet in Air Force One flying home to New Hampshire, but Leo walking out of the White House for the last time (I'm convinced that thematically, had Spencer not had his untimely death, Vinick would have won. Things the producers have said seem to bear that out.) Instead, we had C.J. do that walk, followed by the new President and Josh saying "what's next" in a clear echo to the end of that first episode of the West Wing, followed by Bartlet flying out of public service once and for all.

And... well, maybe it was (somewhat) realistic, as the succession takes place. But it in the end was sad, more than anything else. There was no sense of triumph -- of eight solid, good years and a torch being passed. There was instead a sense that there was more to do. Too much left by the wayside.

Which I think was intentional. Right at the beginning, the first lady said "Jed -- you did a lot of good. You did a lot of good," to a President who is staring out a window in the Residence, clearly seeing all the good he never got around to.

The one arc of real substance left to this last episode was the fate of Toby Zeigler, exiled in disgrace after he outed National Security secrets to save the lives of several astronauts. The question right up until the end was whether or not Bartlet would use one of those infamous 11th hour pardons to pardon him. Now, we knew from that same first episode of the season where we saw Will Bailey was a Congressman, at the opening of the Bartlet Presidential Library, that Toby was not in jail. He was at Columbia. But that could have been a deal or an early release or who knows what.

But yes, Bartlet pardoned him, as we knew he would from the moment that we learned he was considering it. And in what I think was the worst omission of the show, Richard Schiff didn't even appear on this final episode. Leo couldn't be there, because John Spencer died. Toby should have at least been shown at home, watching the Inauguration he could no longer attend.

In short, and in the end, life goes on. The West Wing is over. The "sequel" to it doesn't have anything to do with it, except a couple of actors in common (most notably Bradley Whitford). However, the show -- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip -- marks the return of West Wing and Sports Night creator Aaron Sorkin to television. Sorkin was forced out of the West Wing due to a drug scandal and softening ratings (and the abandonment of Lowe over what amounts to a hissy fit because he wasn't at the center of everything, leading to a staggering series of professional failures on Lowe's part). The show never really recovered from Sorkin's loss, as it went from being policy porn to ER style shocking moments of the week (in the Sorkin years, we could be made to feel the emotions behind farm subsidies and the movement to abolish the penny. In the post-Sorkin era, there were wars, explosions, peace in the Middle East, heart attacks and lots of Gigantic Moments, minus the dialogue that made us care in the first place). Sorkin returning with a show that is bar none the most anticipated thing on NBC's schedule while the West Wing limps to an end is no doubt the sweetest kind of revenge for him, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

But it's not the same, any more than The West Wing really replaced Sports Night.

So. Two shows I always looked forward to, both gone. One an anticlimactic climax that turned out to be a startlingly effective celebration and curtain call, the other a celebration and curtain call that turned out anticlimactic and bittersweet. Two sequels that aren't really sequels, to give me some hope for next year. Endings, and beginnings.

Life goes on.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:27 PM | Comments (33)

April 19, 2006

Eric: This is like a post, only it's not.

Every so often, I try to put into words just how Wikipedia has taken its mind numbingly huge potential and somehow managed to squander it. I do this in good faith, and also try to explain why it is I constantly use Wikipedia even though I think Wikipedia has wasted said potential.

(The answer to the latter is simple, for the record. Wikipedia makes a phenomenally good starting point for a journey. It just makes for a terrible destination.)

Anyhow, the most brilliant man on Earth, Lore Sjöberg, has managed to explain it vastly better than I ever could.

And been funny all at the same time.

In other news, I am recovering from the truly excellent run of the play, by rereading the complete works of Jeffrey Rowland. I'm into 2001 of When I Grow Up. It remains significantly better than many things that today I consider good, and yet Rowland considers it one of his weaker works. I take this to highlight the true and honest brilliance of Jeffrey Rowland, who is no Lore Sjöberg, but he does his best. And besides, who is Lore Sjöberg. Other, of course, than Lore Sjöberg. That old Legion of Super Heroes intelligence scale, which Brainiac 5 was a "12" on? Lore Sjöberg is a 20. In fact, the scale is called the "Sjöberg" scale and originally, Sjöberg was defined as a "1" and everyone else was defined thusly. However, it got depressing for people to be described as .02 intellects, so they finally multiplied everything by twenty and rounded to the nearest integer, so that people would feel better about all of it.

It was, of course, Lore Sjöberg's idea.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:48 AM | Comments (34)

April 2, 2006

Wednesday: Pink sapphires actually exist. Swear to God. Ick.

I don't think it was necessary for there to be an epilogue. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, while not exactly possessed of a magnificent or even useful ending, did at least manage to finish. Once you've annihilated true evil, destroyed all life on earth with the depths of your angst, and then put all that life back again, there's not much you can do to follow things up. This, of course, explains why we got PGSM: Special Act.

Since the epilogue is set four years later, no one has aged a single day. As a result, Ami has become the first twenty-year-old sixteen-year-old to practice medicine in America. The others have all gone on to their dreams as well. Makoto's living with Turtle Guy and arranging flowers. Rei is in Kyoto, lighting candles with her mind. Undead zombie idol Minako is winning nonexistent music awards in London. Hurray, normalcy.

And Usagi and Mamoru are getting married. In a week. So, of course, they've only just started planning, because that's what you do. It's not like Mamoru actually gives a crap, of course; he proposed to Usagi by sticking a plastic ring in her hand and walking off. He doesn't care if Usagi wears a wet rag to the wedding. He doesn't care what the invitations look like -- not that it's occurred to him or her that one week before the event is a bit late to be sending out the pretty cards. And he definitely doesn't want to be involved in any of that planning stuff, because wedding ceremonies are just such a waste of time when you're only marrying the chick 'cause you knocked her up, man. It's all about the marriage, so who cares if the wedding's any good? Usagi's hormonal and irritable and very fond of weddings, so she calls off the whole relationship and pouts.

(Usagi's got offscreen morning sickness in this, for the record. Yeah, that Love Rabbit shirt she wore all through the series was totally on the money.)

Oh, and evil just woke up. Evil wants breakfast. Therefore, evil has a familiar face.

That whole "from beneath you, it devours" schtick on Buffy? Foreshadowing.

Look, I shit you not: Kuroki Mio comes back from the dead. (There's a lot of that going around, but she's a bit slow.) She wants to be queen of the world, and she wants herself some human energy breakfast. She turns a dilapidated old amusement park into a lair with her magic annoyance powers, and then she summons clown servitors. Clowns. Pierrot clowns, to be exact. Dancing ones. Four years dead, and her energy-sucking servitors are circus rejects. Time was when true evil could at least manage something squamous. She does manage to pull a couple Kamen Rider costumes out as well to be unmenacing, but it's pretty much irrelevant. Soul-sucking clowns are swarming the earth.

Some of those clowns are disguised as the Four Generals. They kidnap Usagi and Mamoru for Kuroki Mio, 'cause that's what you do. Kuroki Mio wants to marry the kidnapped Mamoru, because that's what chicks do. These chicks and their Martha Stewart and their wedding ceremonies and their ultimate evil and their clowns.

Bitches.

Anyhow. Look, I'm sorry, this story really doesn't make any sense. I can't make it make sense. I can only explain the problems. One of the problems is that you can't actually have a Sailor Moon special without any magical girl action.

Since the whole point of this exercise is to make all the Guardians -- who haven't been able to transform since the cosmic reset button made them into happy, normal girls -- go zooming back home to fight, they go zooming on back. This is a pretty dumb idea. They can't transform, and they know they can't transform because they aren't wearing anything marketable anymore. Rei tries to fight off ultimate evil with Sailor Luna, only to disappear for several scenes and reappear in the hospital. Minako manages to kick some clown ass, but that only goes so far.

The others completely fail to run over clowns with their cars, which is ridiculous. When you can't transform into a magical girl and use Peasant Fire Strike on your enemies, and you're in a car, your best bet is to try and splatter them all over the highway. Are they thinking of that? No. Ami swerves to avoid the rampaging clowns. And she's the genius.

(Wait. But, but, Luna can transform. And Mamoru becomes Tuxedo Kamen ever so briefly. Why can Sailor Luna transform and fight with Rei, who can't? Luna's not a girl, she's a plush cat. It's different. Same goes for Mamoru, who's not a girl or a plush cat, just... well, just a dick, really.)

The deal here is, Queen Serenity (who's also supposed to be dead, but never mind that now) has discussed matters with Luna through the Jedi holographic communicator thingie, and she's sending A Stone-Embedded Sword Which Is Totally Not Excalibur. If all the Guardians' hearts are united, they can pull Not Excalibur, Honest out of its base and transform just once to do what they have to do. This is the sort of thing which only works when the writers have not actually bothered to write an episode so much as cobble together some fanfic they got in the mail.

No, not even fanfic. That's being mean to fanfic. What they did was they went out for a while and found some kids, and then they asked, "What would you put in a new episode of Sailor Moon?" After the kids got done laughing, because it's not like they were watching Sailor Moon to begin with, the writers went and found some maladjusted teenaged boys. They exclaimed, "Oh! Oh! I know! Kuroki Mio is all back from the dead and wearing this hot corset thing, and, and, and so are the Four Generals, except they're just clowns or something wearing disguises and then the REAL Four Generals come back! And all the Sailor Guardians can transform again because, uh, they all pull Excalibur out at the SAME TIME! Except Rei, 'cause she's a bitch. And, uh, Kuroki Mio turns into the big plant boss from that one Final Fantasy game! But she loses! And then Sailor Moon gets married!"

Oh, I'm sorry. That was the plot. Granted, Rei has to lend her psychic sword-lifting energy from St. Wasn't Available For Shooting That Day Hospital For The Inexplicably Wearing Eye Bandages, but that's all they really changed from the focus groups.

I'd like to be happy for the characters, now that they're not virgins anymore grown up and having lives, sort of. Usagi and Mamoru have their stultifyingly normal church wedding after all, even though Mamoru still couldn't be bothered to get Usagi anything better than an imitation pink sapphire in a plastic setting. The turtle fetishist catches the bouquet and proposes to Makoto. We get closure. Closure is supposedly good. We like closure.

Except, honestly? I'd like the closure to make more sense than the series finale, not less.

There's one more bit of live-action Sailor Moon left in the arsenal: a prequel, featuring Sailor V. I'm somehow not holding out much hope here.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:01 PM | Comments (25)

February 9, 2006

Wednesday: This isn't a story about Miles Peterson.

Now, Miles Peterson had everything -- money, fame, power -- until he lost it. (You can take that however you choose; the net effect was the same.) From the ashes of suicidal despair, Miles rose to embrace Divine force and combat evil. He built a cave of sanctuary and a base of operations beneath his manor home. He built a lightsaber and a full suit of colorful armor, patterned after Ephesians 6, that he might better stand upon the Gospel.

Miles Peterson was a man in a crucible. Now, he's Bibleman.

Christian-themed children's television, in the years since Davey and Goliath, has been very much a cesspool. Its most remarkable shows have engendered, in spite of themselves, a colossal sense of what?!; they are not so much encouragements as bizarre memory devices. Production values run the gamut from lavish (such as CGI juggernaut Veggie Tales, particularly the feature film Jonah) to lackluster (errr... like most of the stuff on Smile of a Child, to be honest). The bulk of it has been, errrr...

Well, generally puppets for Christ. Or fursuits for Christ. Or anthropomorphic food for Christ. But we've been over that.

We do enjoy The Bibleman Adventure, strange as it sounds. It has the what factor going quite heavily, but it's self-deprecating as all hell. In a field which consistently takes itself too seriously (apart from Veggie Tales), Willie Aames (yep) and company are fully aware just how ridiculous their concept is, how little logic is really in operation, and how much worse it would be if they couldn't laugh at themselves. It's a sensibility you just don't get out of Colby's Clubhouse.

So, we accept a lot that we wouldn't otherwise. We've never grasped why a superhero is asked to spend so much of his time encouraging depressed students from the nearby public school system, but we accept this. We've never entirely understood why he built an AI to serve Christ without being able to confirm whether or not she could have a soul. We certainly don't get why sidekick Biblegirl -- who has cycled through at least two separate visible ethnicities while remaining the same person -- has a gun that she never actually shoots.

And boy, do we dig the transformation sequences.

But this isn't a story about Miles Peterson. We do plan to tell you that story, but not until we get a hold of the unedited DVDs; hopefully we'll get that done before Tommy Nelson relaunch the line later this year. After all, TBN and Smile of a Child may be rerunning the series over and over, but heavily edited for television. You can't possibly discuss Bibleman with true critical authority until you've seen every single musical number.

(Also, we need to get a hold of the entirety of "Shattering The Prince Of Pride," which concerns the perils of consulting with other people to produce your comic's character designs. Or possibly the pressures of working on a licensed newspaper property while getting zapped by demon Borg. I'm never sure. Anyhow.)

No, right now, this is a story about a kid.

Before The Bibleman Adventure, see, there was The Bibleman Show. The concept hadn't really shaken itself out yet, nor had the execution. Or the funding.

Bibleman was around, and lurking, and talking to kids, and fighting light saber battles -- but he was doing so as something of an afterthought. What we were really there to see was apparently an all-singing, all-dancing youth group. Of five kids. With no associated youth pastor, at least in the first two episodes.

Five kids. Best friends, from all indications. Five kids, serving God by constantly rehearsing really, really bad musical numbers to perform in front of their indulgent congregation. (To their credit -- or possibly to their detriment -- the congregation seems suitably appreciative and excited by the whole affair.) It's not clear what good they serve, but apparently their praise and their prayers angers a string of Q-list demons enough to strike against them. One little girl is spurred to lying. A couple of kids are spurred to gossip. That sort of thing.

Bibleman's not got a lot to do yet, so he keeps an eye on the youth group and fights the demons off for them. It's what he does. It's not really an adventure at the moment, and you have to knock off the piddly beasts before you can get to level 1-4 and kill the first Bowser anyhow.

Besides, I can't say as I blame the demons. Since the stakes are so low, they fight fiercely. They're low on the totem pole, and little things irritate them an awful lot.

Like appalling song and dance. I don't think I can emphasize this enough. The first time we hear from these kids, they're singing about the Bible vision they possess. It's important, you understand, to have Bible vision, and you should get Bible vision. For the Lord. You see, he wants you to have Bible vision. I will settle for LASIK after this, I am telling you what.

I have a hard time believing that kids would actually get into the work -- it's not edifying, it's not entertaining, it's not even particularly catchy. Near as I can tell, they raided the clearance sale on Trax tapes at the local Family Christian Stores, only to discover that they didn't have lyric sheets for any of the tapes, and the side with the singing on had been erased in a freak accident. So they dug out as many decontextualized catchphrases as possible, wrote padding aroung them, and practiced like mad. "Someday," they told themselves, "we'll get hired for Dooley and Pals, whose site has a Flash intro with sound."

Furthermore, they dance like overchoreographed mimes. STEP two three four! PLUCK FRUIT two three four! GESTURE TOWARDS THE HEART two three four! Now SASHAY! They do so without much synchronization, as one might expect from a self-trained youth group of five, and enthusiasm levels vary according to archetype. Jodi Sweetin there in front? She's more concerned with your hearing her than anything, and she's just a little bossy. She's gonna be the leader. Littlest girl? Sweet and cute and sad as needed. Little boy at the back right? The one who's too short? God, he wants a tap solo. Other girl? Yeah. She's the other girl.

And the tallest boy? The one at the back left, with the glasses, sticking his leg out, there? The one you know really, really wants to be in show business, and has a real love of his craft, but just doesn't have the charisma of a Jodi Sweetin lookalike?

That's Ryan.

Ryan's responsible. When rehearsals aren't at school, or at the church, or in the park, they're at his house. On the porch. Ryan keeps the tapes safe (although he gives one of them to the youngest girl, once, while she's demonically compelled to lie about her failures -- not his brightest moment). Secretly, one guesses that Ryan gets very good scores in math, plays trombone in band class, and keeps a secret blog about Hollywood stars.

Ryan is also going to grow up to draw high-profile webcomics.

You heard me. That little boy is going to grow up to become David Willis*:

* DISCLAIMER: PROBABLY NOT ACTUALLY DAVID WILLIS

Assuming he doesn't, of course, break under the pressure. You know how it goes. You work all week on your Bible vision, your enthusiastic mime-dance, your heel-steppy things and your jazz hands. Inevitably, one or more of your groupmates fall under the thrall of lesser demons. Pretty soon, there's petty lying, transparent gossip, and overenthusiastic efforts to score tap solos in front of the congregation. No one is actually helping you with your jazz hands, figuring out where your leg goes during the big number, or -- goodness knows -- praying the blood of Christ over anything. The big night comes, and this superhero in a purple helmet is out fighting the demons for you! With lightsabers! Total overkill!

What kind of a responsible kid are you? What kind of a group prevents you from demonstrating your responsibility like that? What kind of Christian constantly falls under the thrall of lesser demons?

Suddenly, a career as a puppet vegetable for Christ doesn't seem so bad. Thank goodness he escaped.

Next time: a story about Miles Peterson.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 2:19 AM | Comments (51)

January 30, 2006

Eric: Dirk Benedict: Lost in Antiquation

Hm.

This might be a bit odd, because I'm actually responding to a point a celebrity made, by way of someone else's essay on the subject. However, I didn't actually encounter the celebrity quote. I did, however, encounter the essay, and so that's what I'm going to respond to. However, I'm not really responding to the thesis of the essay. However squared, I am going to be responding to the essayist's take on the celebrity quote, because that's the filter through which I encountered the quote.

Pause, take a deep breath, leave the room, come back in, have some water, and reread the paragraph. It can be parsed, if you put your mind to it.

The essayist is Ferrett Steinmetz, and the essay is entitled "Mixed Messages, and When to Send Them." Please, allow me to quote from the relevant bit:

Basically, Dirk Benedict – the guy who was Starbuck, and has spent the last two decades hanging around conventions like a ghost ever since the original show got cancelled – says that the fact that Starbuck was transformed into a girl for the recent revamp is a sign of the decline of masculinity. He says that Starbuck had to be changed, because there was no way that you could have a hard-drinking, carousing, sexually active single man presented in a positive light.

(Not that women are always presented in a great way, either, I’ll note, pointing to my latest cartoon, which discusses female plotlines in science fiction.)

Dirk Benedict is at least partially correct. There was a time when Father Knew Best, but now every dad in a sitcom is pretty much a doof. A lot of the popular sitcoms involve the clueless, vain dad stumbling into yet another conundrum from which only the wisdom of his wife and children can extricate him. There are smart men in dramas, of course – but if they’re drinking hard they’re sliding into alcoholism and if they’re womanizers they’re not only haunted by their own callowness but the women are frequently shown as the pitiful victims of an awful man who showed up and gave them orgasms and friendship, but no commitment.

Hrm.

See, I can see Ferrett's point. Which is why this isn't really a response to Ferrett, per se.

However, Dirk Benedict is wrong. Two ways, really.

First and foremost, Benedict is wrong because the hard-drinking, carousing, sexually active single man is alive and well. Have a look-see at teen comedies. Or at the sitcoms lovingly euphemized as "Urban" because calling them "Blacksploitation" is considered wrong and bad in the twenty-first century. The 'pimpin' lifestyle is, almost always, a hard drinking, carousing, sexually active single man, and for better or for worse said man is generally portrayed sympathetically and positively in today's society.

As is James Bond, who flirted with darkness in the Timothy Dalton years, but was restored to his suave, alcohol-driven, sex-machine status with Pierce Brosnan.

"Aha!" you shout. "But that's different. 'Urban' comedies and James Bond movies are light, escapist fare. They're not the same kind of sophisticated drama that Battlestar Galactica is."

You're right. You're absolutely right.

And that's precisely the point.

Dirk Benedict is upset because Starbuck remains a hard drinking, carousing, sexually active character, and therefore they had to change her to a woman, because men aren't allowed to be portrayed that way any longer. Only it couldn't possibly matter less, because the core point is much more basic.

The 1970's Battlestar Galactica was light fare. Escapist. Far more adventure driven than character driven. Possessed of no more deep character moments than... well, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

And Dirk Benedict's Starbuck was a lighthearted character. Cheerful and smiling, the perfect foil for straight laced Apollo. You can practically see the planning meetings. "Is there going to be a Han Solo? A rogue? Someone who loves 'em and leaves 'em? All right -- we'll sign off!"

(Remember, this was before The Empire Strikes Back. Han Solo was entirely defined as the lovable rogue at that point. Also, he shot first. And the Police in E.T. were packing guns. But I digress.)

How light -- how sitcommish -- was the original Battlestar Galactica? One episode's B-plot was about the day Starbuck scheduled a date with both Cassiopeia and Athena. Gosh, can that lovable cad manage to keep both dates at the same time? Oh, that drunken womanizer!

I'm sorry no one's sent Benedict the memo, but the modern Battlestar Galactica isn't that kind of show. It's not light. It's not escapist fare. It's dark, and gritty, and everyone involved is flawed. Hell, he should be pleased -- at least the Kara Thrace version of Starbuck is recognizable as Starbuck. The Lee Adama version of Apollo took a much deeper shot to the gut, if you compare both characters... and Boomer's a fracking Cylon.

Honestly, the lack of a Y chromosome is less about television's inability to show a Starbuck style male character in today's environment, and more that the producers decided to make a sharp distinction between the old and the new. There is very, very little that's recognizable to the old fans in this new series. This horrified and angered us right up until it occurred to us that Battlestar Galactica kicked ass.

(I had a hard time with it myself. I loved the old cheese, the pseudo-spiritualism, the shiny shiny Cylons. I posted about it here, if I remember correctly. But I was converted. "33" nailed me. And following episodes worked their way into my psyche. It's hard to imagine even watching the original, now.)

Now, I've actually read the essay that Dirk Benedict wrote about this. It's called "Starbuck: Lost in Castration," and while it makes a point, that point gets lost in diatribes against feminism and smoking legislation. Hand in hand with it is his disgust over the "re-imagining" of Battlestar Galactica -- that in making situations more complex and heroes flawed, something essential had been broken.

He may be right. Only... and I honestly think this is key... they did it too well to be castigated.

Honestly. I wasn't so sure, after the miniseries, but the regular series of Battlestar Galactica has been among the best on television. It is consistent and grand, and shows a quantum leap forward for science fiction on television. It is as significant a leap forward, in its own way, as Babylon 5 was. And The Twilight Zone. And Star Trek.

The original Battlestar Galactica was loads of fun. I loved it as a child. I enjoy it nostalgically when I see reruns of it today. But it wasn't groundbreaking. It was serviceable. It was escapism. And there's nothing wrong with that. Escapism can be wonderful.

It's a Hell of a lot harder to pull of honest to Christ drama. And part of pulling off honest to Christ drama is crafting sophisticated characters who don't always get it right. Conflict is good, and a show where the conflict is deeper, and more strongly felt, can be something far more moving than a thousand laser blasting battles.

And making these complaints, in the manner that he's doing them, is the thematic equivalent of actors from Mannix or Hawaii 5-0 complaining that the cops on The Shield aren't as clear cut heroic as they used to be, or shows like C.S.I. have characters who have flaws. The simple truth of the matter is, popular police television shows in this century are dramas, and police procedurals are far more about forensics than Joe Friday.

It's harder to make the same conceptual leap with the new Galactica, because it shares a name with the original. But it's the same forces at work. This is a show that's telling a very different kind of story. In a way, it's less a re-imagining of the original, and more a story based very loosely on a one paragraph description of the original. And it's vastly stronger than a simple remake would have been as a result.

If that means Starbuck has tits, I guess I'm okay with that. Katee Sackhoff's a damn good actress. She didn't have me at first, but she won me over. I believe her. And really, I vastly prefer her to Lee "Apollo" Adama as a character (though last week's episode helped push Apollo into my good graces).

And honestly, she might be hard-drinking. She might smoke cigars and gamble. She might carouse and be the best pilot in the fleet. And she might flout authority. But she's no more light-hearted than anyone else in the series. She's not Dirk Benedict's Starbuck sans penis. She's a character in her own right, who copes with the genocide of humanity in self-destructive ways. And that too is a further departure from the original than Sackhoff's lack of testicles.

Sooner or later, Dirk Benedict will be given a guest shot on Galactica -- possibly even being paired up against Richard Hatch. He might even become a recurring character, and develop the same kind of deep relationship with Thrace as Hatch has with Lee Adama. And once he's a part of the family, he'll cheerfully talk about the evolution of science fiction and his wistfulness for the old days, and laugh uncomfortably when people bring up his characterizing of Thrace as "Stardoe." And all will be forgiven on all sides.

In the meantime, all Dirk Benedict can do, by not repudiating his earlier essay, is look exactly like what he claims to be: a relic. A relic of a time when Science Fiction was seen as escapist trash, when light fantasy included lovable alcoholic womanizing sitcom characters, and when shows like his were meant for children first and foremost. Things are different, today, and thank the Lords of Kobal for that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:38 AM | Comments (67)

January 26, 2006

Wednesday: A development warranting our immediate attention.

It's come to my attention, over the past few weeks, that we hold an unusual position in the community.

Specifically, I'm told that we have a certain obligation -- nay, duty -- to speak to issues of vital concern. If something significant appears, regardless of whatever else might be happening that day, we need to be examining it closely and bringing you the information. If something monumental is achieved, we need to be discussing it as soon as is humanly possible. We owe this to you, at the very least.

It's our job. Our calling. And when we don't address these matters, we fall down both as writers and as people.

So, having said that, I feel that I should tell you this right away, as a representative of and participant in the Discourse:

Pepsi Max Cino. What the hell?

America gets the Black Cherry Vanilla soft drink wars this season. However, Britain and the Continent are getting the coffee-flavoured soft drink wars. France has just seen the introduction of Coca-Cola Blak (and I swear to God that's spelled the way it is on the bottle, which makes me sad), which manages to contain some actual coffee and is said to froth in a cappucino-like fashion. Great, fine, no problem. Whatever.

Britain? Has Pepsi Max Cino. As usual, this is totally the bitch country when it comes to soft drinks.

Pepsi Max is pretty much Pepsi One, only slightly different and a few years older. Instead of getting the complete line of flavoured Diet Pepsis, we, uh, get Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max. A few months ago, we also got Pepsi Max Twist, which had something claiming to be lemon/lime flavouring. It was drinkable. It didn't resemble floor polish. Much.

This? I don't know. "Coffee flavourings," they're telling me. I think that that's coffee flavour the way that cherry-flavoured things are cherry-flavoured, which is to say they asked someone once what it might be like for a thing to taste like another thing, and then they didn't even listen. Moreover, I think they might have asked someone: "Someone, what does Starbucks Coffee Liqueur taste like?"

And, in fact, this might taste nice with Starbucks liqueur in it. (I'm not pretending that it won't instantly transform anyone consuming it into the femmiest femme that ever wore high-heeled mules, of course. And I'm not responsible for your subsequent dysphoria.)

But... yeah. So this tastes like, uh, Cino. Which is about "pushing the boundaries of innovation," says some guy at Britvic.

Unfortunately, it's not a damned thing like coffee. Or coffee-flavoured things. Or innovation. This is the Coffee Liqueur fanfic of soft drinks. This is the fanfic where someone took a look at coffee, took a look at Pepsi Max, thought, "I would like to see them entwined in a desperate clinch," and wrote something bearing only a superficial resemblance to either character.

Not that it's undrinkable, mind you. It's just completely unrecognizable.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:15 PM

January 24, 2006

Eric: Actors and Producers, and sullen critics: the end of the West Wing and the life of John Spencer

As many of you know, John Spencer -- the actor who played Leo McGarry on The West Wing -- died back in mid-December. I felt badly when I heard. Spencer's McGarry was sublime. It was the best acted, best realized character in a cast full of well realized characters. And John Spencer seemed like a good guy.

I didn't, however, do a retrospective of him. I often do, when people in the media I liked die (typically I frame things in In Nomine terms, which is I suppose as close as I come to religion). However, most of the time it's because the person in question is a writer or songwriter, not an actor.

See, I respect acting. I've acted before (and even been paid for it). It's hard, and it's emotional, and it's sometimes intense and sometimes brilliant. I've seen some truly astounding acting in my time.

And yet, I'm a little nonplussed by it. I'm nonplussed that the "Best Actor" awards on award shows are given so much higher consideration and attention than "Best Writer" awards. Acting is a performance. Sometimes nuanced, sometimes brilliant, often or even nearly always interpretive and creative, but it's putting on the role that someone else created. It's speaking someone else's words. And all too often, that absolutely brilliant performance you see in a movie owes as much or more to the work of the director, the cinematographer and the editors than it does to the actor.

So, when an actor I respect passes on, I feel badly and I know I'll miss him, but it doesn't hit me hard the way some others might.

However, that's a minority opinion, and it's sometimes worth reexamining in the face of new evidence.

The West Wing has been heading towards a major change. Either the entire cast was going to turn over at the end of the year, as a new president is chosen and Bartlet steps down, or it was going to end with the end of the Bartlet presidency. We now know that in early December, before the death of John Spencer, the producers had decided to end the series.

Well, in interviews recently given, we now know the producers gave serious consideration, in the wake of John Spencer's death, to simply pulling the plug. They had five episodes in the can that they strongly considered simply pulling, and ending the series quietly. They didn't see any way they could continue to the end of the season without him.

That's powerful.

If you look at the pilot episode of The West Wing, the very first character seen on screen is Leo McGarry, coming in to work. As it turns out, John Spencer was the very first actor cast on the show. From day one, they knew they wanted Spencer as Leo. And even though Aaron Sorkin was forced out on a rail moved on after the fourth season, it's clear Leo remained the heart and soul of the show. He was the world weary, sometimes flawed but always idealistic figure. The one who sought out Bartlet and encouraged him to run. The one who shored the others up when they were in their darkest place. The one willing to fall on his sword to protect the President. The one the President was willing to fall for, instead.

It's powerful stuff. And again, this is why I didn't bring up John Spencer's death. Because all the stuff I wrote in the last paragraph -- except the part that Spencer was first cast -- was conceived of by other people. It's Aaron Sorkin's work. It's Thomas Schlamme's work. It's John Wells's work. Leo McGarry was given voice and a face by John Spencer, but his spirit was born of others. And it always bothers me to see those others forgotten because the performer's face is easiest to recognize in a supermarket.

It's also too damn easy to ignore the part the actor plays, though. And I think that's what I was doing. Because if it were just a part, if it were just an actor fleshing out a character, then the producers wouldn't have spent three minutes wondering if they should finish out the season. They spent the money filming five episodes and writing a number of others -- of course they would air them.

Only, the producers weren't sure they could make them work without John Spencer. He added too much. He brought too much to the table.

Especially in this final major plotline. Leo McGarry had been named the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. In fact, given that he was a powerful career politician with heart problems and other baggage in his background who clearly was giving gravitas to the ticket that Matt Santos lacked, one could say he was being raised up as a Dick Cheney analogue.

Since this is the end of the series, one could easily have finished it up with Leo just offstage. After all, we would go weeks or months without seeing the Vice President as a character. A few pointed references ("...Leo's going to catch up. He says we're making too much fuss over this anyway...") to make it clear he was a going concern, and voila.

Only, the producers felt John Spencer brought too much to ignore. So instead of moving Leo offstage, they're going to deal with the repercussions of a Vice Presidential candidate dying just before the election. They're moving it front and center. They're moving Leo front and center, despite and even through his absence.

That's the hardest course for them to chart as they're ending the series, and it reflects a profound respect the producers, directors, writers and fellow cast members had for John Spencer.

And it puts the lie to my whole initial thesis. Because if I was sullen about actors being disproportionately lionized, the loss of John Spencer -- and the ways the West Wing crew are both commemorating the man and acknowledging that loss -- proves I was going too far in the other direction.

Some of the lines Spencer had to sell were hokey. I adore Aaron Sorkin, but he could sometimes overdo. He loved the monologue within a dialogue form, and it's hard to believe that anyone could pull some of them off. But John Spencer could take a five minute joke about falling down a hole and turn it into touching television.

I miss him.

I miss Leo.

I miss what the West Wing finale could have been.

And I'll watch what it's going to be, instead. Because if they're going to acknowledge Leo McGarry... and John Spencer... then the least I can do is be there to see it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:25 PM | Comments (46)

December 29, 2005

Eric: Angels sang out, in an immaculate chorus. Down from the heavens descended Chuck Norris.

I don't often do this.

However, the movie of The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny might be among the six greatest things of awesomeness, ever.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:12 PM | Comments (22)

October 16, 2005

Wednesday: Oh, Davey. Stop watching that rubbish.

We're both sick. I came down with a cousin of Eric's bug a couple of days after he was struck down, although a lesser one, and have wanted to do very little other than sleep and take drugs.

(Nyquil and Nurofen Plus. You people. With your insinuations that you haven't even made yet.)

This is the kind of mood which lands me in orgies of TBN-watching. See, we don't have cable anymore, and terrestrial analogue television is seven kinds of dire. I can't seem to justify the cost of a freeview box or other one-time decoder mechanism just to have access to The Daily Show reruns one day out of sync -- if it's good, everyone will tell me via LiveJournal, fourteen and a half times, each, and I'll go find the clip on the Comedy Central site. One wonders why we pay for a TV license if we're not going to have cable, really.

Anyhow. TBN -- Trinity Broadcasting Network, an American-based Christian channel which broadcasts everywhere these days, streams their content in Windows Media and RealVideo formats. For free. (By way of comparison, if I'd wanted to watch the UK's GOD Channel on cable, I'd have had to pay an extra fiver a month. Which, as I recall, is about the same as one would pay to get one of the porn channels.) Some would argue that you get what you pay for, but this stuff is like trashy comfort crack to me. I'm happy to curl up with my hot water bottle, orange juice, and eMac to watch this while recuperating.

---

I get asked, every so often, what appeal I find in trashy Christian media. (No one inquires about my amusement at trashy Pagan media, but there's not quite so much of that.) I'm not a Christian in any recognizable sense of the word. Even if I was one, I wouldn't find myself represented in its television shows, or in most of its books or music. I only barely found myself represented in the various fringes or countercultures there when I did qualify, and even then, the conditions were so strong as to nullify any identification.

When I snark Chick tracts, which only really represent the extremes of one stripe, I get the same question again and again: how can you talk about this stuff? I got similar reactions from friends and acquaintances when I was reading through the core Left Behind series, then comparing it against Salem Kirban's 666/1000 duology. This is dreadful. You don't agree with it. It's fueled by hatred, anger, and disdain for others. It's not even well-crafted. You bitch about it. Why give it your time? Why legitimize it by doing so?

Well, I'd give even odds that most of the people who ask me this sort of question have their own comfort trash media -- sitcoms, reality shows, soap operas, tabloid news, blockbuster explosion movies, whatever. I bet they keep with them for the trainwreck appeal, even if they find some aspect or another reprehensible. Maybe the female characters are sexist twaddle; maybe no technical research has been carried out; maybe it makes a mockery of a given profession or culture. Most of them probably bitch about the downturns of their favourite shows, too. If they don't have a television show they feel this way about, perhaps it's a comic series. They couldn't keep from reading Peach Girl or Happy Mania; they're totally buying Infinite Crisis; their Sluggy bookmark remains stubbornly inert. Someday, they'll find the Best Fetish-or-Orientation-Specific Literary Erotic Collection $ANNUM anthology or My Life in Ponderous Alt.Comix Format tome which isn't full of dismal, pretentious twaddle, really, they will, but for now it's all so bizarrely compelling...

Everyone's got something that they keep on staring at, even though it's dire. Everyone's got a trainwreck. Trainwrecks don't have legitimacy; they just exist. The more you rubberneck at them, the less horror they contain.

There are other reasons. I'll get into those some other time, perhaps, if anyone cares. Maybe. Right now, the trainwreck is the salient factor.

---

On Saturdays, TBN runs children's programming. Most of it is utterly forgettable. Find here a template for innumerable low-budget programs: the characters are ensconsed in a rural, possibly Old Western, village. The community centres consist of a general store, a diner, and possibly some sort of hardware-related shop. There is a barn. For no apparent reason, many of your fellow villagers -- human and animal alike -- are puppets; if your village had been advanced enough to pull in any sort of television signal, you would realize that they had been modeled after early episodes of Sesame Street, but were not quite so convincing. The puppets all talk, regardless of species, but you don't think much of it. Most of them make inane, Scripture-related puns, laughing maniacally all the while.

There are actual humans in your midst, most of them curiously bloated adults, and almost all of them male. For no apparent reason, they have not mastered -- or ever heard -- very basic words, like "forgiveness" or "wisdom" or "respect", so you have to spend a considerable amount of time explaining these tenets of faith to them. Curiously, they all fail to know the same concepts at once; given that you're all of the same religion, you all presumably obtained the same education, and you happen to know this stuff, this makes no sense. You think nothing of it.

Sometimes, you all sing songs together. On cue. You blame the puppets.

(If you are considering making this show: please don't. No one will remember what you did, you won't win any significant number of converts, and you'll constantly get referred to as Gospel Bill. Trust me on this. Even I barely remember Circle Square, and I got up early to watch it last week.)

In recent years, this sort of show has tended to involve goofy CGI animals and a lot more dancing around. Less sittin' around, more Romper Room. Evangelism to giant alien bugs and their robots. Crayons. It doesn't help. It's a mercy they also show reruns of Davey and Goliath, really.

There's also Frank Peretti's show, Mr. Henry's Wild and Wacky World. The formula there is nothing special. Mr. Henry's a sort of renaissance geek who hangs out in his house all day, muttering absently about devices and burbling about the day's subject. Sometimes, he shows the kids somewhat witty dramatizations of the New Testament. It's a polished show, though, and Peretti's shockingly well suited for this sort of job. He's dynamic, amusing, and nerdishly charismatic. He's fun to watch as he bounces around his lab, even if you want to go away when he plays his banjo. He doesn't push too hard or get too ridiculously exuberant. He doesn't condescend. I'm no fan of his writing at all, but I think he missed his calling somewhere down the line. He really should have been up north, on the CBC, becoming a beloved kids' show host for the post-Mr. Dressup generation.

This is not to say that nothing stands out as a colossal bogglement. The classic Japanese-American time travel cartoons are still around, for example, although only The Flying House is on at the moment. (You can get Superbook on DVD, though. If it scares you, send the discs to me.) Two kids and their robot travel back in time, wander through Biblical events, then get very confused and upset when they can't actually make any alterations. Last week, the kids were devastated that they couldn't get Jesus freed instead of Barrabas. You know, because it's only going to invalidate their entire belief system and alter the course of Western history beyond all telling if they can change how the Gospels turn out. It's a very odd thing to show on this sort of network. That's not even getting into how the professor/inventor at the Flying House is obviously Lupin the 3rd in exile, far from any barber.

(Today, Davey, Sally, and Goliath found a time machine in some old guy's cabin. They just watched different versions of themselves throughout time. No interference. Sure, the biblical David looked a lot like the contemporary one, but no one was trying to extract him from the embrace of Bathsheba.)

I've also been gobsmacked by Kids' Ten Commandments (K10C). If you saw The Prince of Egypt, you know from this formula (and I'm surprised that they don't appear to be related projects): teach the kids scripture using Disney-style songs and animation! In this case, the ten commandments are played out through little incidents amongst the Hebrews who followed Moses out of Egypt. And their talking animals.

Their. Talking. Animals.

One of whom has Jodi Benson's voice, I might add. Benson's a lamb. And a single mom, and an adulteress, but not all at the same time.

(When Goliath talks, it's pretty laid back. Not unlike the sorts of things we pretend that pets say to us. He doesn't concern himself with the affairs of the village, or concoct cockamamie schemes to retrieve the adulteress's brooch. He toils not, and neither does he spin. Much.)

They're pretty much going through the gamut of Potentially Recognizable Voice Actors Who Are Between Jobs, incidentally. The pseudo-Ashman/Menken score, the rotoscoped swing dancing, and the excessively fluid body language would all have dripped right off of me if it hadn't been for the voice cast, or Susan Blu's direction. Maurice LaMarche? Rene Auberjonois? John Schneider? And how did they not only manage to get Tim Curry, but steer around the obvious?

And, while we're on steer, did I mention the talking animals? Like, not the miraculous Balaam sort of ass, but farm animals and a bearded rat? There are conspiracies against anthropomorphic mice. There's a cocky, self-assured calf who gets asked to model for the golden calf idol. There's a balding camel. Achewood, this isn't, although the balding camel did make me pine for Cornelius Bear. I can't decide what's more sacrilegious: post-Eden talking animals (who, admittedly, aren't trying too hard to talk to the people) gossiping about Moses, or time-traveling kids trying to mess with the course of Scriptural events.

Actually, no, neither of these things. It's the rotoscoped swing dancing.

I mean, people. Dance about if you must. Sing your theological lessons if you must. But there comes a point where even the most banal Western village is preferable, and that point is where Tim Curry's angular character is smoothly dipping some vacuous harlot in front of the golden calf.

(I could get into Bibleman, but that's for another time. When I've seen more Bibleman. If there's one thing we feel strongly about at Websnark, it's that we should have lots of data to hand when we go off about superheroes.)

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 1:34 AM | Comments (64)

October 7, 2005

Eric: An observation.

Nicholas Cage has gotten a lot of press because he named his son "Kal-El Cage." People are mentioning how silly it is to name his son after a super hero.

That doesn't bother me.

I'm just stunned he didn't name the kid "Luke."

Sweet Christmas indeed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:46 PM | Comments (68)

Eric: Those Cinematic Moments, and how Star Trek's lost the ability to do them.

As a note of warning, this post contains spoilers for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: Nemesis. I probably don't need that spoiler warning -- the statute of limitations has long since expired on four of these movies, and even the fifth is now three years old. However, while I sincerely doubt there are any surprises left on the first three movies for anyone who'd be coming to Websnark in the first place, only twenty-seven people saw Star Trek: Nemesis in the continental United States, and it might well be on someone's "I should really see that before I die" list, so, you know. There it is.

Oh, and I spoil some of Star Trek: The Next Generation, too. Just to say.

Oh, and the last episode of Babylon 5.

In Wednesday's post on Serenity spoilers, yesterday, she made mention of the fact that for some people the movie had events or moments on a level with Star Trek II or The Empire Strikes Back. She wasn't referring to those movies as a whole, of course. She was referring to the "holy fuck" gut punch moment of the movie. "Luke, I am your father!" "I have been, and always shall be your friend." Shocks that reverberate through you. (I don't know what the nature of such shocks might or might not be in Serenity, mind. This isn't about that.)

I found it interesting to think about, though. Frankly, The Empire Strikes Back, while my favorite of the Star Wars films, failed to have that intense a shock for me. I remember sitting in the movie theater back in 1980, twelve years old and full of wonder. I remember digging on Yoda and Dagobah, and I remember being impressed with Cloud City and thinking that Leia should be with Luke, not that smuggler. (Hey, it was years before they played the incest card, and besides, I was twelve.) I remember thinking that hey, you mess around with another man's girl, you get frozen in carbonite.

Regardless, I was completely hooked.

And then Vader shouted "Luke! I am your father!"

And I thought "oh, now that's just stupid. What is this? The Young and the Restless?"

Sorry. I was an opinionated kid. Still, given that (and given that Leia was Luke's sister), it really didn't surprise me that teddy bears could soundly defeat the Empire while our heroes stood around, got shot, and failed to do anything of significance to the main battle while fighting Vader on the Death Star. I mean, sure, why not?

Star Trek II, on the other hand? Devastated me. There was an intensity to that death scene that became literally a part of cinematic history. The entirety of that movie built to that one, shocking moment. In a movie that on one level was about growing old, growing up, and letting go of the past (seriously -- it was Khan's inability to let go that led to his ultimate destruction and the destruction of all his followers, even though -- as Joachim said -- he had already won, and had a ship, and could do whatever he wanted. At the same time, the death of Spock gave Kirk a new chance at life -- and a chance to feel renewed and young, once more, even as David let go of his anger and pain at Kirk, and so on and so forth -- hell, even the Genesis Device itself was a symbol of letting go of the old and creating new life!), this was the ultimate moment of ending. Spock wasn't just dying -- he was letting Kirk know he had to move on. I still tear up when I see it, even though I've seen all the sequels. Even the crappy ones.

As a side note, I felt similarly when Enterprise burned up over Genesis in Star Trek III. We had tremendous emotional investment in that ship.

So. You'd like me to get somewhere near the point, right?

Well, I was one of the twenty seven people who saw Star Trek: Nemesis. And if you haven't seen it, let me clue you in. (See, I told you there was a spoiler warning.) Data dies. Horribly. He leaps across the gulf between the Enterprise and the bad guy ship, crawls inside, finds the captive Picard, slaps a plot sensitive macguffin emergency transporter on him, sends him back to the Enterprise, and then dies as the ship explodes.

Now, Data was, without a doubt, the Spock of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The most popular character after Picard. The character with the most depth added to him over time. The character the writers lavished all the experience points on during the series. Seriously -- every third episode was Data finding a new friend or Data learning how to dream or Data having to fight for civil rights again (my favorite was the attempt to classify Data as Starfleet property, so he could be disassembled -- despite the fact that Starfleet never built him in the first place, and that if he was anyone's property it would be the estate of Noonian Soong), or the emotion arc. Dear Christ the emotion arc. Contrast that with poor Geordi, who was played by an actor who'd won awards long before this (and who was considered to be slumming by taking the job in the first place). I think there were... what, three Geordi centered episodes in the series? Four, maybe? Reg Barclay got more episodes devoted to him.

Every one of the Next Generation movies had significant Data subplots (Insurrection the least such, mind, but it was still there). Jonathan Frakes was top billed after Patrick Stewart and whatever major guest stars were in a given movie in each of the films (a relic of his Next Generation contract) but Brent Spiner was clearly the most significant returning character in each of them. Gates McFadden, on the other hand, might as well have just sent a photograph in, for all they gave her to do. Clearly, the thought was the fans would have a maximum sense of investment in Data, and his death would be Spock's death for a new generation.

(Also, similarly to Leonard Nimoy at the time, Brent Spiner wasn't all that interested in continuing to play his electronic counterpart, and was having trouble 'not aging' as time went on. So there were pragmatic reasons to do such a thing.)

And so, Data died.

And no one cared.

Hell, it seemed like the Enterprise crew barely cared. There was a wake, which featured (surprisingly enough) some fine acting by Jonathan Frakes, but the scene seemed perfunctory -- of less significance than Riker and Troi leaving the ship. And of course, there was a scene before where Data's memories and brain patterns were put in the prototype B-4 in an effort to "force him to evolve," despite the fact that this would be like taking eighty gigs of a Windows XP install and loading it onto an IBM XT in hopes of forcing the 8088 to develop the ability to handle it. It was such an obvious and clear attempt on the part of the producers to have an out for Data's return that no one who actually saw the movie thought for a second Data was really gone.

This wasn't the first time such a thing had happened. When the Enterprise burned in Star Trek III, there was a powerful sense of history and endings that went with it. This was a ship that we loved -- a ship that Kirk loved. A mythology had built around it that was tremendous. (And the producers learned pretty quickly that it wasn't easy to replace.) When the Enterprise-D was destroyed in Star Trek: Generations, it was at best an exciting set piece and crash sequence, but even the characters didn't much give a damn. (Riker, once again, seemed to be the only one who even had wistfulness for the ship's being destroyed. Maybe Riker is just a big softy at heart.)

So, setting aside the fact that Rick Berman has no actual poetry in his soul, why is it that the most powerful and evocative moments in Star Trek, when replicated by the Next Generation crew, fail to inspire even slight interest?

Well, for one, there's the sheer banality of how they went about it. As was said, when Spock died in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, it supported the underlying themes of the movie as a whole. Things die. New things are born. Those who let go of the past can move on. Those who can't stagnate and die. Joachim's sacrifice led to Khan's death. Spock's sacrifice lead to Kirk's life. And the Enterprise died -- a painful, horrible sacrifice -- to turn death into (in the words of Leonard McCoy) a fighting chance to live, harkening back to the central themes of the previous movie. These events and sacrifices had weight, because the movies gave them weight, and built successfully off the series. It wasn't enough that Spock was a beloved character -- his death still needed meaning, and still had to have pain.

Next Generation pulled this off once, weirdly enough. When Tasha Yar died in the epitome of the meaningless death scene, there was a far more evocative wake. And her death caused ripples through the rest of the series. Data kept his holocrystal of her, and their shared intimacy continued to matter. We met Yar's sister, and that sister's failings contrasted with Tasha to the point that it hurt even more that Tasha was gone. With "Yesterday's Enterprise," Yar was returned in an alternate timeline, and in learning her death was meaningless specifically travelled on a suicide mission to the past in search of that meaning. And that in turn meant she was alive to give birth to Sela.

In Generations, the Enterprise-D was destroyed for no good reason. Mostly, it was so they could design a really bitching Enterprise-E, one without all those stupid kids and families on board and have it be entirely designed to be a kickass warship without exploration (seriously -- they said as much, in the voice of Picard. The Enterprise-E was designed to be able to fight Borg, not explore the galaxy). That palpable sense of extraneousness -- that lack of dramatic purpose in the Enterprise's destruction -- reinforced to the fans watching that they weren't really supposed to care.

Remember, we're discussing Star Trek fans -- the ur-fan. The archetype for obsessive fans who care. Teaching them not to care was not a survival strategy.

Then, on top of that, we had the last series that truly invested in its characters and set that way -- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- end. Star Trek: Voyager began, and managed to inspire... well, no real passion from anyone. The continuing sense that maybe we just shouldn't care continued, day after day, show after show, movie after movie.

Of course, those fans do continue to care -- just not about Star Trek. They're the ones who cried their eyes out when Babylon 5 was destroyed in "Sleeping in Light" (right there was a textbook definition of how to make your audience care. The visuals, the music, the buildup). They're the ones who, when Joss Whedon said "please don't spoil Serenity for other people" took him at his word and took it as a commandment. They're still out there.

But they don't feel that passionately for Star Trek any more.

So, Data died -- in an even less meaningful and more... well, stupid fashion than the Enterprise-D did. Seriously. He had to die because he only had one magical transporter device, and he gave it to Picard instead. Now, forget for just a moment that the idea that Data -- a functionally immortal being who was the only representative of his race -- clearly was a higher priority to keep alive than Jean-Luc Picard, who was a great Starfleet officer but who's only got a few decades left in him anyway, and will no doubt die just like this somewhere down the line, unless the Space-Senility gets him as was presaged in "All Good Things." Forget that, and focus on the magical transporter device he only had one of.

Guys, he'd had that singular device for most of the movie. And every fifteen feet there's a magic box on the Enterprise that makes exact duplicates of things. They even call it a replicator. Data knew Picard was over there, he knew that they'd both need a way back, and it's not like we've ever seen a replicator take more than eighteen seconds to make anything in the past. What the fuck?

For that matter, he died because he shot the Macguffin with a phaser, blowing everything up. But he'd already made one leap into space, and there was no one left alive to stop him from doing anything. So why not take out the phaser, set it to overload, run down through the ship retracing the path with your super Android memory and your super Android speed, and leap back out into the black before the bomb went off? Why? Because then Data wouldn't die, and the point was Data had to die.

Naturally, no one cared.

And of course, a complete copy of Data's brain is in B-4, all Spock/Katra like. So either B-4 will magically have his processors become Data-capable somewhere along the line and "oh, hey, Data," or someone will get the bright idea to copy those files back out of them, load them into any random Starship's computer, and then recreate Data's body on the Holodeck.

Of course, the Holodeck gives us a good reason why no one in Starfleet gives a damn that Data's dead. Seriously, the point was sentient artificial life, and now they do that so trivially there's a Ferengi bar owner who has a sentient 1960's lounge singer. Why would anyone bother with android tech now that they have "photonics?"

So, after seven full seasons and four feature length films, the death of the character with the most development, the greatest time and energy put on his growth, the most importance placed upon him and the most focused investment by both producers and fans was met with abject indifference. Far from being "a Star Trek II" moment or a "Empire Strikes Back" moment, it couldn't even compete with the emotional resonance and long term repercussions of the death of Tasha Yar twenty two episodes after we first met her.

So. We have Firefly now. And Babylon 5. And Battlestar Galactica, of all things. And Stargate. They're where the emotional investment is going. They're keeping the faith. And Star Trek? It's off the air for the first time since the 80's, with no chance of it coming back any time soon, and while they're supposedly working on another movie, no one's sure why. Certainly I don't want them to. If they have to, I'd want it to be about Sulu's Excelsior before, you know, George Takei gets too old to play the part. (Or give Chekov the Enterprise-B. I'd pay seven bucks to see Chekov in the center seat.)

This is how you end a franchise. Not with a whimper and not with a bang, but with a bang that everyone treats like a whimper.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:49 PM | Comments (44)

October 6, 2005

Wednesday: Later, they found Augustus Gloop in the ship's communal toilet.

There is not a lot of point in another blogger reviewing Serenity at this stage of the game. Either you've seen it by now and you know what happens, or you haven't seen it and you Don't Want Any Spoilers (making any review either pointless or necessary to avoid). Or you just don't care, and you want everyone to shut up about it already.

Mostly, it comes down to the spoiler problem.

The film was screened extensively for fans, from rough cut to final edit, for the past several months in various English-language territories. An unusually devout Browncoat (or, failing that, a particularly keen fan of all things Joss Whedon) could possibly have traveled to see this film a multitude of times before the North American wide release. That release, alongside the Australian one, was last week. The London premiere was Wednesday, and it went wide across the UK Thursday.

Now, despite not having attended any of the screenings (not, I assure you, out of any lack of desire to attend), I've been spoiled for Serenity since about a day after the first workprint fan-preview. This was intentional. I have certain weird fragilities around given types of imagery in films and on TV, and I tend to take the sorts of tricks that Whedon routinely pulls with his characters quite badly as well.

(It started young. As a kid, I saw Star Trek III before Star Trek II. I knew what happened to Spock from books and Trek IV, wanted the reassurance that he'd be okay -- look, I was pubescent and crushed out on Leonard Nimoy -- and still spent hours pretty much shredded over seeing the death scene played out in flashback at the start of III. It depressed me for a week. You don't want to know what I was like for a month after seeing Tasha Yar take it in the face from an oil slick.)

There are enough unpleasant surprises in the real world that I'm not real big on them in my entertainment. Knowing what happens makes it easier for me to enjoy and/or appreciate how these things unfold, and the specifics are never anything like how I imagined them, anyway.

Now, I won't say that I had to look particularly hard to find spoilers. But, if I didn't already know where to look, I'd have been pretty much screwed going into Serenity.

I'm amazed at how effectively the no-spoiler pact has worked until now. I'm sure there's been a few nasty people, or that there've been some slipups by now, but I'm not aware of any particular backlash. You didn't have Browncoats needing to sign NDAs in order to attend screenings; Whedon just asked them, politely, not to be jerks. So, by and large, they weren't. Official PR didn't take the tone of, say, the Harry Potter series (and let's not get back into the tussle from a few months ago, okay?), whereby the publishers deem the Magical Sense of Wonder and Revelation to be such a matter of entitlement that potential leaks are generally addressed, not through politeness, but via legal sanction.

I'm particularly impressed that it's kept up into this week. This is the part where I harp on again about having grown up in Canada, and living in England now. Even in these days of near-simultaneous releases, we still end up waiting a week or two for films to come out here, and anywhere from two weeks to four months for television series to filter over. Let's not even start on certain types of book. It wasn't that long ago that we'd have to wait two to six months for a movie, sometimes longer, and up to a year for a TV show to make it across the ocean. Never mind the gap between British cable and terrestrial broadcasts. (Canada had the benefit of nearby American cable, but that didn't always work.) I am far too accustomed to waiting around for genre entertainment to come out, only to pop online and find a predominantly American fan base blithely discussing whatever, because, well, everyone's seen it by now, right? (Babylon 5 fans might recall a nasty period on USENET where some episodes ran in Britain first, and the spoiler rules only turned out to apply to when the shows first ran in the US for some reason.) I'm not suggesting that everyone who lives outside the US is as jaded -- or blunted -- as I am by now, but there's only so long you can spend either having to keep to isolated, regional online fora or just deal. Eventually, that kind of good will comes as a surprise.

I don't think it's revealing anything to suggest that, for many who've seen and enjoyed Firefly, Serenity has an impact not unlike that of Trek II or Empire Strikes Back. (I also don't think it's revealing anything to observe that, as good as the film is, much of it is probably wasted if you don't have the prior context as a result. I attended the movie with several friends, some of whom were prepared and some of whom were going in effectively cold; we pretty much saw two completely different movies.) I'm really impressed that it's possible to pull this off, now, across international markets, under circumstances which you'd think would completely kill that potential for most properties.

I don't think that this should be seen as something unique to Browncoats, either. I'm kinda hoping that other franchises can learn to trust their fanbases, and politely ask them not to be jerks, either.

Now, having said all that: while we don't normally take heroic anti-spoiler measures here at Websnark, we also very rarely have a situation like this one. Not just with regards to the Browncoat community trust agreement, either: I've seen a major American science-fiction film release before Eric's had the opportunity. Eric is still working through Firefly. Now, it's up to him whether or not he finishes the series off before he hits Serenity, but I've strongly recommended to him that he not go in without at least the series context.

He'd like the impact undiminished. And I'd like for him to see the movie I saw.

Comments to Websnark posts? Go to our mailboxes.

So, just this once, for now, I'm asking a favour of you guys. One that's out of character for me, and one I'm hewing to as well. (Even though I don't want to. Even though I'd really love to write something about River tonight.) Please: don't post Serenity spoilers in any comments thread here until one of us has sounded the all-clear, okay?

Thanks.

Y'all rock.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:42 PM | Comments (66)

October 4, 2005

Wednesday: When you're lost out there and you're all alone, a light is waiting to carry you home.

Now, this isn't about Serenity, and this isn't about Orson Scott Card. The latter, y'all have talked about here, and the former, well, it doesn't come out here until Thursday.

But it is about a thing that Orson Scott Card declared, while reviewing Serenity:

Play it safe. Stay home. Watch reruns of Full House. That was a really funny, heartwarming TV series and it's just a shame the kids have all grown up and now we can never have the feature film with the original cast.

Naw, man! Full House embraced the aging of its kiddie cast. We can totally do this. Besides, if Growing Pains managed a reunion special despite Kirk Cameron's overwhelming commitment to The Way of the Master, there's no reason why a series with Candace Cameron Bure couldn't pull it off.

Okay, you're not going to get stasis, but Full House didn't even have stasis! As the kids got older, they handed their sketchy personalities down to the next cuddly child on the cute chain, so as to simulate growth and change. When they ran out of kids, Jesse and Becky were even kind enough to generate two fresh receptacles! Okay, they were boy receptacles, but it's not like they weren't being raised female. Just look at them.

The trick, of course, is going to be falling off the top of that cute chain. The sequence works like this:

• Anne Geddes model baby
• Precociously witty, yet innocent child
• Dulled, slightly bitter tween
• Bland, overachieving teenager with socially acceptable rebellious streak
• Wholesome, yet vaguely quirky adult

You don't deviate from this sequence in the Tanner house. It's just not done. Rebecca? Wholly assimilated. Total brood mare. Danny's failed relationship with Vicky? Joey's erratic love life? Those women just weren't good enough to learn the Tanner way, not like Joey. Kimmy Gibbler? An outsider. You know that she was only ever, at best, tolerated in the Tanner household. Did you notice how, when everyone else was getting lovebombed, they just told her to go home?

Yeah. You know how it goes. She asked too many questions. Go home, Kimmy.

So, the problem is, the kids have grown up. As they've followed the cute chain and adopted the roles appropriate to their ages, the Tanner house has gotten top-heavy. At best, Michelle is now a bland and overachieving teenager, and the twins are sullen. (And probably slightly dysphoric, but that'll be resolved in 21 minutes.) It's incumbent upon the house to find new members, and thus revive the chain. Ideally, they need to be diversifying, only permitting conceptions on a prescribed schedule. This way, the chain flourishes, and doesn't become overburdened at either end.

You can have managed conceptions in this setup, too. Consider: no one ever really leaves the Tanner house if they've been accepted into the family. If we learned one thing from the final episodes, it's that true Tanners are, in a way, tied to their real home. Karmically tethered. Bound, almost. They don't ever really want to leave.

So, if everyone still lives there, bringing their spouses or other close, helpful relationships into the arrangement, really, it'd be a pinch to handle supervised conception. Insemination becomes much easier when you have a whole family to pitch in and help make the fertility awareness method a smooth and easy thing. Everyone's so helpful.

"Ten-thirty on Tuesday the 24th, DJ! Time to boink!" And so winks Rebecca.

Jesse, of course, will play appropriate music. Live.

Now, it's entirely possible that DJ has settled down with Viper, Nelson, or (quite likely, really) Steve. Michelle will be experimenting with relationships, but may or may not be deemed ready to actually contribute to the chain. What about Stephanie? She's something of a weak link. Dulled and sullen doesn't really work with the Tanner way, but it's apparently something of a necessary phase. She stayed there too long, though. It's easy to wonder how much of a placeholder she was for Michelle, really, who managed to hold onto precocious wit for a far longer timespan. So far, we don't know if those familial ties can be severed -- everyone who's left didn't really belong anyway. Who's to say?

And who's to say that Rebecca can't help out some more? She's got stamina. She's had twins.

Now, adoption could certainly be a consideration. The problem there is timing; you can't necessarily guarantee your schedule is going to work out in the event of paperwork problems, and then the chain falls out of sync again. Also, we've already demonstrated that the male Tanners have a hard time bonding with those who aren't blood kin. Rebecca and Joey are very much exceptions here; Rebecca was easily subverted, and Joey got in on the ground floor. Joey and Danny have demonstrated that they have difficulty keeping a potential mate around long enough to conceive, let alone have children. Female Tanners have the advantage of not needing to keep their mate around in order to bring a child to term and raise them within the house.

No, I think you could have quite a compelling Full House film with the original cast as they currently stand. There's absolutely no reason not to follow the delightful escapades of this warm, inclusive family to their logical conclusion.

You know. The one where Danny Tanner wanders down to the tattoo parlour.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:02 PM | Comments (43)

September 29, 2005

Wednesday: He also looked an awful lot like Dave Broadfoot, later on. I just noticed that today.

Writing about famous, recently dead people with whom one is not acquainted is a bit on the tricky side.

Pigeonholes make rotten gravesites. Of course, you're in something of a quandry anyhow, going down this road; what do you know this person for? Chances are it's for one high-profile job. You're somewhere around Barstow, at the edge of the desert, when the tri-ox begins to take hold. Suddenly, there's a terrible roar, and the sky is full of caped guys flying out of their wheelchairs, all swooping and screeching and diving around your car, which is going a hundred miles an hour towards the Experience down in Vegas. And you hear a voice reciting the lyrics to London Calling. Over and over and over again. And you'd like to call for help on the shoe phone, or possibly the finger phone, or the coconut phone, but you figure there's no point in mentioning this to anyone. Penny's probably blogged it all by now anyways.

Which brings us to Jerry Juhl, who died this past Monday from cancer complications.

Some of you are going, "Who?" Stop that. Right now.

Juhl was the writer behind an incredible quantity of Muppet material. He started out more or less behind the puppets -- covering the pregnant Jane Henson on Sam and Friends, co-piloting the LaChoy Dragon, and such -- but found his strengths were better suited to writing. He co-wrote most of the cinematic Muppet movies; he worked on specials like The Muppet Musicians of Bremen and Hey, Cinderella!; he wrote for shows like Fraggle Rock, The Jim Henson Hour, and Sesame Street. Second head writer on the Show. Creative producer on the Fraggles. He worked on the Meeting Films. His fingerprints -- his handprints -- are all over the Muppet oeuvre. His involvement with the Muppets predates even that of Frank Oz.

(Also? He worked on The Cube. That's versatility right there.)

Untangling specific moments where you can point and say, "Juhl did that bit right there," isn't easy. You can cover how profoundly he influenced the core Show characters out of the gate, but things start getting slippery beyond that. It's not all down to the usual problem of a group effort getting chiefly attributed to a single driving force, which you get a lot of with the Muppets and Jim Henson in anything coming out after Henson's death. (Henson was charismatic and very hard-working, but he was never a Joss Whedon.) Even before that, though, the emphasis on documenting Muppet lore has very often been with the performers and technical staff. This is fair enough, since that's the sort of material fans tend to be after, but this makes learning about the very tangled writing process for all of the Muppet projects a bit frustrating. Right now, for example, I'm having a really hard time turning up an obscure note on Gonzo's early history.

No, not Muppets From Space, the script for which was Kirk Thatcher's instead of Juhl's at the end of the day. Before that.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume I saw it in Of Muppets and Men, a book I read into the ground as a child and would perform terrifying acts of derring-do to own today. (Our family begged the local library to let us just buy it and have done with it. I'd have it on constant renewal, for months at a time, until the librarians would yank it forcibly back and beat me with novelty clubs.) I'm positive it turned up in magazine articles from the era as well, and possibly in passing during documentaries. (My R2 disc of the accompanying special is in another country. I can't check that particular one right now.)

We know that Gonzo's chicken fancying comes from an ad-lib Dave Goelz made concerning passing poultry: "Nice legs, though." His nature, though, was never so clear. Up until Muppets From Space, he was a "whatever" or a "weirdo." If you asked further about this, though, it'd come down to Gonzo's mother.

No, we don't know what Gonzo's mother was. But we knew what one of her pastimes was, while she was pregnant with him.

Gonzo's mother enjoyed sitting in the Nevada desert. She enjoyed watching the pretty lights in the beautiful night sky.

The pretty lights from the nuclear testing.

That informed Gonzo for me, growing up. My family didn't care for him so much -- too bizarre, too flagrant -- but, once I realized exactly how you end up looking like a tweaking Grover with a twisted beak, I had no issues at all. He fell into place for me. And if he wanted to run away to Borneo to launch his Bollywood career, or swing with semi-anthropomorphized hens, hey, great. When the kids at school are throwing rocks at your head for whatever's wrong with you this week, and no one's bothered to show you an X-Men comic? Muppet mutants are pretty compelling stuff.

But I can't remember whose idea that was. Goelz? Juhl? Chris Langham? I want to say Juhl, obviously, to point to that and a slew of other character details and say, "he did that." I could probably do that with Fraggle Rock if I had the interviews from the R1 series 1 boxed set to hand, but I don't have them, either.

Which is probably missing the whole point of writing about what Jerry Juhl did for the Muppets. Reading interviews with him, you get the sense of a very communal workflow which he worked hard to shape and direct. (This is, of course, the way of television, but one gets the impression it was much more so.) Pointing to moments becomes an exercise in playing with one of those weiner-shaped water balloons, the ones which are all wrapped in upon themselves and slip out of your hands when you squeeze them with any force.

The Muppets are in a curious state these days. Recent and upcoming video releases have the old material in sharp focus, but new developments are a bit alarming. The team suffers from a certain amount of attrition and flux. Richard Hunt died two years after Jim Henson. Many of Frank Oz's characters have been handed over to Eric Jacobson, and a number of Henson's have been split between Bill Barretta and Steve Whitmire; Barretta is now going through the same mastery process it took Whitmire considerable time to deal with, with more key characters at once. If you had the principal credits from anything up to Manhattan stashed away in your head, something's going to give if you look at them today. Even as Kermit prepares a fiftieth anniversary world tour (and, make no mistake, I'll go and find him in whichever major city I can reach), the Muppet Holding Company are auditioning new puppeteers to play the original cast on cruises and at theme parks. No matter how one feels about the state of play these days, it becomes increasingly obvious that one needs to cherish what one had. They're building on a legacy, but they're still starting somewhat from scratch.

Boiling Juhl's work down to a soundbite would be a disservice. He was woven all through the Muppets. He doesn't have that one first book, or that one unforgettable role, or that one song. With his stuff, you just can't point at all; you have to make broad, sweeping gestures with your arms.

And you'll look really silly when you do that, too. "He did that!" you say, swooping dramatically. And then you fall over, possibly down a flight of stairs. With cakes.

And that? That's the right thing to do, right there.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:01 PM | Comments (16)

September 24, 2005

Wednesday: Also, the CAP Alert guy accuses Piggy of "gamming." Unfortunate pun, really.

So, I'm talking to Eric. I'm not sure how it happened that he confessed unto me the egregious sin of not having seen The Muppets Take Manhattan, but there it was. Shaaaaaame on him.

He tried to placate me. "I did see Muppets In Space," he said.

"Muppets From Space," I replied.

This man needs education. I think that you should know that.

Anyhow. The salient point is that we're now confused about what makes Muppet cross-species romance acceptable in some situations, but freaks us out in others. While trying to sort out what other films or specials Eric might not have seen, we realized that the coupling of Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog is something we just take for granted, but Gonzo's relationship with Camilla still verges on the distressing (and, in point of fact, it has been rather heavily downplayed over the years). "That's different. They're never going to breed," asserted Eric.

What of The Muppet Christmas Carol? "Those kids are adopted. Robin's one of them."

What of the pig daughters? Look at those eyes. Those are frog eyes. Those are little figs. "True. Although those could be contacts. They're Miss Piggy's children; they'd be taught the value of accessorizing."

I throw it open. Is it the power of denial? Is it whether or not the Muppets in the pairing register to us as human? Camilla doesn't speak, although she communicates well and she plainly understands English. Does this make her a little less easy to identify with? Or is it just Gonzo's initial carnality (and, to some extent, promiscuity -- for a while, their relationship was at least somewhat open, if fraught with jealousy) that's bothersome?

Also, why are we willing to excuse the fact that, charming as she is, Piggy's an abusive spouse?

Are chickens just funnier, on average?

It's really no wonder Sam gets so het up. I'm surprised he lasted that long.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 3:02 PM | Comments (61)

September 22, 2005

Wednesday: I also don't understand arithmetic.

Sam the American Eagle would shake his head. So would Fozzie Bear.

Seriously. What kind of world is it where the fine boys at Penny Arcade sell Twisp and Catsby shirts, but the many did not buy them?

I am rife with confusion. Replete. Suffused. What the hey, people. It's just one more thing that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Up there with Lea Hernandez and Bill Mallonee not being superstars in their fields. And the CBC lockouts continuing apace, but more on that later.

(Also? Perl. I never could learn perl. As far as I know, perl is this thing that people do when they want to say to me, "Wednesday," they say to me, "you are a very silly woman who is addled with insufficient coffee. Everyone knows perl. Also, you should write a video card driver for X.")

Anyhow. How'd that happen?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:50 AM | Comments (17)

September 20, 2005

Eric: I don't suppose anyone at Fox is interested in a modern fairy tale with jazz undertones? Anyone? Anyone? Damn.

(From You Damn Kid!)

Okay , it's official. I'm surprised. And we now officially have a frontrunner for "biggest story of the year in Webcomics," and -- with all apologies to Owen Dunne -- I never expected it to be You Damn Kid.

For those who don't know, Dunne's comic strip -- which has been running since 1999, and is a perennial favorite of the people who recommend comics to me -- has been optioned for development by 20th Century Fox Television.

What does that mean?

Well, first off, it means a pretty decent payday for Dunne and for Keenspot. I don't know how decent a payday, but I do know a thing or two about how much development companies pay for short story rights, and it could easily be six figures. In the writing world, significant optioning is the long green, and this is about as significant an optioning as we could imagine.

(It's also possible that they didn't get six figures. Or even five. We literally have no idea, and that's not going to change. But let me dream for a minute, okay?)

Secondly, it means it's possible that a Keenspot comic might -- might -- end up on Fox. That's network. And that's huge.

We know Fox is very interested in animation right now. We know that Fox felt burned by Cartoon Network/Adult Swim successfully marketing Family Guy when they let it languish, and we know that they've started a lot heavier interest in animation. We also know that Adult Swim gets demographic numbers that makes the people at The Late Show With David Letterman weep.

At the same time, 20th Century Fox Television doesn't equal Fox. They could just as easily develop You Damn Kid and try to sell it directly to Adult Swim. Or, for that matter, to G4 (which has been pushing for late night Adultswimish humor to try and get some of that sweet demographic). Or to whoever might want to buy.

Or, the development might stall out. Or a pilot might get made and might not sell. Or a lot of things. A lot more shows get optioned than made.

Now, if You Damn Kid gets made and put on the air in network, that's monumental. That's life changing. If it's a hit, then suddenly a whole lot of webcomics could get serious interest in them -- our corner of the media suddenly becomes a place for inexpensive mining for potential hit shows. But even if You Damn Kid never gets made, this is huge news for Keenspot.

You see, according to the information we have (and Dunne has confirmed it), it's Keenspot that negotiated the option. So... for a couple of years now we've know that Keenspot's been shopping strips around. And there's been some laughter about the subject.

Only now, they've done it. And it's a truism that your second sale is a lot easier than your first. Suddenly, Keenspot has credibility in the development cycle. Certainly, if You Damn Kid goes somewhere, it's going to be easier for the Crosbys to successfully option other Keenspot strips.

Suddenly, being on the 'Spot has a potential for, as stated, long green. And, while a hit cartoon based on a webcomic will be good for webcomics in general (I can see G4 suddenly hungry for Penny Arcade, or Adult Swim really wanting PvP or Something Positive, just to throw a few common names out), it's going to be a bonanza for Keenspot and for strips on Keenspot.

The next year is going to be very, very interesting.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:33 PM | Comments (62)

September 17, 2005

Wednesday: If Ray seduces any of them over the phone, I'm going to cry.

I started out tonight by being disappointed in The Trek Life, a cynical fan-niche comic strip. The characters are Star Trek fans having tepid, faintly amusing Trekkie experiences. The most remarkable thing about the strip is that it's Paramount-sanctioned; it looks for all the world like something they're going to try and pitch to newspapers once they've gotten some buzz out of the startrek.com placement. It does nothing that piles of other geek-subculture comics haven't already done, and usually done better. The poorly socialized protagonist isn't ironic enough to be resonant, but he's too bland to be offensive. And it's obviously a cash grab; there's already t-shirts, for crying out loud.

So, I went and had a look at the character profiles to see what they were setting us up for. (That link goes to the press release, actually; the gallery's in a popup. If you open the page directly instead, it tries to forcibly resize your window. So you're warned.) Got a couple of doughy, ordinary-looking guys. The slightly doughier one is more pathetic than the less doughy-looking one, and the less-doughy one has a bloatee. Okay.

I got to page three -- "Carl has made it his mission in life to catch Kate up on all things Star Trek, even if it means loaning her episodes from his growing DVD collection (with property damage insurance, of course)" -- and thought three things:

1. Wow. That's pink, all right.
2. Yeah, those are definitely some biouxbies up there. Stickin' out and everything. Yep. Those are some hooters.
3. She doesn't match the other two at all. She clearly leads a completely different lifestyle.

Why is this still happening?

We can complain all we want about the range of acceptable humour in geek-subcultural webcomics right now, the limits of characterization and plotting and gags available to female characters there compared to the male ones -- but that situation is improving somewhat. (It's not fantastic. It sucks that the solace there comes from the process existing at all. It angers me somewhat that geek males of all types can find some well-realized representation of themselves in webcomics right now, but women are still comparatively constrained -- and that we still have to think in terms of exceptions there. It pisses me off considerably that I could just cut and paste my Comixpedia article from last year and still have very little else to add. But that's also not the point today.)

Something this targeted and insipid, though, is only going to do what's well within the bounds of safety. I've got a hard time believing that someone -- several someones -- at Paramount didn't sit down, read PvP and Dork Tower and so on, and say to themselves, "Hey, how can we cash in on this 'online comic' lark without pissing off Joe Q. Eighteen-to-Thirty? He's just a regular guy doing the best he can. What about these comics would he like? What makes him uncomfortable?" And, don't get me wrong, that depresses me too.

But the two bland guys in your "Normal" Range of Trek Fans there? They don't have to be attractive. And that's just as problematic as Kate up there, really; why can't a hardcore Trek fan have luck with the ladies, for example, or be less doughy than the midrange fan, or have good hair and decent clothes? Why the hell is the tacit implication that, the less fixated upon Trek you are, the smaller you get, anyways? (Near as I can tell, the smaller I've gotten, the more serious I've been about Trek fandom, and vice versa. At the height of my little Deanna Troi fixation there, my ribs were showing!)

It's just depressing. These are the Generic Star Trek Fans, folks. That's the lowest common denominator; that's the safe, marketable, plush, baby versions right there.

Maybe they're aiming for Dilbert or FoxTrot readers here to some extent. I suspect, though, that The Trek Life, if it lasts that long, is more likely to end up resembling Cathy.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:28 PM | Comments (47)

September 5, 2005

Eric: Also? There is a psionic midget. I'm just saying.

A couple of people have written to me about my recent City of Heroes comic book post. Not the post on the recent video game update, mind. The post talking about Troy Hickman's first issue of the comic book. The people who wrote to me noticed that I put a lot of blame at the rather... depressive tone of the first three issues at Mark Waid's feet, but failed to do the same with Troy Hickman -- instead, I seemed to put the bulk of concern on Cryptic itself.

This is true. And it's true for a couple of reasons. The Waid issues seemed to follow a trend from other Waid materials, and the tone was so radically different than the earlier City of Heroes comic that it seemed to be Waid's influence primarily. However, the continuity of depressing 'role models' among the Freedom Phalanx seemed to take the onus off of Waid. And as for Hickman?

Hickman gets it. I know this, because I've read Common Grounds.

Common Grounds was an anthology series. It didn't really feature a single hero or hero team, so much as it featured a recurring setting which told several... well, largely non-violent stories about the kinds of people who became superheroes and supervillains. The hook was a chain of coffee shops and donut stores that seem like a cross between Dunkin Donuts and Tim Hortons (the donuts and the like reminds me of Dunkin D's, but the culture surrounding the shops reminds me of the sense of Canadian pride and community that surrounds the Canadian chain). These coffee shops were neutral ground, where heroes and villains could come in, sit down, drink coffee, eat donuts, relax and shoot the shit with each other. Highly powered bouncers were on staff to prevent fights from breaking out.

It's a relatively high concept, and it's the kind of coffee shop that a city like Paragon City would actually need -- after all, there are hundreds of superheroes running around every neighborhood in the city, not to mention roving packs of villains. It's almost certain they would need a place to kick back, relax and have a cruller or three.

Now, long time readers know I'm not particularly happy with the state of comic book super heroes. In a world where the Justice League is stealing plot points from the Gruenwald Squadron Supreme, where ex-wives of super heroes are killing off wives of other super heroes to win their man back, where rape and hate are par for the course and where the entirety of the Giffen/DeMatteis is subverted into a plot by normal humans (and murderers) to make super heroes subjects of ridicule, it seems to me that the core idea that super heroes are supposed to be heroes, idols for millions, and adventure stories which adults and children alike can enjoy has been totally lost. Many people have highlighted the watershed events of the eighties -- Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Miracleman, and even Crisis on Infinite Earths have led an increasingly post-modern and adult take in the nineties and the twenty-first century (including such clear successes as Marvels and Sandman) which, while yielding some great stories (as well as a ton of crap) also have meant that super heroes aren't simply 'not just for kids any more,' they're not for kids at all, these days. In particular -- the core concepts of the super hero... principles of justice, of honor, of truth, and of heroism for its own sake... are seen increasingly as either quaint or suspect. There must be something really going on.

Well, Common Grounds certainly counts as acting in this post modern tradition. The stories don't accept superheroes on face value. (It reminds me in a lot of ways of Astro City, but that's a different essay.) And yet, even cloaked in sophisticated storytelling... the stories all proceed from the core assumption that being a super hero is a positive thing.

Some of the stories are funny -- detailing a very human face among the heroes. Speaking as a fat guy who's struggling to get less fat, I found the Superheavyweights wonderful. Others are darker, but the dark stories never subvert the heroic principle. Sometimes, a person breaks under the strain. Not to spoil folks who haven't read it, but the story of a former hero who couldn't go on after someone died on his watch resonated hard -- because it was the kind of thing that would have been a given in the 70's, and it's the kind of thing that no modern hero thinks about in the twenty-first century. You have Superman and Batman who won't kill, but there are days they feel like they're it, and they're always seen as quaint because of it.

Hickman remembers the power of a hero who just wants to do the right thing.

There are two stories in the collection that contrast with the City of Heroes comic in question. One is a patriotic hero having to defend her values and choices to people who feel America has let them down, which compares to Statesman's general sense of fatigue. The difference was, even though American Pi -- who did in fact pull herself out of the gutter to become a heroine -- had her faith waver, she never let it go. Statesman one doesn't get the sense has that faith to begin with. And even as Sister Psyche goes through her laundry list of the ways she hates her life and powers, we compare that to Speeding Bullet, whose own life and powers is pretty old crappy. And yet through it all, the one thing that makes it work, the one thing that keeps him going is the fact that he helps people.

Troy Hickman gets it.

I could mention Charm and Strangeness and their discovery, and what it means to them and why it affects them as powerfully as it does. Or I could mention the bathroom talk, where even the villain mentions that hey -- he doesn't want to destroy the economy. Or the sheer joy that is Flamebelle's debut. But the point threatens to become redundant. While this story is firmly in the twenty-first century, it harkens back to Silver and Golden Age beliefs and attitudes without sacrificing the story that's being told. Grim and grittiness is acknowledged satirically if at all.

In a way, it strives to be as genre expanding -- as deconstructionist -- as Watchmen was in its time. But Watchmen, as Moore later acknowledged, did so destructively. Common Grounds, while not as groundbreaking a work, deconstructs the myth while also celebrating it.

This is why I don't blame Troy Hickman for the dour, bitter, cynical ultimate heroes of City of Heroes. Because Troy Hickman gets it. And the old man Statesman and Sister Psyche meet (and fail) in the comic? He gets it too.

So. I'm not a fan of the Freedom Phalanx, but as I've already promised in the comments of my last snark on the comic, I will read the rest of Hickman's run with an open mind. Because if Statesman and the rest aren't careful, he might sneak superheroic ideals into the comic when they least expect it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:26 PM | Comments (19)

August 29, 2005

Wednesday: The Longest Dash of All

Eventually, as with everything else, the time signals were corrected. Only not quite.

The National Research Council's official time signal is a venerable institution at CBC Radio One. It's been there ever since Radio One was just plain old CBC Radio (as opposed to CBC Stereo). It's probably older than I am. It's the one thing which was always guaranteed to work the same way forever (one of my most comforting memories is of my dad coming back from an NRC research trip, telling me he'd seen the time signal computer). Across Canada, at the same absolute time every day (with the announcement adjusted according to region, of course), the sound of the long dash following ten seconds of silence would indicate one o'clock, Eastern time. Ten o'clock, Pacific. Two thirty, Newfoundland. Your life would go to pieces, but the time signal would remain. The world might crumble, the oceans might rise, and the bombs might fall, but the National Research Council's official time signal would always follow up ten seconds of silence at the same time every day. Archaeologists would discover it, still ticking. Alien archaeologists. From another universe.

Not now. Now, it's one. One everywhere. Except Newfoundland, where it's one thirty. The last time I wrote about this, it was one thirty in Newfoundland several times a day -- the feed, shifted across time zones, was identical for everyone in Canada save for news reports. This, among other things, was a sign that the center simply couldn't hold at Toronto's broadcast centre; it was a rough, jagged edge.

It was the work of management, doing a job it was never meant to do.

The lockout of CMG-affiliated employees at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as I write this, is about to enter its fifteenth day. Management is prepared to settle in and do the work of producers, technicians, journalists and announcers for as long as it takes (just not very well), no matter the effect it has on public relations.

And they already have ensconsed themselves for the long haul. Radio One now isn't dissimilar to a relatively well-polished student station. The nasal, whining apology has become an almost pleasant, customized continuity voice between shows. The news reports are competent enough for people who don't do this sort of thing for a living; sometimes, the tapes run in the wrong places, or the announcers stumble, or the style guide seems to be an afterthought at best, but it's not egregious. It's not overwhelming. An iPod playlist shuffles through Cancon music for over twelve hours a day. Susan Marjetti and Rob Renaud, though lacking in significant chemistry or rapport, are at least technically comfortable behind the morning show controls at this point.

Put it this way: it's good enough for a random local station just trying to get by. The problem is, we're talking about the CBC here. "Good enough" simply doesn't fly. It doesn't work. It doesn't count.

The best example of this, so far, actually comes from television. Already, a CFL match has aired on CBC Television with no commentary whatsoever, just ambient stadium noise and a score counter in the corner. This didn't really impress the football fans.

Or the CFL.

And there have been more gaffes than that.

Even as Radio One (bafflingly!) dropped the Radio Overnight programming segments, all of which are sourced from overseas public radio services, they replaced World at Six with news from the BBC World Service. A similar move took place on CBC Television and Newsworld. The BBC's unions weren't particularly thrilled by this move -- the BBC itself didn't wish to be seen as taking a side, and the unions, if anything, sympathized with the CMG's desire not to have permanent positions largely superseded by casual contracts.

Much of Radio One's programming now consists of slightly aged reruns, which is fine from the casual listener perspective, but probably not long-term workable. In the afternoons, in place of Tetsuro Shigematsu's version of the Roundup, we're hearing 2003 editions of Richardson's Roundup. This didn't impress Bill Richardson, who stated his piece eloquently and succinctly in a Studio Zero podcast. He's angry -- "pissed off," actually -- that they've retroactively made him, the other people who worked on the Roundup, and those involved in other rerun CBC shows, into scabs. (To be fair, he does concede that the CBC is well within its rights to rerun these shows, since it owns them. But even so.)

And goodness only knows what Shelagh Rogers thinks of the Sounds Like Canada reruns. Probably not much; CBC Unplugged reports that Rogers is about to start her own podcast, touring Canada much as she did in the first incarnation of SLC. Difference being, this time, she's not simply talking to regular Canadians -- she's also going to the picket lines.

The podcasts from the picket lines have been one of the most remarkable aspects of this lockout. While Rogers may arguably be releasing the first of these to truly be accessible to casual listeners (others will undoubtedly follow), CMG workers across Canada have been hard at work getting their side of the story out and available this way. The CBC Unplugged feed is the second most popular one at Canada's iTunes Music Store (right behind CBC Radio 3, amusingly enough), and this is the best way to keep up with as much as possible if you only have so many hours in a day. While much of the podcast content has been preaching a bit much to the choir, that's fine at first; the troops need to support one another, and the early adopters from the outside are inevitably going to be those of us who are firmly behind the CMG's cause. There's been some argument that CMG workers shouldn't be putting their energies towards creating programming independently of the CBC, of course. I disagree; if these people can show us, show the CBC, show Canada, and show the world how brightly they can shine without the public broadcaster's support, I think they'll do a much better job of capturing the population's hearts.

And, really, it's not the devoted among us the CMG needs to captivate; we're already reading the blogs, scrutinizing Ouimet's entries, writing essays, writing letters, co-producing podcasts, and ironing things onto shirts. It is the casual listener, the alienated listener, the disillusioned listener, that they need; the satellite radio convert, the commercial television aficionado. They need Joe out in the middle of nowhere, who might not have cared for the CBC, but that's all his region's got.

They need everyone.

'Cause the CBC, the way it is right now? This just isn't going to work.

EDIT: Above and beyond the podcasts, Toronto's Metro Morning staff is moving to a community radio station. Meanwhile, negotiations resume on Wednesday.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:59 AM | Comments (11)

August 15, 2005

Eric: We should do a blogger's panel show. Wil Wheaton could host.

Weds and I chatted last night, and talked about our shared nostalgia for Canadian television and Canadian radio. (Or as she refers to it, "television and radio." I, being American, don't see it quite that way.) We're from opposite ends and sides of the St. John river, which means that the same way she got to see WAGM out of Presque Isle and WLBZ out of Bangor, I got to see CHSJ ("the New Brunswick Television system") growing up in Fort Kent, Maine. In any case, we both agreed that it was going to be a very CBC day here at Websnark.

I, naturally, can't speak to CBC Radio One at the moment. I'm not a daily listener like she is, and while I know from the National, it's been a while. And of course, Weds has much greater depth and knowledge of the subject, and can write about it better. However, the lockout has me feeling nostalgic, and so I'm going to throw in my own two cents about the CBC. For interesting and in depth analysis of the CBC, of the replacement managers, and of... well, stuff, go back and check Weds's stuff. Me? I'm going to talk about panel shows.

Oh, there's so much I could talk about, as a kid growing up and watching CHSJ as one of a very scant number of options in Northern Maine. I could talk about Casey, Finnegan and Mr. Dressup. I could talk about the Friendly Giant. Or the weird "Wizard of Oz" cartoons or the stop action puppet based "Adventures of Pinocchio." Or the sheer surreal pleasures of Barbapapa. But I'm not going to. There are better folks to talk about that. Weds is one of them.

But panel shows? I know from panel shows.

For those who don't know, a "panel show," on television and on the radio, is essentially a fake game show. I say 'fake,' because typically the people competing aren't actually getting any prizes -- they're the same celebrities or near-celebrities every week, perhaps with a 'guest star' or two. Oh, sometimes there's a person who's trying to trick them for some nominal prize, but it's hardly the same thing as a quiz show. In America, the seminal panel shows were To Tell The Truth, where the celebrity panel would try to figure out which of three people ("Number one -- what is your name please?" "My name is Rich Beetle." "Number two? What is your name please?" "My name is Rich Beetle...") is really the person described to them by the announcer, and What's my Line, where the panel asks questions to try and figure out what the guest's job is. There used to be a lot more of those panel shows on American television and radip -- I've Got A Secret, The Name's The Same, Information, Please, and many others -- but they all featured the same basic thing: an affable moderator and three or four affable and witty panel members, who brought wit and banter to somewhat banal problems.

To Tell The Truth and What's My Line clung to life the longest, but by the seventies and eighties, the panel show was more or less dead in America.

But not in Canada.

I remember a wonderful, cheesy as Hell panel show from my youth, over on CHSJ. It was called This Is The Law! It featured movie skit goofiness where a guy dressed up as some kind of policeman depending on where this skit took place watched a goofy actor pantomine something, generally innocently, and follow all of it up by walking up and putting a firm hand on the hapless crook's shoulder. To this day, I think of "putting a hand on a crook's shoulder" as the International Symbol for 'You're Booked, Punk.' Then, the panel would cheerfully debate what obscure Provincial law the hapless crook had broken. It was ridiculous and goofy and I loved it.

The seminal panel show on any television network -- even more than What's My Line or To Tell The Truth, was the very Canadian Front Page Challenge, of course. Pierre Berton, Gordon Sinclair and others served on a panel where they would question guests about what news story they were a part of. Once the news story was guessed, the panel (all journalists) would then interview the guest about the story and get in depth. It was the longest running panel show of all time -- and the longest running non-news CBC program -- going close to forty years in production. In fact, when SCTV did its absolutely brilliant satire of the CBC on one of its episodes (most notably by running the same Hinterland Who's Who segment seven times during the 90 minute episode), they threw in Front Page Challenge, including specific parodies of Berton, Sinclair, Betty Kennedy and others. It nailed it. Utterly nailed it.

Today, panel shows are mostly gone. You still hear them on the radio -- My Word was a British wordplay panel show until just recently, and it spawned the American public radio knockoff Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, but they're pretty well gone. The CBC doesn't even carry many any more, I'm led to understand. And that's sad to me, because in a way, it was a format uniquely suited to Canada, where a dry wit remains valuable and intelligence remains a popular hook for television.

That, by the way, might have been the panel show's undoing in America. Somewhere along the line, we stopped being entertained by funny smart people saying clever things. Somewhere else along the line, David Hasselhoff became a television icon. I'm not saying these things are related. I'm just saying.

Now, if you want me to compare brilliant Canadian shows with anemic American ones, liquor me up and get me comparing Saturday Night Live (of any era) and CODCO sometime. Now there was some hardcore funny.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:16 PM | Comments (37)

July 20, 2005

Eric: Requiescat in pace, Mr. Doohan

It's not fair to need to write two of these within twelve hours, but then life isn't fair, is it?

James Doohan passed away this morning, from complications from pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease. I hardly need to summarize his career -- if there's someone here who doesn't know from Scotty, I'm wondering how they managed to get the internet working in the first place, and what led them here in particular. And Doohan, for better or worse, had "Scotty" eclipse the rest of his career. When one saw him as the headmaster/commander in Space Academy, it hardly displaced the Chief Engineer from our mindset.

There are a lot of people out there who liked Scotty most of all, of the Star Trek cast. I was one of them. I think to a degree it's because Scotty wasn't overused -- he rarely had an episode devoted to him. The later Star Trek shows very specifically made themselves out as ensemble casts, which meant every season had to have a requisite number of Geordi episodes, Troi episodes, Data episodes and the like. I sometimes think a Star Trek series that was strongly about the ship's Captain and one or two crewmembers, with the rest of the cast clearly simply supporting characters, might make for a stronger show than, say, Voyager.

And here we are, writing a commemorative of James Doohan, and I've drifted onto a tangent about Star Trek: Voyager. This was Doohan's legacy and curse, in life. He is so identified with the show that one cannot separate the subject of him from it.

And yet, he found peace with that. According to CNN's obituary, Doohan complained to his dentist about his being typecast, all the way back in 1973. The dentist replied "Jimmy, you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you, I'd go with the flow."

"I took his advice," said Doohan, "and since then everything's been just lovely."

And he did. Guesting on the (not nearly good enough) Knight Rider reunion movie Knight Rider 2000, Doohan played himself. After being stunned with a sonic cannon, Doohan reverted to Scotty, incoherently babbling lines from the show in his trademark burr. On more and more shows, Doohan played cameos in that vein.

And yet, even as he embraced Scotty, he was the cast member of the original Star Trek most willing to stand up to William Shatner's ego. Many of the supporting cast members had grievances with Shatner -- recounted most tellingly, ironically enough, in Shatner's co-written book Star Trek Memories. And, when he had started conducting interviews with the cast, several admitted that they had decided not to cooperate with him at all. But every one of them relented -- telling him all the ways they were annoyed with him, but still willing to give in one last time. Takei, Nichols, Koenig... they all gave in.

Except James Doohan. And when Shatner publicized Star Trek Memories, he recounted that story time and again. I remember Arsenio Hall calling on "Scotty" to bury the hatchet.

But he never did. He stuck to his guns. He loved Star Trek and his fans, but thought William Shatner was arrogant and insecure, and he never changed his tune.

That's chutzpah. But Doohan always had that in spades.

He came to Boston University a number of times while I was there. My dear friend Robin was a part of the club that brought it in, and she was privileged to spend time with him on more than one occasion. As long as I've known her she's retold those stories again and again. Doohan was extremely nice, and gracious, and funny, and felt privileged to have dedicated fans.

I'm certain that somewhere, Robin's crying. I kind of want to too, though I never got to meet the man. It seems somehow unfair to me, though, that in a world where Shatner's getting Emmy nominations for a new series, James Doohan can die.

But like the dentist said... Scotty won't ever die. And I like to think of the last two times we saw Scotty. One was on the U.S.S. Enterprise-B, where Scott has (erroneously, admittedly) just seen Kirk die.

The other... is a Scott who is older, but still hale and healthy, being rescued from a transporter by the crew of the Enterprise-D, and who at the end is getting ready to fly out into a new universe, his zest for life reinvigorated. And that's the last we'll see of Mister Scott. He will forever be out there, tinkering with engines and tipping back ethanol and slyly convincing all those around him that he is a miracle worker.

And so long as that's true, he'll carry a little James Doohan with him too.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:36 PM | Comments (7)

July 19, 2005

Eric: Thoughts on Jim Aparo

Jim Aparo, who drew, inked and lettered literally hundreds of issues of Batman, Detective Comics, The Brave and the Bold, The Spectre, Batman and the Outsiders and the Outsiders has passed away at the age of seventy two, following years of semi-retirement and a bout with cancer.

Aparo was part of the same realistic school of art that Neal Adams was the most famous practitioner of. Aparo's figures were leaner than the rugged and muscular -- if realistically proportioned -- Adams heroes. You could get a sense that Aparo's characters really could exist in the world, especially when he drew his signature Batman characters.

His most famous comic was the infamous "Death of Robin" issue of Batman, where a jaded public in a publicity stunt voted to kill off Jason Todd, but for me -- despite my adoration of the early Batman and the Outsiders -- the seminal Jim Aparo issue was a Brave and the Bold that starred Batman (as always) and Sergeant Rock. Rock, who was getting on in years, was dressed in undress greens instead of his trademark fatigues and helmet. Which made sense -- it was the seventies, not World War II. And yet, somehow the older man who Batman was helping still conveyed the pure essence of Rock of Easy Company. It was the artwork that pulled it off. I seem to recall an issue of The Brave and the Bold that Aparo actually appeared in, too -- where he literally had to draw Batman's actions or they wouldn't happen, and disaster would strike. It was a pretty creepy issue, if I remember correctly.

Jim Aparo wasn't the kind of superstar that a Jack Kirby, a Steve Ditko or -- yes, indeed -- a Neal Adams were. He was a workaday craftsman who produced a finished page of comic art each and every day. And I mean a finished page. Like I said, he inked and lettered his own work. That's downright remarkable, if you think about it.

We live in a world where stylized comic book art has taken over from realistic. Whether looking at the exaggerated Bad Girl art, or the Image school, or even the beautiful -- but highly stylized -- Animated DCU work of Bruce Timm, you see a return to caricature. Jim Aparo didn't play that.

I'm going to miss him.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:25 PM | Comments (10)

July 14, 2005

Eric: On the Fantastic Four...

So, we went out last night, and I saw Fantastic Four. When I heard the movie was supposed to suck and suck hard, I actually got more enthusiastic about seeing it. I admit it, I love watching train wrecks, especially when they're comic book related train wrecks on the big screen. I'm holding out hope that I can score a copy of the original Corman film, too.

Well, having seen it -- and not putting much in the way of spoilers on it -- I can say definitively... it wasn't a train wreck.

Was it a great movie? No. Not even close. It's not in Spider-Man's league. Or either X-Men movie. I had a friend insist it was on a level with the original Tim Burton Batman movie to me, but I heartily disagree. The story was full of holes, but it was pretty to watch, the explosions were good, there was some good use of powers, and I actually thought the actors playing Our Four were pretty good, for the most part. Okay, Jessica Alba's role was paper thin, but that was more writing than Alba, really. She was introduced as a "Director of Genetic Research," and then proceeded to have absolutely no scientific dialogue.

Oh, the science in this movie: if you've so much as had Eighth Grade science, will hurt you. I mean, it's horrible, horrible science. My favorite (not really a spoiler) was the assertation that if fire exceeded 4,000 degrees Kelvin, it would go Supernova intense and set the Earth's atmosphere on fire and destroy all life on Earth. For those of you who don't know, 4000 degrees Kelvin is about 6740 degrees Fahrenheit. For the record, the Earth's core is (probably) significantly hotter than this, which means we apparently have a Supernova at the center of the planet. Who knew?

But you just kind of ignore that. The banter was good, Chiklis as Ben Grimm and the Thing was great (he looked so much like the original Kirby drawings of the Thing it's scary), Reed and Johnny were excellent, Sue was acceptable, Doom was... entirely unlike Doom, but meh. And it was a fun popcorn flick.

And without a doubt, Stan Lee's cameo was the role he was born to play.

So... why the unmitigated hatred? Why did Ebert one-star it? Why the monumental bad press for this film?

Simply put, the bar has been put very, very high. People expect more from Superhero films than they used to. Let's look at the three most significant superhero films of the past year: Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins, and The Incredibles. All three were heavy on story -- story that hung together incredibly well, that drove the plot (and the special effects) far more than the special effects drove the story. In each one, there was something more than punching and explosions and banter. We felt for Peter Parker. We were sucked into Bruce Wayne's story. Compared to those, Fantastic Four had the consistency and texture of tissue paper. One sneeze, and there was nothing left of it.

Doubly hard on Fantastic Four was The Incredibles, because the Parr family was clearly a pastiche on the Fantastic Four themselves, and the story and style was so many leaps and bounds above anything Fantastic Four tried that it's almost embarrassing to put them next to each other. And even if we completely step away from the questions of story -- the power uses of The Incredibles vastly exceeded anything Reed, Ben, Johnny and Sue tried in this film. Violet -- full of self-doubt and fear -- could so kick Sue Storm's ass it's not even funny. And Elasti-girl set the bar for stretching powers so high that poor Reed Richards shouldn't have bothered showing up to work.

(Yes, I know the Incredibles was animated -- but for all intents and purposes, so were all the super-power sequences of Fantastic Four.)

So... here's a movie that's not bad. A good popcorn flick. A high budget B movie. With explosions and Jessica Alba in her underwear (you knew that was coming, right?) and tiny tiny shreds of story that act to (barely) hold the set pieces together. And it's coming on the heels of a year when superhero movies have become story heavy, with innovation on all sides.

That's what's driven critical response, more than anything else. It wasn't bad -- it was just nowhere near as good as Batman Begins. It wasn't poorly done -- it just wasn't done nearly as well as The Incredibles. For better or for worse, Superhero Movies have gotten good -- and an okay superhero movie has significant trouble competing.

(And all the people who compare it unfavorably to Catwoman need to watch Catwoman again. Because that movie? Sucked.)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:51 AM | Comments (35)

June 19, 2005

Eric: Aeire was so totally right.

Right. It's official. Batman Begins totally rules.

I saw it with multiple friends, and then the still hanging out Weds and I went to Longhorn for dinner. There were multiple screwups, which caused the Longhornians to give us our dinner for free. This, despite the fact that said screwups were no big deal.

So, kickass Batman, kickerass Bruce Wayne, and free filet mignon.

Clearly, Wednesday has mighty powers of coolness.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:59 PM | Comments (35)

May 12, 2005

Eric: Can we get transforming jet powered motorcycles? No. But GOKU HAIR we can do...

Of all the technology posited by the vast and varied genres within manga and anime... we get hair care?

I guess this works differently from all the other hair styling products that make your hair all spiky and clumpy through... um... being... more expensive....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:29 AM | Comments (4)

April 24, 2005

Eric: It's LAPORTE POWER!

In an earlier snark, I talked about my disappointment with what G4's X-Play has become, and pined for the days of TechTV, based out of San Francisco, and really quite remarkable in what it did.

Well, Leo Laporte, along with several other alumni of TechTV's Screen Savers (including one who's actually still on Attack of the Show, which is the vapid replacement for TSS), has begun The Revenge of the Screen Savers Bleep, a podcast that does the kind of banter they used to do on the Screen Savers (and isn't exactly afraid to discuss what they think has happened to the home they once had). If you had any love for TechTV -- especially the old Screen Savers or Call for Help, you'd do well to go and have a listen.

(Cat Schwartz, who was a SS and Call for Help alumna as well, podcasts off her own website as well, but that podcast isn't as good. I'd like to hear Schwartz on ROTSS one of these weeks, though. I doubt they can tempt Morgan Webb into coming on, though if they did it'd be interesting to find out if she's supportive of the direction her career's gone in or not.)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:18 PM | Comments (1)

April 23, 2005

Eric: Still, Enterprise would be even better if someone had a Lion's Roar attack.

I'm a little rubbery -- I had a sandwich out at a food court which looked perfectly fine -- roast beef, some light cheese, tomato -- but which apparently had a big ol' sugar source in it (probably the dijon mustard was honey dijon, even though I specifically asked that it not be. Or perhaps the pickles were bread and butter instead of dill). That causes a reaction a couple of hours later which I'm still kind of getting over, so I'm a little foggy and shaky when I stand and stuff. Which isn't really relevant, because what I want to talk about tonight is Good Media Stuff.

First on the agenda is Kung Fu Shuffle Hustle¹, which was fantastic -- and extremely satirical. It didn't just satirize the conventions of Kung Fu legends and cinema -- it had a brilliant Matrix parody (sans computers and everything) in the middle of it all. Also, toads. And shouting. And a motorcycle chase without motorcycles. There was full on brilliance there, though the beginning had humor that was off timing just a touch.

On the other hand, it also had the dance number in the beginning. And dude. The dance number. Yeah.

Then, there was Star Trek: Enterprise -- a TV show I've often despised and often begrudgingly liked. Well, this was the first part of the mirror universe episode they've been touting for a while. And the episode was vastly more interesting than Enterprise tends to be -- I'll give you that. It's the first time we've ever seen the Mirror Universe without Our Heroes on hand to be a contrast.

But that's not what made it cool as Hell. No... for that, we turn to the opening credits.

See, the opening credits of Enterprise have a discoed up version of an old Rod Stewart power anthem, while the evolution of exploration is played out in graphics in front of us. It's all meant to be very life affirming and thrilling, and before they discoed the theme music it sort of worked (though some people have always hated the theme music).

Well. They redid the whole sequence for the Mirror Universe, showing the rise of warfare, as it grows increasingly more mechanized and deadly and destructive, with martial music in the background. Even some of the graphics from the regular credits are there, like the unnamed circle ship with nacelles flying... only this time it's firing torpedos at an inhabited planet, slaughtering millions.

It's incredibly dark and twisted and I absolutely loved it. It ended on the Sword-Through-Earth symbol of the Empire. I would watch this series obsessively, I think.

Finally, this week's Justice League Unlimited was pretty good.

Anyway, I'm going to drink another gallon of water. Since I've been putting complex carbs and protein in me to try and balance the blood sugar crash out, I should also keep things as flushed as possible. Or maybe I'm making it worse. I dunno. But drinking a lot of water seems like a good idea.

¹ Paul Southworth, who does the always fun (when it was regularly updating) Krazy Larry, has let me know that I actually got the name of the movie wrong. Because, as has been said before, I'm an idiot.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:06 PM | Comments (30)

April 19, 2005

Eric: I'm going to need to change the lexicon now, aren't I?

I seemed to have been pushed into exhaustion. I spent the morning asleep, and the afternoon feeling like I should be. So if these posts don't make any sense to you, please understand I'm completely hatstand.

That being said, I could have sworn I dreamed this, but Science Fiction Blog confirmed it.

First and 10 is coming to DVD.

I may be the only person in America who does this, but I need to own every season. I need to own every Delta Burke, O.J. Simpson, Shannon Tweed minute of this thing. I owe them that much.

It's only the first couple of seasons, so far, so we're not going to be in the serious bits yet. If ever, because I can't imagine sales will be brisk on these. So humorously enough, I'm going to be getting First and 10 from before it fell into First and Ten syndrome.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:07 PM | Comments (5)

April 7, 2005

Eric: Lessons Taught, and Lessons Learned.

A lesson was taught over in the comic book world. It took pretty much all of the 90's for said lesson to fully develop and flourish, but in the end it could fully be understood.

That lesson was "it's a bad idea to take an established character, invert it for the sake of short term publicity, and then screw with it in the name of creating 'the new age of comics.'"

A decade back, it was Zero Hour. It was Hal Jordan being driven insane, killing off the Green Lanterns and Guardians, consuming the power of the Central Power Battery, and attempting to rewrite all of history to his specifications. When Jordan fans screamed bloody murder at the editor of the comic, he said -- almost exactly -- "excuse me for making the comic book popular again."

Years later, they have just finished the absolute worst example of "pushing the reset button" ever, to bring back a Hal Jordan they can claim is wholly unstained and is a full Green Lantern. Perhaps it's because they've realized that the only people still at all interested in buying their comic books are adults, and they pissed off that demographic when they screwed with Hal in the first place. Hand in hand with that, they rebooted the rebooted Legion, again, and from all reports are doing a good job with it so far. I don't know because they didn't 'reboot it' by setting the next issue immediately following the Magic Wars's conclusion, so it's still not any Legion I'd recognize, so honestly who cares?

Does this sound snobby on my part? Well, it is. But my point isn't "they should make the Legion what I want it to be if they want me to read it." My point is "they're not going to get me back by grandstanding it again, so they might as well work at keeping the fans they have instead of trying so hard to convince the old guard to come back." It's true of Hal Jordan too.

They learned their lesson, though. They learned that screwing with the beloved yields a short term of interest followed by a long term of ennui.

But they didn't learn the actual lesson that was taught.

I wasn't a Kyle Rayner fan. I wasn't a Postboot Legion Fan. But they had Kyle and Postboot Legion fans. And, believe it or not, they were growing. Maybe not in readership, but in number. I look at Livejournal, and I see icons made out of Postboot Cosmic Boy, and Kyle Rayner. Yeah, no one was particularly happy with how it had all happened, but with time was coming loyalty, and foundation. Ten years from now, they could have gone full circle, and used Hypertime to actually inaugurate a "Silver Age Earth" where the Crisis never happened, the age of super heroes started in the sixties and seventies, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were still heroes (and still alive), and the traditional Legion still existed in the far future. If it proved popular, they could even have had crossovers and created a whole "Silver Age" imprint, while still developing the "Bronze Age" heroes of the 90's and 00's.

Instead... they're doing the Crisis again. And to do it, they're "shaking the foundations to the core." They're killing off the comic relief heroes, "dramatically," to give something for the top tier heroes to angst about. They're bringing antiheroes back to life (including one we saw beaten to death, set on fire, blown up, and carried offstage) to give our heroes something to angst about.

And they're revealing that one of the good guys -- selfish, but good, but with years of evolution as a character away from his selfishness -- has been EV-AL all along, playing our heroes for chumps.

In other words... they're now in the process of alienating a whole new set of the increasingly smaller group of comic book readers in the name of creating "a whole new foundation/attitude/whatever." The difference is, they're doing their shocking twists with far less important characters, in the hopes that no one will care in the long term.

Only they will. I still know people who gave up on DC because they screwed over Hawk and Dove, whenever the Hell Armageddon 2001 was. (Four years after the year 2001 has passed, anything which continues to piss people off from that was clearly a bad idea).

If DC honestly wants to increase and improve sales and build readership, they should create an entire line of comic books to be sold in Supermarkets, targeted to kids and teenagers and priced so that a parent feels good about dropping three or four comics in the shopping basket. If they're going to target all their efforts on the people who bought comic books when they were kids in the 70's and 80's -- a reductionist system at best -- they need to stop alienating those people every few years in the hopes of getting some mainstream press attention and "popping a rating."

Oh, and for the record? Making a comic book universe darker isn't revolutionary. It's just the comic book equivalent of First and Ten. And having started with Identity Crisis and seen it progress into Countdown, I can say without any reservation that DC is jumping into First and Ten with both feet.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:17 AM | Comments (48)

April 3, 2005

Eric: Also? Breasts. I mean, dude.

Sin City was astounding.

Truly astounding. Astounding in the way you think movies should be, but so rarely are. It was more than Noir, more than comic bookish, more than Frank Miller (though the Milleresque dialogue was -- of course -- spot on. Lots of "get up, Old Man" that sounded right out of Dark Knight Returns.

The cinematography deserves an Oscar. So does the editing. So does makeup.

So do other things, but it'll never happen. Never in a million years. But this was the ultimate Noir story for the twenty first century -- it understood Noir in a way that 99% of Modern Noir fails so badly at. The core concept -- the One Good Man who must deal with a world of failure and death and destruction and horror and corruption and (most of all) despair -- was better than updated. It was commemorated. It was exemplified.

And even though we had more than one One Good Man... every one of them, at the time they were on screen, were it.

It was good. It was very good. You should definitely see it if you like things that are good. Or at least things I think are good. And if you don't like the things that I think are good... um... well, it might be odd that you're here, reading what I write.

I also bought lots of Preacher while I was out. Not that I think you care about that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:22 PM | Comments (23)

February 28, 2005

Eric: Back from appointments

Car registered, car inspected, thirty five pages of Pedestrian Wolves read.

You can tell my feelings about a book by how fast I read it. If it's something I think I should like, I slog my way through, doing two or three pages in five minutes. It's like doing homework, only without the pleasure of grades.

If I hate a book, I skip to the last chapter and see if I like that any better. If I get through the last chapter and don't wonder even slightly how we got there, I'm done with that book.

If I like a book, I devour it whole. Pages fly by like leaves in the wind, and I couldn't tell you how I got to the end -- I was just glad I did. And then I reread it. On a good book, I'll reread three times in a row to squeeze out every drop, and then it goes onto my pile of books that I reread roughly yearly.

I had less than twenty minutes of reading time so far, between everything. That was good for thirty-five pages.

I conclude this is going to be a fun ride.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:56 PM | Comments (0)

Eric: Ah, synchronicity.

On the same day that my eBay purchased Cuecat barcode scanner showed up (barcode scanners should only cost 8 bucks, I've decided. Any more than that is silly), I also received a book to scan into Delicious Library as a test. Namely, James L. Grant's Pedestrian Wolves, which took its sweet time to get here from Amazon, but now it's in my grubby little hands right when I'm in the mood for it. I'm a fan of all things FLEM, and this is a book that folks like me are supposed to enjoy right out of hand. So, I'm looking forward to it.

I'm heading out the door to get car inspection et al done. While I wait, I'll start reading. More later.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:00 PM | Comments (1)

February 19, 2005

Eric: Something to spend a little of your money on

If you've been following along for a while, you know I'm besotted with Hitherby Dragons. Rebecca Borgstrom -- one of the most brilliant RPG writers and designers... well, ever (her Nobilis brings a level of brilliance to the field of Roleplaying that I don't think has been equalled since) and a woman who channels a kind of brilliant insanity -- has created a truly remarkable collection of vignettes and short stories -- a form she has so redefined that I refer to stories of that length and kind as 'hitherbys' now.

Well, today Borgstrom announced Hitherby Dragons over at Lulu.com, which is the most writer-friendly of the Print on Demand self-publishers. I've been curious about the quality of Lulu's work, and I know the quality of Borgstrom's work, so I've ordered. I'll let you know about the quality of the book when I get it.

As for the stories? I recommend them wholeheartedly. Go give Borgstrom some money. She deserves it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:01 PM | Comments (1)

January 15, 2005

Eric: Still, I miss Lucifer. And Cassiopia. And Lorne Greene. And the faux Egyptian thing. DAMN THEM!

So, this is something of a television review, because like many of my fellow geeks, last night I watched the series premiere of Battlestar Galactica.

I had watched the miniseries, and was somewhat underwhelmed. See, I was a young nipper when the original came on, and the disconnect between the original -- which was cheesy but also had style, and mythology and grandeur and a cowboy dimension and an epic scope -- and the new one, which seemed to want to do "American Realistic Military SF" with a few nods to the source material, was significant. Oh, the show itself was okay, back in the miniseries. As good, in its way, as Space: Above and Beyond, which itself was a pretty good SF show. But it wasn't anything exciting -- not like the Richard Hatch planned updating of the original would have been. It felt... generic.

Well, last night the first episode of the new series came on.

It'd be easier on me if it were named something else. Anything else, really. Because I still have certain associations with the words "Battlestar" and "Galactica." And so I resent it just slightly, because I still want to bitch and complain about the changes, and that's going to be hard to do while obsessively watching every second of this series.

This was exceptionally good. The characterization was brilliant, the execution of the two episodes (these were two episodes mashed into one, right down to them having two different names -- "33" and "Water." They were laden with style. Everything was tone, setting an honest feel of fatigue, of desperation, of despair barely being fought off. The first episode, "33," refers to the Cylons, who attack every thirty three minutes on the dot, no matter where or how the fleet jumps away. It has been five days of cylon attacks. Five days since anyone on the Galactica or Colonial One has slept. They're exhausted and horrified and don't have any way of escaping. The second episode, "Water," opens with Boomer opening her eyes in a strange place, soaked to the bone. The reason why highlights the scarcity of resources -- and the incredible odds against the humans -- in the setting.

One thing that stands as a triumph is a whiteboard. An absolutely normal whiteboard, like you have in your own office or take down phone messages. It's on Colonial One, where the President and her staff keep track of just how many human beings are left. As "33" progresses, the number slowly goes down. First over 50,000, then dropping below, then lower... lower... a number that constantly says "this is how many human beings are left alive. When this number gets too low, it's all over."

Only there are other human beings left behind. In a wholly unexpected and brilliant stroke, the series cuts back over to Caprica, the largest of the colony worlds that the Cylons have conquered. There, Helo -- one of the soldiers from the miniseries, left behind to give Baltar a chance to survive (because Helo figured his brilliance would be needed on the Galactica, not knowing Baltar was the reason the Colonies fell in the first place) is on the run from the Cylons, highlighting a world of humanity under conquest. And highlighting one of the best elements of Cylons who sometimes can look just like humans, all at the same time.

And, out of nowhere, there's something of the Mythic returned to the series. Not the original mythos, for certain... in an odd twist, it's the Cylons who have a sense of spirtuality. Not that the humans can take comfort in it.

This series is totally not Battlestar Galactica as we knew it. And yet, it's incredibly good. Ronald Moore -- the reason Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the best Star Trek series -- has proven exactly what he can do without suits over him telling him what he can and can't do. This series has the potential to equal or even eclipse Babylon 5 in terms of sophisticated science fiction on television, and I'm bloody well excited to see it.

But weirdly, despite the fact that Babylon 5 is vastly better than the original Battlestar Galactica, I don't think the new version exceeds the original. In a lot of ways, it's sold its pedigree for superior -- but far less interesting -- generic SF tropes. They're pushing those tropes beyond all possible thought, but the Terra saga, the idea of Earth as a real hope and goal (instead of a panacea to prevent panic), the clues for the lost tribe, the mysticism, the political aspects, the cowboy aspects... they're all set aside for a very solid world of military SF and passenger liners trying to survive. The primary colors have been washed away in lieu of washed out grey. Hope has been set aside in lieu of defiance in the face of extinction. It's good, but it's not better. I really wish we could have seen what kind of glory an updating of the original premise could have yielded. Having lost that, I'm excited to see where this series is going.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:18 PM | Comments (7)

January 11, 2005

Eric: Humor! Or something like it.

The break is over, and so Comixpedia is back with their next issue. In this case, it's the Humor issue. And, because I have people who love me this much, I've gotten a couple of concerned letters that Feeding Snarky wasn't in this week's dispatch.

Well, there's a couple of reasons for that. The official reason is the inauguration of Through the Looking Back Glass by Erik Melander. (The Eric Conspiracy continues to gain strength in the virtual world. Mu hu ha ha ha!) This column replaces the monthly roundups that were on 24 hour pixel people, now that the pixel people have moved off to the Grey Havens, and it only makes sense that this column would appear in the first bit of issue, since it's all about the last month.

The unofficial reason is I was desperately late with it and another article I did, this month. Frankly, I'm lucky they don't throw me out. But Erik's new column is spiffy, so read it. And I'll be along by and by.

(It scares me anyone even notices I wasn't in the first week, to be honest.)

Anyhow, in addition to Erik's new column, I'll mention that T. Campbell has a spiffy Humor Roundtable, with many of the people I think are demonstrably superior to other life on Earth talking about what they thing is The Funny what can be Brought. This includes R. Milholland, M. Campos, D. Wright, J. Troutman, B. Guigar, and R. North, all of whom are people whose 'things' I read every day they put them out. Which to me means "yay." And, the Incontestable Wednesday White returns with a Review of Questionable Content, which makes it a review of a strip I like by the finest mind in Webcomics Commentary. This, to me, is cake. Sweet sweet cake.

I should mention the new site design. I should, but it seems kindest not to. Though it seems to be in evolution, so I have hopes. (I especially have hopes that the links will become the same size as the body text, in Firefox.)

Finally, going back to the Tuesday Morning Update, there's a mention that the Dumbrella folks -- particularly Jeff Rowland, Rich Stevens, John Allison and Jon Rosenberg -- will be in Northampton, Massachusetts on Thursday night. Now, that's... hrm. 3 or so hours from where I sit, which is a significant jaunt. On the other hand, while it's certainly conceivable I'll get a chance to meet some of these folks, John Allison has elected to live in an entirely different country across a great heap of water, and it seems like I should see him in the flesh before I die. If I make this trek, it'll be to sit in the back of the room and not be noticed, since... well, this isn't my event, and besides, no one wants to see me in a coffee shop. I figure it's even odds I wouldn't even say hello to most of the artist types. (Because... well, I'm shy and they're mighty. Also, Jeff Rowland possesses spider powers, whereas I possess a cat.) Well, except for Jon Rosenberg, but that's because I would need to buy him a beverage that adults enjoy.

We'll see. In the meantime, Comixpedia. Go. Enjoy.

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

January 3, 2005

Eric: It's like a shout out, only it's not

One of David Letterman's running jokes of the night is his love of the word "Snarky."

Do you have any idea how weird it is to hear that from David Letterman, over and over and over? It's not like the word is mine in any way -- it's just I don't expect him to use it.

Snarky. It's just fun to say.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:58 PM | Comments (2)

January 2, 2005

Eric: A music thing

Can someone tell me why the incredible, complex, musical, sophisticated and somewhat angry Nellie McKay is considered "Pop?" Pop these days makes me think of Britney Spears and her demon brood. McKay doesn't seem to fall into that so much as "twenty-five years from now we will fucking revere her as a genius in an age of vapidity."

Or am I missing something?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:53 PM | Comments (12)

December 18, 2004

Eric: Another snark about Identity Crisis. Because clearly, I am a nerd.

This is going to get into spoiler territory. If I were a better person than I am, I'd rig up some kind of "click here if you want to know how it all comes out" thing for this, but I'm not going to because... well, because. So, if you don't want to know the shock ending and various plot points on Identity Crisis, I'd just stop reading.

Still here? Cool.

It was a lie. It was all a lie. Every bit of it was a lie. The premise of this series, the execution of this series... and most importantly, the stated goal of this series, was based on falsity.

I don't mean the actual in-comics plot points. Those were just there. Gratuitous at times, and deceptive at times, but still. Those are the breaks.

No, it's the metacommentary... the reasons this story was done in the first place. Even the name of this story.

Identity Crisis.

The point was supposed to be "it's wrong and bad for super heroes to reveal their secret identities. If they do, it's their loved ones who suffer." Thus, the murder of Sue Dibny and the willful destruction of one of the rarest of rarities in comic books: an actual, happy marriage between a superhero and a nonsuperhero, with the "normal" half of the marriage an equal partner in the crime fighting adventures. They solved mysteries and bantered and legitimately loved each other and were happy. And Ralph didn't take super heroing that seriously and neither did Sue -- she was an heiress, and they just liked being with each other.

But Ralph didn't have a secret identity, so Sue had to die, because that's what happens, isn't it? That's why secret identities are necessary.

Only... Sue wasn't killed out of revenge. Sue wasn't killed to hurt Ralph or super heroes. Sue wasn't killed by a Super Villain.

Sue was killed by Jean Loring, who apparently went psychotic after the poor performance of Power of the Atom. She was trying to throw a scare into the super heroes, in a bid to win Ray Palmer -- the Atom -- back. It wasn't the criminal fraternity looking for revenge. It was just Jean acting out a bad movie of the week plot.

The whole rape scene? Utterly unrelated to the plot. The Justice League mindwiping Doctor Light and conditioning him to be a buffoon (wow... just like the Squadron Supreme miniseries, only stupider!), and then going on to mindwipe Batman, tarnishing the League and raising the specter of their inappropriateness to use the power they have been given? Irrelevant to the murder mystery. The fact that Ralph and Sue Dibny were publicly known? Irrelevant to Sue's murder. Unless you believe that Ralph should have hidden his identity from the Atom, lest the Atom's wife decide to go walking in Sue's brain.

I didn't put these pieces together, mind. I was trolling the web and came across this post on the "Comics Should Be Good" blog. It was expressing some good old fashioned outrage at the rape of the wife of the fucking Elongated Man as a red herring. I read through the comments afterward, and it gelled for me. It really did.

This is absurd. This is obscene. And the much ballyhooed "darkening of the DC Universe" that will follow this (because Christ knows we need to make mainstream comics less fun these days) is being predicated on an essential lie.

Secrets versus public identities? Had nothing to do with the plot of this story.

You want to fuck around with the cultural mythology of the last sixty years? Go right ahead. But don't lie about it in the metacommentary.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:09 PM | Comments (8)

December 17, 2004

Eric: On Superman, Batman, and Stunt Casting Writers

So, in the brief snark about my lack of snarking, yesterday, I expressed a brief, negative opinion about Identity Crisis. I felt the plot was TV Movie, not Super Hero. I felt it committed cheap thrills instead of real character evolution. And I felt that the story was the last nail in the coffin for the idea of Super Heroes -- of the Justice League -- as something meant for teenagers. This was a story meant for adults, and this was also a story meant to guide the forward evolution of the DC Universe, or whatever we're calling it this week.

And, I referred to the hiring of Brad Meltzer -- author of The Millionaires, Zero Sum, The Tenth Justice and other novels, as well as the creator of Jack and Bobby on television -- to write the series as stunt casting. Take a successful writer in another field -- one with some bearing and relation (The Tenth Justice is a Young Adult book, for example, and Jack and Bobby had science fiction elements to it), hire them to write for the comics and hope that the publicity pulls in new readers.

Well, this wasn't Meltzer's first comic book series (he did a run on Green Arrow that's now been collected into The Archer's Quest), but certainly DC has leveraged his non-comics credentials hard in promoting Identity Crisis. Which irks me at best -- it's like they're trying to convince readers that no, really, it's okay to read this comic. It's not being written by one of those hacks like Peter David or Roger Stern. It's being written by a real writer. One you like!

I despise that. I despised that when Kevin Smith was put on both Daredevil and Green Arrow. I despised that when J. Michael Straczynskiðtook over on Spider-Man, too. And to be blunt, that annoyance is unfair to the writers.

It honestly is. It's unfair to Smith, who wrote a Green Arrow series with tremendous affection and understanding of who Green Arrow was in the 70's, who he became in the 90's, and who he would have to be in the 21st Century. (I don't know enough about Smith's run on Daredevil to speak to it intelligently.) It's unfair to Straczynski, who's been a journeyman on Spider-Man for years now, who wrote the beautiful Midnight Nation before that (Rising Stars never interested me. I can't tell you why), who writes one of the few comics I've actually bought in the last several years (Supreme Power) -- and who's been let into the lodge officially as of this latest Spider-Man arc, because no one's trashing him mercilessly because he's a Hollywood Writer writing Spider-Man. They're trashing him mercilessly because they can't stand what he's done to the legend of Gwen Stacey and they expected better of him than that.

(I use "they" instead of "we" because I've never been enough of a Spider-Man fan to care about Gwen Stacy. So it just sounds like an interesting story to me, not an affront to Man or God. My point, however, is that it's not Straczynski's background that's fueling the anger -- it's the actual story. Which means he's officially accepted as "Comics Folk" by the community.)

Well, I honestly do believe that Meltzer was put on this incredibly controversial story to drum up even more interest, get some mainstream attention and some publicity... to "hotshot the angle," to use a wrestling reference. I think that's evident from the way DC has handled this.

But this morning, I got an e-mail from someone who knows Meltzer, somewhat. Someone who is good friends with one of Meltzer's best friends, in fact, and who has gotten some inside story. That person didn't disagree with me on my impression of the story (he couldn't in fact speak to the merits of the story, because he hadn't read it), but there was one thing he was absolutely certain of: Brad Meltzer didn't consider this stunt casting. Brad Meltzer loves comics. Brad Meltzer has always loved comics. And Brad Meltzer knows comics, and was excited and enthusiastic to write this -- not as a job, but as a fan.

And thinking back over the story I read... I have to concede that he's right. It shows. There's too many touches... too many details that reveals that Meltzer is deep into this stuff. He knows who Jean Loring is. (Well, he knows her name and role, anyhow.) He knows from Zatanna, and Doctor Light, and Captain Boomerang and the Flash Rogues Gallery.

Going back to The Archer's Quest tells us even more. This was... a travelogue, in effect, of the DC Silver Age. This wasn't a story written by a duffer given the keys to the kingdom because he wrote a few thrillers. This is a comic fan.

The elemental difference between what Kevin Smith has done in comics and what Brad Meltzer has done is Kevin Smith's Green Arrow run was pretty much liked by everyone, so he got a bye. The difference between J. Michael Straczynski and Brad Meltzer is Straczynski put in enough years before the incredibly controversial story that people are now hating Straczynski the way they hate John Byrne. Which in its own, sad way is a compliment.

Well, Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis was certainly a commercial success, but not a critical one. I'm not the only commentator who was caught between sadness and offense by it, and I'm not the only one who feels it represents bad things for DC ahead. So the real elemental difference between Meltzer, Smith and Straczynski is Meltzer's huge project is seen as an artistic failure instead of a success. It's seen as a mishandling of the characters, a tarnishing of them, not an exalting of them. Certainly, it's how I see it.

And so Meltzer is seen as a novelist and screenwriter who got stuntcast into writing comics and didn't get it. He's seen the way the literary novelists who decide they want to write a science fiction novel, because they think no one's ever really written literary science fiction (because they don't know anything about science fiction other than Buck Rogers and Star Wars), are seen by the SF community -- as a poseur and a hack who doesn't have enough experience with what's been done a thousand times before to not end up looking like an idiot.

And it's unfair to Meltzer. Because clearly, he's got the background, and the love. He's done the research and taken the time to learn. That e-mail I got today made me think long and hard about what I wrote yesterday.

Identity Crisis is a sad moment in comic books. And DC hired Meltzer to do it because they wanted the publicity. Those are both true things, as I see them.

But Brad Meltzer himself is trying. He understands the responsibility. He knows the history. It's not stunt casting to him.

And I shouldn't imply that it is.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:38 AM | Comments (18)

November 14, 2004

Eric: Oh yeah, that's funny. Let me riposte your light humor with a lovely joke where I ram a spike in your colon from the front. Hah hah hah hah! Isn't that a laugh?

EDIT: See the next entry for an update. Boing Boing quickly responded to rectify. So they get props for that.

So, I like Boing Boing. They are, after all, a directory of wonderful things. And I've seen many, many cool sites off of links they've posted.

Tonight, they posted a link to an "eeire possible ghost sighting" on their site. They recommend turning the sound up to hear the sigh, and the whispering, and describe a mist effect.

Now, if it were April 1, or Halloween, I'd take it with a grain of salt. But it isn't. And it's Boing Boing. I trust Boing Boing. So I go into it with a certain amount of faith.

For those who don't know? I have a heart condition. It's under control, but among other things, I try to minimize shocks. When they happen, and when they're intense enough, I have to take medication. Medication which produces pretty nasty side effects in me when it's taken in heavy doses.

So, I now expect that instead of having a productive writing day tomorrow, I instead am going to have difficulty keeping my eyes open and spend a lot of time lying on my back wishing I were dead because I'm so fucking naseous.

Oh yeah, fucking funny, guys. Laugh riot. See if I ever, ever trust a link you put out again.

Boing Boing: Signs of a ghost in TV commercial? leads to their entry on the thing. Know going into it that it doesn't lead to what they claim it does. If you like that kind of thing, enjoy.

If you're pissed because I spoiled the joke? Sorry. I was wondering about five minutes ago if I had to go to the Emergency room. Makes me selfish.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:21 AM | Comments (4)

November 6, 2004

Eric: Twenty-one Word Movie Review

I beg you, in the name of all that remains being good in this world, go see The Incredibles. Right now.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:44 PM | Comments (11)

October 22, 2004

Eric: Meanwhile, back in commerce territory....

(From Goats. Well, from its store. Which is much the same thing. Click on the thumbnail for a chance to spend money on fabulous automated simian corsairness!)

Remember my ruminations on cliches in webcomics? Well, seriously cool musician E. A. Rowe commented that Goats -- the very webcomic that I was referring to, because of their artistic use of ninjas, themselves made fun of the phenomenon earlier, with the announcement of the Robot Monkey Pirate tee shirt. It was used in a strip as an example of the ridiculous crap that webcomics could get their fans to buy. Needless to say, they then started selling the shirts. And God help me, I want one.

Naturally, a Zombie Ninja with Cleavage tee shirt has to follow, now....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:59 AM | Comments (6)

October 11, 2004

Eric: In Memorium: Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve was an avowed Atheist. But, as he once said (or so I've been told), "Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching." It's a good philosophy. One I can get behind.

Tomorrow, there will be an innumerable number of editorial cartoons showing Christopher Reeve entering the gates of a Heaven he didn't believe in, the same as when George Harrison died. He'll be wearing a Superman costume in most of them. And flying in many of them.

If there is an afterlife -- and I'm open on the subject -- and if there's any justice in the world, he won't be flying. He'll be walking. He always said he would walk again, and that's how I choose to imagine him now. One foot in front of the other, the way most of us take for granted.

But I understand why the cartoonists will put him in that costume and fly him through the air. Because I was a child when I saw him in that movie. And I believed. Just like the tagline said. I believed a man could fly.

I believed that man could fly.

There has never been anyone so perfectly suited to play Superman. Dean Cain comes close, but he lacks that certain wry sense of humor. George Reeves had the wry sense of humor, but lacked the utterly, complete lack of guile Reeve brought to the part. And besides, Christopher Reeve looked the way Curt swan drew. It's really kind of astounding.

I happened to watch Superman: The Movie about three months ago. Tivo caught it. It held up astoundingly well. And it proved conclusively that you don't need digital enhancement or redone special effects even in such a special-effects laden movie. Because when Clark Kent buckled his uniform's belt for that first time, in the Fortress of Solitude, stepped off into the air, and swept forth into the sky, he was really flying. I know that to be true. I saw it.

Christopher Reeve was never ashamed of the material. He treated Clark Kent and Clark's alter ego as a sacred trust. Even appearing on the Muppet Show he maintained a sense of respect for the material. That's more than the "Stars of Star Wars" could claim. He was always genial. A gentleman.

And then he had his accident. And we learned that when the worst adversity on Earth happened to Christopher Reeve, he maintained that geniality through it all... and proved once and for all that Superman was, if anything, typecasting. Because he believed, with all his heart, that he would walk again. As fervently as I believed he could fly. And he was gaining strength. Getting back feeling. He was working hard and exploring all options and advocating hard for the research that would set him free.

I think he would have made it. It was dumb luck that caused him to get an infection. And his weakened body couldn't take that infection well. He slipped into cardiac arrest, and then a coma, and then slipped away.

My hopes and thoughts are with his family. And with all of us -- his children, who believed he could fly. We have a responsibility to live our lives well -- to live up to his example. To live as if Christopher Reeve -- and God -- were watching, even if we don't believe in God or life after death. We have a responsibility to take up his causes and fight his fights. And we have a responsibility to face up to our own adversities with geniality and compassion.

It's a tall order. But he managed to it. Now it's our turn.

And most of all... we have to believe.

Because if we believe hard enough... we too can fly.

EDIT: Please give generously to The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 7:59 AM | Comments (1)

October 7, 2004

Eric: Okay, we're flirting with respectability and... yes! Back to square one! Whew, that was close!

Whitney Matheson writes a Pop Culture thingy for USA Today. And she was sent to cover SPX, and decided to file a webcomic for her reactions. It was pretty damn good -- Keith Carter did the art, and it honestly made some efforts. Okay, it had a stupid Flash interface, but eh. If I sobbed every time I had to use Flash to read a comic that needs nothing but HTML, I'd have no tears left for the pathetic shell that is my life.

But it was thoughtful. It mentioned that there weren't a lot of people in funny costumes (because you can't admit going to a comic book oriented production without mentioning people in funny costumes. Because, you know, we're a pack of geeks. Not cool people like Football fans. For the record, even Evan Dworkin's fans don't wear cheese on their heads) so that had her more comfortable, and it talked about all the ways that comics and cartoon art are beginning to emerge from the Superheroes Only club to embrace other forms. I was pretty pleased, all told.

And then, right at the end, there was this week's pop question of the week. "If you could have a superpower? What would it be? E-mail your answer to....

Thanks, Matheson. Thanks a whole heap.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:52 PM | Comments (3)

October 6, 2004

Eric: Now this is an icon for Nanowrimo. A pity A) I don't own it and B) it has nothing to do with Nanowrimo

From Obsidian Wings.

Moe Lane is deranged. But in a good way. He's a long time fan writer in In Nomine, which is my own RPG drug of choice, but he's also totally bent. I mean, totally, totally bent. He created Ronald, the Demon Prince of Cows, for example.

Well, he's also a conservative. Which admittedly isn't my political leaning at all (I'm apparently getting more liberal with every passing day). However, when he founded his own political blog, he recruited people from all over the political spectrum to write for it. The result is Obsidian Wings. ("This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . ") The picture adorning this entry is their mascot, and God help me I think it's brilliant.

I'm pretty burnt out on politics, but I still like Obsidian Wings. I read it at first for Moe, who doesn't agree with me politically but is a good guy nonetheless, as well as a smart and funny writer. I kept with it because the people I do agree with politically are also good guys (and girls), smart and funny. Maybe you can't imagine reading anything having to do with politics (especially a site guaranteed to post something you won't automatically agree with) right now, and I respect that. But if you're in the mood for some smart punditry in convenient blog-form, you could do a Hell of a lot worse.

And damn it, I want a blog mascot just as warped as that one.

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

October 1, 2004

Eric: Because I don't need to sell you on the content, here's some chatting about technique

So, in case you don't know, BBC's Radio 4 is broadcasting a third series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's All I've Got To Say covered the wheres and whys nicely, so I won't retread Chris's ground.

If you find yourself excited by the prospect of new Hitchhikers radio goodness, you won't need me to tell you why. If you're not excited by that prospect, there's little I could say to make you so. So, with your kind indulgence, we'll have the recommendation as read and go on to something I think is interesting: technique.

How does someone take a decades old radio show and make a sequel to it?

For those of you who came in with the books, please understand that the radio show came first. In fact, it contained a considerable amount of additional material and a substantially different ending (including a bit on how Zaphod Beeblebrox was directly responsible for the destruction of the Earth, if I remember correctly), as well as the only time that Rula Lenska did anything other than Alberto VO-5 commercials in my experience) than the book series did. The television series (which I'm geeky enough to own on special edition DVD) was a condensed version of the radio show with some bookish flourishes thrown in, and of course, there are many too many books in the Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy to actually call it a Trilogy, but that's just part of the fun.

However, to do a new radio series, they've actually chosen to adapt the fourth book in the series, more or less, with some of the third book thrown in, and are completely ignoring where the radio series left off. Which, if one looks at the later Hitchhiker's books, is absolutely apropos.

They absolutely nailed the "old school feel," however. In part because they brought back the theme music, theramins and all. Not a remixed version of the theme music, a la the various Doctor Who revivals, but the exact same music that heralded the start of the radio episodes and the television show. And, although Peter Jones has passed on, they used his voice as the voice of the book in the beginning, retelling the famous opening prologue of... well, almost every version, but distorted it as if the speakers on the Book were failing. Then they gradually sampled in the new actor's voice, along with an explanation that as part of the ongoing upgrades to the Book, one could now have a variable voice, though it wasn't quite working right at the moment.

As a result, the old school fan had a perfect introduction to the series, and therefore was willing to accept that Trillian hadn't even been in the second series.

Plus, it's free to listen to online. I mean, how cool is that?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

Eric: For the record....

...even as we speak, a debate that might well decide the election in America is going on, carried live on most television stations and on NPR.

I, correspondingly, have gone to a cybercafe that's playing a jazz CD, surrounded by other people who are desperately hiding from open media sources. This might make me a bad person. If so, I revel.

November can't come soon enough....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:11 PM | Comments (2)

September 23, 2004

Eric: On the revision of past success, or how to ride the pony a little longer

(From PvP, Casey and Andy, and Penny Arcade, respectively. You can click on the thumbnails and see the full sized strips in their natural, unLucased habitats.)

Okay, this is about the Star Wars DVD collection "controversy." Which isn't. You know. Controversial. I mean, if he'd called these things "Director's Cuts" everyone would be fine with it. Except, you know, the totally insane people. But that's not the point here. Because I couldn't care less. I'm not going to buy the DVD sets, because I don't buy DVD sets of that nature. I buy Complete Television Seasons On DVD™, because I love archives. Everything else, I let the Tivo slurp up when they become available on my extended tier Dish Network thing. I have a DVD burner built into it, so if I really want to keep them, I can. The only "Special Edition" movie exceptions have been the Lord of the Rings movies, which a friend has given me for Christmas the last couple of years, and which I really love. But I wouldn't have bought them for myself. Because Hell, Fellowship was on Encore already.

But you don't care about that. You want to know about the webcomics I'm referencing.

This is a big deal in the geek community, and so we've had a lot of Webcomics reference it. There've been a lot more references than just these three. The community's in upheaval, so people are making note of it. It's what they do. And these three strips between them surround the whole issue, to my mind.

Scott Kurtz has the sanest take -- the take that most needs to be said, in my opinion. Yes, he's putting it in Brent's mouth. Brent is his designated "guy who can say crap we all wish we could say but most of us never dare" character. Still. It's a clear bucket of cold water being thrown on people, and I'm glad to see it. Yes, it's a remix. Yes, the changes weaken the movies they're allegedly celebrating. Yes, Jesus, Han shot first and Hayden Christensen's damn face is in Jedi. Who the Hell cares? If you like the movies, you're still going to like the movies on DVD. If you can't for the life of you let this crap go, then you're going to buy the movies and enjoy being outraged, because clearly that's the kind of thing you like to do. There's nothing wrong with that, either. Also, Kurtz gets bonus points for shading the light on Cole's Vader helmet so it looks like one of /usr/bin/w00t's asshats. Subtle, but there it is. Tell me I'm wrong. (And for the record, I really wish Chaobell wasn't on break, because her take on this 'controversy' would rock.)

Penny Arcade takes the opposite tack. Their strip tells the opposite side, as well as anything I've seen does. Lucas is doing this for cash, and he's clearly lost any vision he once had for the movies. And, more to the point, they include a phrase I think should be locked into the lexicon of all fans everywhere.

That phrase? "Accidential Masterpiece."

George Lucas just isn't a top flight director. He's no worse -- and no better -- than Leonard Nimoy was, to be honest. If there had been no Star Wars, he'd still be known for American Graffiti, which was good but doesn't exactly make top ten lists. (AFI listed it as #77. They listed Star Wars as #15.) As a Producer, his only truly great work has been attached to other people -- Steven Spielberg had a lot more to do with the success of Indiana Jones as a franchise than George Lucas did. (Spielberg is a top flight director, of course.) Lucas happened to hit 00 on the roulette wheel with Star Wars. It was great. Truly great. Utterly wonderful. A triumph of casting, of timing, of story. No wonder he keeps trying to go back to that well -- nothing he's ever done has ever come close to it. The Prequel Trilogy -- which I actually enjoy, I would add -- are good popcorn entertainment, but they're nothing compared to Lord of the Rings. Same with Return of the Jedi. Empire Strikes Back is actually my favorite of the movies, but it's not as good as Star Wars was, and besides, he didn't direct it.

Lucas has to remind himself that he's great, so he keeps going back to the movie that was great. It's pathetic, but there it is.

Finally, we have Casey and Andy, which is by far the best satire of the 3. In fact, it's fall down hilarious. It hits all the high points of the controversy, and makes its point perfectly.

And more to the point, it highlights how utterly useless Lucas's efforts to 'improve' the movies are. No matter what he does to tinker with them, the simple fact is with flat effects and a true bastard owning the Millennium Falcon, Lucas accidentally created a pop culture phenomenon that literally exceeded Star Trek. Nothing he does now can possibly recapture that lightning in a bottle. It can't actually hurt the original movie (and the day he dies his estate will sell the original versions of the trilogy on whatever they're using for DVD that week, and will reap another ton of cash). It's just silliness.

I don't suppose there's any chance that these strips will cover the Cat Stevens denial of entry tomorrow, is there?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:59 AM | Comments (3)

September 21, 2004

Eric: This brings the Cute, damn it!

And here we are, my two favorite tchotchkes from webcomics: my plush Skull, from PvP, and my Gerbil, from Narbonic. I have no idea if Shaenon Garrity and Scott Kurtz like each other, hate each other, are indifferent to each other or "other," but on my desk these two get along in perfect peace and harmony.

The gerbil is handmade, in the best sense of the word. It's clearly excellently put together, with a scosh of craftswork in it. It's soft and adorable and sits very nicely, and is the best packaged thingy I've ever received. Oh, it showed up in a Priority Mail box full of packing foam, but what a box. See, I'm addicted to commissioned/original artwork. If I could, I'd wallpaper my apartment in bristol board dirtied with Sharpies. And the box the Gerbil came in had three Garrity original drawn gerbils on it (one on each of three sides) and a drawn picture of Shaenon Garrity herself on the front, a bold finger (not that finger) thrust upward as she declares "I BRING THE GERBIL!" This to me epitomizes going the extra mile.

Skull, in contrast, is machine made, in the best sense of those words. Well stitched, bean stuffed and amazingly soft, I'd gladly get Skull for any stuffed animal lover -- especially children. Skull was meant to be adored by a child. As for packaging... well, it got dumped into a secure mailer envelope and sent on its way. I was a bit torqued about that -- what if it got crushed? -- until it hit me that Skull is essentially stuffed with the same stuff you'd use to pack Skull in anyhow, so the chances that harm would come to him were negligible. (The gerbil, on the other hand, has a rigid spine, and so could be harmed in transit if care were not taken -- but of course, care was taken.)

So, I'm grooving on them both. This was a good day.

(Oh, the picture in front? More proof I'm not an artist.)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:16 PM | Comments (1)

Eric: And Jesus, do we really need to see "Apprentice" promos before a movie? Don't they know Trump is totally last season?

(From Too Much Coffee Man. Click on the thumbnail for full sized constructive feedback.)

Dear God does this strip speak the truth. It's worse now than it ever was, and it makes me progressively more frightened for the future. See, way back when you would go to the movies and the following things would happen. First, the curtain would open up on the screen. Then, two or three previews of coming attractions would be shown. Then, there might be an advertisement for the refreshment stand or an injunction to use the exits at the far side of the room if the building caught fire. And then you would see the movie.

Then, the number of previews increased.

Then, the commercial for the refreshment stand grew more elaborate.

Then, commercials began to run, before the previews. Commercials for Coke, for Hollywood.com, for jeans. At first, they were distinctive commercials made for the movie screen. Then, they were the same crap we watch on television.

Then, they started showing a short film about the Jimmy Fund. I have no argument with this one.

Then, they began running slides before even showing the commercials, for when you first arrived at the theater. They had rebuses any developmentally disabled four year old could guess (when they actually have four or more letters on the screen, it's not a rebus any more, it's the work of a confused calligrapher who thinks a picture of a light socket is part of the English Language.) They had "trivia" that proved conclusively that the word derives from "trivial." And they had local commercials. The Portsmouth movie house we go to typically had slides advertising the York County hospital, just over the border. Generally, it advertised it with a giant picture of a baby, which makes me think I can drive to York County and pick up a small child for all my small child needs.

And now? Now?

The Twenty.

That's right, the slideshow encouraged people to ignore the ads and engage in conversation before the damn movie. We can't have that. So now we have twenty minutes of faux "behind the scenes" coverage of your 'favorite' shows from NBC and TNT, plus full out commericals. It's horrible, and it's offensive.

That's right, offensive. If I pay someone eight bucks to see a movie, I don't want to see commercials for FUCKING TNT. I have TNT and I never, ever watch it! And now they've driven me to block it from my Tivo list, so that I never even see it! Tivo can't even record shows off of TNT as suggestions any more! THIS IS WHAT THEY HAVE WROUGHT!

We have gotten some fun out of it, though. Part of my ritual for buying a ticket now includes my desperately asking the ticket taker if we get to see The Twenty before the movie. It's become clear the staff of the movie theater hates it as much as we do.

Probably more, actually. Most theaters have taken to playing it in the lobby. I'd think that would be grounds for an unsafe work environment lawsuit.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:51 AM | Comments (10)

September 14, 2004

Eric: Proving I'm a bleeding heart liberal at heart....

I spend a certain amount of each paycheck on webcomics, in one sense or another. Not a huge amount, typically -- five bucks to a tipjar here, a subscription there. I seem to be a sucker for cute plush -- my Skull plushie is theoretically waiting for me to get enough time at work (which won't be this week) to walk over to the mailroom and get it, and I dropped money last paycheck on a Narbonic brand plush gerbil. And I get compilations every now and again.

This paycheck, however, my money went to support the art form as a whole. I dropped some change on a membership at the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco. Not a high level membership (I don't have that much money), but enough.

The perks that come with membership... won't matter that much to me. I live in New Hampshire -- being able to walk into a San Francisco museum won't pay for itself, even if I manage to get there when I hit Baycon next year. I doubt I'll have much opportunity to use a discount at the museum store. I won't be at any of the receptions they hold, unless a miracle occurs. I doubt the newsletter will have much I don't already know.

But that's not why you give money to a museum.

It matters, guys. Art matters. Segar and Shultz and Capp and Gould matter. Abrams and Crosby and Krahulik and Kurtz matter. The hundreds... the thousands of webcartoonists and print cartoonists worldwide matter.

Art matters. So they get my money. Simple as that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:23 AM | Comments (2)

September 13, 2004

Eric: By "later," I meant "way, way later." And XPlay has some hope.

After barely sleeping last night and a notebook computer passing day of sheer adrenalin and discussing the merits of Berry Rubble versus Princess Ariel on the comment boards, I got home, settled in for an evening of snarking and cheer....

...and fell asleep. I'm going to go back to sleep momentarily. I only woke up at all because my cat demanded attention, and she has claws. Painful, painful claws.

While I pet her, XPlay came on the Tivo. Their new set (they moved from San Francisco, which is a cool place to be a TV show, to Los Angeles, which is... very standard) is incredibly busy and full of worthless tchotchkes... and the show itself is back to its low budget glory. Adam and Morgan wandered the new set and snarked about how utterly worthless it is for a show about video game reviews to have a set with egg chairs and fluorescent checker sets. It's back to being video taped, the higher production values only having lasted until they could take the time to go to Ikea... and walk around behind it, to where the Swedes take powerful drugs before designing furniture. And the voiceovers are back.

I am content.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:34 PM | Comments (1)

September 12, 2004

Eric: I'd be more impressed if it was the special unrated edition with pharasees gone wild

I just saw a commercial for The Passion of the Christ on DVD. With "special bonus features."

I would pay two hundred dollars for a copy if one of the features was a Thermian language track like on Galaxy Quest. This thing is screaming for something surreal.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:24 PM | Comments (4)

September 8, 2004

Eric: Excuse me? I thought when you made this you'd use milk -- not crap

XPlay has always had a kind of "cable access charm." It's total lack of production values and snarky sense of humor (there's that word again) made it fun. Great fun. The kind of fun that... well, every G4 show has failed to have.

Now, their San Francisco studio has been closed, their staff has been fired, and Adam and Morgan are down at G4TechTV's Los Angeles studios. Yesterday's show showed promise -- declaring that their studios hadn't been built yet, they filmed it out of Adam's apartment with all the 'graphics' being sharpie-on-cardboard. It was fun, in an Xplayish kind of way.

Today... they're doing riffs on movies. Filmed. With clear money being spent. Costuming, effects, writing. Production values. A significant bump in everything they do.

Dear God this show sucks now. I mean, sucks. All the charm has been bled out, leaving bad jokes and stale references. Even the reviews seem overproduced now, though they remain the strongest points of the show.

Tell you what. Give Judgment Day the budget. That show already sucked, so some influx of new ideas might do it some good. Let XPlay be XPlay. Right down to video tape, bad wigs and stupid jokes.

Alternately, do bikini shots of Morgan. I mean, if you're going to pander, pander.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:15 AM | Comments (4)

August 29, 2004

Eric: Serving the casual reader by not reviewing anything he's looking for

So, Joey Manley, the guy behind Modern Tales and the hoster of American Elf -- and a guy who gets money from me every month, I'm glad to say -- is publishing a new literary journal entitled The Graphic Novel Review. His stated goal is to create a book review that is for the casual graphic novel fan what the New York Times Book Review is for the casual book lover.

I can get behind this idea. I think something that brings graphic novels closer to the mainstream and develops critical scrutiny for them is a good, good thing.

It's a pity they've elected to be dumbasses about it.

We hope to review books featuring corporate-owned properties (e.g. non-creator-owned books) almost as rarely as the NYT Book Review covers Harlequin Romances, or any other prose book put together on an assembly line by creative workers with no long-term stake in the economic life of the work they have done. Which is to say: hardly ever. Our assumption is that such economic conditions will almost always lead to sub par work, even when the creative workers themselves are capable of great things. Since the vast majority of superhero GNs coming out are corporate properties, the genre may get fairly scant coverage on GNR. This is not a slight against the genre, so much as against the method of production. Creator-owned superhero books will have a much better shot at garnering a review.

Okay. So.

Under this system, Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing wouldn't have a home here. Or a collection of Superman stories that includes the single finest Superhero story I've ever read: Moore and Gibbons's "For The Man Who Has Everything." Or The Dark Knight Returns. Matt Wagner is only good when he's doing Grendel or Mage. Drop him into Sandman Mystery Theater and he's got no reason to bring his A game, obviously.

And anyone who's working on Batman or Green Lantern or Spider Man? Sub-par work. They have no economic stake, so they're just phoning it in, clearly. Always. Almost no exceptions. Because... because. They have no reason to really try, do they? (Setting aside the paycheck they're receiving.)

Guys? The New York Times Review of Books doesn't review romance novels. You're right. But they do review potboilers. And Stephen King novels. And Harry Potter books. Look, I'd love it if this meant the next Dan Cowles book got to sell ten times what the last one did. But it won't do that if the 'casual graphic novel reader' doesn't buy Graphic Novel Review in the first place. If they're walking through Barnes and Noble, they see a graphic novel section, they pick up your magazine, and see that 95% of the display isn't being covered... they're not going to pay any attention to the other 5%.

If you disdain the masses, you don't get to educate them. If you want them to learn about the gemstones, you have to address the semiprecious stones they already collect. And, most importantly, you have to accept that quality and art can be born from many sources and many directions. You have to accept that sometimes, the wage slave is going to blow away everyone around him because the art is more important to him than anything else. Sometimes, a writer wants to write, to make something glorious, even if he's doing it for hire. Charles Dickens wrote a ton of his stuff on an serialized assembly line as work for hire, but we still think Pickwick Papers is pretty damn spiffy, you know. And a good number of the best -- or at least most celebrated -- writers and artists of graphic novels are on the wage train. Hell, no one's more celebrated right now than Alex Ross, and he does most of his work for the big two.

Superman. Batman. Spider-Man. These are cultural icons, whether we like it or not. To simply dismiss graphic novels that feature them means dismissing the absolute core of American sequential art. That won't elevate the fringe, that will make your magazine part of it. And besides, we have no need to recover Gary Groth's territory. He's already staked it out pretty thoroughly, guys. Have faith he can hold that fort down, and choose your articles on the basis of their merits, even if the subject has been heard of by more than forty people.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:10 AM | Comments (4)

August 27, 2004

Eric: Celebrating Public Domain Guthrie, One Voice at a time

As a celebration of the discovery of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land's" public domain status, I posted the lyrics to the song. Well, in his own blog That's All I've Got To Say, Chris Meadows does me one better. He actually recorded an MP3 of himself singing the song, a capella, and threw it up for people to listen to. And wrote a new stanza which he included in the song.

We should all do this. We should have an Internet-wide celebration, where we all record ourselves singing a song which, in the end, belongs to us, not to publishers without senses of humor.

Chris started the ball rolling. If I can get the equipment (I think my USB headset is in my office) I'll do one too. You do one too. Get your friends to do one. Let's make this the most covered song on the Internet. It doesn't matter if you sound good doing it -- this song isn't meant to sound perfect. It's meant to be sung, because you want to sing it, period.

We're not trying to piss anyone off. We're just trying to celebrate a sentiment, and the idea that there reaches a point where art becomes all of ours. Let's do it!

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:57 PM | Comments (2)

Eric: THE POWER OF KITTY COMPELS YOU!

Not really a snark on The Devil's Panties. I just love this graphic. And sentiment. THE KITTY COMPELS YOU!

Man, the more I ref cats in these things, the more pet food Google ads are going to show up in the sidebar. I hope to Christ you people have a lot of livestock to feed.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:35 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2004

Eric: This song belongs to you and me!

So... you know the JibJab parody of "This Land is Your Land?" That one? The one they're being sued over?

The publishers don't even own it.

Woodie Guthrie published it in 1945 and never renewed the copyright. So it expired. In 1973. It's your song, and my song, and everyone's song.

So. Not only can't JibJab be sued over this... the publishers could potentially be sued by anyone who paid them licensing fees to use the song for the past 31 years.

Wow. Bet they wish they'd just had a sense of humor and an understanding about the Satire Fair Use provisos now. As it is, their little hissy fit's costing them. A lot.

In honor of this so-fitting ending, the complete lyrics of the original song. Owned by me! And you! Thanks, Woody!

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the redwood forest to the New York island.
From the snow-capped mountains to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.

As I go walkin' my ribbon of highway
I see all around me my blue blue skyway
Everywhere around me the wind keeps a-whistlin'
This land is made for you and me.

I'm a-chasin' my shadow out across this roadmap
To my wheat fields waving, to my cornfield dancing
As I go walkin' this wind keeps talkin'
This land is made for you and me.

I can see your mailbox, I can see your doorstep
I can feel my wind rock your tip-top treetop
All around your house there my sunbeam whispers
This land is made for you and me.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:52 PM | Comments (1)