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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 (2)

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 (77)

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 d