I'm an Addict!

I can't stop thinking about it.  Every extra penny I can scrounge goes to buying more.  When I am not doing it, I can only think about doing it.  It is disrupting my life.  I can quit at any time though.  I don't have a problem.

I am talking about VS system.  The nifty comic book based trading card game.  I blogged about it about a month ago, but that was before I really got into it.  This game is its own little world with websites dedicated to it and the way that you can play the cards.  It has it's own lexicon using words like drops, press, and exhaust.  All of which sound like some form of exercise. 

The game gives you so many possible strategies to choose from when you play golden age (any card from any set) and/or limits you to work from within an established set of strategies when you do a draft or sealed pack tournament (you work from one set and build your deck from a certain number of packs).  The game is incredibly complex, but only if you let it get that way.  To win you have to know your cards and how to use them, or you can just be lucky.

This game is a lot of fun.  The variables make it different every time you play it. 

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta has been criticized for being pro terrorism.  It is also said that it attacks the Bush administration.  I would disagree that the movie is pro terrorism, and that if it is attacking the Bush administration, the Bush administration deserves to be attacked. 
In an Orwellian future, Brittan is run by a hypocritical police state.  The bureaucracy can do whatever they want while preaching religion, while the people are ruled by fear of the "fingers."  Dissenters are sent away, never to be seen or heard from again. 
In the midst of this, one man with knowledge that the government is behind the evils that agitated the peoples fears and allowed the existence of a police state makes a stand.  He does so behind the guise of a Guy Falkes mask.  He makes his stand with explosions, fireworks, and music. 
The use of explosions to blow up public buildings is what is considered being a terrorist act.  I will give two reason why it is not.  First:  The building were blown up at night, so no innocent bystanders would be harmed, let alone V warned of the second building a year early.  Second:  V was overthrowing a tyrannical government.  We was a one man militia. 
To prove my second point let me quote the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Yes, you read that right.  It is the right of the people to abolish such a government.  Sure the movie is set in England, and I am sure the British hate this document.  The criticism, however, is coming from the USA, where this document is the source of our freedom.  It is not terrorism to want to be free and to take that freedom by force.
The movie was good.  The message was true and honorable.  Good prevailed over evil.  Natalie Portman is hot!  I have never read the comic so I can't compare on that front.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

In 1985 Detective Comics(DC) set forth to make their titles more reader friendly. To do this, they wanted to get all of their characters into one universe and have a set origin story. To do this, DC had to destroy the other universes and either move or destroy the characters from those universes.

Superman, for example, existed in multiple universes. His history and origin were different in each. This lead itself to confusion amongst a new reader who would pick up a few Superman titles and see the inconsistencies. Crisis, as it is now commonly referred to, solved all of that. DC recreated their universe of superheroes in such a way that the definitive origins had to be told still. Crisis was a giant reset button.

I was eight years old when this came out. By the time I was reading comics the after shocks of crisis had settled down. All the magazines would refer to it as when DC got straightened out. I had never read it. That is until I picked it up at the library a couple of weeks ago collected in trade paper back(TPB) format.

I am pretty unfamiliar with DC continuum. I grew up on marvel stuff and only picked through some DC titles. This TPB was great though. It was reader friendly for people just stepping in. You could see the epicness of the project. It was a compelling story. It was also the beginning of cross title crossovers. Best of all, it was for the fans. Sure it made money, but it was ultimately for the fans.

BSG on the pulse

THE WEBISODES ARE HERE

THE WEBISODES ARE HERE

hyperventilating a little

okay, well the first ep was so-so, but it's b/c it was so brief and the setup was coming out of no where. the resistant few are trying wage a lose lose battle against the enemy toasters. Ha! XO Tigh 's leading the charge??

well it was a good thought. Remember the Alamo!!!!


rocking back and forth in my seat waiting for October.

P.S. in the meantime, enjoy these links of diversion

http://www.galacticaactual.com/Home/Podcast/Podcast.html

http://mediageekspace.com/

Fantasy Cliches And Why I Want To Kill Them

So the title is a little harsh, but hey, harsh can be fun.

I played D&D as a kid, read Tolkien and a few others so I have some familiarity with the genre. I watched a lot of the fantasy movies, blah blah blah, so I have some kind of leg to stand on when I criticize the cliches. I do so because I would like to see more original ideas in the genre. The genre suffers from several problems, some innate to the genre and some due to the general hackery of fantasy writers. Now I am talking strictly about books written in a pseudohistoricaal medieval setting, not Harry Potter or any of the modern fantasy or vampire books. I'm talking typical Fantasy here. The kind with Frazetta covers, ya dig?

Now I warn you that I will sound like I am tearing apart the very basis of Fantasy and that I am not a fan. This isn't true. I am merely tired of the same old crap. I used to like the cliches, but how many near exact copies of Lord of the Rings and Conan can I take, come on.

Also, I expect most to say, "lighten up dude, it's just fantasy," in response to my dislike of the implications of the fantasy setting worldview. I am not trying to multiculturalize or legislate rules re: fantasy. I want a larger range of fantasy worlds. Y'all can keep writing the same old baloney, I just won't read it.

The following are several of the problems.

RACIAL DETERMINISM

Fantasy has this tendency to create races as living stereotypes. Now these stereotypes don't necessarily connect to real world stereotypes. I can't really match up dwarves or what-have-you to real ethnic groups. That is not my point really. My point is that its endorsement of stereotypical thinking.

This is all reinforced by the tendency to develop human-like structures to their societies. The demihumans (to steal from D&D) have a typical human sexual reproduction and family format. There has been a tendency to try and create an ecological niche as if there were at one time Cro-magnon elves, dwarves, goblins, orcs, etc all competing for the same resources in the stone age. They have their own cultures, societies, rules, etc. Once you make these magical races biological it creates a setting that seems to endorse a biological deterministic framework. Goblins are innately inferior because of their evil Goblin heritage/genes. Elves are innately superior (and coincidentaly quite Aryan in appearance) because of their Elven genes/lifespan/abilities. And I think that is where they go awry in multiple ways.

If you start to go biological you then need to really think out the world beyond all levels of frustration. To create a semi-realistic setting you have to walk through all of evolution on the planet and explain why Elves don't rule the world. Once you do that you have to think up reasons why different groups are innately evil and how they could have survived at all without some kind of kindness/cooperation within their group. From everything I have seen a society that is as cutthroat as the Goblin races are usually depicted would be out-competed by early man who was at least somewhat cooperative at the tribal level. The point is that you would have to recreate a pseudo-biological history of the entire planet. It's just too annoying.

My favorite method is to return to myth and to return to the general idea that these are magical creatures not biological. They don't have families or societies as we would understand them. They are creatures of magic and spirit and so embody ideas not real species. Like the Fae of Ireland they may reproduce by stealing kids and feeding them magical food under the hills. Stuff like that helps you avoid all the biological and ethical complications of a decent fantasy setting. This was very much inspired by the Hellboy comic book by Mike Mignola. He's bloody brilliant (as some denizen of Harry Potter might say).

And so in designing the setting you create a roughly Earth-like evolved planet with magic creeping in at the edges.

THE CHOSEN ONE SYNDROME & THE EPIC

The next major problem is the idea of the prophesied chosen one who will save the world from darkness. I am so utterly tired of the chosen one vs dark lord BS. Are we that short of ideas that the only plot to be redone in infinite variety is some kind of Tolkien + Jesus mish-mash? It is just so painfully, sickeningly done to death. What about the little stories about interesting characters in interesting fantasy settings? Fahfrd & The Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber is a notable exception. They should be more interesting than me or the butcher down the corner, but does it always have to be about saving the whole of middle earth? Why this need for the epic in every single novel/series? Just laziness to me.

Back to this chosen one nonsense. In the real world there are no chosen one's who change the course of history. The exceptions are Jesus, Buddha, and other such major religious figures. By and large history is made by the mass movements of people with leaders that seem to know how to ride the crest of a movement. The leaders ARE NOT THE MOVEMENT. I do not want to read about another Jesus figure sans pacifism and compassion. It doesn't appeal to me and while it has its place within Fantasy it is not the only plot one could do. To me the chosen one syndrome encourages simplistic thinking about life. Simple is comforting, but wrong and unhelpful.

The chosen one is often a farmboy, who is secretly the long lost son of the king. Besides being a tired cliche I disagree with its implications. It implies that no one could possibly become a great man without some kind of genetic link to other great men, feeding the eugenics BS throughout Fantasy novels. Why can't the farmboy, merely be a farmboy who rises to greatness? (The exceptions is Conan, the Fantasy genre's self-made man.) Why does it have to turn out that he belonged to the ruling class all along? This leads to my next pet peeve...

AUTHORITY WORSHIP

Fantasy novels make certain entirely false assumptions about authority figures.

Firstly they depict rulers as either entirely enlightened, just, nearly holy rulers, or evil usurpers of the throne. They are very much wrapped up in the nobility and the justifications of the nobility.

Let's set some things straight. Kings and the like started out as bandit/warrior/Mafioso who basically ran a protection racket and made themselves rich off of that. That is the entire basis of "nobility." All this rightful king bloodline nonsense was cover for Machiavellian Mafioso politics. There is not one shred of decency or admirability in the Lords and Ladies. They generally starved the people to live in luxury and for that should never be praised in my book. They gave nominal protection, but the primary protection the people needed was from their own King or a competing King.

The wise gentle authority figure is pure fiction. Kings of the past are generally quite similar to dictators of the modern era, e.g., Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Stalin, Hitler, the Kings of the Middle East, "President" Musharraf, etc.

Do any of these strike you as similar to King Arthur? No? That's my point.

And so I merely wish Kings to be depicted as well rounded humans who were driven primarily by greed and power lust, but had a human familial side as well. They can vary character, but at their hearts they are all amorally ruthless when it comes to keeping themselves in power.

I can quite easily picture an adventurer type getting stuck between Machiavellian Kings, why is that so rare?

BOREDOM WITH EUROCENTRISM

I know the genre was born out of reinvention of the ancient European epic, but does it all have to be? I enjoy it and all, but I'd like to see more novels set in fantasy setting based on extrapolations upon Asian, Native American, and African cultures. Fantasy is a big what-if anyway. Why can't you imagine how A pseudo America would develop after a few more centuries of settled culture and technological advancement? Or a pseudoAfrica? All of these can create interesting imagery. Or you can try (and this is hard) to make up your own fantasy cultures from scratch. Start with maps, then how folks look, make up language and culture, clothes, food, animals, social structure, the way magic works, the whole kit & kaboodle. That sounds challenging!

Perhaps the problem is the fantasy audience. Perhaps they just want the Lord of the Rings re-told in slightly different ways over and over and over again.

I dunno.

Peace.

NF.