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

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

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

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

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

So... I did.

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

I reproduce the letter here.

To Whom it May Concern:

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Eric Alfred Burns
Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

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

Oh.

They also said "yes."

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

We won.

I was out of place.

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

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

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

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

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

Lions are very large, by the by.

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

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

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

April 7, 2008

"So, what's the matter?"

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

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

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

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

"1:30."

"You sure you shouldn't go sooner?"

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

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

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

February 8, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I assume the Casino de Lac Leamy hates us.

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

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

But, I was determined to have a good time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I blinked, and looked more closely at the screen.

I had cleared $295.

I looked at the number of the last bet.

23.

I had just hit on Roulette.

I was a winner.

April 7, 2008

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

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

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

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

"Absolutely."

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

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

I blinked. "Is there a problem?"

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

"Oh. But it's probably nothing?"

"Probably. But we want to make sure."

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

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

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

I began to get concerned.

February 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to play a hundred dollar slot machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it wasn't money I had expected.

And I would never have this chance again.

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

April 7, 2008

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

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

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

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

"And?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feburary 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 8, 2008

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

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

"So I'm okay?"

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

"Well, yeah."

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

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

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

"You bet." I grinned.

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

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

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

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

But then, I never took stupid chances, right?

February 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I closed my eyes, feeling silly for feeling nervous.

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

I am having a wonderful time writing the "State of..." essays, and I'm not dropping the project. Unfortunately, I've been having major sleeplessness issues of late, to the point where my doctor has prescribed chemicals that cause luminescent butterflies to render me largely unconscious during those times. They remind me of Gossamer from this webcomic I once knew....

...anyway....

While my brain chemicals sort themselves out and I get back on track, writing simply isn't. I don't have the brain for it. I've been pushing myself to get back into gear -- I actually just wrote and posted a couple of Superguy episodes to push my head back into writing space. For whatever reason, I've always been able to write Superguy when my brain is starved for rest and oxygen.

With luck, by the end of the weekend I'll have my sea legs under me again, and will be back to "Stating of," and possibly even Justice Wing and/or Myth writing.

And is it weird that my brain is turning a new RPG idea over my head... one that would require me to have a conversation with, in no particular order, Chad Underkoffler, Shaenon Garrity, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Jeffrey Channing Wells, Darren Gav Bleuel, Howard Tayler, David Willis, Andy Weir, Bruce Baugh, Randy "Action" Milholland and Gary Olson? Or is it just sad and hopeless? I don't know -- my brain is soft and sleep deprived.

(No, the project is not "Credenza: The Role Playing Game.")

Regardless, that is the Deal™. In the meantime, please enjoy some jazz.

This is one of those mornings where I don't have enough brain to work on webcomics criticism. I know, that may seem like a strange statement, but sometimes these posts actually take a moderate amount of thought. Who knew?

So, that to me says it's time to touch on a few announcements from the wide world of Superhero Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games! Yee-haw! I know folks were just praying that I'd get back to this subject in short order.

Right now, we have our two entries into the field, and they're at significantly different places in the universe. City of Heroes is a strong, vibrant game. It has a solid subscriber base, it has the force of momentum behind it, and it makes announcements in terms of weeks or months. Champions Online is, for all the excitement, vapor right now -- it's due in the Spring of 2009, and there's very few video games that actually hit their target release date without a few delays. So, no matter, how cool Champions Online sounds, it's still more than a year away at best.

Still, the news coming out of the two Heroic Houses -- our DC and Marvel, and I have no idea which is which -- makes for fun dissection and speculation, and that's how we're going to approach this here post. We're going to dissect and speculate, which is a fancy way of saying 'bitch and make shit up.' But hey, with luck it'll be fun to read.

City of Heroes, having come off of an unusually weak Valentines'/Spring Event, has come back strong. First off, they brought back one of the best "in-zone" events they've done -- the Rikti Invasion. This is a sequence where every so often (on a relatively regular basis) the alarms are sounded in almost any given zone, the forcefields drop (if it's a City of Heroes zone), the skies turn green, the bad guy NPCs flee and the Rikti come sweeping in, with carpet bombing and ground troop assaults. This was a big event last year, and was an occasional event since (whenever some team completes the Lady Grey Task Force in the Rikti War Zone it triggers a Rikti invasion in some random game zone). Well, they've now made invasions a recurring event. It looks like, roughly, they do one week on for the invasion for every six weeks off, with the "weeks" breaking down to encompass a weekend.

I know some of my friends hate the Rikti invasion -- it's an imposition, from their lights. It makes actually playing the game in the affected zones harder, not to mention the massive spamming that goes on during them. But God help me, I love the invasion. For a solo roleplayer (I know, it's a contradiction in terms) they're just about perfect. They're relatively fast, and there's a real sense of everyone dropping everything, defusing bombs and grabbing any pickup group they can to smash the invading armies. Because they've implemented scaling code on Rikti invaders, everyone can grab whatever team they want -- it doesn't matter if I'm Level 37 and my partners are level 9 -- we all get XP for our fighting, and we're all equals in the battle.

This is the first sequence that's really felt like a world shaking event in the game, and as laggy and confusing as it can get, it's amazingly cool to be standing in the heart of forty heroes slamming down Rikti soldiers, drones and Heavy Assault Suits at all sides, noise everywhere and flares and particle effects flying at all sides. On the other hand, I have a really solid computer to play on and this last invasion I was generally playing a Mastermind, which meant I pretty much threw Healing Poison on my allies and henchmen and spun around looking for Heavies to target while my henchmen did all the actual fighting. For a scrapper, these chaosfests might suck.

Anyway, I really like this. I'm glad it's happening in one-week chunks, so I don't have time to get sick of it, and I'm glad it recurs. And I noticed that the incidence of Lady Grey Task Force-triggered Rikti Invasions went up significantly in the days following this Invasion's completion -- clearly, a good number of players were inspired by it. Or wanted the Apocalyptic badge. Either way.

Anyhow -- this turned out to be the minor bit of City of Heroes news, because after the first week of renewed invasion was over, they made their major announcement: Issue 12: Midnight Hour, the 11th major free expansion of City of Heroes. (They call Issue 6: Along Came A Spider a free issue because of a few adds to City of Heroes, but that issue was really the release of City of Villains, which was a paid expansion which actually funded things like Siren's Call and Warburg, even if they credit them as 'free' because City of Heroes players could play them.) We had been told to expect little this issue, with the major stuff coming in Issue 13, but as it works out the paid Wedding Pack costume and emotes pack sold very well indeed, giving them the chance to get ahead of the cost/result curve in research and development, and as a result Midnight Hour looks like a solid expansion.

The announced new features are:

• Join the Midnight Squad (Levels 10 - 20): The text indicates this is Hero-only content, but developer followup indicates there's some Villain content here too.
• New Roman-Style Maps (Levels 35 - 50): Hero and Villain cooperative stuff in the ancient past.
• Unlock Roman-Style Armor Costumes: Just what it sounds like. Off the shoulder capes and skirts for everyone!
• Villain Epic Archetypes: Finally, a symmetrical balance for villains who hit level 50, in answer to the Peacebringer and Warshade archetypes available to heroes after a player dings 50.
• Powerset Proliferation: We're crossing the factional divide with a few powersets.
• Hollows Zone "Gameplay Makeover:" In the tradition of Faultline and the Rikti War Zone, the Hollows is the latest zone to get a new look, new missions and new balance.
• Major Gameplay Improvements: Various quality of life and minor new systems and functions bundled together into a "major" one.

Let's cover each of these in turn, shall we?

Join the Midnight Squad: The Midnight Squad is a Pulpesque organization dating back to the 20s, mentioned in various places throughout the game. It's known this semi-public group of occultists was of particular value during the Rikti Invasion, which also took a monumental toll on their ranks, and most of their in-game inclusion to date has involved some researcher or the other getting killed.

This is a cool thing all around. In storyline terms, enough time's passed since the war that this organization is finally getting its feet back under itself, and it promises to add some significant content both in terms of the Rikti War ongoing storyline (including a teased resolution to it, which makes me wonder what will happen to the Rikti War Zone in coming Issues, unless this is a red herring), and in terms of the very creation of superpowers in the World of Paragon City and the Rogue Islands.

On the other hand, the level 10-20 stuff is described as a significant story arc for heroes and "two smaller adventures" for villains, and the story description we have to date is couched in Heroic terms. (Stopping the war, helping end the assault, fighting the Lost, stuff like that.) This is one of those areas where heroes and villains have different content, but the villain content is either less significant (to the point where they're not advertising specifics) or is in fact still "heroic" content. The player base strongly cants Hero, so that's where the development goes, which makes bad guy players (like me, much of the time) sad pandas. But more on that in a few minutes.

In terms of what this is, rather than what this is not, this is exciting stuff. Levels 10 - 20 can be a slog on either side of the factional divide -- play enough alts and you see pretty much all the content over and over and over again. Having something to transition you into the 20s that isn't the Golden Roller or Virginia Hoffman will be a nice change.

New Roman Style Zone Maps: Let me say first and foremost -- anything that expands the City of Heroes map base is an innately good thing. I remember when I was introducing a friend to City of Villains, and talking about the lush levels of detail, the expansion of gameplay, the joys of Brutes and Masterminds and the like, his response was, more or less, "wait -- this is just that same warehouse map I've been on a thousand times. They just redressed it." He went back to World of Warcraft in disappointment, and I spent some time sighing. These things do matter.

And new content from 35-50 is also always good, especially if it's engaging enough to pull my level 50 heroine back out to play. And this sounds like it could be interesting and exciting, adding depth to the City of Heroes backstory and mythology and giving us a preview of the long-promised Shields powerset (the Romans you encounter have Shields, you see). Let me quote from the announcement:

There is a familiar threat in an ancient land and the Midnighters need the help of both Heroes and Villains to stop it. Players step foot upon the ancient land of the Roman Cimeroran Peninsula, where they battle deadly creatures, defend an ancient city and ultimately come face to face with the enemy of time itself. Throughout this journey players uncover the mysteries of power and the origins that guide them today.

On the one hand, I like the sound of this. I'm looking forward to playing in it. And if it's a chance to play my favorite character (a villain) alongside the friends I most like to play this game with (all of whom vastly prefer playing heroes to villains), so much the better.

On the other hand... I'm waiting for the day we get an announcement like this: "from the ancient depths of antiquity comes an order heroic and true, who have access to a source of power so monumental, so epic, and so valuable that villains and heroes alike will band together to smash these paladins and seize this power for themselves -- to change the world, destroy it, or sell to the highest bidder!"

I'm waiting, but it won't ever come. In fact, it shouldn't come. Everything in the genre demands that heroes remain, in the end, heroic, There won't ever be a situation where they join with villains for villainous reasons.

But we've now had several instances where villains join with heroes for heroic reasons. The threats are too large -- and as distasteful as the heroes might find it, it's the villains' world too, and sometimes they need to set their differences aside for the Greater Good. This drives the entire Rikti War Zone. This drives the co-op elements in the Valentine's Day and New Year's events. Heck, while Ouroboros isn't a cooperative zone, in order to become a real member of Ouroboros you need to save a future Atlas Park, fight the scourge of the Rikti, invade old Fifth Column bases (and help bring it down) -- pretty solid good-guy stuff. And while there are some villain missions in Ouroboros (the 1960's battle to establish Lord Recluse in the Rogue Islands is a heap of fun, if you can get past the ridiculous "proving yourself" mission in the middle of it, and damn it, I want one of those cheesy 60's Arachnos suits -- they have non-functional 'spider arms' coming out of their sides! It would be like being the Monarch's Henchmen!) there's a lot of places where you can be a good guy, and not many places where a good guy can be (forced into being) a bad guy.

This is a tangential complaint, however. The content should be good and I'm looking forward to running through it. See more of this later.

Unlock Roman Style Armor Costumes: This, on the other hand, I'm a little dubious about.

Don't get me wrong -- the Roman Armor looks cool. I could easily build a good character concept for it.

However, that may be a fool's errand. The armor is unlockable, which is to say we have to do something in-game to get it.

There's a lot of ways that could happen. There may be a badge or mission in the 10 - 20 range Midnight Squad missions that unlocks it. There may be a "Merit" system similar to the Vanguard Merits unlocking the Vanguard costume pieces. There may be a reward of the whole thing for completing the Level 35-50 mission sequence. There may be a Task Force or the like in the game. We just don't know.

The problem with most of those is they make the new armor essentially useless for the best possible use of it: character concepts.

Seriously. If I can "unlock" my armor at Level 10, it's probably fine (from L1-10 I can come up with some kind of placeholder) but if the earliest level I can unlock Roman Centurion armor is 35 then forget tailoring a design around it. That's a mug's game. And L35 is a terrible earliest level to get a new suit of clothes unlocked anyhow -- sure, some folks will jump into it, but a good number of people get their costume slots set and at most do variations after that. If you get the armor unlocked from L35-39, then maybe you'll use it in your last slot at L40, but if you're already over 40 when you do this set, is Roman really a look that'll displace one of your current costumes?

And if they use the horrific "Vanguard Merit" style system to unlock the armor, I'll just give up on it and be done with it.

Vanguard Merits are the game's means of creating an 'alternate currency' for players to earn costume pieces, temporary powers and even temporary pets while fighting the Rikti. When I first sent my L50 character into the Rikti War Zone, I was into the concept -- the character had gone to war, and as the character earned Merits, one of the character's costumes would slowly morph into a Vanguard uniform. That made happy sense to me.

But it took so freaking long to get enough Merits to get any of the costume pieces, I abandoned it. The only way the Merit system really works is if you do a lot of the Raids on the downed Rikti ship in the middle of the zone. I don't do Raids. I hate Raids. I hate Raids. I may be the only person who preordered City of Heroes and started playing on the first day who's never once done a Hamidon Raid. So I just gave up on costume pieces for that character.

If we have to earn Midnight Merits to unlock the Roman armor, then each piece better be five freaking Merits, or else I have no interest and by the by, stop clogging my salvage display with them.

On the other hand, the announcement actually says that a player's achievements will unlock the Roman Armor costumes. If this is the case, then it's possible they'll be hard to unlock and a part of the higher level range, but unlocking the costumes once unlocks them for all that player's characters, past and future. If so, that's okay -- a hard task that gives a solid reward is cool instead of frustrating.

Villain Epic Archetypes: As I said above, Villains have been waiting since the introduction of Grandville and L40-50 content for an Epic Archetype to counterbalance the heroes' Kheldans (the aforementioned Peacebringers and Warshades). Now, "Epic" in the City of Heroes sense means "tied to a specific epic story," not "all powerful and grand." On the other hand, the Kheldans are pretty damn spiff. You can become an all powerful energy squid that can blast as well as any given blaster, or you can become a gigantic lobster person -- in effect a somewhat gimped pocket tanker -- and you can also develop a wide variety of personal powers. And you get your travel powers for free, and the content -- the epic story -- was all new to the game, and added whole new dimensions.

The Villain Epic Archetypes are... Blood Widows and Wolf Spiders.

Which, for those who don't play the game (and if you don't play the game, why are you still reading this far down?) are two of the minions that serve Arachnos.

Yeah. On the hero side, we have energy squid lobsterpeople with a rich, new dimension of storytelling to the game. On the villain side.... I have the mooks I've been mowing down by the truckload since the day I first started playing City of Villains. In fact, one of the sidequests in the Outbreak tutorial involves your Level 1 villain saving a hapless and clueless Wolf Spider from capture and completing the mission he bungled. And hey, now you too can be that wolf spider! Yay!

Yay.

On the one hand, the execution of these new Villain Epic Archetypes looks really cool. It's a branching system, so you can climb the ladder of Arachnos types -- you start as a Blood Widow, say, but work your way up to Fortunata Mistress or Night Widow. And Wolf Spiders can become the nasty and powerful Bane Spiders, or they can become Crab Spiders, which means will have giant eight armed crab spider backpacks. And God damn it, I want a giant eight armed crab spider backpack. And they describe it as "infiltrating" the ranks of Arachnos, which could be cool and the story could be good.

But... dude, the Villain epics are mooks. And honestly, I'm sick of Arachnos anyway. Instead of Epics that added a new dimension and story to City of Villains, we're getting additional depth and explication on the overused part of City of Villains.

But dude. Eight Armed Crab Spider Backpack. Not to mention Night Widow. And they've finally put gender equality into the ranks of Arachnos, including male Blood Widow(er)s, and female Wolf Spiders, which they highlight in the archetype specific costume choices. I'm weird -- It's not the metrosexual guys or the Goth Chick Bane Spider that looks cool to me -- it's the badass reddish female wolf spider on the end. Yeah, she's a mook in the most mooklike armor, but that armor is slick.

So, on the one hand I'm disappointed. On the other hand I'm desperately levelling my top villain to be able to play one of these upon release. So, I'm going to call this a win for CrypticNCSoft, but I hope we get some different kinds of Epic which add new story elements soon.

Powerset Proliferation: What this means, in effect, is a bunch of the powersets currently reserved for specific archetypes (especially on one faction's side or the other) are going to be added to other archetypes. We already know that Plant Control has been imported from the Dominators to the Controllers, which is cool. And we know a Psi set is going to the blasters, and Brutes are getting both Mace and Axe. Everyone is getting a new primary and secondary except for Brutes, who get two primaries and a secondary, and Masterminds, who only get a secondary since there are no Mastermind primaries that Masterminds don't innately get.

This is all good stuff. More variety is more variety, and it makes me more likely to indulge my Altaholism, testing out new combinations and having fun. I'm looking forward to learning more -- especially what the Defenders are getting, because there's lots of cool stuff on the Villain side and any of it would be fun. That said, I hope it's Thermal -- because Thermal means setting your allies on fire, and who doesn't like to do that?

Major Gameplay Improvements: In brief (yeah, fat chance) summary: significant improvements to the UI, including new configurable power trays, being able to organize your contacts, continued real numbers in place of the vagueness instituted at the beginning, and improvements to chatting. You can also take three Inspirations of a similar type you don't need and convert them to another type you do need, which is exciting. And the explosion of light and sound you get when you Level Up now also gives you one of every inspiration autocast on your character. So when you're in a pitched battle and you level up, not only do you get better combat statistics, you also suddenly get a pile of 30 second buffs on your character. I am entirely in favor of all of the above, though it's not the sort of thing that inspires dancing in the streets.

On the whole, Issue 12 looks like a really solid issue, and I'm glad people bought the Wedding Pack so we could get the cool stuff. My lingering regret is generally villain-related, though it's not like Villains were ignored this time out.

(That said, I really, really want Redemption in Issue 13 -- or at least Probation. Either let my villains, having fought alongside the heroes so often, finally join up and become heroes or give a system that lets a villain cross the divide and work with the heroes a la Catwoman with Batman or the Rogues with the Flash in all those issues of the comic book. Or, you know, go the other way if they'd rather. But honestly. My friends play heroes. I love Masterminds. Please let me play with my friends in something other than Pocket D or the Rikti War Zone. I'll give you a doughnut.)

Well, the stuff coming out of Champions Online central isn't as deep or rich as what's coming out of City of Heroes, but that makes sense. Champions Online is still a year away, and so we're at the point of getting dribbles of information, not details. Still, we did learn a few things that continue to have me excited for the game, and so I'm going to goob about them. Because Christ knows a 4000 word post on City of Heroes needs padding.

We got some new screenshots that demonstrate our heroes have actual facial expressions -- something the City of Heroes characters lack. Your character can smirk, or look defiant, or stuff. Wink, I presume. Which, by the way, is likely how these announcements are going to go for a while. We're going to see new and exciting stuff that you can't do in City of Heroes highlighted. Cryptic knows who their competition are, and they're not going to highlight the stuff that's essentially the same between the two games.

That said, facial expressions, while neat, aren't at the top of my wishlist.

One thing that was on the top of my wishlist was autotargeting, as you'll recall. And an "Ask Cryptic" dev post where players got to ask questions helped to allay some of my fears for the game. It's that post I'm going to focus on.

First off, we learned about some of the HEROalike elements of the Champions Online system, including a good breakdown of a Champions (pen and paper) energy blast. Now, it's worth noting -- I was not hoping for nor even wanting this game to use the HERO system. I adore HERO. I used to sit for hours and generate characters with it, refining and developing them and fitting them into the point constraints. But if there's one good way to turn a lot of casual gamers off, it's monumentally complicated math based character generation. Sitting there and optimizing your CON to punch up your END and REC stats is a lot of fun... for some people.

So, instead of the incredibly broad HERO system, which separates mechanics from special effects, we have a system that has predefined special effects (they mention Dark Blast and Ice Blast as examples, instead of a HEROesque 'energy blast' you could then define as ice or dark if you wanted) that you can then add advantages and limitations to as needed. Amusingly, this sounds more like GURPS Supers than Champions, but that's okay with me!

And, while the customizing system is exciting and cool, I know a lot of City of Heroes fans who are mostly just excited at the chance to change the colors of their powers. That's one of the most requested features in City of Heroes, but the graphics engine wasn't designed with that in mind, and it's nigh-impossible to retrofit it. You can bet the Champions Online people will be trumpeting this for some time to come.

They also say that there will be a rich and robust non-combat skill system, where you can take things like Stealth or Science and use them in missions to affect things, or compete with your enemies or the like. This could be amazingly cool, but it could also be pretty lame. Further, this was the sort of thing that Cryptic tried several times and methods to add to City of Heroes without success. It's possible that those skills just couldn't be added to the engine, but they might work really well if the engine is designed with it in mind in the first place. I'm hopeful, but I'll actually believe in the robust skills system when I see it.

They mentioned also that Archvillain fights will involve more than just beating your archvillain into pus, again highlighting the upcoming Nemesis system as a part of that. As part of my ongoing hope that heroes will be able to do good as opposed to just fight evil, I'm hopeful this is a sign of flexibility in mission design.

They've revealed that the penalty for defeats will echo the World of Warcraft system -- your equipment is damaged if you lose, and will lose effectiveness until repaired -- eventually becoming useless. This includes all "upgrades," which may be how they do the Level system in this game (they may eschew the Level distinction altogether, which I'm in favor of since it's more Championsesque, but they'll still need some means of easy comparion). Nothing dramatically new, but I'm just as happy to see "debt" not a part of this.

Finally, the one I cared most about. They reinforced again the very active combat system, but also reinforced it would have things like autotarget. However, they've reduced recharge times (in hopes of preventing the 'energy blast that goes around corners) issue, and added stuff like persistent powers that will hurt you until you break line of sight with your opponent. These are good ideas, especially because they sound intuitive. I should be able to run around a corner to break Firewing's line of sight and stop the horrible pain.

So, the short term prognosis for City of Heroes is excellent, and the long term prognosis for Champions Online is exciting. With City of Heroes learning that sales of an optional costume pack can equal significant increases in resources (and the continuing growth of their development team, thanks to their new corporate overlords), there's every chance we'll see more optional paid content which in turn will fuel more free expansion content going forward. And as Champions Online gets closer to release, we can start to see how the promises being made in 2008 turn into gameplay in 2009.

All in all, it's a good time to be a Hero.

And an okay time to be a Villain. Stupid heroes with their new zones and their universal threats and "oh, if the Earth is destroyed where will you spend your ill gotten gains and rabble dragah mutter....

The Webcartoonist: Bill Holbrook

Current Webcomics: Kevin and Kell

You Might Remember Him From Such Nationally Syndicated Newspaper Comic Strips As: On the Fastrack, Safe Havens

Enthusiasm: Why Do I Read This Webcomic Again?

How Frequently Read: When I Remember to Check

For some of these strips, it's easy enough to be cavalier. It's a little bit like selecting a lobster for dinner. "That one," you say with the disinterested air of a sociopath. "It looks like it has fight -- perhaps might be considering rebellion. That one. Boil it until its skin turns red and then I shall consume whatever I find when I crack the shell."

It is worth noting I am from Maine, a state that used to have lobsters on their license plates. A state where we actually have turned lobster, which is generally $22.50 for a relatively poor one on the plates of New York restaurants, into fast food. Seriously. We scoop out the meat, mix it with mayonnaise, slap it into a hot dog roll, and grill it. McDonalds sells lobster rolls around here during the summer.

It is also worth noting I hate lobster. It tastes like rubber dipped in butter. This is one reason I cannot live in my home state, but must forever live across its border, staring mournfully back from New Hampshire, yearning to be one of the special. I do not like lobster. I do not claim to like lobster. And when I describe lobster, I compare eating it to psychosis.

Once, in Camden, I saw children being entertained at a dockside restaurant by a chef who plucked out lobsters and teased them. They laughed, and then the lobsters got thrown into boiling water so their parents could eat them. The children laughed some more. As did many others. I am not a vegetarian. I am a classic omnivore, and I do enjoy meat. Still, I was creeped right the hell out that day and stuck to salad for about a week. Laugh, children, laugh.

Still, there are strips I can be that jaded about. Sooner or later, User Friendly is going to come up on the random rolls, after all, and whatever emotional connection I had to that strip suffocated sometime after the missile silo storyline.

This isn't one of those strips. Bill Holbrook isn't one of those cartoonists. I have immeasurable respect for Bill Holbrook, and I think his webcomic, Kevin and Kell, is one of the most significant in the history of webcomics. It legitimized the form from an early start. Heck, Holbrook has intimated in the past that he continues to produce his two nationally syndicated comic strips so that he can afford to keep Kevin and Kell going. And he did this years before anybody made a living at being an online cartoonist.

It is also worth noting those nationally syndicated strips are high quality, with good jokes, good art, excellent writing and continuing storylines full of strangeness and mirth the likes of which we haven't seen since Pogo. And Kevin and Kell is the strip that he does for love as much as money, and it turns all of the above up to 11.

And God help me, I'm falling out of love with it. Have fallen out of love with it, really, but I can't quite let it go and I'm not sure I ever can.

Kevin and Kell was one of the earliest online comics I read, just after the aforementioned User Friendly. (Which also wasn't the first, but this is not the venue to discuss Slugs! except to say I'd like it to come back, please.) It was a webcomic that featured good humor, a good situation, excellent geek jokes, good art, and social relevance all wrapped up with an ethernet cord chewed by a half-wolf/half-rabbit baby who was busy spitting up full elk skeletons. Which was a testament to Holbrook -- Kevin and Kell is, after all, an anthropomorphic comic. A furry strip, in other words. And 'furry' has baggage these days, deserved or not.But in Holbrook's world of Domain, the gruesome side of society is presented with as much cheer as the suburban side. Predators and prey both live and work together, but it's well known and understood that the predators eat the prey, and we see evidence of that all the time. Casual jokes about the slaughter of innocent sentient beings so that other sentients may live. A carnivorous baby who sometimes kills and eats the antagonist of a given series of strips as a resolution to a given plot. Seriously. And then the followup isn't "our nonverbal daughter in diapers just consumed a living being with hopes and dreams, solving some of my problems in a horrific but brutally final way," but "boy, I hope this doesn't screw with Coney's toilet training."

This is not the only time the day has been saved by Coney eating the antagonist. I seem to recall a sequence where a feline Human Resources manager discovers Kell is domesticated and is going to ruin her life, but the baby doesn't just eat him, she mounts his stuffed head on the wall as a trophy. But I can't find it and honestly, absent Oh No Robot access it's too hard to track down for the purposes of writing this.

As a side note, even back at the time I found the consuming of a living being perfectly acceptable, but fishing in a toilet made me a little ill. Ah, situational ethics.

The thing is? The strip was about racism. Or anti-semitism. Or gay marriage or homophobia. Or anything else you want to talk about where one person hates other people because they're not like he is. Kevin (Heaven) is a rabbit. Kell (Hell) is a wolf. They met in an online chatroom, they fell in love, and then they discovered that she was a predator and he was prey. And they decided "well, what the heck," both having had bad experiences before -- Kell's first husband was trampled to death trying to impress people by bringing down too-large prey. Kevin's first wife, though a rabbit, was a bitch who ditched him for a skunk, then got ditched by the skunk after adopting his large number of skunk children. Later still she would be ejected from Rabbitdom and downgraded to "rodent," which she cheerfully accepted, had surgery to make herself resemble a rat, and married a predator herself.

The point is, the tension point of the strip -- the situation of the situation comedy -- is "here's a couple that's supposed to avoid each other. The wolf eats the rabbit. This is how the world works. You don't go against the order. Only they love each other, and they've had a baby, and they have children from their earlier marriages, and now they have to make it work."

And it did work -- as a marriage and as a strip. It worked for a long, long, long time, Jesus, this thing's been running since 1995. There are people reading this right now who weren't alive when this strip started. (And if you're one of them, talk to your parents about whether or not you should be reading this site. I use bad language, talk about art, and am a liberal. I just don't want you to get into trouble.)

So, why am I falling out of (fallen out of) love with this strip? It's clearly great, right?

Well... yeah. Yeah it is.

But I mentioned the tension point above. The interfactional marriage. (Interspecies marriage seems to be such a common occurrence that the taboo is clearly predator/prey.) Kevin and Kell trying to be accepted by their society, trying to hold a sometimes resentful family together, and trying to have a decent life despite being different. That's the cornerstone of the series -- the prime motivating factor behind the story and the funny.

And... well... it's been thirteen years, almost. Society's pretty well adapted. In fact, they've had several storylines to prove it. (Not the least of which was when the entire neighbor came out with mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the Dewclaws' tree -- it had lost its access to sunlight -- so that it wouldn't die and force them to move.) Heck, Kevin and Kell saved the world from the Y2K bug by fixing the code and "infusing it with their tolerant personalities." These days, when someone reacts negatively to the predator/prey relationship, it seems almost quaint and ridiculous. Jeez, man. This is yesterday's news.

Not to mention there have been lots of other interfactional marriages since then.

To compensate, Holbrook has put in other analogues. Bruno, Rudy's best friend, started the comic as a "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing," ostensibly as a hunting technique, but in actuality he was wearing his sheep girlfriend on his back the whole time (kinnnnnky....) After she was revealed (and later revealed to be half-wolf, and Ralph Dewclaw's daughter, making her Rudy's cousin and Kell's niece and -- yeah, there's a Hell of a lot of this kind of thing going on), he went back to his sheepskin disguise in part to make the character look right, but also to be reminded of Corrie (said half-sheep/half-wolf). And after that it became an analogue to crossdressing/transgendering/transsexuality when Bruno gets three extra stomachs put in so he can become a herbivore. This leads to arguments and friction and prejudice and "will Bruno be allowed to stay on the Hunting team" and Rudy and Bruno having a fistfight and...

Or how about Domestication, the homosexuality of Domain. Kell develops spontaneous domestication, which she's passed on to her son genetically, and they have to disguise the signs and compensate for it so Kell doesn't lose her job and be downgraded to Prey, et al. Later, several other people (including R.L., the Alpha Male destructive force of a wolf who owns and runs Herdthinners, Inc.) And then there's lots of ways Domestication proves to be an advantage (at least, Fiona, Rudy's girlfriend, is willing to take advantage of it).

Oh, Fiona. Half-fennec fox with rabbitlike ears that she hates at first, as her father generally does, but later accepts. Fennecs are actually African foxes and we go through a Fennec pride storyline and she wears modified "traditional Fennec dress" and are you getting the subtle point here?

Oh, and Lindesfarne, who was a herbivore in the registry because she was adopted as a porcupine but as it turns out she's really an English Hedgehog so she becomes an insectivore overnight, only she and her insectivore bat boyfriend Fenton are best friends with a firefly and a moth--

Oh, did I mention that Kell hated cats until she became best friends with Aby, who's a feline car mechanic who teaches her the feline language and Kell learns to--

Oh, and now we have Kevin's mother entering the strip, and she hates carnivores with a passion and tries very hard to convince Coney to be a herbivore exclusively only she and Kell's mother who despise each other really don't and learn to--

...are you seeing a pattern here?

Without the societal tension implicit in the situation, the strip loses cohesion. Holbrook is a pro (oh man is he ever) and knows this, so he has to reintroduce tense situations. Only at this point they go straight into formula, because everyone involved has huge amounts of practice. And we see a lot of repeating as a result. And yeah, every so often someone gets eaten to boot (though not "name" characters, though Holbrook used to tease it.)

The next issue is the sheer complexity of the strip. At this point, the FAQ for the strip is seventeen thousand words long, and a huge amount of that FAQ comes down to answering who all these secondary characters are. Which is a godsend and good on everyone involved, but it denotes something -- Holbrook is very creative and very careful with his continuity, and has been doing this for thirteen years. Of equal value is the Comixpedia writeup, which is very long and very complete and an excellent synopsis and oh my God there's a lot going on here, and that's not even counting the Birds.

It gets exhausting. And not unlike the Simpsons, more and more of the strips deal with the extended cast instead of the primary cast because honestly, the primary cast has done so freaking much it's hard to give them new situations.

And though he's slowly begun aging his cast (Lindesfarne was finally allowed to graduate and go to college, while Coney finally became a Toddler, for example), there are ways that aging isn't fast enough. Lindesfarne won't get married until she graduates from college, which might not take long (she is, after all, a supergenius), but if it happens before Rudy graduates from high school that would be difficult, only Rudy and Fiona moving into college would take the strip further from its roots in one sense... and in another give us another situation to set up....

And that doesn't even touch on the phrase that drives me the most insane. The phrase that for long as I've been reading this comic has knocked me right out of the moment. The phrase that doesn't happen all the time but recurs just often enough that I want to pound my head into brick walls when I see it.

"We canines use our tails to communicate--"

"We felines use our tales to indicate displeasure--"

"We bats use echolocution as--"

"We rabbits have a complicated strategy of--"

Gah.

Every time I see a character say "We [whatever] do [a thing]," my brain is thrown back into the bad side of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. "As you know, Bob, the gravity reductionist device has enabled us to fly our ships without regard to inertia!" "Why yes, Steve, and as you'll recall our oxygen comes from the O2ameter here in the corner...." I know. I know Holbrook has to get us information on the way an entire civilization from the Whales to the insects are intelligent manages to operate without thermonuclear genocide, but for God's sake we know she's a cat. We can see she's a cat. Aby doesn't have to tell us she's a cat when describing cat behavior! SHE'S A CAT!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry. I got frothy there for a second.

Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Kevin and Kell is bad. It isn't. It's very, very good. That Holbrook still manages to make nine strips out of ten funny in the fourth panel even to a new reader is a testament to his sheer competence in this arena. But at this point, after all these years, I no longer think anything will really go wrong for these people. Society's pretty well adjusted. They adjust to each new wrinkle. Problems get solved, usually within a couple of weeks. The years of long extended metastory are well and truly behind us. We are left with domestic comedy, and we've heard the jokes a bunch of times.

It's not a hate. It's not even aggravation (outside of the phrase mentioned above, but we critics fixate on language and recurrence, as you know, Steve).

But it's hard to feel the love. It's hard to care. Rudy's not going to flunk out. Fiona's not going to cheat on him (again). And she's certainly not going to end up pregnant or anything. The family's going to make it through whatever comes up, and so are the secondary characters. Mom Kindle's got her new boyfriend and his criminal record? No big deal. Mom Kindle and Mom Dewclaw will spar as they both work at Aby's garage, but the wolf won't turn, seize the rabbit in her jaws and shake until the rabbit lies dead, waiting to be devoured. The only speaking characters who end up devoured are bad people, and it'll probably be Coney who eats them.

Laugh, children, laugh.

I'm not giving up on the strip. I've loved it too much and I don't hate it enough to try and kill the inertia. I go two or three weeks and I catch up, and usually that gets me through a conflict or two, and I enjoy Holbrook's clear skill.

But I'm falling out of love with it. Have fallen out of love with it. I'm just sticking with it because I don't actually dislike it, and that's a little sad for me.

Anyway, 2800 words in and we'll get to the metrics.

Strengths

As stated at length, Holbrook is a consummate professional. He's rock steady on updates. His strips are perfectly executed from panel one to panel four. The art is distinctive and clean and lovely. The characters are well written. The jokes are funny. It's hard to say anything bad about someone who's so good. And the FAQ and other website elements (on the several websites where Kevin and Kell appear) are well done and easy to work with.

Weaknesses

Beyond the malaise I mention in the body of the essay, the biggest issues are actually pretty trivial. The tag lines added to the strips can sometimes spoil them if you don't train yourself not to read them before looking at the strip. Though it would be a monumental task for the fanbase, incorporating Oh No Robot would be a very cool thing and helpful to boot. And while there may not be anything to be done for it, the cast really is unfeasibly large at this point, and it might behoove Holbrook to do some series surgery to narrow things down.

On the Whole

Kevin and Kell is still a damn good comic. Better than most, really.

It's like in any relationship. You want to say how they've let you down, but really sometimes the magic just fades.

It's not you, it's me.

And that's a sad thing to write.

Right-o. We roll the dice for the next one of these -- hopefully not so complex, so I can get it out in a more timely fashion....

Oh! Cool. Right. See you then.

The Webcartoonist: Jennie Breeden

Current Webcomics: The Devil's Panties, Geebas on Parade

Enthusiasm: The Devil's Panties: The Hoi Polloi, Geebas on Parade: Happily Reading

How Frequently Read: When I Remember to Check

It's interesting to me, writing these, to hit a cartoonist who's doing multiple strips. It's certainly reasonable that my enthusiasm might be different for two or more strips done by a given artist -- after all, if the two strips are so identical that my reactions are identical, it raises the question of whether or not multiple strips are really called for. After all, it's nice to see a webcartoonist stretch -- even if they're following paths they've gone down before, working in multiple areas and with multiple intentions keeps the writing and drawing muscles supple.

Jennie Breeden interests me, having said this, because my reactions are actually pretty atypical for me, looking at her current stuff, in two ways. One, while the subject matter of her two ongoing strips are significantly different, there is a real core similarity between them. Both star, for lack of a better word, her. Both are humorous elaborations and exaggerations on aspects of her own life. The Devil's Panties is at its heart a journal comic, even if it takes creative liberties with what's happening in Breeden's life for the sake of the punchline, if nothing else. Geebas on Parade details the goofy and funny side of Breeden's long years of playing SOLAR. The art style is virtually identical between the two strips, some characters appear in both strips, the humor is very similar between the two strips and most importantly -- though we call her "Jennie" in one and "Talia" in the other, Breeden is the same in both.

And yet, my reactions to the two strips are really quite different. And even more unusually, the strip I'm indifferent to is her primary strip, while her secondary, specialist strip is the one I actively look forward to. And that's very unusual, in my experience.

It's worth noting I didn't always feel this way about The Devil's Panties. I used to be very into it. It's over the past year to year and a half that it's just sort of faded into the background -- not quite 'why do I read this webcomic again' but I can see it's house from where we're camped out. Geebas, on the other hand, almost never fails to make me laugh.

And that kind of mystifies me. Why does "Talia finds the half naked gypsy boys appealing and is unafraid to show it" make me laugh, and "Jennie finds the half naked boys at the charity auction appealing and is unafraid to show" kind of meh? The jokes are largely the same, the circumstances aren't dissimilar, the art is almost identical, and it's not like Breeden isn't good at executing a four panel gag comic -- she is, and very well.

It took me a while, but finally I figured it out.

Breeden has settled down.

Let me explain through the lens of someone else's life -- my own.

I used to write an online journal, back in the days before 'blogs,' and in its own way it was popular, and when I discovered I was looking at dying off thanks to my heart expanding like Jiffy Pop Popcorn and my kidneys deciding I must be dehydrated and drowning me in my own fluids (I'm much better now, thanks) it got very popular -- for an online journal, anyway. And that's part of the key right there, but let me talk about my later writing career -- when I started up a cultural commentary blog and named it Websnark. And if I look over several years of records, I see that some of the most popular stuff I've written for websnark are details of my life. If you look at the Evergreen section over in the sidebar of the main page, you'll see them -- Spider Webs and Shadows, and the Purgatory of New Hampshire Malls in Summer, Views of the Q List: The Dumbrella Meet and Greet, Dead Dogs and others. And some folks want to know why I don't write more of those. They like them, and they think it's the sort of thing I do well, and they wants it, their precious.

The answer can be found in that old Online Journal -- when I wasn't, you know, dying, having chemicals put in me to keep me alive, and generally trying to get better -- which was great for ratings because it was interesting -- my life was boring. Boring boring boring. Once in a few months I have an experience that makes for a good nonfiction story, and I try to do well by those stories when they come up, but if I tried to make a decent blog out of "worked until 6ish tonight, then got some food at the cafe, went home, talked to my cat and watched Iron Chef America," there would only be so long I could make that entertaining. Back in the days when I was living hand to mouth, surviving on temp salaries, rarely acting and ekeing out an existence on the streets of Boston or Ithaca or Seattle, there was a lot more grist for the mill -- that would have made great journal or blog fodder. But in New Hampshire, with a steady job I'm good at and comparatively few changes in my day to day life?

And this is the crux of The Devil's Panties and why it's not as enthralling as once it was. Once, Breeden's life was very random -- there were changes day to day. She was trying to get by. She was trying to keep sane. And she was really, really good at making those experiences funny.

And now... she's home a lot, with her boyfriend, who is cool. She sometimes goes out to clubs, but it's rare. And she goes to a lot of conventions because that's a big part of how she makes her money as an artist.

And the eighteenth or nineteenth time she does that, it's really hard to fall over laughing. We've seen it. Her life has become routine. It may be a much different routine than one you or I know, but it is still routine. There's very little chance something so new is going to happen to her at a con that it will knock me off my perch and call me Susan.

It's not that the strips are bad. They aren't. They're still Jennie Breeden. It's that they're familiar, and not in the sense of "oh, I've done that." In the sense of "is this a rerun? Check the TV Guide, honey!

At the same time, that's not the case with Geebas on Parade. Now, though I am a gamer, I'm not by nature a LARPer. I was a Renn Fest geek which is not unlike LARP, only without combat, magic, the chance to be a monster or naked fairy chicks as played by large men (at least, not at my old festival), so it's not the laughter of the other kind of familiar. However, even though the premise is locked down as much or more than The Devil's Panties, there are new spins to be found all the time. Even retreads feel fresher, somehow. This isn't a journal comic -- not really. Breeden is free to cherry pick the Funny, refine it and toss it to we the ravenous readers. It's just plain fun. And it gives us a sense of what it's really like to play one of these games -- the joys and the pains of it. And, it's taught me that if I ever take up SOLAR, I should make sure to get a Women Lore skill tag, but that's really not here or there.

In other words, The Devil's Panties is a humorous journal comic, and Breeden's settled into a life routine that reduces her chances for distinctiveness, while Geebas on Parade is a situation comedy, and she's far from mining out its comedy vein.

And every so often, something does happen that inspires The Devil's Panties to its former greatness -- and I generally feel kind of badly because it usually mean Breeden's had a nasty personal experience -- and is strong enough to share those experiences with the group. I'm reminded of a sequence when Breeden's car was stolen -- a painful and traumatic experience for anyone, and it turned into a bunch of funny strips. This puts us in the awkward position of rooting for something terrible to happen to Breeden for our pleasure, and I'm pretty sure that's the kind of attitude that led to Rome falling. I'd rather just enjoy Geebas and have Breeden have a happy life.

Strengths

I love Jennie Breeden's art. It's stylized, and dynamic -- she's great at conveying exactly what she wants to have happen on the panel. And Geebas is almost always just darn funny -- well written, well voiced, a good blend of mockery and gentle kidding -- her affection for her subject comes out.

And, because I live dangerously, I'm going to talk about Breeden's spelling. But I am not here to condemn it. (Breeden is dyslexic and often spells phonetically, and woe betide anyone stupid enough to take her to task for it.) Well, I'm not taking her to task for it: I think it's great.

Seriously.

Breeden's spelling adds something to the strip. It contributes to the overall aesthetic. It creates a slight sense of the surreal and the whimsical. I'm not saying this to talk bravely about the brave girl who overcomes blah blah blah. I'm saying both strips are improved by Breeden's word usage and phonetic renderings. It's like reading Pogo, only with the edge of reality. The effect is only enhanced by her lettering -- when Breeden hand-letters, the result is beautiful and fits the art perfectly.

And, while Breeden's life might not be inspiring new strips, Breeden is perfectly good at executing that four panels from setup to punch, and it's hard to knock someone when they get the fundamentals down so solidly.

Weaknesses

Stepping away from the above, I'll mention the slow rise of computer lettering, particularly in Geebas. I'm sure this is meant as a timesaver, but I do think it takes something away, given how cool Breeden's lettering chops are.

Also, the avatar/sprites can sometimes be overused a touch.

On the Whole

As I've tried to make clear, I think Breeden's a great cartoonist. I'm not sure what can be done to fire my interest in Devil's Panties, absent a really funny tragedy happening to her, and I'd rather just pass on that. On the other hand, Geebas showcases her strengths so well it''s hardly a surprise I'm always so psyched when we get new episodes.

Daylight Savings Time continues to kick my ass, and I continue to track the post-Gygax gaming world. I may have a few things to say sometime soon, and I hope not to bore folks when I do. In the meantime, let me do the die roll for the next one of these....

Aha. A "why do I read this webcomic again" strip. This one ought to be interesting... well, we'll see you then!

This is in the area of experiments. I'm curious what kind of change this will bring to the daily ad revenues. We may go back, we may stick with this. We'll see.

In the meantime, if you have a skyscraper sized ad, right now it's pretty cheap to put it up over there. If that's what you're into.

On the other hand, I finally had Geek Girl porn advertising on the site, and you know I've been waiting for the day I could say that. Ah well, one must make sacrifices in this world.