TheyStoleFrazier'sBrain

Two Legends Pass

2011-12-16T12:58:00.000-06:00

Within the last couple of weeks, we've lost two legends of the comics world, co-creators of iconic figures who were largely overshadowed in the public eye by their more famous collaborators.

Jerry Robinson, an artist on the early Batman comics, co-created both the Joker and Robin, the Boy Wonder. But he was virtually unknown outside of fan circles, since Bob Kane's contract with DC said that only his name could appear on Batman stories, a policy that went unchanged until the 60's, IIRC. He died on Dec. 7.

One week later, on December 14, Joe Simon also died. Joe was better known as the co-creator, with Jack Kirby, of Captain America. He and Kirby also invented the Romance Comic genre. And in later years, as Kirby was returning to DC Comics to work on his Fourth World books, Simon was writing books like Prez and Brother Power, the Geek. It was Kirby who sucked up all the press and accolades in later years, and justly so, given Kirby's role in creating the Marvel Universe, but Simon should never be forgotten. The men were a team for decades.

Maybe Not

2011-12-07T12:45:00.000-06:00

Well, turns out the proofing process on Createspace takes a while to complete, so Hero Go Home might not be ready in time for Christmas. My proof copy is due to arrive around Dec. 12, and then I'll probably have to make some fixes which will delay the process further. On the other hand, I'll probably end up with a horribly ugly one-of-a-kind proof copy that I can use as the prize in a contest or something someday.

Just in Time for Christmas (I Hope)

2011-12-02T22:41:00.000-06:00

Although it's still under review, I thought I'd let you know now that, very soon, you can own an actual physical printed version of Hero Go Home. I will post the link where you can purchase it as soon as it is available. I plan to follow up soon with print versions of Digger Breaks Through and Death Wave, although perhaps not in time for Christmas.

I've also been noodling new T-shirt ideas that may be available very soon. And there may be a major surprise announced in the very near future, if I decide that I can actually pull it off.

The point is, I need to get more serious about making money off of Hero Go Home, and the best way to do that, as far as I can tell, is to have stuff available to make money off of. I have some ideas to bring in traffic, but I don't want to spend money on them until I have some options for making some of that money back, and three e-books isn't going to cut it.

Oh, and if you're not reading Run, Digger, Run!, you should give it a try. We're eight weeks into the story now, and things are starting to heat up. I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails, getting the daily episodes posted (and today's episode, frankly, was a little rushed--I am committed to the 500-word limit, but today's episode needed about a hundred more words or so before the big cliffhang), but the characters are firming up and the momentum is starting to build. Give it a try, and I hope you like it.

So tonight, to (prematurely) celebrate breaking Hero Go Home into print, I'm drinking some cheap champagne. Also because tomorrow morning, I have to go to divorce class, which is the final step before my divorce is final. I keep hoping that I'll feel relieved once it's over, but right now, it still sucks.

Disintegration

2011-11-19T13:00:00.000-06:00

We all have ups and downs. Riding through a down period right now. Not depressed like I was the last couple of years, just stuff collapsing around me. Had to buy some new tires, because the rubber was worn down to the radial belts. Power supply went down in my computer, which was a pain, but was remarkably easy to repair (literally the only hardware work I think I've ever done on a computer which did not require opening the case multiple times to troubleshoot the fix plus hours of cursing--even just adding a memory card always seems to go wrong at least once). I've had an upper molar slowly disintegrating for the last four years which lost another chunk last night. There's a class I need to take to finalize my divorce that I still need to schedule (yes, after 17 years of marriage and three-plus years of separation, the State of Oklahoma requires me to pay for a class in order to be divorced).

And then there's the royal screw job Target is giving its employees by moving its Black Friday sale up to midnight. I can't really blame Target; they're giving the customers what they want. I blame all those greedy douchebags who will be lining up on Thanksgiving for hours so they can buy cheap toasters. Part of me hopes that people won't show up so this doesn't get even worse next year, but the part of me that eats and has a mortgage must hope the sale is a big success so I will get plenty of hours.

I hate the holidays. I've been indifferent to Christmas for years and generally enjoyed Thanksgiving, but working in retail, I'm already sick of Christmas and hate Thanksgiving as well.

Riding the Wave

2011-11-09T23:28:00.000-06:00

So the other night, we're doing our weekly role-playing game, and efamar gets this text alert. Everyone sort of pauses, because this never happens. So she checks her phone and announces, "Tornado warning. Huh." Which prompts a very brief discussion of tornado warnings. Brief because suddenly everyone stops talking, and their eyes go wide.

"Did you feel that?"

And before I could say, "No, I didn't feel anything," because apparently I was the only one who didn't (my feet weren't touching the floor at the time, but resting on the chair legs), the ground started to rumble and the house shook.

It didn't last long, maybe 30 seconds of real shaking, plus another minute or so for the last rumbles to die down. But everyone was really freaked out, except me. And I want to say it's because I've lived in California and earthquakes just don't faze me, except that I never felt a really major one even in California.

No, mainly I was just giddy with delight at what had happened in the game. Let's rewind a bit. A couple of weeks ago, my character found a little girl, the only survivor of a wrecked airship. And it was apparent that this girl was in some trouble, because she was being pursued by some real badasses. I wanted to take her back to her father's house, but there was some doubt as to whether or not he was in on it, and even if he wasn't, there was some doubt (mainly from efamar's character) that he was a fit father, given that he had sent her off to be wed at age 10.

But we decided we needed to meet with the father and probe to see if we could learn more about the situation so we could make a more informed decision. And as I have mentioned before, my character has alternate personalities. And as a matter of fact, one of them was feeding my main the lines he should be saying (there was a deal between them involving letting him out later to spend time with efamar's character--that bit didn't work out so well for him). The story was mostly true with one major bit of bluff in it, but the mark decided to call the bluff and start threatening the characters' lives (along with insulting the cover story).

And so I make with a few twitches and an inappropriate smile, and this wave of "Oh shit" flutters around the table. Because although my performance was no Ed-Norton-in-Primal-Fear star turn, it was enough to let them know there'd been a switch, and everybody was sort of panicked, wondering what the new arrival would do.

And of course, what the new arrival did was defuse the situation without bloodshed, because that's what he's good at. But the point is, by the time the ground started shaking, I was already riding a wave of giddiness.

Because there's a real sense of power in that "Oh shit" reaction. I'm not the kind of guy who generates that kind of reaction in everyday life, but at that table, one inappropriate smile and suddenly, everyone thinks I'm Bruce Banner and my eyes have just turned green.

It was also gratifying that at least one person at the table knew immediately which personality had emerged. I had tried to differentiate them. Seems it worked.

And now it seems as if we're stepping out into the larger campaign. Baby steps are done, small tremors have been noted, but now the shaking really starts.

I Should Be In Bed, Again

2011-10-24T00:36:00.000-05:00

Here it is, after midnight. I'm supposed to get up at 5 in the morning, as I do every morning that I work, but I stay up till past midnight to update Hero Go Home. The image gallery on the front page is cool, but it doesn't update automatically. Every morning, I have to update it by hand--replace the image, replace the link taht accompanies the image, and add a line of code to the previous chapter of Run, Digger, Run! so you can click through to the next episode.

And the thing is, on the one hand, I'm terribly disappointed in myself. I had intended to be worked ahead with a comfortable buffer on the daily episodes, but instead, I'm barely getting each week done in time. I have episodes done through Friday, but I don't have next Monday's started yet. I barely have any outline notes. And I still need to sacan pages for Satuday's Vault and watch Blade II and do screen caps for Sunday's Super Movies. Not to mention all the sound editing I still have to do on the podcast dropping next Monday.

And yet, I feel pretty good. I spent a lot of time sound editing today. I'm starting to remember why it's taken me a year to get back to this again--it's a ton of work and frustration--but it's also fun. And I think I put together a good graphic for this week's chapter. Last week's was a little boring, but this week's is nice.

The big problem is, I'm still not generating traffic or money. I think I'm getting better at the serialization thing, and as I get further into the story, I'm hoping to generate more exciting chapters. So far, I'm worried that it has been a little uninvolving. Part of that is the nature of the format. Five hundred word episodes don't allow for a lot of emotional exploration. But as the story builds, I hope to make it more gripping. And the blanks are starting to fill in. For instance, this last week I figured out what the final scene will be. There's still almost fifty weeks between now and then, but I know where I'm headed now.

Seriously, as worried as I am that I'm dancing right on the edge, I'm also jazzed, because it looks as I'll definitely make it through the first month with 7-day-a-week posts on time. And if I can do it for a month, it's possible that I can do it for a year. And if I can do it for a year, I might actually be able to build a following and make some money. I hope.

Channeling

2011-10-14T21:52:00.000-05:00

Today, I channeled the ghost of Arch Oboler and wrote what seems at first blush like an almost note-perfect Lights Out. The funny thing, of course, is that I wrote most of it during my shift at Target, muttering scenes under my breath as I was scanning shelves and stocking merchandise. I'm probably not the only Target employee ever to spend an entire day mumbling about murder, but I may be the first to do it for a radio-style drama. We'll see if it's actually any good on Halloween.

Gaming, Spoilers and Expectations in Writing

2011-10-04T16:23:00.003-05:00

So last night we had a gaming session, and though not a lot seemed to happen, I came away from it pretty happy. It's tough with a new gaming world to find your place in it right away. It takes awhile to learn how the new world works. When I was in college, it was easier: a big fight against a cool-ass monster or villain, then phat lootz after, and I'm happy.

It's different now. I'm older, and I place greater value on different things. And our group is made up of writers and avid readers, so much of the joy of the game comes not from big combats, but from moments between characters who have revealed themselves over time. Last night, I had a pretty good moment with lots of conflicting emotions crammed into a relatively brief period of time. I wish I could get something that complex and interesting on the page.

And thinking back over it today, I realize that part of what made it work was that I had set up some expectations earlier. Essentially, what happened was, my character appeared to give another a hug. And in the moment between initiating the contact and explaining what it was about, there was a tension between several alternatives. Was he doing this as a lost child needing comfort (since he had explained that he had no memories beyond a few years previously and had been wandering the fringes of society for as long as he could remember), or was this perhaps a more romantic gesture (since another personality controlling his body had hit on the same character the previous night--perhaps there was a secret crush or something)?

The reveal, when it came, managed to be both creepy and pathetic, and I hope was a surprise, upending the expectations set up while also (I think) satisfying them in a different way.

This plays into a theory I've had about writing for a while now. The trick--the really hard trick--to writing a story that works is to set up expectations and then satisfy them without satisfying them.

What?

An example: in the mid-1970's, Ralph Bakshi directed an animated film called Wizards. It was a satirical look at fantasy and sword-and-sorcery about the clash between the good hippie fairies led by the wizard Avatar and the dark forces of evil led by Avatar's evil brother, Blackwolf. It is set up in the beginning that these are the two most powerful wizards on the planet, so we know, we expect, that there will be a climactic duel between the wizards. And although it seems as if Avatar's powers are all bluff throughout most of the film, we hang in there waiting for him to bust out his Moment of Awesome, because we've been told that he's actually really powerful.

But the confrontation, when it comes, is over almost before it starts, because Avatar pulls out a gun and just shoots his adversary. And yeah, it's funny and it's a shock, and it's in keeping with Avatar's character. And yeah, this exact bait-and-switch is one of the most fondly remembered moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out four years later.

But the key difference is, in Raiders, it's a throwaway joke against a character we've never seen before. We had no real expectations. In Wizards, we'd been watching Avatar travel to this confrontation for an hour-and-a-half, only to settle for a swift kick in the balls. Now, knowing it's coming, I can appreciate the joke, but the first time I saw the movie, I was pissed off. Because I hadn't received what I thought I'd been promised.

And I wonder if that's part of what went into a recent study which found that spoilers do not actually ruin a story. I like surprise twists in a story, but obviously a story that depends wholly on surprise cannot become a perennial favorite, enjoyed over and over again. You can only be surprised once.

A well-told story is like a series of promises from the author--"Okay, you don't know what this means, but I promise, hang in there with me and it will mean something later, and it'll be cool, I promise!" So if you promise a fight, there needs to be a fight. If you promise love, there needs to be love. If you promise a solution to a mystery, the mystery must be solved.

But there's a trap, which is that you can't meet their expectations too square-on. There's a reason why the words "dull" and "predictable" so often go together. The story needs to be predictable, but in a surprising way, a way that lets the reader or viewer feel smart while also appreciating the author's ingenuity--"man, I knew something like that was going to happen, but I never thought it would happen like that! That turned out way cooler than I expected!"

It's a delicate balance, and one I'm always trying to do better.

It's ON! Run, Digger, Run!

2011-10-03T17:46:00.000-05:00

The new story launched today. I'm not worked nearly as far ahead as I'd like, but it has taken me a while to get into the rhythm of the short daily clips. I'm hoping it will get easier as I get more used to it.

Misogynistic Joke of the Day

2011-10-02T16:24:00.000-05:00

In the party supply section at Target, they have boy pinatas and girl pinatas. Boy pinatas, we're all familiar with: hit them hard and candy comes out.

But you are not allowed to hit the girl pinatas. You must instead get them drunk and promise to love them forever, then see if they'll give up the candy voluntarily. Afterward, you have to promise to call them.

The Children

2011-09-25T23:47:00.001-05:00

Had an impromptu bad movie night the other night. We watched the 1980 horror film, The Children. And yes, it is still wretchedly bad.

But bad in interesting ways. The story in brief: a school bus carrying most of the kids from the small town of Ravensback passes through a cloud of toxic gas that leaked from a nearby nuclear plant. The exposure turns the kids into zombies with black fingernails with only one desire: to hug people. Unfortunately, their hugs kill the recipients. They burn until they are half-melted, unrecognizable husks.

So yes, it's awful. Filmed on a low budget in a small town somewhere (but a small town with some huge houses--maybe a suburb of a larger metropolitan area), there are no stars. Not one. Not even a cameo by a minor B-list celebrity has-been to pique an audience's interest. The script is awful, and the acting is worse. But it is not entirely amateurish. There are a few stylish shots, and some camera movement.

And the score is interesting. In places, it's reminiscent of the Friday the 13th movies, minimal keyboards with a hollow echoey feel, which just makes sense because the score was written by Harry Manfredini, who scored the Friday the 13th films. But in places, he also "references" (or rips off) Bernard Hermann and Leonard Rosenman. It just seems odd for this low-budget little piece of nothing to have an orchestrated score, even if it is just strings and keyboards But this was before synthesizers became ubiquitous.

Directing choices are also strange. The movie introduces us to many residents of the town, and it seems as if a lot has been left on the cutting room floor. Two women living together, one of whom seems really angry at the sheriff, for some reason. It looks like there's a history there, but it's never explained. Another rich woman is set up to be a major subplot--she shares a fairly big scene with the sheriff, and later, someone coming to see her is able to talk his way past a police roadblock--but then she disappears. we never hear from her again, there are no consequences to her scene with the sheriff, and her body is not even discovered when the sheriff visits her place later. The other people with her are found dead, but she's just gone. It just feels like a lot of stuff got left on the cutting room floor.

But as Sargon aptly observed, it's not as if they had no time for character stuff. Much of the running time is filler, dead space, as characters get in their cars, turn around, and drive into the distance, just so we know they're going someplace.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the film is the subtext. Stephen King in Danse Macabre talks about how horror movies often have a subtext that serves as an accurate barometer of what concerns society at large--Cold War paranoia, economic concerns, the Generation Gap. And that might be true for movies that are broadly successful. But what about a movie that found little to no audience?

Might it just be a look at the filmmakers' private fears? And what does it say about the filmmakers in this case? I mean, you could look at it really abstractly and say that it all about people we should trust implicitly being our enemies or something, but at base, the monsters are little kids who want hugs! What about that spelled "terror" to Carlton Albright and Edward Terry, the credited writers?

Casting Call for Halloween '11

2011-09-17T09:22:00.000-05:00

I've finished a first draft of this year's radio script and am now looking for voice volunteers. Details are on Hero Go Home here.

A Story About Theme

2011-09-12T16:23:00.001-05:00

There's a thread running over on Codex about themes in writing, with basically two camps developing: one side that basically says, "I never write with a theme in mind," and another that says, "I never write without a theme in mind." And I 'm pretty much in the former camp.

When I was in film school, I took a class (actually, I ended up taking it twice and never passed) in which you had to make 5 short films. So comes the week my third film is due, and I have nothing. I get up on Sunday, realizing I have to get the thing planned and filmed that day in order to send it to the lab on Monday, get it back and edit it on Wednesday and turn it in on Thursday.

So I end up doing a TV commercial sort of thing, a pure exercise of movement and music, with no actual story to speak of. I draw my hand writing out the word "Canon" in pencil and then going over it with ink, with the idea that I'll then play Pachelbel's Canon along with it.And to make it visually interesting, I filmed it in short cuts of ultra-close-up with the paper backlit. Substitute chopping vegetables for drawing a word and it would look like any number of TV commercials. But after I had it edited, I realized that Canon was too slow and made it drag, so I substituted an upbeat Mozart concerto instead. So now it really had no meaning.

Now, the way the class was set up, after you showed your film, you had to sit silently while everyone gave their crits, and then you could respond at the very end, after everyone had their say. So for twenty minutes, I sat there while person after person waxed enthusiastic about my film and tried to tease ever more elaborate themes from it. Then when it was my turn, I told them that it was just an exercise in sound and motion, with no more theme than "Fuck, I've got a film due." And then I had to listen to them get angry for twenty more minutes for shitting all over their thoughtful criticisms.

I've always envied the people who can write a story that says something fundamentally important about the human condition, even if I disagree with it. The fact that I've never really been able to do it with any kind of conviction has always struck me as a lack within myself--I don't write stories with messages because I have nothing useful to say.

However, over time, I find I've grown less patient and less impressed with stories that try to preach a worldview to me. Death Wave and Hero Go Home might be superficial and without overriding themes that would make them into good English Literature 101 fodder, but at least they don't fall back on the evil faceless corporation, the evil secret government program, the evil military, the evil televangelist, the noble outsider deciding that other=righteous, "true love conquers all," or any of the other simplistic nonsense that makes up most of what I see and read. I can live with that.

A Very Apt Metaphor

2011-09-10T10:27:00.001-05:00

Cracked.com is funny in a way that Cracked, the magazine (which in my youth was always just a lame Mad wanna-be), never was. Sometimes they pile it on a little thick, and sometimes I disagree with them, but that's a risk with comedy. The point is, in general, it's a fun diversion of a site that you never expect to say something profound.

But this...

In an online world, your writing is going to form a shell around you, and most of the people who interact with you will only see the shell.

Is profound. The rest of the article is good, too.

Did I See This Wrong?

2011-09-06T06:08:00.000-05:00

So the other day, I'm at work, standing near the front doors. And there are these two teenage girls standing sort of huddled together looking at something on the floor. And they turn to me and ask, "Is that real or is that a toy?"

So I look down, and there's a big spider. Not tarantula big, but probably the biggest non-tarantula I've ever seen. The legs are spindly and smooth, not fuzzy, but the body is about as long as my thumb and a little thicker. And yes, I have small hands, but still...

The point is, it's so big that it looks like a toy spider, and it hasn't twitched. But it's not obviously rubber. So I nudge it with my shoe, and it starts crawling. And the girls squeal and by the time I've turned around to tell them, "Looks real," they're long gone. Not that I totally blame them, because they were wearing short shorts and I hear that spiders sometimes jump.

So the aisle of dollar-crap is right there. I grab a couple of small cardstock baskets, drop one on top of the spider, then use it to scoop the spider into the other one and trap him in between. And after a pause to show the guy at the Guest Service Desk my catch, I take it outside and away from the doors and dump it.

And this is where it gets weird. Because it hits the ground and suddenly, I see the ground is crawling with little tiny bugs the same color as the spider. I mean, it's like the spider had been covered with little tiny baby spiders who suddenly decided to all jump off at the same time, or maybe were knocked off when the spider hit the ground. Except that I've never heard of this, and saw no baby spiders on the floor in the store or in the baskets after I dumped the spider out.

So maybe it was just a coincidence and there was a colony of tiny ants or something in exactly that spot where I dumped the spider. What I do know is that the spider immediately crawled away, but not towards the doors, so not my problem.

It's Here! Hero Go Home Ebook Now Available

2011-09-01T06:01:00.001-05:00

I've been looking forward to getting this one out there for a while now, and the day has finally come! Green monkeys and a Silver Scorpion! A Man Who's Known By Many Names! Balloon Armor! Ninja Robots! A Valkyrie Riding a Giant Wolf! A Deus Ex Machina! An Alien Invasion! Superbattles Galore! Hell on Earth! All in Color for a Dime!

Okay, that last one was a lie. It's a prose novel, and it's $3.99. But all the rest, seriously. Go read it.

Find it at Smashwords here. I'll get the Amazon Kindle link up as soon as it finishes churning through Amazon.

ETA: The Kindle version can be purchased here.

On the Launchpad

2011-08-23T12:03:00.000-05:00

New character is all ready to go--stats rolled, background written, skills and gear purchased. I know pretty much who I intend him to be. Now to see who he will be.

Tomorrow night...

Strange Inactivity

2011-08-20T18:05:00.000-05:00

Feels strange to be sitting at home tonight. I've spent the last five nights out of the house, plus Saturday nights are often movie nights with friends. However, we had movie night on Thursday, so now everything feels skewed. I just feel as if I should have somewhere to go, and I don't.

Which is not to say I don't have things to do. I have a ton, and a nearly unprecedented 4 days off in which to do them. Bad in terms of hours worked this week, but good in terms of having time to get caught back up on life. I need to start reclaiming the house from the mess that engulfed it after the heat wave clamped down on us. I need to put together some eBay sales for my dad. I need to finish editing Hero Go Home and finalize the cover. I need to get a lot of work done on the Hero Go Home relaunch: settle on one of the potential new themes I've been playing with for weeks, and finish up the new logo, as well as designing the look of some new featured graphics. And write a new Movie Monday, as well as working my way ahead on Out of the Vault.

Oh, and set up a plan for Halloween. Since Hero Go Home is now the official location for all Blog Events, the big festivities will happen over there. I have a short story written that I'm going to adapt into a new radio play (hard to believe it has almost been a year, already). I'm going back and forth between Non-scary 70's Horror and Superheroes Who Are Really Monsters for the Out of the Vault theme. I don't have a theme for Super Movie Monday yet; maybe some 70's British stuff like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, or maybe (as a companion to Out of the Vault) Superheroes Who Are Really Monsters, like Blade and Ghost Rider (which is unbelievably getting a sequel--you can see the trailer here).

I probably won't get it all done in four days, but I hope to get some really big chunks done. Good intentions and all that...

GIMP Tutorial and Game Preview

2011-08-17T00:04:00.003-05:00

So I used GIMP to put together a really quick and dirty portrait of my new character in the new game campaign, and thought I would throw up a quick tutorial on how I did it. I'm not going to give all the menu paths and such; generally, selection tools are under the Select Menu, Gaussian Blur is under Filters>Blur, and the layer modes are on the Layers dialog under Windows>Dockable Dialogs.

I took as my model this photo of actor Corbin Bleu, best known for his role in the Disney Channel's High School Musical movies. He has matured into a handsome young man, and between the hair and the well-defined planes of his face, he looks a lot like the character I see in my head.

STEP 1: I used the Path tool to copy him out of the background and paste him on a new layer. There are some complicated methods using high-pass filtering to preserve the detail of the hair and such, but in general, I find it faster and easier to simply define a path around the figure, Select From Path, Invert, and Cut, then use the eraser to do fine clean-up. I will usually then Select by Color the transparent portion of the layer, grow the selection by 3-10 pixels (depending on how big the photo is) and run a Gaussian Blur of 2-3 pixels to eliminate the sharp edges to the image that are a telltale giveaway that the person has been cut and pasted.

This was a quick-and-dirty conceptual piece, so I didn't do as much clean-up as I could have on his hair and neck/shoulder areas, or the gap between his chest and his right hand. I also cloned out the necklace, although not completely.

STEP 2: I added a desert background, then flipped it to make the angle of the light more closely match that of the Bleu photo. Then because my character is of a non-human race with golden cat-like eyes, I needed to change Bleu's dark brown eyes to match. First I selected the area of Bleu's eyes, cut and pasted to a new layer, then erased everything except the irises. I desaturated the image so it was black and white, then upped both the brightness and contrast until the brown area of Bleu's eyes (hardly noticeable unless you're looking at extreme magnification) was quite bright. Then I used a small brush to paint in black, darkening the pupils and extending them into catlike slits.

STEP 3: I added another layer just under the one with the copy of the irises and painted in yellow over Bleu's irises. Most irises darken at the edges, so I left a little gap between my yellow and the edge of the iris to provide an outline (I've hidden the other layer so you can see the color more clearly).

STEP 4: I set the layer mode of the iris copy to Hard Light. This allowed the natural patterns of light and dark in Bleu's eyes to overlay the yellow color I'd painted in, making a realistic looking eyeball with shadows that match the lighting in the base photo.

The eyes look a little bright and artificial at this point, so I reduced the opacity of the color layer to about 60% and the overlay to about 80%, which made the effect more subtle and natural-looking.

STEP 5: I had the eyes looking pretty good at this point. The problem now was the color. The original photo had been taken indoors, while the background was saturated in the warm colors of sunset. So I added another layer, did a Select by Color on the transparent portion of the figure layer, followed by Invert Selection. Then I filled the selection with a tone which I thought would give a good match and set the mode to Overlay. It wasn't quite right, so I fiddled with the Hue and Saturation sliders under the Color menu and played with the Opacity until I had something I liked.

STEP 6: It still didn't look right, though. Notice that on the background image, it appears to be taken at sunset, and the shadows are very deep and black. So I needed to deepen the shadows on the figure, while making the highlights pop. I couldn't simply change the contrast on the figure, because that would also change the hues, making them garish. So I copied the figure and pasted it to a separate layer above my color correction layer. I Desaturated the image, then ran a Gaussian Blur. The figure was large, so I may have gone as high as 10 pixels on this. Experiment with what works best. I erased out the irises to allow the eyes I'd worked so hard on to show through.

I set the mode to Overlay and kept the Opacity at 100%. Notice how it makes the shadows deeper and the highlights brighter without changing the overall hues. The blur also has the added benefit of smoothing out the skin tones and giving everything a slightly alien sheen. I probably could have done this better and more easily with an Alpha Channel or something, but I still don't understand channels, so I stick with what I know.

STEP 7: At this point, I was pretty happy with the result, although I figured I would add some processing to the overall image to add a subtle iris effect to focus attention on the focal point of the picture. I usually do this on a separate image, though, so I saved what I had to a separate JPG, then added the iris effect for the final result.

I intend at some point, once the game has begun and the character has taken better shape, to do a better portrait. But as a quick-and-dirty picture that was completed in an hour or two, this is not bad, and the basic techniques are applicable to a wide variety of situations.

If this kind of article interests you, let me know and I'll do some more. I'm no expert, but I've learned a few tricks here and there, and I'm glad to share if it does someone some good.

The Other Smeaton

2011-08-14T17:31:00.002-05:00

So I thought I was done with the Dougal Smeaton posts, but turns out, I've got at least one left in me. I am excited about our new campaign and about my new character in it, but I notice that I still break into the Scottish accent every now and then for no damn good reason except I miss the big brute, I guess.

But here's the thing: I've mentioned this before, briefly, but he wasn't the only character I had in mind when we were setting up the campaign. I actually proposed two characters, and Dougal was the one who seemed to fit best with the rest of the group as it was taking shape. And since naamah mentioned publishing some of her initial notes as she was putting together Tom Gentry, I might as well do the same thing with the Smeaton who might have been. So here is my intial email to sargon proposing two character ideas.

Like I mentioned Monday, I had a character idea leap into my head while we were talking. Then as I was driving to see my daughter last night, it occurred to me that the group may have too many of one type or other character, so I came up with another. And no matter which one you pick, the other may be useful. So let me present the Smeaton boys.

Dougal Smeaton is the older of the two Smeaton brothers. The Smeaton family runs the Glenellon distillery near Aviemore along the Spey river. Dougal grew up around the boilers and condensers used to make the family product and experimented with steam machines when he grew older, an enthusiastic amateur like so many who helped drive science and invention in those days. His skills with machine tools and engine design are not fully developed yet, though he is an expert when it comes to boilers and pressure systems.

But when was old enough, he joined the Royal Highland Regiment (The Black Watch) or whatever Scottish unit you might have that would get him to Atlantis. He's a big man, strong, stalwart and intrepid. A trained soldier who also knows a little about steam machines and is eager to learn more.

His younger brother Torin Smeaton is a different character altogether. He also grew up around the family business, but was more interested in the product of the distillery than the equipment used to make it. He was fascinated at the thought that barley could be transformed into something entirely different. As soon as he was old enough, he began to travel to other distilleries in other countries, learning more about the art of distilling spirits. In Italy, he discovered that different herbs could be used to infuse multiple flavors into a product, such as Strega:

http://www.strega.it/store/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=1&language=en

He also had a brief affair with mysterious Italian woman (at least he thought she was Italian--they met in Italy), who introduced him to more exotic herbs, herbs which acted on the mind and psyche. In attempting to learn more about these substances--telling himself it was only to develop a new product for his family's company--he traveled to Atlantis in search of herbs unknown in Europe. In Atlantis, his studies on herbs brought him into contact with students of the Dark Arts, and almost without consciously deciding to do so, he found himself learning magic instead. When he looks back on it later, he'll wonder if perhaps his winding path was actually directed from outside, by Fate or by some other Power.

So there you have the forgotten Smeaton, as well as a first look at what would eventually evolve into the Smeaton we now know. Sargon expressed a preference for Dougal and suggested that he might be an officer for greater latitude of action. But I saw Dougal as more of an NCO. Which led to a bit more exploration of his possible background.

Thinking about this further, the Coldstream Guard/1st Atlantean Rifles obviously is the way to go. If there's any kind of technology exchange with Atlantis or something, he might have joined for that reason, which would have caused some hard feelings with his father, who would have preferred he join a Highlands unit..

As far as his age, I'm thinking he's probably mid-20's, like 25 (Torin is younger, closer to 21 or 22). And as far as freedom of action, what if he had been cashiered from the service, dishonorably discharged for some offense he didn't commit. It wasn't bad enough to get him thrown in jail, but it was bad enough for them to dismiss him (or maybe it _was_ bad enough to throw him in jail, if the case against him had been stronger). So he's military-trained, but not actually serving. Too broke to go home (and his Dad might not welcome him back with open arms anyway, after leaving Scotland to join some crazy Atlantean unit, then getting thrown out for dishonorable conduct).

As far as his military job, I don't know enough about the tech level of the Rifles to speculate. Maybe artillery or a mortarman, or a driver of some sort if they have war machines. Crewing one of those would have improved his engineering knowledge, also, I would think.

Best ideas I can come up with without more detailed knowledge of game world.

There was a little more back and forth, but it was mainly about what kind of engineering he might be good at. Finally, by the first game day, we had a more-or-less finished character: Dougal Smeaton, ex-artilleryman, engineer at the Phoenix Steamworks, engaged in building a steam-powered submersible for Sir Walter Graves and then pressed into service to help find him. It took a few weeks to really find his rhythm, and then it was a really fun ride. I can't imagine how the group would have looked with Torin in there instead.

I Should Be Writing

2011-08-11T22:52:00.001-05:00

SO I've got a ton of projects that need doing, but I can't concentrate on any of them, because I'm getting so revved up about starting a new game. I was a little iffy on the concept of the campaign world when it was first being described, but now my character is really starting to take shape, and I think he's got the potential for about eight different kinds of cool.

I've got the basic parameters of the character mostly figured out. There are some setting-specific details that need to be ironed out, either by me or by the gamemaster. I've tried to set him up so that there are some mysteries in his background that may or may not come into play down the road. I've tried to set it up so that he can be interesting both in and out of combat, while also being totally different from either Cole Chen or Dougal Smeaton (for that matter, he's not really like any character I've played, although he shares some similarities with a couple).

It's been fun coming up with his personality, his history, his abilities and the way they fit together. It's fun imagining what kinds of scenes he might play with other characters, to help me define his personality more clearly in my head. But he really won't take full shape until we're actually playing and he has other characters to react to. And that's one of the coolest parts, because at that point, I'll really be getting to know him at the same time as everybody else.

It Wasn't All Perfect

2011-08-08T19:23:00.002-05:00

One might get the impression from past posts about the Atlantis campaign that it was some sort of perfect experience. Of course, it wasn't. So just what sorts of problems were there? I mention these not to be a buzzkill on our fond memories, but just as a reminder of things to watch out for. If I ever do get my nerve up to try to run a game, I will want to keep these things in mind myself.

One continual worry of mine at the prospect of running my own game is the fear that I won't be able to provide enough interesting things for the players to do. That was not so much a problem in Atlantis. In fact, we sometimes had the opposite problem: too many things going on simultaneously.

For instance, when the group returned from the Ghul city, we had several sub-plots going at once. We had come back with a ton of treasure which we had to deal with (and never actually did--the game ended with a ton of golden artifacts still locked up in a room of the late Lord Waugh's estate, assuming no one had just come in and looted it). Victoria had come up with a plan to marry Lord Acrisian, so much of her time was involved in planning that. In addition, someone had sent assassins to kill Victoria, so there was a lot of running aroud trying to figure out who had done it, which dovetailed with the wedding plans.

At the same time, Smeaton was seeing the princess in the tower while trying not to get sidetracked from what was supposedly our main quest to finish the submarine and go hunting for Sir Graves. Gentry's messing with this mirror he got, and Amice is trying to figure out what to do about the hydra goddess we had bargained with.

And the whole time, the gamemaster is trying to throw out these hints about deaths down by the shipyards, but no one is taking the bait, because we all had a dozen other things to worry about, and frankly, with that group, you needed a little more to motivate them than "I smell a mystery. Come on, gang." And eventually, I decided to go ahead and pay attention to the ever-more-obvious signals that the waterfront thing needed looking into, and it led to a good series of encounters. But there may have been a few too many balls in the air at that point for us to focus on the one he wanted us to focus on.

Which leads to the ever-present question of railroading. This is a tricky subject, because on the one hand, as players, you don't want to be led by the nose. But on the other hand, especially in the early game, you don't know enough about the world and your characters to act confidently. You need to be led a little and shown what the possibilities and parameters are. And if the gamemaster has gone to the trouble of preparing an adventure, it kinds of sucks for everybody if you deliberately avoid it. Now he's just wasted a ton of effort, and probably not happy about it, while you're sort of wandering around at random wondering why nothing really interesting is happening. Um, it's because you decided to avoid the interesting thing, genius.

But having said that, it became a little obvious at times that there were tracks that we just weren't going to be allowed to go outside, which got a little frustrating sometimes. And there were a lot of situations that were just so complicated, where we really didn't know enough about all the pieces of the problem, where we would just be lost. Like planning the defenses of Avalon and Atlantis. To really set up the defense correctly would have required maps and detailed order of battle information, and a series of encounters sending out scouts and probes to get intelligence back, which would have stretched things out interminably and probably bored the hell out of the other members of the group. And what the GM would almost inevitably fall back on was an NPC channeling Sean Connery and saying, "Perhaps I can be of assistance." The NPC would detail the plan, and we would just sort of say, "Yeah, let's do that. Tell me when to roll dice."

Which ironically is why it's a good thing all these RPG fantasy worlds look mostly the same. The more unfamiliar the world is, the harder it gets to figure out your options. A good thing to remember for my own game if/when I ever run it.

And then there was the Dawn Forge. Great concept. Wonderful, impressive movie moment as we go in and see this incredible device with the glowing plasma discharges and all. But then we try to use it, and are required to roll dice.

And here's the thing: there was no reason to roll dice, except to make it feel gamey. There were no consequences to failure. There was no way we were going to spend a year-and-a-half getting to this thing, only to die because of a random bad roll. And the gamemaster wanted us to have kewl gear as much as we did. So failing a roll didn't mean you couldn't have the gear. It only meant you had to roll longer to get it. Which made it all kind of pointless. If there's no prospect of failure, why bother rolling at all?

On an almost totally unrelated note, I found out that while my daughter was off visiting my mom this past week, she printed out the rules to a role-playing game. It's a very simple one, looks like, that uses chips instead of dice. Instead of rolling dice for skill or combat resolution, each task has a difficulty, and as long as you have a skill level high enough, you succeed (you also have a pool of chips to buff up certain skills-- not having read the rules thoroughly, I think the challenge level remains secret from the players, so you can fail if you fail to bid enough chips to perform the action or something).

On the one hand, I think it's really cool that she's interested in my kind of gaming, and part of me would like to play the game with her and share that experience. However, it's based on the Warriors books, and I just don't know how much patience I would have playing a game about a tribe of feral cats. Urgh. Difficult question.

A Farewell to (Hairy) Arms

2011-08-07T15:17:00.014-05:00

So this is it, the last Smeaton post (probably). This will be long, but I want to get it out, so bear with me.

The Atlantis campaign is officially over. We played the last real session on Thursday night and had a brief epilogue/wrap party last night. Scotch was sipped, secrets revealed (more plotting to kill Smeaton by the other party members than I was totally comfortable with, actually--don't blame them, but still...), and songs were sung. There ended up being a total of thirteen song parodies inspired by the game, which is just... Oh god, I'm almost a filker. It's seriously embarrassing. It may have been one of the dorkiest evenings I have ever spent in my life, which is saying something, but it was also one of the most fun.

Because this game was something special to all of us, I think. Besides the 13 song parodies, the game also inspired faux tintype portraits, physical props, various other illustrations including portaits of efamar as her character:

Smeaton's original, but too small and plain, sub design:

And Smeaton's letter to Gentry after the night of the demon battle:

As well as a few side porn stories for the ladies, the copious notes written up by the GM for campaign background including a world's worth of locations and a huge cast of NPC's. And then there were my own piles of research for Smeaton, including research on making Scotch, info on early submarine designs, research on period poetry, and even a full manual of light artillery from 1896 I found on Google books. Oh yeah, and the recipes. Seriously. (ETA: And how could I forget that bat-cheva recorded something like the last 10 months of game sessions? Or the CD of soundtrack music and naamah's description of the game's proposed movie trailer that inspired me to construct an audio track of my own version of the trailer?)

And the thing is, it wasn't clear from the start that things would turn out so well. Our previous superhero game had been wildly fun, a laugh-a-minute gonzo ride through space and alternate dimensions. But for the new game, we were not only taking a more serious approach, but also adding two new players, efamar and jormungandr. Jorm had played years ago, but not recently, while efamar had not really gamed at all. Bat-cheva had only one campaign under her belt, and sargon and naamah had been gaming solely with each other for years, and so had developed a very personal gaming style that might not translate to a bigger group.

The early sessions were erratic, trying to find our place in the world and our dynamics as a group. Efamar was very shy and unsure, jorm's character had trouble finding his niche, and bat-cheva felt unequal to the leadership role she found cast upon her. As for me, it took me a while to find Smeaton's voice, but between the first moment I obeyed the impulse to have Smeaton deny the reality of magic and the time I gave the speech about Smeaton's goal in life--selling Smeaton's Own Steam Man whisky from town to town back in Scotland--I think he fell into place.

And about the time jorm dumped Dr. Travis for Strego, the entire group began to click and things got seriously fun. And now we're looking at the next game with some anticipation--because though we loved Atlantis, I think we were all ready to move on--but also with some trepidation, because what if we can never recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle thrill we got during the best parts of the Atlantis game?

Sargon is unsure of the campaign setting he wants to run. I had been planning to propose taking my own turn GMing after Atlantis ended, but I'm barely keeping up with my blogging commitments now. I don't think I could sustain a decent campaign as things stand right now, though I am keeping the notes I've prepared in case circumstances change and I want to try at a later date.

One of the coolest things about the game for me is that the game ended, in dramatic terms, with a kiss between Smeaton and Amice, his secret crush for most of the game. Games are played in basically two modes: dramatic mode, when players speak as their characters in scenes of discussion or action, and narrative mode, when time gets compressed and information in discussed at a higher impersonal level. And as far as I can remember, the last actual scene was between Smeaton and Amice. In a movie, it might look something like this:

Amice plunges the enchanted dagger into Smeaton's chest. He jerks and gasps as magical life flows into him. His eyes fly open to see Amice sitting in his lap--covered in blood, still flushed and panting from the battle, her concerned face only inches from his own, her eyes gazing into his.

Impulsively, he leans forward and kisses her, heedless of the blood. After a moment, she kisses him back. FREEZE FRAME. FADE to sepia as Waylon Jennings narrates.

NARRATOR

And that's the story of how Mister Smeaton freed the hydra goddess and then killed her ass, with a little help from his friends. Smeaton and Amice never really discussed the kiss afterwards. They had both already made other choices with their lives.

DISSOLVE to sepia toned shot of the palace.

NARRATOR

Smeaton eventually married the Empress Leda, while High King Valor returned to Avalon to wed his queen. Lady Victoria and King Acrisian, not to be outdone, had two weddings, and in the years to come, there were children, kittens and puppies for everyone.

DISSOLVE to shot of the mountains in sunset.

NARRATOR

Strego, Son of Thunder, led his followers back to their home in the mountains, where they learned the art of breeding dragons from the Dorks of the North, who were much impressed by Strego's boots.

DISSOLVE to shot of Atlantis as the sun sets over the distant ocean.

NARRATOR

And Amice Belden, the true hero of the Battle of Bel-eth? She assumed the throne formerly held by the late Lady Celaeno. History doesn't record whether rumor ever reached her ears of Empress Consort Smeaton's favorite concubine, a petite ~~brunette~~ redhead who was always seen dressed as a British librarian, and if anyone ever drew a connection between the concubine and the fearsome Witch Queen, they were probably smart enough not to speak such suspicions out loud.

And so everybody lived more or less happily ever after, until Smeaton's son, whom he always called Alfred after his favorite poet, assumed the throne and declared himself Caesar, which never works out for anyone. But that's... another story...

CUE THEME MUSIC. ROLL CREDITS. FADE OUT:

So that's out of my system now, and I move on to a new character (though if anyone wants to write their own alternate ending, go for it).

I'll be back.

The First Avenger

2011-07-25T08:03:00.003-05:00

Saw "Captain America: The First Avenger" last night. I was a little doubtful going in, because while I have found Joe Johnston's films enjoyable in the past, he's never struck me as a particularly strong director. And I had been underwhelmed by the last couple of big budget superhero movies I saw ("Thor" and "Green Lantern").

And to tell the truth, Cap has never struck me as an interesting character. I've always loved his design; Kirby really did himself proud designing that costume. But the comics I've read never did much that was interesting with the character of Steve Rogers. Even the writers would regularly get bored with the guy and have him quit for a while, or, you know, shoot him in the head.

But I seriously loved the movie. The pacing is good, the action scenes much more intense than I expected (the later scenes really capture the frantic mass action Kirby would often evoke with Cap, leaping over the heads of dozens of Nazis while flinging his shield), and the Marvel mythos is worked in abundantly without being too intrusive. Bucky is reworked into an interesting and vital character, which I never expected. The art direction, special effects and period details shine.

But best of all is that this really is a movie about Steve Rogers. In the comics (see Hero Go Home on Saturday for a look at Cap's first appearance), Steve Rogers is a 4-F rejectee given a second chance to enlist via a special serum that makes him into a super-soldier. But once he becomes Cap, the comic never really looks back. Captain America becomes sort of iconic, and his commanding presence is such that even gods accept his orders without question. Which is cool and heroic, but also kind of boring.

But the movie never lets you forget that big Captain America grew up as little Steve Rogers, and Chris Evans really sells the character's heart and courage in a way that I never imagined he could from the previous projects I've seen him in.

It's not perfect. The movie does start to feel kind of long after a while, and if you're an old-school Marvel fan, there is a momentary bit of dislocation you have to work through when they introduce Sergeant Fury's Howling Commandos (never named as such) and you realize there will be no Sergeant Fury to lead them, because he's Samuel L. Jackson and in the movie-verse, he hasn't been born yet.

Bu overall, the movie kicks all kinds of ass. This is definitely one I'll add to my library when it comes out on disc.

Smeaton Sings

2011-07-20T23:07:00.009-05:00

Yes, the Atlantis game is still chugging along, though drawing to a climax soon. And so, I thought it was a good time to reveal a particular aspect of Smeaton's character that has gone unrevealed to the others for over a year. And because the Atlantis game is unlike any other RPG I've ever played, I ended up revealing the secret in a song.

Lemme 'splain. No, is too much. Lemme sum up: efamar and jormungandr have been treating us to song parodies about our characters for a while now. I've got a stack of them in the back of my game binder, parodies of "A Whole New World" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and others. I didn't participate because, though I have written songs before and enjoy the discipline that comes with lyric writing, well, I have to get pretty inspired to do it. The last song I wrote IIRC was composed while driving in a military convoy around northern South Korea.

But then jorm sent around a link to a video of a guy named Matt Mulholland doing a mournful minor-key cover of Rebecca Black's "Friday." And I thought it was cool, so I watched some of his other videos, and ran across an acapella multitrack of Ceelo Green's "Fuck You."

Which sparked something in me, because Smeaton has long had a secret crush on someone else in the group, and a not-so-secret grudge against her boyfriend. And when I actually sang the song for everyone over the weekend (and BTW, having not sung in front of people in years, I had to rehearse a lot--try to imagine what it felt like walking around work for two or three days constantly singing "Fuck You" under your breath), I don't know how many pieces actually fell into place for the people listening, but a few big ones obviously did.

But for the benefit of completeness, here is the timeline of the Smeaton crush (pause while everybody else who knows nothing about the game scrolls down to the next post or else leaves entirely).

THE MEETING: Smeaton wasn't actually impressed by Amice Belden when he met her. She was pretty enough, but bookish and full of fancies about so-called "magic."

THE CHIMERA: His attitude toward her changed over time, especially when they went upcountry to battle a chimera. She showed amazing spirit and bravery, yet still remained feminine and somehow fragile. A contradiction.

THE SOLDIERS: Smeaton kept his feelings buried most of the time, but when the group tried to flee the country to avoid arrest by British soldiers due to their association with the spy, Dr. Travis, he let his feelings show just the slightest bit. When the soldiers leveled their rifles, he cried "Amice" (not "Miss Belden"--one of maybe three times in the entire game he has done that, and nobody ever notices) and tackled her to the ground, covering her body with his. She was very annoyed at his sexism.

The trip to and from the city of the Ghuls did not allow much time for him to dwell on his feelings, what with the seasickness and the Hesperian woman and the giant hydra and all. Amice became more involved with her magical studies and Smeaton wondered if it was simply not meant to be.

CUPID'S ARROW: During a strategy session at Lord Acrisian's house, Smeaton was struck through the heart with an assassin's arrow. Everyone else went their separate ways in the subsequent battle, but Miss Belden ventured down to the lawn where Smeaton lay on the verge of death to bring him back. This was also where the group met rather slippery Jareth Rosewood, spy and scout.

THE WET T-SHIRT: While fighting a sea serpent, Smeaton was swallowed whole and carried off. The others pursued the creature to a submerged cave to rescue him. Amice cast off her heavy dress and swam down in only her shift. Though he tried to bluff his way through, Smeaton was not immune to the beauty on full display.

THE PRINCESS AND THE DEMON: Smeaton's feelings became very confused when he met a beautiful princess imprisoned in a tower. She claimed that she had seen visions of him all her life, and long ago fallen in love with him. They began an affair which seemed doomed, for her visions also showed him being killed protecting her from a fearsome demon. The battle, when it came, though, saw Smeaton emerge victorious against near-impossible odds.

But it was clear that the victory was only temporary. Whoever had sent the demon would merely send another, perhaps stronger, to finish the job. Smeaton needed help to sort this out. And who should show up at precisely the moment he needed help with precisely the help he needed but Amice Belden? As if she knew instinctively, as if they were somehow connected.

THE PIRATES: Once Smeaton's submarine was finally finished, the group set off to find the lost tomb that would give them clues to the location of the next phase of their quest. Along the way, they were beset by pirates. While Smeaton tried to seal the barrel of the deck gun so the sub could dive safely, he was struck by arrows and fell, senseless, into the water below. With no thought for her own safety, Amice cast herself over the gunwale to save him from drowning. Smeaton began to think she might care for him as much as he was coming to care for her. He was even considering finding a way to split amicably from Leda when they reached the Triton city, where things changed.

THE BUGGER AND THE BABY: Once the group reached the Triton city, however, everything went wrong. Leda and Smeaton ended up in some drunken orgy that he only barely remembers, while at the same time, Rosewood and Amice became lovers. Not long after, Leda informed Smeaton that she carried his baby. Smeaton's opportunity had passed.

THE PACT: Smeaton decided his first responsibility was to the child, and so decided that his loyalties must lie with Leda. However, his distrust of the Viceroy and the current Emperor led him to a dark decision: to insure his child's safety (as much as it could be insured), he must overthrow the throne of Atlantis and see Leda made Empress instead. And the first person he approached with the plan was Amice. He still didn't dare reveal his feelings, but now they shared a secret. It was something.

THE POSSESSION: Unfortunately, Amice was soon taken over by the spirit of an evil ancestor, a powerful ancient sorcerer named Daath. She turned against her friends and caused them to be routed in a crucial battle. And here we depart the actual history for a small meta-digression. I would sometimes prepare speeches for Smeaton to deliver in case a certain situation arose. They were often memorable: the Steam Man Whiskey speech, the "We're in Hell" speech, the Dougal Bloody Smeaton speech. I had actually prepared a "Come back to me, My Amice, My Love" speech for Dougal if he ever had occasion to come face-to-face with Dark Amice. Alas, he was off kicking the asses of an entire army of barbarians and giants while the others got to facilitate Amice's return from Heel to Face. Oh, and Rosewood earned Smeaton's enmity by stealing Smeaton's favorite dagger. Bastard.

THE MIND-READING: Nothing further developed between the two during the trip to the Dawn Forge in the furthest reaches of the north, but there was one dangerous moment (not counting the danger of the giant evil-sorcerer-possessed automaton). While debating the fate of the Forge, Lady Victoria used her newly developed powers of telepathy to read Smeaton's mind. If she had tried to read deeply and learn his secrets, the truth might have come out, but she specifically stated that she was only trying to read surface thoughts regarding Smeaton's intentions concerning the Forge. And so his secret feelings remained secret. And his resentment of Rosewood grew.

THE ASSASSINATION AND THE DEATH OF CELAENO: Lately Smeaton's trust in Amice was shaken when she offered to "fake" Leda's assassination as the factions have begun their battle for the Dragon Throne. Smeaton had no guarantee that the assassination would not be real, and it certainly looked real. But in the end, he chose to trust his heart in trusting Amice, and during the subsequent battle with the sorceress Celaeno, Amice healed him back from the brink of death (resulting in another rare use of her given name when Smeaton thanked her).

Truth be told, Smeaton may never reveal his feelings for Amice, almost certainly not while Leda's alive, especially since it seems evident by now that she does not reciprocate them in the least. Which is fine. I mean, there's a reason why you never hear "romantic" as one of the adjectives bandied about concerning Scottish men, and Smeaton is a stiff upper lip-type. He's good at expressing anger, but other emotions, not so much.

Thinking About the Future, Except...

2011-07-13T18:46:00.002-05:00

Something weird is happening with Hero Go Home. I updated the Wordpress install, and now traffic has dropped to zero. It was never big, but there was always something.

It puts a crimp in my ideas for the next step. I had thought to abandon the serialization idea, since hardly anyone was reading the novel anyway. Almost all of my traffic was coming from the movie and comics articles, so I figured I would focus almost exclusively on those and just put up links to the ebooks.

But now I wonder if maybe I shouldn't give up on the story content. It occurs to me that people weren't reading the novel because...

1. The first chapter didn't have an effective enough hook

2. The chapters were too long.

3. Once a week wasn't a frequent enough release schedule to make it a habit to come back.

So how to fix it?

My thought is that instead of doing one big 2500~ word post a week, I emulate the old Adventures of Superman/Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar template and strip the chapters into five 500-word episodes a week. And I work harder (which I did starting about 10 chapters into the previous novel) to build in cliffhanger endings. With the short episode length, I couldn't waste any words. I would have to write punchier, funnier, and more aggressively.

And I wouldn't have to abandon the other features. I was previously writing other features while doing a 2500-word chapter a week, so the word counts are not impossible. I may have to get by with fewer frame-captures and scans though.

Although I want to keep as much of that as I can. I'm also contemplating changing the blog template to something splashier and more exciting, with a bolder approach to the graphics. This might stretch my GIMP abilities to the limit, but I want to do everything I can to make people want to come back to the site, and appealing graphics can do that.

I don't have a storyline yet, of course. My previous planned story idea, Digger's Big Con, probably wouldn't be exciting enough. It's got a murder mystery structure, which means a lot of setting up and introducing characters and not much happening until somebody dies. I need something that grabs from the first page. So as I prep Hero Go Home for ebook publication, I'll also be rolling ideas around in my head for a completely different type of turbo-charged Digger adventure.

Of course, first I need to make sure I haven't somehow broken my site. It still shows up for me, both from Favorites and from Google searches. But something's definitely wrong.

The Outcome

2011-07-07T05:50:00.002-05:00

She did not recover. The funeral is tomorrow.

I'm not sure how my dad is going to adjust to her being gone. They were together for 39 years, and she did a lot for him. I'm sure those roles were reversed somewhat these last few years as she was hobbled by her own health problems, but not completely. I'm actually debating whether I should try to find a job in the Muskogee area and move up there to stay with him.

That would be a difficult prospect in a lot of ways, but part of me thinks he really needs it. And the idea of a fresh start is appealing after the mess of the last few years.It's nothing I can decide on the spur of the moment, though. Both the Biggest Mistake of My Life and the misadventure of Casa Estrogen should serve as warnings against jumping into new situations too quickly in the aftermath of life changing events.

The Spiral and the Plunge

2011-07-03T13:43:00.003-05:00

My stepmother is in the hospital. It is not trivial. She is currently on a respirator, because she is unable to breathe on her own. The doctors are keeping her in a forced coma, so that she will not dislodge her feeding and breathing tubes. If it weren't for the occasional involuntary swallow, you could mistake her for a corpse having air forcibly pumped into her lungs.

Which is not to say that she is as good as dead. Her heartbeat and blood pressure are good, and the CT showed no evidence of a stroke, which they initially feared. It appears to be pneumonia, and the doctors hope that once they have cleared up the infection, they can back off the respirator and let her breathe on her own again. Past experience tells me that people apparently at death's door can fight back and live well for several more years.

But it brings home so many things. The thing is, she and my father and my mother and my step-father have all experienced rapid and lingering declines in health over the past year or so. My wife's grandmother as well. I mean, they've all had problems for decades--heart problems, bowel problems, osteoarthritic problems. Bad knees, bad backs, bad teeth, thinning hair... The same slow downward spiral that I'm now starting to experience. But recently, the decline has accelerated into a plunge.

It's scary to see them all deteriorate so quickly, and all at once. Scarier still to show up at the hospital and see my step-brother for the first time in several years--his head shaved nearly bald to hide his natural hair loss, pudgy, with glasses and a stark-white goatee. My dark-haired athletic brother has somehow morphed into Burl Ives. And when I look in the mirror, it's hard to deny the evident miles on my own odometer.

Just as I am starting to feel optimistic about my possibilities for the future, I am reminded that my time is finite, and there's a good possibility that much of it will involve a frustrating downward slide that I'm helpless to stop. My dad and I talked a lot yesterday, about the past and the future. He spoke with some bitterness that I've never sensed from him before. He is a private man, secretive, like me only more so, because he doesn't have the same inclinations toward being a raconteur that I have.

He told me about how much weight he has lost recently. I felt his arm and his thigh and was shocked. My father spent most of his life on one crutch, because polio had rendered one leg useless. He walked on one leg and one arm and used the other arm to carry what other people used two to do. His arms were steel, his good leg an oak. Now his limbs are thin and frail. It's hard to accept, and harder still to accept that I'll be there too, and sooner than I like to think.

But at the same time, I published the final chapter of Hero Go Home on Friday, and got a comment that said, "AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! THIS WAS EPIC!!!" and another, more reasoned comment that was also very complimentary, so even while I'm scared and contemplating my own and others' mortality, I'm also feeling pretty good. Life refuses to be pinned down to one emotional response at a time.

An Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong

2011-06-29T13:44:00.003-05:00

So I have not been getting the results out of my diet that past experience tells me I should be getting. Either I'm doing something terribly wrong, or else my system just doesn't react in my late 40's the way it did ten years ago (probably a bit of both). So in the process of tweaking to find a more effective approach, I decided to try giving up soda for a week.

Disaster. After two days, my weight had gone up two pounds. Why? Because without the occasional sweet kick of diet soda, I ended up turning to actual sweets, which (I'm guessing) spiked my insulin and led me to retain water. Not a big problem in the overall scheme of things, but it's obviously a step in the wrong direction. So today, I switched back to soda, and I haven't been tempted by cookies or frozen pops.

I also tried working out again today after taking an extra couple of days off due to soreness from the run. And that was a disaster, too. I don't know if I tried working out too early in the day since I'm now accustomed to working out in the afternoon, or just too soon after breakfast. but my energy crashed big-time, and I had to quit. A couple of hours later, I tried again, changing up the order, and got through most everything, but seriously. I used to be able to figure out my body's signals better than this.

I mean, it's not as if I'm getting no results. It's just that the results so far are merely tangible. Which means that I can't really see any results in the mirror nor on the scale (over a month of weigh-ins, and today I weighed in one pound less than the day I started keeping track). But I can feel the results when, say, I shower. My body is firmer and stronger, but nowhere near where I should be after over a month of diet and exercise.

In other news, I finished Hero Go Home last night and set it to drop Friday, and now I'm casting about for a final plan for herogohome.com to continue. I intend to pick up Super Movie Mondays again, as well as another possible feature that might be fun. Ideas are developing for my new book, but I'm still not sure it's the one I want to write right now. And I'm pretty sure that it's about the least commercial idea I will ever have, while what I need right now is a moneymaker.

But you can't fake the funk on that stuff. Trying to chase a commercial trend right now would probably not only not make me any money, but also result in a worse book.

I do have four other ideas: two Diggers (prequel and sequel), a Secret Project I've toyed with for over a year that I could not publish under my own name, and an expanded version of my fragment from last year's Christmas contest (in which Santa Claus is a soldier-of-fortune having international adventures in the months between Christmases).

I don't really have a plot for that last one, but of all my character and setting ideas, that one looks as if it would stand the best chance of selling as a YA novel. Other than that, I've got nothing. So it looks like 20's supernatural detective for now, and hope like hell that somehow comes into vogue by the time I'm ready to submit to somebody.

Green Lantern

2011-06-27T20:50:00.002-05:00

My ass hurts. I did my normal workout a couple of days ago, doing kettlebell swings, which really work your legs and butt. Then yesterday, I got the bright idea to try running for the first time in ages. My legs did not thank me. Now every step I take, my thighs and butt ache.

Went to see Green Lantern today, and BTW there are spoilers in here, but seriously: it's Green Lantern. How can you really "spoil" it?

I'd heard awful things about the movie, but it wasn't as horrible as I expected. Ryan Reynolds makes a fun hero and there were some decent things happening in the script.

Unfortunately, the good things they did were overshadowed by two problems, one major and the other one... well, pretty major, but only to those who recognize the references.

The first problem: the two big opposing forces are identified by color--Green signifying Will, and Yellow signifying Fear. The Green Lanterns and the Guardians are the good guys, while the bad guy is a former guardian gone rogue (yellow). It's the Jedi and the Sith, only less subtle. It's like a Rainbow Brite version of Star Wars, and you know you're on shaky ground when people say you're oversimplifying Star Wars.

The second major problem: the good guys keep talking about how their power derives from Will. Now, in the Silver Age Green Lantern comics, the term was "willpower." And I'm not such a dorky fanboy that I quibble over them changing the wording, except that "Will" has unfortunate connotations.

But hey, it's not as if this were the only Hollywood film to pay tribute to Leni Riefenstahl.

Hands down, the worst scene in the movie is the one where Hal Jordan goes to the Guardians to ask for help in fighting the evil, and somehow manages to talk them into allowing him to fight alone instead. Truly makes no damn sense.

But the effects are good and Tim Robbins dies horribly, so it's not all bad.

The Transformation Illusion

2011-06-25T23:19:00.003-05:00

So I really desperately need a new job, or some pathway to writing success, neither of which are in the offing right now. Because my life feels really positive right now, but only because I'm completely ignoring a couple of very large financial hammers poised to drop on my head.

What I'm saying is, I'm functioning better than I have in almost three years, but only by basically ignoring or denying reality. How bad has it gotten? A few times in the past couple of weeks, I've actually wondered about the feasibility of moving back in with my wife (yes, the one who's divorcing me).

I understand part of why it's happening. Several big things have changed in the past few weeks. I've been moved to a different job area at work, which has resulted in me having a more consistent and predictable schedule, which has done wonders for my attitude. And my wife's grandmother has moved out of the house, which would make living there more endurable.

But the biggest part has been that I've started a diet and exercise regimen. And here's where the danger zone is for me, because I've gone through this a few times before.

As I transform my body, I begin to enter this trance where I feel as if everything in my life could potentially change radically for the better, if only I would have the confidence to try. I don't know if it's low blood sugar or just too many crappy movies, but it seems to happen every time.

Like today. I spent the afternoon shopping around the mall looking at the things I want to buy when my finances magically change for the better after I've finished working through the immediate issues in my life and completed my physical transformation.

But here's the thing: the shape I want to be in, I've been in before. The weight I want to achieve, I've achieved before. And my life did not suddenly get better. Women did not suddenly find me more attractive, my self-confidence didn't skyrocket and job offers didn't come pouring in.

This is not to say that my life can't get better, only that there's nothing magic about weighing 150 lbs. that will make things radically better than weighing 165 lbs. And while it was nice to spend the afternoon in a trance, fantasizing about a better life, I actually need to get to work to make it happen, and even then, it probably won't, not in a hugely dramatic way, anyway.

And speaking of fantasy, I have a problem. I have accumulated a shit-ton of plastic 2-liter soda bottles. I have been loath to throw them out with the regular garbage, because they are mostly air, which seem like a waste of trash bag volume to me. At one time, I was cutting the bottles in half and stacking the halves inside one another to save space, but that's a lot of work, and I have too many bottles now to contemplate such a move.

So what's a good way to dispose of a bunch of 2-liter bottles? Yes, I know the problem took a long time to reach its current proportions, but I'd still like a solution that's a) relatively easy and b) relatively quick. Perhaps I'm asking too much, but then, I've spent the afternoon in a trance.

Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

2011-06-22T18:55:00.004-05:00

No, this post is not about my impending divorce, although the title certainly fits that as well.

Hero Go Home will be officially wrapping up next week. The final chapter publishes on July 1, and with any luck, I'll have the entire thing available as an ebook by August 1, exactly one year after I published the first chapter on-line.

The experience has been really interesting. Since I had already written two previous drafts of the story, I was able to keep up with deadlines at many points by simply defaulting to large chunks of stuff that had already been written. On the other hand, entire chapters were written completely from scratch, and the storyline overall is very different from the previous drafts, even though some incidents play out almost exactly the same.

What has really been interesting for the last few weeks, though, is how the process of writing the climax has progressed. Normally, when writing the climax, I really barrel along. I can sometimes barely ooze out the middle act, but when I get to the big action setpiece at the end, I get in the zone and can knock out 5,000 words in a day, easy.

This time, though, strangely, exactly the opposite has happened. Forced by the deadlines of weekly serialization, I cranked out the middle chapters at a good clip. And now that I'm at the end, that same weekly chapter pace has me lingering over every paragraph, rereading and polishing over and over.

And then comes the agonizing choice of what to do next. Part of me wants to do the Johnny-Dollar-Meets-Cthulhuzilla book, while part of me wants to try writing for one of those houses that publishes exploitative crap under house names. Then again, part of me wants to write something that my daughter will enjoy reading. Guess which option I totally don't have an idea for? There's also another Digger novel partially plotted, but I'm a little Digger'd out right now.

Musical Romance Without Vampires

2011-06-20T08:45:00.008-05:00

Just finished watching the Korean drama I Am Legend yesterday, which not only has nothing to do with vampires, but turns out to be sort of the exception which proves the rule with Korean drama. I think I had mentioned before that the shows function mainly on strong writing that overshadows all the other elements.

I Am Legend was written well enough, but what really carried the show was the performance by lead actress Kim Jung Eun. She plays Jeon Seol Hee, a former wild child in high school who is currently trapped in a loveless marriage with a high-powered attorney from a rich family. They got married after she accidentally got pregnant, and after a miscarriage, her husband and mother-in-law never forgave her. They treat her with utter contempt, and she suspects her husband is having an affair with another attorney at work. Seol Hee spends most of her time feeling isolated and miserable.

There is only one bright spot in her life. She still rehearses with her high-school garage band, rocking out wherever they can manage to find a practice space. They don't perform in public--her husband's family would never allow it, for one thing--but she likes to imagine them playing for adoring crowds.

But when her sister is diagnosed with leukemia and her husband and mother-in-law forbid her from donating marrow to save her sister's life, it's the last straw. Seol Hee moves out and asks for a divorce. It seems at first as if this will be a drama mainly about Seol Hee finding a new life with her band and new love with another musician, but it doesn't quite work that way.

The divorce plot ends up eating about half the series before it's completely resolved, but instead of clearing the decks for the band's story to really take center stage (to mix some metaphors), it merely makes way for a completely unrelated legal case to start up, as Seol Hee takes a job with the lawyer who helped her with her divorce. The second half of the series splits time between the band and the legal case. Seol Hee is like a Korean Erin Brockovich, if she had also been Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go's in her spare time.

So the writing ends up being pretty much all over the place, and though there are some really good moments, the story overall kind of disappoints. Two things really make the series memorable: the music (the women playing the band members are all musicians and have continued to play as the fictional band even after the series ended, sort of like The Monkees) and the performance by Kim Jung Eun.

What really sells her performance is her eyes. In scenes where she is confronted with a crisis, she gets the crazy eyes.

It's hard to describe or capture in a single frame, but it happens over and over again: she faces some kind of adversity and is ready to give up, go along just to get along, until someone decides to push her just a little too far. Then her eyes flash with this almost desperate energy, and the next thing you know, she's fighting back, hard, whether it's in the divorce against her husband, or in a bar fight against a couple of drunken thugs messing with one of her friends. She even gets much the same look when their first public gigs with the band don't go the way they'd hoped.

And then about two thirds of the way through, the band has one of their first major gigs at a music festival, where they debut their signature song, "Comeback Madonna." The lyrics in the bridge are about pushing forward in life and love, knowing that you are worth the effort. And the first time she sings it, she's singing to the man who helped her write the song, her new love interest who is serving as the band's unofficial mentor. Her eyes are full of affection, and it's a nice moment.

But then they hit the instrumental break, and she sees her evil mother-in-law standing in the audience. One of the big issues during the divorce was the husband's family trying to keep her from performing in public, to keep from being an embarrassment to her husband, who had political ambitions. So needless to say, Mom-in-Law has never shown up to a gig before, and isn't there to be loving and supportive.

As Seol Hee notices the evil old woman glaring at her from the audience, she falters and her hands fall away from the keyboard (although the piano on the soundtrack keeps playing--a sad technical glitch distracting from such a dramatic moment). But then she gets that flash in her eyes again, and when she resumes the bridge, she's singing to her former mother-in-law with defiant joy (which once again was hard to capture in a single frame, but I did my best).

It's a brilliant moment, and I almost wish the series had ended there, because it never quite got that good again afterward.

Another scene that I wish I had screencapped when I first saw it because I can't find again without practically watching the series over featured an incredibly subtle performance by Kim Seung Soo as her ex-husband. There's a scene where the attorney he's having the affair with proposes that they take their relationship public after the divorce (an impossible prospect, since she is divorced with a child, unsuitable for a man with ambitions for a political career).

Kim Seung Soo plays his role in the mold of other stone-faced Asian men, playing most of his scenes very cool and neutral. So as the other woman makes her proposal, his expression remains almost unchanged; I could screencap the first and last frames of the shot, and you would be hard-pressed to spot the difference. Yet you can see in a miniscule twitch around his eyes and mouth how the wall slams down emotionally between the two in the matter of a second. It's a really well-played scene.

Twin Peaks

2011-06-17T15:15:00.003-05:00

So one of the things I promised myself as part of my rejuvenation was to let myself eat out once in a while (and by eat out, I mean go to a sit-down place, not fast food). Today, I decided to take myself up on it.

I went to a place called Twin Peaks, which someone at work had described as basically "Hooters with good food." Now actually, I have not been dissatisfied with the food at Hooters, but still decided to give Twin Peaks a try. I drove out to the hell-corner of 71st and Memorial, found the place and went in.

The place looked just as expected. It's decorated with rustic fashions to suggest a mountain lodge, while the female staff dress like Naughty Lumberjacks (or should I say Jills?). First disappointment: there seems to be no lunch menu, so I had to order off the full menu. But yeah, that's just my cheapness talking.

So I ordered the Steak Sliders, described on the menu as "mini ribeye steak sandwiches." The waitress, a gorgeous girl whose nametag read "Bambi," said it was her favorite dish on the menu. When the food arrived, I received my second disappointment.

The sliders were not steak. Or let's say, you could technically describe them as steak only in terms of what cut of the cow they came from. But steak to me says the beef should be grilled or broiled. What I got tasted like it had been simmering in a crock pot for a few hours. It was soft and mushy and bland. It certainly did not have the savory flavor I had hoped for. Part of the mushiness may have come from the sauteed onions slathered on top. I appreciate the zing of a good sauteed onion, but these were also mushy and overcooked, and there were so many that they overwhelmed the beef, which was also overwhelmed by the thick, thick bread slices.

I ended up taking the sandwiches apart and eating all the constituent bits separately in an attempt to wring some flavor out of the individual elements. That made them edible, at least. I probably should have just had a cup of coffee.

Bambi was very friendly and had a great rack, but I didn't like the food, nor did I love the ambience. There may be a lot of guys who just love the mountain lodge/sports bar aesthetic, but I tolerate it for the women. So I probably won't be back.

A few years ago, before I made the Biggest Mistake of my Life, I had an idea for a geek-themed place. I was seeing it as more of a bar than a restaurant, but a restaurant would probably work better. The idea was to decorate kind of like a sci-fi Hard Rock cafe, with lots of different SF and Fantasy memorabilia. The waitresses would dress in cosplay outfits, and instead of a bar or a live music stage, there would be a discussion pit where geeks could debate DS9 vs. Babylon 5 to their heart's content. It would be like a con suite, only year round and with hot women. I didn't have a good name for it, so my working title was "The Fan Club."

I doubt if such a place could actually succeed, especially in Tulsa, but it was fun to fantasize about for a while.

A Revelation of Sorts

2011-06-15T19:56:00.002-05:00

Even though I've made some professional sales, I sometimes feel like a bit of an imposter at this whole writing thing. My writing often seems plain and graceless compared to other writers I admire. I'm not very prolific, and I rarely have the confidence to submit what I written. Even when I am confident enough to submit, it only takes three or four rejections to make me give up on that story and move on.

The lack of reaction to Hero Go Home and slow sales on both Death Wave and Digger Breaks Through! have just reinforced that notion that I'm just not good enough.

And yet...

Two of the stories in Digger Breaks Through! are stories written for Codex contests. The first one placed second in Codexian Idol four years ago, and the second one placed third three years ago. There was another writer in the contest both years, a guy named Eric James Stone. I placed ahead of him the first year, and right behind him the second. This year, he won the Nebula award for Best Novelette.

I'm not saying I write as well as he does, or that I will ever be so good as to win a major award. But maybe I'm not as mediocre as I all too often run myself down as. Maybe it's time to start trying to play with the big kids again instead of telling myself I'm out of my league.

Too Many Things to Say

2011-06-14T22:13:00.002-05:00

I haven't been posting much, not because I had nothing to say, but because I have had so much to say that I was almost afraid to take the time to write such long posts. For instance, the last Korean drama I watched, My Girl, got me literally angry--so angry that I was screaming at my computer monitor. But I didn't write a post, partly because it was triggered by the main character acting like my wife as our marriage was dissolving.

The drama before that, You're Beautiful, also had me thinking of a lot of things to post. Actually, every drama I watch reminds me of stuff from Korean culture that I think might make an interesting post, except I end up deciding that the people who would be interested already know what I'm going to talk about, and the people who don't know won't be interested.

Right now, between the low-carb diet I'm trying to follow (not well so far--no real results to speak of) and the food porn drama I'm in the middle of (Pasta), I'm getting kind of cooking-obsessed. I've ended up restocking my pantry and refrigerator almost completely, and today, I finally ended up breaking out the old wok and the stove-top grill to try to do a proper bulgogi. Still need to work on the marinade, though.

Tonight's supper was stir-fried steak and vegetables (I'm writing this out so I can remember what I did--it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good). In the wok, I stir-fried sliced green onion, chopped red pepper, minced garlic and grated ginger. I rubbed the juice from the ginger on the meat before slicing it into strips. I added soy sauce and a dash of Liquid Smoke before adding the meat, and after letting all that cook down, I threw in some spinach leaves to help pick up the sauce and balance out the spiciness right before removing it from the heat. Like I said, it was pretty good, but I really think some five-spice or hoisin would have added a lot of flavor.

It's not the kind of thing I plan to do a lot; that's more prep than I usually enjoy. But I've been cooking at home a lot more and saving some money on eating out, and for the moment, I'm really enjoying it.

I'm also plotting my next book, which is turning out strange. It's my Johnny Dollar vs. Cthulhuzilla book, only I'm overlaying a Korean-romance-style formula. And it's a little bleak, given the impending divorce. My wife introduced me to someone as her "ex-husband" the other day. And it's not like it's a surprise (and it may not even be the first time, now that I think of it). But not only is the divorce not final, the paperwork to start the process is not even turned in yet. So it feels weird to be called the ex. It's like reading the will before pulling the plug.

I"m in a weird place, anyway. On the one hand, the prospect of making things official seems like it has prompted me to start putting my life back together, which is good. And all the romances I've been watching certainly have me thinking about dating again. But there's still a part of me that doesn't want the divorce, that wants instead to rediscover with my wife the things that made us fall in love in the first place. And it's so frustrating to watch stories in which even estranged lovers end up winning through their disillusionment to finally reconcile in the end, knowing that it can't happen for me. My life is not a movie and I'm no leading man.

Perils of Parenting

2011-06-11T23:22:00.003-05:00

You want to believe somewhere in your heart of hearts that your child is a miniature you, only better. Like she got all your good qualities and all your interesting quirks, but none of the major hang-ups that have caused you so many problems throughout your life. And when she's very young, you can shape her interests to a degree. What you like, she likes, and what you don't, she often doesn't.

But then one day, you discover that she has somehow become an actual person while you were looking the other way. And on the one hand, it's inevitable and good, but on the other, it's sad.

What brought this on, you ask? Last week, I was watching my daughter for a day (one measure of how far I've cleaned up the mess from the Worst Mistake of My Life is that I was finally willing, after over two years, to let my daughter come into my house again--the house is far from clean, but I'm not too ashamed to let her in the door anymore), I decided to share with her one of the great treasures from my own childhood. I showed her the original Star Wars.

Okay, it wasn't the original, or the VHS version I have that's really close to the original. It was the Special Edition (ptooey!) which I have on DVD and which is mostly the original.

She got bored less than halfway through and stopped paying attention. After Ben Kenobi died, she looked up and wondered why Luke was sad; she had been doodling throughout the entire lightsaber duel. When they were tensely running down the Death Star trench, she briefly looked up and asked, "What are they doing?" having completely missed the significance of, well, every scene in the movie talking about how the Death Star was the ultimate enemy they had to destroy.

And it's not as if I expected her to have the same reaction I did. When I saw it, I was in a theater coming out of a period when any movie with a happy ending was considered a kid's movie. Movies were depressing and often incoherent. And special effects, even the good ones, were crude at best and usually just laughably awful. And the movies those effects featured in were usually stilted and boring until the brief shining moments when cool stuff happened.

Star Wars was different, fast-paced and funny with effects totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Without Star Wars, I would not have gone to the University of Southern California. The movie changed my entire life. It is not an understatement to say that it was, for me, a religious experience.

I didn't expect it to have the same effect on my daughter. To her, effects like that and even better are an everyday experience. And the movies she has seen have all been influenced by Star Wars to such an extent that it's no longer the unique experience it was for me. So no, I didn't expect her to speak in tongues after watching it. But I did expect it to at least hold her interest.

*sound of heart breaking*

But all is not lost. She came over again on Thursday, and I showed her Raiders of the Lost Ark. And that one, she not only watched all the way through, but really seemed to like (I'm super-duper hoping that she wasn't saying "awesome" just to keep from hurting my feelings). So yeah, there's hope.

Old School Shave

2011-06-06T12:28:00.002-05:00

So anyone who has known me for a while knows I've got this nostalgia thing going. I love old movies, good or bad, I love old radio shows, I like to wear my vintage hat now and then. I took it to such an extreme degree while I was writing Death Wave (which takes place during the Great Depression) that I even switched from regular shaving cream in a can to old-style mug shaving soap with a brush (and never went back) with old-school Bay Rum for aftershave and old-style Brylcreem on my hair on those occasions when I would wear my vintage fedora.

The thing I didn't change was my razor. I've been using a Gilette Mach 3 since I was sent a free sample handle in the mail years ago and liked the shave I got with it. But when I had to cut back on my expenses, I could no longer afford the replacement blades, which are getting a lot more expensive. I tried switching to a cheaper generic drugstore alternative, but it just magnified the frustration I'd been feeling with the Mach 3.

What frustration? When I let my beard grow for a few days, I get a crap shave with it, because the whiskers clog up the spaces between the blades. And all too often, I miss spots that I don't notice until later in the day, and when I get in a hurry, I cut myself with it. I also tend to overuse the blades, stretching them out way past the time I should, because the replacements are so expensive, meaning worse shaves and more cuts.

So between the frustration and the expense, I've been mulling for a while switching to an old-school safety razor like my dad used when I was a kid. You sometimes see specialty boutiques carrying new ones, but they're always really expensive. But last week, I finally decided to look some up on eBay and see how much an old, used one would cost.

After doing some shopping around and losing my first bid, I won my second for amazingly little. Even with shipping, it was only around 5 dollars, and a pack of 5 blades at Med-X is $1.50. By comparison, a four pack of Mach 3 blades is somewhere in the neighborhood of eight bucks, so

I'm already saving money. (Are there any journalists cringing at the style inconsistencies in this paragraph?)

I got the razor in the mail today and just tried it out. Don't know how I'll feel in the long run, but after the first shave, I like it. I hadn't shaved in several days, but there was no problems with clogging; the entire shave went smoothly (so to speak). And it feels as if there's more feedback with the single blade. You can really feel the blade interacting with the whiskers, which I like. I understand that cuts are probably more likely with this razor, especially given my inexperience with it, but at the same time, I have to be more mindful of the way I'm shaving, take my time and be more deliberate, which should help me avoid cuts and missed spots. All in all, I like the result.

I've got a couple of big announcements to make, but I'll wait, since something is still cooking, so to speak. I'll space them out over the next couple of days.

You Know It's Serious When This Happens

2011-05-26T21:18:00.003-05:00

I cleaned my room last night. Which may not seem like a big deal, but it was the first time in two years, maybe? The cycle went like this: I got depressed and didn't clean. Plus, between the heat of summer and trying to save money on utilities due to unemployment, I tried to move as little as possible and not run things like the vacuum cleaner (although I did stay on the internet--oh yes, I did). When the weather cooled off enough to think about doing a little cleaning, maybe, the mess was so big that trying to think of where to start made my brain shut down in panic, which got me feeling more useless and depressed. And before I could get past that, it was too cold to clean.

Rinse, repeat.

It's different this time. It really is. Not only did I clean one room, but I also worked out, something else I hadn't done for over two years. And really, for the first time since just after I moved into the house, I'm starting to think about changes I want to make to the property. If I won the lottery, I would tear the whole thing down to the ground and rebuild it. But there are some things I can do to make it suit my personality more, and I'm thinking of ways to do them. It's starting to feel as if the future will not be a long downhill grind until death. Life might actually be good again, someday. It's weird to feel that, and embarrassing to realize that I fallen so far that it has become weird.

All this has come at a cost to my productivity. It's like I just woke up and all the stuff I was doing with Hero Go Home and Digger Breaks Through was a dream I'm trying to piece together in the light of day. I don't know if I'll make that June 1st deadline.

Multiple Personality Day

2011-05-23T21:14:00.003-05:00

Strange day today. Happy, restful, but also sad and frustrating. Productive in some ways, maddeningly not in others.

I mentioned the other day that I'm slowly putting my life back together. What does that really mean? There's a list--not written down because it's too long, but in my head--there's a list of stuff I need to take care of. Long list. And over the last couple of years, since I made the Biggest Mistake of My Life, that list has done nothing but grow as poverty and severe depression put me into near stasis. Mail piled up unread, trash didn't get taken out, the yard grew wild as debts accumulated and bills fell behind. I might occasionally take tiny stabs at the list, but they were brief.

I've been gradually pecking away at small things on the list for a couple of weeks now. Cleaning things up here and there, catching up on utility bills, working in the yard. And I'm starting to cook more, improving my diet to lose weight, and even thinking about working out again. I'm still a L-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-N-G way from catching back up to where I was two years ago, but I'm taking small, positive steps, and more than I have in ages. So that's had me feeling good today. The smell of red wine and garlic from the steak I fixed for supper (a small, cheap cut, but still a steak) makes me smile every time I walk past the kitchen.

On the other hand, my wife and I went to the bank and signed quit claim deeds for each other's houses and cleared out our joint safe deposit box. And I guess we're close enough to the end that it doesn't really hurt the way it did, and I guess that's a good thing too. The only time I came close to crying was when I was looking over some extra prints of our wedding pictures that were in the box.

There was a time when we were so in love and eager to discover life together. Now it all seems sad and empty.

Other than that, it was strange, the stuff we saved in it. Some old rings of hers and mine. My high school class ring (which I got through my dad and not through the school's official company, so they misspelled the name of the school). Another ring my dad gave me right about the time I proposed so I could get used to wearing a ring. My birth certificate and my mother's. My wife's international drivers license, which she got just in case she ended up being able to come visit me in Korea. Negatives of our pictures. A bunch of paperwork related to our first daughter. The mortgage agreement for the home we bought as I was going to Korea for my last tour. A forgotten savings bond that had been a wedding present from a college friend of mine. Every item had a story.

Then came the frustration. I set myself a deadline of June 1 to finish putting together Digger Breaks Through, the short story anthology, but the rewrite on one of the stories is totally blocking me. It's another "Digger tells a story in the bar" story, and on a line-by-line basis, it feels pretty good. There are good moments in it. But overall, it just seems dead and flaccid on the page, and I'm not sure how to rescue it. I may just have to leave it out altogether.

Thor

2011-05-23T00:21:00.003-05:00

Saw Thor on Saturday, and I was a little disappointed. The 3D wasn't great. There was plenty of depth to the picture, but there were some scenes, like Thor's coronation in Asgard, that the 3D effect caused to feel miniature. I'm pretty sure I would have felt a greater sense of scale in plain 2D.

But that wasn't the major source of my disappointment. The big thing was, by the time it ended, I was wondering where the story was. Loki's motivation never really worked for me, and the stuff with Jane Foster was just sort of rote and by-the-numbers. When he suddenly declared his love for her, I was like, "Where did that come from?" And where was Balder? If they could include the Warriors Three, they should have had Balder in there as well.

So yeah, the effects were great, and Heimdall was bad-ass for a token black inserted randomly into a Viking story, and Thor's powers were depicted pretty much as in the comics, with the lightning and the hammer-twirling and the flying. But by the end of it, I felt as if I'd watched a bunch of scenes in search of a story. I wondered where the movie went.

The Fever Has Passed

2011-05-21T12:10:00.003-05:00

I seem to have burned out on the Korean dramas. After finishing the last one, My Lovely Sam Soon (the English title - the Korean title translates to My Name Is Kim Sam Soon, which actually fits the story better, but is also super-boring), I tried to watch another, but lost interest less than halfway through the first episode. After a while, they don't have the addictive newness that the first couple did.

But after burning through seven in the last few weeks, I think I've learned a few lessons about how Korean dramas work and why they are so popular.

1. They rely very heavily on plot formula. Every drama I've watched has followed the basic formula I outlined a couple of posts ago, with the seeming exception of Oh! My Lady! about an actor who falls in love with a woman who blackmails him to get a job with a theatrical production company (she learns he has an illegitimate daughter and helps him take care of her and keep her secret in exchange for him agreeing to star in a stage musical). Except that it, too, follows the formula. The difference is that the formula applies to his relationship with his daughter, not the romance with the older woman.

Lesson: Formulas work.

2. They rely on stock characters and situations. Out of the seven, four centered around show business as the main or secondary plot, with a possible fifth in Coffee House, with a novelist as the main character and another main character who becomes a writer on a radio show. Three featured a main romance between an older woman and younger man (though maybe Gumiho doesn't count, since she was a 500-year-old mystic creature). Five revolve around forbidden romance between rich man and poor woman. Three feature characters who find expression in food (two by learning to make great coffee, and a third who is a Le Cordon Bleu-trained patissiere).

Lesson: Stereotypes are shorthand that make people feel comfortable with the environment quickly.

3. Every character starts out as a stereotype, but almost every one--even minor characters--grows beyond it. Sometimes they cheat--Seung Yeon's family in Coffee House becomes much less cartoonish by the end, but we don't really see how or why--but even the worst characters are given moments of real human emotion.

Lesson: Stereotypes can't satisfy in the long run.

4. Character is everything. As stated before, the plots are formulaic and the situations are familiar. The budgets don't allow for spectacle. So character writing and performances have to carry everything, and this is where the Koreans shine.

I may still watch some now and then, but it's not going to consume all my time the way it has recently, which is good. I'm starting to put the pieces of my life back together, and I'm approaching this summer with a pretty positive attitude. The divorce process may kill that, but it will take a few months for it to finalize (got to get those numbers together this week--urgh), so my summer at least should be good.

Some Random Commercials

2011-05-16T14:09:00.003-05:00

Watching as much K-drama on Hulu as I have been means I've also been seeing a lot of the same commercials over and over again. Some thoughts:

I have gotten to know the Geico commercials well enough that I can predict which of the three current endings--"Do dogs chase cats?" "What, do you live under a rock?" or "Is the pen mightier than the sword?"--it will show based on the Rod-Serling-wanna-be's walk to the camera.

A phrase I'm really getting sick of: referring to eating as "putting fuel in your body."

It is very rare that I refuse to buy a product because I don't like their commercials, but Northern has managed it with that idiotic commercial featuring women droning on about how it's "time to get real about what happens in the bathroom." It's not. It annoys me more than that animated bear with the cling-ons, which is a lot.

On the other hand, I'm actually thinking about trying the Quaker Oatmeal Squares in spite of the horribly annoying "homemade video review" commercials. They do look kind of tasty.

Don't have much use for cats, but I love the Fancy Feast commercial where the guy proposes by getting his really gorgeous girlfriend a kitten. On the other hand, I'm baffled by that Friskies commercial where the cat enters a phantasmagoric dreamworld when it starts eating. I mean, I get the concept. I just don't get who thought it was a good idea. Remember, Fancy Feast = lifelong love. Friskies = Cat LSD.

I really should be writing rather than watching all this stuff. But it's actually helping me break through a wall I had run into on a novel project I'd been toying with(the drama, not the commercials), so maybe it's not a complete waste of time.

More Korean Drama and a Formula

2011-05-13T12:49:00.003-05:00

So I've watched three more, and thankfully, they're not all the gut-wrenchers that Kumiho and Secret Garden were.

Coffee House was fun, about an asshole author who torments his gorgeous female publisher and his gawky younger assistant. The main female lead was lovely, but often wore ugly clothes. Ham EunJung as the assistant alternates between sweet and stupid. Her character is sometimes a bit too slow-witted, but I found myself really liking her by the end, to the extent that I wished the author had ended up with her instead of the more conventionally pretty one. And she does a nice bit of acting in her final scene with the author in the last episode. She starts to cry, stops, wipes her tears and gives a little smile to say, "See, it was nothing. I'm fine now." And starts to cry again, harder.

She also does some fine physical comedy; I think she just used the simple physical trick on swinging the same arm and leg when she runs, but it does an effective job of making her look totally clumsy. I was amazed to find out she's a member of a girl group whose videos show her as glamorous and sexual, two things she never is on the series.

Prosecutor Princess was okay, starting out as a sort of Korean Legally Blonde before descending into melodrama. And once again, I found myself liking the secondary female lead more than the main (I actually liked the secondary male more than the mains, too, though that doesn't mean I would rather have watched a show centered on them, if that makes sense). From a legal standpoint, it was pretty ridiculous, though I don't know how much of that is cultural difference in the Korean legal system and how much is simply bad writing.

And last night, I finished Coffee Prince, a Korean version of Just One of the Guys. There were some nice turns in the writing which were sold well in the performances. The pacing of the show slows to a crawl in the mopey middle, to the point where I started to get frustrated with it, but it picks up again in the last third. The performances are pretty good, too, though I think more than performances is the chemistry the cast members have with each other. The final episodes are full of playful, telling moments where you get the idea these people not only love each other, but are really comfortable with each other and having fun.

I had never really thought too deeply about the ways in which the Romantic Comedy both fits and deviates from the basic three-act story formula I learned back in screenplay class, but the Korean romances provide a fascinating study. Because unlike a feature film, with 16-20 hours to fill, every step in the progression gets its own in-depth treatment.

I plan to think more deeply about this, because one idea I'm noodling for my daughter's birthday present next year is writing her a book about writing, with all the story construction stuff that I wish they had taught me in high school instead of that simplistic "rising action/falling action" nonsense. I had the idea a few days ago, too late to write it up for her birthday yesterday. It was a good birthday nevertheless. I went by to drop off her present and ended up staying to grill hot dogs in the backyard. It was nice.

But back to the formula: It seems to go something like:

Two protagonists, call them A and B, each have a goal (feature films often focus on one as the main protagonist, while Korean dramas with more time to fill give both characters equal weight) and each face outside pressure forcing them into choices they don't want

They encounter each other while pursuing their goals, find each other interesting, though often also infuriating

End of Act One: The Pretext, or the Ill-Considered Choice - something happens that gives the two characters a reason to spend more time together as they continue to pursue their separate goals. This something is very often a lie.

They continue to pursue initial goals, but also get to know each other better. A is attracted to B, but resists.

Midpoint: The Flip - Character A realizes that he/she loves the other, and suddenly pursuit of the goal is less important than pursuit of the other character.

Tension rises as A waits for B to reciprocate feelings; this is often complicated by the Pretext, which helped keep them together early, but has now become a burden that threatens to ruin their relationship. B still resists feelings for A, until...

Character B professes love for A, just before...

End of Act Two: Truth or Betrayal - Either the truth comes out or there is a betrayal by a romantic rival. Often, both happen at once, as the rival reveals the truth.

Heartache, break-up, reconciliation.

Both characters have professed their love for each other privately, and in the climax must also do so publicly, while overcoming the outside pressures that disapprove of their love (romantic rivals, social class, age, race, religion, political affiliation, whatever). The story also circles back to the initial goals, as the characters either give up their goals for the sake of love, or find that their love gives them the wherewithal to succeed at their goals where they formerly failed.

One other interesting twist on the standard formula in a romance is that, though there is an outside force they must overcome, it is not the main antagonist for much of the story. Instead the two characters are each other's antagonists, pushing against each other. And in Korean dramas, especially, the characters are also their own antagonists, competing with each other to see who can sacrifice more for the other. This is the cause of much of the heartbreak, as they hide the truth from each other in the name of protecting the other person.

You'd Think I Would Run Out of Tears

2011-05-02T22:58:00.004-05:00

So after almost three years of separation, my wife finally wants to make things official and file divorce paperwork. And while I know intellectually that things can never go back to what they were, and that we can never be the kind of people we were for each other, it was still a blow. I sometimes buy lottery tickets, and when I idly think about what I would do with the money, one of the things I want to do is take my daughter to Disney World. But I can't imagine just the two of us going, and there isn't anyone I would rather take with us than my wife, and I know it would end up being more uncomfortable than fun, because the entire time, I would be hoping for some kind of affection that is just not there anymore. So I guess it's a good thing I haven't won any jackpots.

But in addition to the loss, there's the shame of having to do a full financial disclosure and let her see exactly what a hole I've dug myself into. And of course, in order to do the disclosure, I have to actually look at the figures myself, something I've avoided to keep from depressing myself even further.

And in the midst of this, my favorite shows have been on hiatus, so I decided the other day to try out a Korean drama on Hulu. I have been idly considering the idea for a while now, given that a writer's group friend of mine has been watching them enthusiastically, and I have spent a couple of years in Korea and know a little bit of the language.

So I tried watching this action show titled A Man Called God, but it was so awful that I couldn't even finish the first episode. But I got bored a couple of days later and decided to give another show a try. I picked My Girlfriend Is a Kumiho (Nine-Tailed Fox), which looked like it would be funny. And the first episode was okay, kind of a live-action version of a standard magical girl anime, like Video Girl Ai or something. It had some good scenes, and the girl was cute, so I watched the second episode the next day.

And got totally sucked in. Because although the scripting and acting and production values aren't always up to American standards, the plotting is brilliant, and relentless in the way they tighten the screws on the characters, making their situation more tragic and desperate. In the entire second half of the series, it seems as if all of the main characters are either crying or on the verge of tears. It's exhausting, but also addictive.

And maybe it is just my own fragile emotional state, but I ended up being a total sucker for the tear-jerking. Not just because of recent events, but because I've wanted to cry pretty much every day for the past, I don't know, three or four years? I'll be walking through the store, looking for the right spot to shelve an item, and my throat will close and my eyes will start to well up, and I have to stop to take a breath and reorient. Sometimes just for a single random moment, but it's Every. Single. Day. Usually several times.

The Hulu page for a particular show will recommend similar shows, so after I finished Kumiho, I tried another show called Secret Garden. And though at first I didn't like it as much, I did end up watching all twenty hours in three or four days, missing out on a lot of sleep and writing.

And it was surprising how similar the two shows were, not just in the ways they use the plot and characters to tighten the emotional screws and put me in tears episode after episode, but also in surprisingly specific ways. Both shows, for instance, use the story of the Little Mermaid to develop the theme of the doomed romance. Both shows feature main characters who work on action films, so major plot elements revolve around casting and filming and stunts gone wrong. And both use comedy relief involving elevators (I like both scenes a lot) in the first episode to set up major plotlines later.

Secret Garden is subtler and better scripted, I think, but though it's cruder, Kumiho is more tightly plotted and more relentless about tightening the screws and investing the audience in the outcome. In fact, one of my biggest problems with the series was that it tightened the screws a little too far to allow for a satisfying resolution (an idea I might explore in more detail in a later post).

Overall, though, I really liked both series a lot, though I liked Kumiho a little more, if only because it stars the awesome Shin Min-A, who is super-cute. I mean, weapons-grade cute. If the point of a romance is to get you to fall in love (at least temporarily) with the main character, she totally did that for me.

But imagine, if you will, the kind of emotional and intellectual roller-coaster ride it was watching these shows. On the one hand, I'm totally sucked into the plot and the characters, laughing and crying right along with them. And all the while, I'm also relating the tribulations of the main characters and their seemingly doomed romance to my own failed marriage and impending divorce, so I'm crying even harder. And while I'm doing that, I'm also kind of embarrassed that I'm a 48-year-old man falling so hard for such a nakedly melodramatic soap opera of a show. And on top of that, I'm also analyzing the writing and story structure, even through the tears, thinking, "I totally need to remember how to do this so I can use it myself."

My heart and my mind are both broken, it seems.

Daunting Success

2011-04-26T23:53:00.002-05:00

So I've lately been back on Codex after a long absence, and I notice several of the writers there are also putting out ebooks. And in one thread, they're posting their cover images.

Which gets me thinking about the Digger short story collection I want to publish soon. So yesterday, I start toying with a cover concept, and sometime late last night, I end up with something that looks actually sort of awesome. Which presents me with a problem.

What's the problem with an awesome cover?

Well, I'm currently struggling with revising some unpublished Digger stories to include in hte collection for extra value. I thought the stories were sort of pleasantly funny, but now I'm thinking, "Man, I really need to step up my game so people won't be disappointed that this story is in a collection with that cover."

Because I've been a victim of the cover bait'n'switch before, and it sucks.

So the editing and polishing may take longer than I thought.

Adventures in Retail

2011-04-18T10:47:00.002-05:00

Politically, I lean toward the libertarian and the conservative, in the belief that it's better to let people figure out things on their own than impose some sort of top-down Soviet-style rule commanded by "experts." I also generally hold to the hope that people will act like adults if you treat them like adults.

Working at a large retail store is utterly destroying that belief. Because people are pigs.

Virtually all I do, all day long, is pick up after them. I remember in one Diner podcast about New Year's Resolutions (either this year or last), Lileks mentioned that one resolution was to put stuff back on the proper shelf in Target rather than just dropping it at random anywhere in the store. He meant it as a joke, but I actually started to get mad.

Because that's all I do. I find frozen food that someone didn't want hidden among the bottles on the shampoo shelf, now warm and ruined. I find full carts of stuff picked up at random by teenagers with nothing better to do, abandoned in the corner of the store, and now I've got to put all that stuff back. At the end of the day, you cannot walk through the shoe aisles, because the floor is so littered with shoes. One shopper yesterday set up shop in the patio furniture section, setting up chairs for himself and someone else, plus an end table, and then proceeded to tear open a box containing a wire mesh firepit and partially assemble it on the floor of the store. I found the half-assembled firepit, surrounded by cardboard and plastic strewn heedlessly about, abandoned without a word.

People are pigs.

But it is fun to laugh at them sometimes. A dude in the store yesterday was looking at a grabber, one of those aluminum things to extend your reach (not this one, but similar). And his kid, maybe three or four, is sitting in the shopping cart, and Dad is grabbing his arm with the thing, and the kid's going, "Do it again. Do it again."

And then, in that loud shouting voice that kids use as a default because they think it's the only way they can get attention (and it may be true), the kid yells, "Dad, grab my pee-pee with it. Dad, grab my pee-pee!"

Rude Software is Still Rude

2011-04-17T01:15:00.003-05:00

I should be used to this by now, given that I wrote a rant about it three and a half years ago, but every now and then it still jumps up in my face and bugs me. I walk into a fast food place and start to order.

"Hello, I'd like a number..."

"Will this be for here or to go?"

It's bad enough that they're interrupting me. That's rude, but people are rude to me all day long. What really gets my goat is that they don't intend to be rude to me. It seems to be the way their POS software is designed; they seem to be required to ask that question first before they can take the rest of my order. Thanks to this stupid-ass program, it is their job to be rude to me.

And as I said, I've been complaining about this for years. I should be used to it by now, except that not only is it rude, it's a bad design. This is just a guess, but I'd say nine times out of ten, the main thought on people's minds when they step up to order is what food they're asking for. That's my priority, that's what I'm thinking about, that's the reason I walked into your place of business in the first place. So why is it so hard to just let me order and then decide on the delivery details?

Imagine trying to order something from Amazon, and every time, before it lets you choose which book you want to buy, it makes you choose how you want it delivered first. It's ridiculous.

I'm looking at you KFC, Chick Fil-A, Arby's. Maybe also Long John Silver's and A&W; it's been so long since I've eaten there that I forget if they do it too. I like your food (some more than others), and with the exception of KFC, I enjoy visiting your restaurants. But seriously, even when I don't get interrupted because the person opened the conversation with the question before I could speak, I notice that the question comes first and that it's not the way I want to order.

If this bothers you too, pass it on.

Interesting

2011-04-14T19:03:00.003-05:00

Well, after being profiled as arrogant, I went to take this rather disturbing test, and got this result.

Thoughtful to the extreme, you are often obsessed with perfection and the rules governing your own personal interests. Your world is black and white. You love to work within a logical system, such as language, computer programming, or mathematics. Manipulating a system that can be completely understood is a distinct pleasure to you, because of your confidence in the underlying veracity of your belief system. Because of your appreciation for logic and order, those who speak or think in a sloppy manner are apt to generate more than their share of wrath. Although very amiable, you are not drawn to friendships out of a sense of personal need. You are just as happy by yourself with a good book or puzzle. Because you are so involved with thought, you will on occasion have difficulty dealing with the day-to-day problems of a normal life. Taking out the trash, doing the dishes, these are often left until the last possible moment, if at all.

It's interesting, because on the one hand, I think I see the world in more shades of gray than most people. On the other hand, I do get annoyed very easily by relatively small things, and my house is indeed a mess, and I often forget about birthdays, holidays, bills due, and other obligations because I'm caught up in thinking about other things. It's one of the things that helped kill my marriage, the fact that I would drift off as my wife was telling me something, either thinking about something I had been wrestling with before she started talking, or toying with a story idea that occurred to me from something she said, or worst of all, chasing a completely random thread of connections, as something she said reminded me of something that reminded me of something else which reminded me of something else, so by the time she finished talking, I would be thinking about something three subjects removed. I wasn't trying to be rude or dismissive. It's just the broken way my mind works.

Then again, these summaries are often written like horoscopes, in that they deal in generalities that could apply to virtually anyone. So who knows? But the test itself is kind of disturbing.

ETA: One other thing that occurs to me, though, is the opening comment that I am drawn to language because I like working with logical systems. I must say, I became interested in linguistics when I was an Army linguist, and in the similarities and differences between languages. In other words, I was interested in language as a sort of abstract subject for study, but was much less effective when it came to actually speaking and conversing in the language with other people. So that seems to be pretty spot-on as well.

Cogitation

2011-04-13T16:10:00.002-05:00

It's been a few months now since I stopped posting weekly features here and put all my eggs in the Hero Go Home basket. Now I'm about 2 1/2 months out from finishing the novel, and I need to start thinking seriously about where to go from there. Call it quits on the website and move everything back here? Or develop a new storyline and continue to hope it finds an audience?

Electronic Attack and a Painful Memory Lapse

2011-04-10T11:15:00.003-05:00

So I've mentioned that I'm now working part-time at a big box retailer. Last night, something odd happened that had me flashing back to the Army. See, we use portable radio transceivers in the store. Okay, walkie-talkies. So last night, someone came onto our channels and started saying he was Kermit the Frog, asking if anyone had ever made it with a puppet and talking about condoms and crap.

Which was annoying, but slightly entertaining. But as time went on, he interrupted more frequently, and by the time he announced he would be reading from Alan Ginsburg's Howl, I was seriously hoping they called the cops on the jerk. And I was hoping that when the cops caught him, they would give us all the chance to take turns kicking this kid in the balls. I mean, seriously, Howl? It's like the Starcrash of poetry.

Of course, later I felt a little sorry for the pathetic turd. I mean, it's Saturday night, and this is all you can think of to do with it? Sit in a shopping center parking lot with a walkie-talkie, reading Howl and fapping (one of the girls was sure she heard him doing that as well)?

But the Army flashback... I was in signal intelligence, and one of the jobs there was radio jamming. And basically all radio jamming is, is taking a stronger signal and using it to overwhelm a weaker signal. In true Army fashion, they have a boring official name for it, though this one's cooler than most: Electronic Attack. His signal didn't seem much stronger than ours, but it was strong enough that it would interfere with ours.

Another function of jammers is something they called ICD when I was in, Imitative Communications Deception. Basically, getting on the radio and pretending to be the enemy, calling in false reports and false orders. Which is what this guy was doing, sort of, at least when he started. After he'd been on a while, I started thinking back to my Army days, wondering whether I could rig up some sort of directional antenna so I could triangulate on his position.

But in the end, we settled on another accepted military practice, switching to a backup frequency and observing communications discipline, keeping communications to a minimum (which I kind of wish we would do all the time).

Oh yeah, and at some point, someone offered me some gum. I broke a tooth about three and a half years ago, which has been slowly decaying ever since. Every few months, I have another little chunk break off in my mouth. A few months ago, I had to stop chewing on that side, because it was bothersome. Lately, it's been downright painful.

But I hadn't chewed a piece of gum in a long time, and I thought, "No problem. I'll just keep it on the other side of my mouth." And I was fine for about five minutes or so. Then I absent-mindedly let it switch to the other side.

The pain was blinding. I seriously thought I might have to go home for a second there. But we were already short-handed, and I really need the money, so I stayed, and about ten minutes later, I was fine again.

But wow. No more gum until I get this fixed.

Sucker Punch AAR and Other Crap

2011-04-01T14:22:00.003-05:00

So I went to see "Sucker Punch," and I'm really not sure how to evaluate it. It's a film that tells a sad, bitter, complex story wrapped within a loud, dumb story structured like an 8-bit Nintendo videogame. And there's a tension between those two things that keeps me from fully embracing either side. It's like "Brazil" without the satire, in some ways, but with sequences of awesome action punctuated by some really excellent music.

Although I still get irritated at director Zack Snyder in the way he cannot let an action sequence go by without slowing or stopping time every two seconds. It's like watching a football or basketball game where the refs are continuously calling penalties and stopping the action. At some point in the third or fourth action sequence, I was going, "Just let them play, already."

So anyway, it's not as dumb as the people who can't get past the surface dismiss it as, but I can't embrace it the way some folks I know have. And maybe that's just because I find the message disturbing, which seems to be, '"You can't ever win, but you can find happiness in illusions." Because though I'd like to, I can't.

But at this point, I should count myself lucky that I actually did see the right movie. Because when the trailers started, I wasn't sure I was in the right theater. First, there was a trailer for what was apparently supposed to be a romantic comedy starring Russell Brand. Never mind the fact that I still don't know what Russell Brand's supposed to be famous for, other than hosting the MTV Movie Awards that time or something. The few times I've had to endure him on TV, I found him to be fully as appealing and talented as Tom Green (Who? Exactly...). So I'm watching this trailer where British Lurch is trying to be all cute and appealing, and where they've actually cast Jennifer Garner as the villain (what's that about?), and then imagine my horror to discover that this is actually supposed to be a remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy, "Arthur." No.

This was followed by a trailer for "The Hangover II," the sequel to another comedy I've never seen, and I actually had to turn to Sargon and ask if we were in the right theater, because the trailers seemed to have no common thread with the film we were there to watch, and certainly didn't appeal to me in any way. The next few trailers included "Fast Five," the fifth "Fast and Furious" movie, so at least we were in the right theater, although still not appealing.

And then there was a trailer for a new remake of "The Three Musketeers." I know this, because the trailer mentions musketeers, and that there are three of them, and also names D'Artagnan. But my God, the story hinted at in the clips was completely unrecognizable. There were explosions and bullet-time kung fu-type stuff and a flying airship and some kind of arrangement of dozens of muskets firing in sequence like a machine gun, and I think there may have been some kind of robot casting magic spells, I don't know. I do know that when they finally showed that the title was indeed "Three Musketeers," I turned to Sargon and said something to the effect of, "What the hell?" Which, by the way, let me clarify. What I meant was, "What the HELL?"

Sucker Punch

2011-03-30T15:20:00.002-05:00

I'm thinking tf going out to see "Sucker Punch" tomorrow. Don't know if I'll go at night or try a matinee. Matinees used to be a bargain, but they don't seem to be as much of one anymore, so I haven't decided. I know at some point I may see it on Sargon's big screen TV, but I'd really like the theater experience for this one, just once.

One Strange Thing

2011-03-29T23:12:00.002-05:00

I recently had occasion to take a sort of personality evaluation thing on-line, and one result really threw me for a loop. It scored me very high on Arrogance. I look at myself and I can sort of see it, but...

I mean, I would sort of need self-confidence to be arrogant, wouldn't I? Because I have little to none right now. I'm not currently in one of those troughs of despair where I feel completely worthless, but I'm certainly not feeling as if I can take on the world or tell other people how to live their lives or anything. Maybe I should look up arrogance and see if there's a nuance I'm missing, but nah. Too much work.

Final Note About the Rant

2011-03-28T23:52:00.003-05:00

I think I'm figuring out why I felt I had to write things out in such detail last night. I never really worked through my grief over my daughter. So much of it was bound up in anger and resentment over that whole final year, and I just shut it away rather than try to process it at the same time that my wife was trying to grieve for her friend. It was hard because while I was trying to shut it away, my wife was trying to get me to let it out. I don't think either of us really understood why I was so resistant, but it didn't help to have my wife basically saying "OMG, U R doing it wrong!"

I've spent the last 12 years just avoiding the subject of my daughter altogether--not just her death, but her life, simply because there was so much painful shit bound up in it. I have not visited her grave in the past ten years at least, I avoid looking at pictures of her, change the subject as quickly as I can when someone brings it up or even when my own mind brings it up. It's supposed to be impossible to not think about something, but it's pretty easy if the subject is painful enough. I hope that maybe I can start to move past that now.

Well, That's Out of the Way

2011-03-28T09:22:00.003-05:00

I spent all night working out my bile below, went to bed at 6, tossed and turned until 8:45 or so with maybe an hour of real sleep in there, still thinking about it, and now I'm ready to move on. The last time I wrote a career-and-friendship ending screed was around two and a half years ago, so with luck, we can mark our calendars for November 2013 for the next time Frazier goes mental.

Fingers crossed.

Sean Sellers Was a Murdering, Narcissistic Douchebag, and I'm Glad He's Dead

2011-03-28T03:41:00.005-05:00

If you don't want to read almost 4,000 words of autobiographical whining and angst, pass this one by. Seriously, things will get ugly. I really wish I knew how to do a cut in Blogger.

I don't do the angry rants often, because they make me deeply uneasy, and because I don't think they're particularly interesting to read. But this eats at me in the way that only the worst insult you can imagine from one of the people you love most in the world can, and there is nobody I can tell the story to. Nobody I can imagine who would actually sit and listen to me talk my way through it all, everything I went through and how much it hurts now.

I could just write it all down and never show it to anybody, but that won't help. I need to communicate it, and if I can't communicate it to anyone, then I'll communicate it to potentially everyone. And maybe, among the thousands who think I'm a monstrous asshole for being happy that the state of Oklahoma killed someone for a crime he committed at the age of 16, there might be one person out there who says, "I feel you, brother. That's fucked up, what you went through."

So who was Sean Sellers?

He was a guy who made national headlines in 1986 when he was sentenced to death for killing his parents and one other random dude. This was notable not only because he was 16 at the time, but also because he claimed during the trial that he was not responsible by reason of demon possession. Not only that, but the demon possession was a result of his dabbling with Satanism, for which Dungeons and Dragons had been his gateway drug. It was an incredibly sensational story and trial, and of course, it gave great impetus to the Pat Pullings of the world.

By 1986, I had stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, but still dabbled in other roleplaying games, so at the time, Sellers was to me just a loser who was trying to spoil my good time. And if that were the only reason I hated him, I really would be like the world's biggest asshole.

And speaking of assholes, let me address the "executing a 16-year-old" thing here, right up front. In America, as a society, we acknowledge that 16-year-olds are mature enough to handle the responsibilities of life-and-death, because we license them to operate motor vehicles on public thoroughfares, where every time they drive, they are literally taking hundreds of lives in their hands in the form of every other vehicle on the road. And the liberals who oppose the death penalty so vociferously are also the folks who argue most strenuously for sex education and free birth control for teenagers, trusting that teens, given honest information and free condoms, will exercise their sexuality and the attendant life-or-death consequences responsibly. The same people also fight like grim death for the right of teenage minor girls to receive an abortion--which is not only a life-changing event for them, but also literally a life-or-death matter for the child--without any form of parental input or even parental notification.

But when a 16-year-old boy takes a pistol, walks into his mother's room while she's sleeping, and puts a bullet in her face, suddenly it's "Poor baby! He can't be held responsible! He had no idea what he was doing!" Bullshit. You should slap yourself in the face for being an idiot, and also slap your mother for raising one. Fuckwit.

But then, I'm an asshole. Also a failure. I have failed in every way a man can fail. I dropped out of college. The peak of my career, at least in terms of making my living doing what I wanted to do, was in the late 80's, in the immediate aftermath of Sellers's crimes, when I was writing for a living, reviewing movies for the biggest newspaper in the state. Professionally, everything's been downhill from there. I have been separated from my wife of twenty years for almost three years now, and she has made clear on multiple occasions that true reconciliation will never happen. I am not a man she wants to be married to.

I quit my fairly well-paying, but very dissatisfying job a couple of years ago to go into business for myself. I did almost everything wrong in the deal and got swindled out of $25,000. Employment has been sporadic and low-paying since. My car was repossessed, I'm behind on my mortgage, and I don't answer my phone anymore because 90% of the calls are from creditors. I'm currently working for barely more than minimum wage part-time at a big box retailer, and serializing a novel on-line that even my best friends aren't reading. I have few friends and rarely speak to my family. Oh, and my house is a mess. By any measure, my life is an epic FAIL.

But let's go back to Sellers. He made headlines again not long after he was sent to Death Row when he publicly claimed to have converted to Christianity. At the time, I found the timing... suspicious, like the soldier in Vietnam from the comedy routine by Christian comedian Mike Warnke, who had a bunch of chains around his neck with a cross, a Star of David, a little Buddha, a crescent and star, and some other things. Mike asked him what all that was for and the guy replied, "I believe."

Believed what? Anything that would get him out of there alive, obviously. So yeah, in 1987 and into 1988, Sean Sellers was to me just an inconvenient douchebag who had killed three people, evaded responsibility by blaming my favorite hobby and was now trying to evade punishment by claiming a foxhole conversion.

That all changed in 1988 when I started dating the woman who would become my wife. Because she, it turned out, was one of Sean Sellers's best friends.

I'm not a Christian. Among the many things I have failed at is believing in God, any God. I was raised Pentecostal, but it didn't take. For a long time, I called myself agnostic, but eventually that just seemed wishy-washy, so now I call myself an atheist. I'm not a militant, angry atheist. I don't hate Christians, nor do I believe that "Christianists" are just as bad as Islamists. You don't see any Christians trapping girls in a burning building to keep them from coming into the street with their faces uncovered. I think most Christians are reasonably good-hearted people who find comfort in certain illusions, and as a guy whose hobby is writing about superheroes, I'm sure not one to throw stones. On the other hand, I don't believe superheroes are actually real.

K, my wife, is a Christian. And she told me that she had felt led by God to contact Sean not long after she learned of his case. So she did, and they became good friends. She wrote him often and visited him in prison about once a month.

So I had a choice to make. I didn't much like Sean Sellers as a concept, but I very much liked K as a real person. And if Sean was her friend, I would have to accept it or else move on.

So I accepted it. And in time, I came to accept him. He made her happy, and he seemed supportive of our marriage. He dabbled in painting in prison, and did a couple of nice paintings for K, including a portrait of her with ghostly angel wings. We never became friends, but we did exchange a couple of letters during one of my tours in Korea.

I wasn't actually thrilled with the letters. Because although on a personal level, I appreciated the fact that he was a good friend of my wife, I really resented him in other ways. See, his high-profile trial and subsequent conversion made him a celebrity. When Geraldo Rivera did his infamous special about Satanism during the Satanic Panic of the late 80's, Sellers was a featured guest (via satellite feed from inside the prison). He also appeared on Oprah. And after his conversion, it wasn't enough for him to be a humble sinner saved by grace. He had to establish his own ministry, with a monthly newsletter in which he would purport to teach spiritual truths to folks who had somehow managed not to kill their parents and get sent to Death Row, and so might be assumed to have a generally better grasp on how to live than he did.

In 1995, while I was in the Army, Sellers got married to one of the women he had been corresponding with. I was living in Clarksville, Tennessee at the time, serving in a Military Intelligence unit at Fort Campbell. Sellers asked my wife for a favor. He wanted my wife to buy his wife a dildo. Not a vibrator--he was very specific--but a realistic artificial organ that she could pretend was his, since Oklahoma didn't allow conjugal visits for Death Row inmates. Ever the supportive husband, I went shopping with my wife for a substitute penis to send to the wife of her best friend.

Sometime during that same year, K came to me very unhappy. Life at Fort Campbell was hard for both of us. She had no job to keep her busy during the day, I was working long hours in my job (not to mention the two or three months I was gone on different exercises and training schools), and even when I was home, I was stressed out and exhausted, not to mention some other personal baggage that had arisen between us during my first deployment to Korea.

She handed me a copy of Sellers's ministry newsletter, in which he waxed rhapsodic about how much he loved his wife, how their souls seemed to be in perfect sync, how they completed each other and always knew what the other was thinking, and what a wonderful gift it was from God to have received a mate so perfect for him in every way.

K was unhappy, because the relationship Sellers was describing was the kind of relationship she wanted with me, and I wasn't delivering. The article was nonsense, of course, the kind of infatuated drivel you see from anyone experiencing the highs of a new relationship. I explained to K that after 5 years of marriage, our relationship was more mature than that. We were going through hard times, and we would need more than blissful feelings to get through them, but in the long haul, I would be there for her. We would see five years down the road if Sellers and his wife were still as blissfully, perfectly happy.

Two years later, the perfect, blissful marriage that my wife so envied was annulled. In a strange twist of coincidence, I ended up working with Sellers's ex-wife not long after, as well as the man she married almost immediately after the annulment. Apparently, she wasn't satisfied with a substitute rubber penis.

My marriage endured, but Sellers wasn't done fucking with it.

After I got out of the Army, life was hard. My wife and I had endured years of separations and tensions and hard feelings, and we were raising a young daughter as well. I was working full-time and attending school on the G.I. Bill and also writing a book about my experiences in the Army, while she was working part-time and trying to finish her Master's in Psychology. And Sellers exhausted his last appeal, which meant his execution date was now set for February 5, 1999.

That last year was miserable. My wife was working frantically with a group called Oklahomans Against the Death Penalty to stop the execution. As the supportive husband trying to help my wife through this hard time, I attended several OCADP functions with her. There were basically two distinct sets of people at these functions: the opponents of the death penalty, the most liberal of liberal idiots you ever met, and the Friends of Sean, a bunch of young single women (plus one married one, ahem) who found him charming. I didn't enjoy myself, but I went with her without complaint (with one exception which I'll detail later), because she needed this.

During the same period, Sellers was also frantically trying to complete as much work as he could. He had taken up writing and convinced several friends to publish a book of his poetry, titled Shuladore. He had also written a Christian fantasy novel about a female warrior-princess with fairy wings (I think it was actually called The Warrior Princess[ETA: actually it was The Princess Warrior according to his website]) that mixed together oddball Christianity with Bushido in much the same way he had formerly mixed together Satanism with ninjutsu.

Because here's one thing about Sellers you never read. Although he appeared on national television several times to talk about the great Satanist conspiracy, he was never part of it (probably because it didn't exist). He was not drawn into Satanism by any cult or coven. He met a girl who was into witchcraft, and he wanted to get into her pants, so he got into it with her. Then he read the Satanic Bible, and thought it was cool, and ninjutsu was cool, so he picked out all the parts he liked and became a roll-your-own-Satanic Ninja, practicing a religion unique to himself and a few younger acolytes he tried to bring along. Just like when he couldn't be just a Christian but had to have his own ministry, he had to try to lead a group as a Satanist. Lucky for the other kids, it didn't take.

After his conversion, he did the same thing, reading the Bible and picking out the parts he liked, then drawing influences from Bushido and other bullshit he thought was cool to create a roll-your-own-Christianity. My wife was part of that process, discussing all this endlessly with him through her letters and monthly visits.

So that last year was not just a frantic scramble to stop the execution, but a scramble to get all of his unfinished work finished before he died. My wife was editing and proofreading the novel, and working with Sellers's new girlfriend on typing up his massive memoirs and working with some other folks who were publishing his graphic novel. Yes, he was a comics fan as well, and wrote and drew a graphic novel titled Donjonhoefen. And in true narcissistic Sean Sellers fashion, in his editorial message, he stated that he had created this entire incredible world in the hopes that other people would continue to write adventures in it. Because it wasn't enough for Sellers to create; in his own mind, he had to inspire and lead and be followed. Hell, the very act of "creating" a world and having other people inhabit it would make him a kind of god himself, which in the end was the only thing that would do for Sean Sellers.

And no, the graphic novel wasn't very good, and no, no one ever followed his lead and continued to write adventures in the wonderful world he created, and no, I will never, ever be featuring it in Out of the Vault.

Things got more and more tense as the final date approached. One night in late November or December 1998, with the execution only a few months away, I attended a particularly excruciating meeting of the OCADP folks. There had been a clemency hearing, and Sellers's step-siblings had testified against him. He had killed their father in cold blood, and they had never accepted his so-called conversion to Christianity. The OCADP folks sat around and discussed, with typical liberal venom, what awful people Sellers's step-siblings were. They then went on to talk about what a bad mother Vonda had been, and what an asshole step-father Lee had been, and how they had pretty much deserved what they'd gotten.

I held my tongue while we were there, getting angrier and angrier at this bunch of self-righteous fuckwads, and when we were in the car, I finally unloaded on my wife. Maybe I shouldn't have--maybe I should have just made a scene right there with everybody present, or else never expressed my opinion at all--but I went off with my wife when we were alone. I talked about the rank hypocrisy of the whole Sean Sellers Fan Club, how this guy had become a celebrity by killing his parents and then making lame excuses for it, and that it was totally fucked up that this group of pricks would then sit around and bad-mouth the murder victim by implying she deserved it, which also completely forgot the third victim, who was certainly not to blame in any way.

I was honest, and as far as I was (and still am) concerned, I was right, but my wife was hurt, and it drove yet another wedge between us. The final couple of months before the execution were non-stop Sean. My wife was either heading up to the prison, or talking to interviewers, or going to hearings, or talking to OCADP or Sellers's lawyer. Once, I answered the phone, and it was Bianca Jagger (ex-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger) wanting to talk to my wife about Sellers's case.

In the end, none of it made a difference. On February 4, 1999, my wife left home to attend the execution, being one of the people invited on Sellers's guest list. She dropped our daughter off in Oklahoma City to spend the night with my mother, which my mother was thrilled to do. Alone at home, I went out and got drunk.

Sellers was executed by lethal injection a little after midnight.

The next morning, I got a call at work from my mother-in-law, who seemed shocked that I hadn't heard. When I asked her what I was supposed to have heard, she told me that my daughter had died, smothered by a pillow after falling off the bed in my mother's guest room. The bed was in the corner of the room, at an angle which left a small triangular space behind the night table. My daughter, our daughter, had somehow fallen off the bed into that small space headfirst with a pillow and become trapped. She was dead when my mother found her the next morning. She was two years and one month old.

And I'm not saying that Sean Sellers killed my daughter or anything, but the fact is that it happened on the night that my wife went to his execution, and only because she went to his execution. The furniture arrangement was a potential deathtrap, but the actual event occurred on that night and no other. Without that reason, my daughter would not have been there in the first place.

The life that I hoped would somehow return to normal after the execution never returned to what it was. My wife decided she could no longer live in the small house we'd lived in with our daughter, and convinced her mother and grandmother to sell their houses and move into one big house with us. Later that year, she became pregnant again, which meant that within another year, I was living with four generations of women in Casa Estrogen. By then, my wife and I were in marriage counseling and everything was unraveling.

It took several more years to get to the breaking point. I wanted to make things up, get right somehow, but she rejected every subtle gesture I made, and I was too proud to come right out and say what I was feeling. By the time I finally forced the conversation we had been avoiding for so long, my wife of 18 years told me that I was not a suitable husband because she needed a man who could be her best friend, who could talk to her about anything and listen to her with total interest. If only I could have been more like Sean Sellers, she said, our marriage could have worked.

And there, in a remark that was not meant in any way to hurt, was the worst goddamned insult I have ever received in my life. My wife of 18 years, with whom I had endured all the shit that 18 years can bring, told me that I was less suitable as a life partner than a man who once shot a convenience store clerk because he had decided to break all 10 commandments and wanted to watch a man die.

And I want to tell her she's wrong. I mean, of course he listened to her with total attention. He only got to see her for an hour or so once a month. He never had to go to OCADP meetings with her, never had to hold her as she cried on his shoulder over and over and over, never got nagged to mow the lawn or take out the trash or clean the bathroom, never had to deal with her periods or her pregnancies, never got to raise a daughter with her nor had to bury a daughter with her, never had to look at an empty bank account at the end of the month and know that he wasn't providing for her as he should, never had to lie next to her at night and feel her stiffen up when he tried to touch her, never had to prove himself every day worthy of her love. He was on Death Row. He had it easy.

And I want to tell her that she's wrong because, for all the myriad ways in which my life has been an epic FAIL, compared to Sean Sellers--who murdered his mother, spent half his life on Death Row, had his first marriage annulled after two years, and died at the age of 29--my life has been a huge win. I never killed my parents, stayed out of jail, lived in Los Angeles, went to movie premieres, visited foreign countries, had two beautiful daughters (one of whom is still alive), and got blow jobs from a woman who, it seems now, was in love with him the whole time. I WON, DAMN IT!

But really, it's all hollow. Somehow, this fuckwad, this murderer, this narcissistic douchebag, inspired a devotion in my wife that I never could. Even now, 12 years after his death, he wins. My wife loved him more than me.

I'm so glad that motherfucker's dead.

An Awful Thought

2011-03-21T02:49:00.003-05:00

Firefly-- cancelled in less than a season. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles--cancelled after two seasons. Dollhouse--cancelled after two seasons. The Cape--cancelled after 9 episodes.

The common factor?

Summer Glau (yes, I know she wasn't part of the regular cast on Dollhouse, but she did have a recurring guest role). How long until she inherits the mantle of "showkiller" from Rena Sofer?

Oh, Summer. Please end up on a successful project soon. I'm begging.

Just Some Random Stuff I Noticed

2011-02-22T22:31:00.004-06:00

I saw this Barbie at work and immediately thought of Van Halen.

Not that I think she looks like any of the women in the video, but something about the short skirt and glasses just makes me think of her as "Hot for Teacher Barbie" every time I pass by.

I did a double-take as I passed a video rack which had these two DVDs on the same row.

I mean, it's just weird to see two covers with almost the same gesture, but with two very different meanings.

Yeah, I know, nothing of substance here. I spent most of the day mulling a very long, very depressing post about the despair which once again threatens to overwhelm me, but it does me no good to post about it. By which I mean, staying positive doesn't seem to be doing me any good either; objectively, my situation is getting no better no matter what attitude I maintain. But dwelling on all the negative things I can't do anything about just makes it miserable as my life swirls down the drain. With artificial positivity, I can at least fool myself into thinking it's a water slide or something. "It's like a ride!"

Early Spring?

2011-02-14T22:17:00.001-06:00

Okay, not really, but it feels like it. I don't know if it's the weather breaking or a larger change in my attitude, but the last few days have been interesting. I had a busy weekend with lots of activity out of the house, unusual for me, and then last night, I started watching Master Chef on Hulu. I watched the rest of it today, and missed cooking so much that I bought some honest-to-goodness produce, which I haven't really done since, I don't know, 2008?

Cooked steak and potatoes tonight, and though neither one was really very good, it was enough just to dip my toe back into the skillet. I feel as if good things are starting to emerge now, even though I have no rational reason to believe it. I'm on a financial precipice, and everything could come crashing down at any second. But at the same time, there's sunshine, and friends, and Death Wave on the Kindle.

And yes, this is a plug. It may be a dark and bitter book, but there's a beating heart in there. It's a fast read with humor and action, and it's only $2.99. And it's not only for the Kindle. Amazon provides reader software for PC and smartphones as well. Plus the mobi format can also be read in conjunction with the Mobipocket Reader, if like me, you have an old Palm PDA.

And if you do like it, I would ask one favor: please tweet it, or blog it, or just tell a friend about it. I'm going to be putting up one more preview (this time a darker section from about mid-book) on Wednesday, and I'm hoping that it will generate some interest.

Not Loving Snow Right Now

2011-02-05T15:44:00.007-06:00

So on Monday night, this blizzard rolls in. So I had to miss work on Tuesday, because though my car was in the garage, the snow outside was already a foot thick and it was still coming down hard.

The next day, Wednesday, I got out with a shovel and had to dig a trench down the side of my house from the garage behind the house to the fence. It wasn't hard, because the snow was loosely packed. It was almost like shoveling marshmallow or something. It took a lot longer than I expected, though, because I had to go something like 50 yards. It didn't matter anyway, because work called at 3:30 p.m. to say that I didn't need to come in. They were closing the store a half-hour before my shift was supposed to start. So I got the trench shoveled out through snow which was piled 3 ft high in places.

Thursday, I got in my car and tried to drive to work. I got halfway down the Death Star trench, and my car got stuck; I hadn't shoveled it out quite wide enough in that spot. So I had to roll down the window and crawl out onto the hood, because the snow was literally as deep as the window at that point. I got the car dug out and drove down to the end of the drive, but gave up at that point, afraid to brave the actual streets from all the reports I was hearing.

Yesterday, I tried again. Got in my car and pulled out to get into the street. Literally got stuck 6 feet from my driveway. Looked up and down the street and saw four other cars stuck and abandoned and decided to quit. Later in the day, I walked to the Med-X drugstore and bought a little food. It took an hour and a half, and I fell seven or eight times, but the snow was soft, so I didn't hurt myself. On the other hand, none of the streets were very clear, even the main streets. I missed work again. An entire week of income, gone.

I really don't get why I'm so skittish about leaving my house this time. Maybe it's just that this level of snow is unprecedented in the time I've lived in Tulsa, but I don't know. I think it may be just because this car is an automatic, so I don't feel as if I have as much control driving it. Or maybe it's related to the greater crisis of confidence I've had in every aspect of my life, so I tend to shut down more easily, rather than rise to the challenges. Or maybe it's the related fact that my current job has no real responsibilities, not like the Army, or my supervisory positions at TV Guide and the station where I had to lead by example. There's nothing resting on my shoulders other than my own fate.

All I know is, in previous situations like this, I got out and overcame the challenges and got to work even when other people were staying in. And this time, I haven't. I've shut myself up for the most part and just tried to ride things out. But I've lost a week's worth of income in the meantime.

So I really need to hope people start buying Death Wave. And if you can, please spread the word about Death Wave. It's available right now, it's affordable, it's a fast read, and it's not exactly like anything else you've ever read before. And you don't need a Kindle to read it. Amazon has reader software for the PC, as well as other mobile devices like i-Pads and smart phones. And it's in mobi format, so you can also read on Palm devices with Mobipocket Reader.

Sample chapters can be found here (with more publishing this coming Tuesday). Any help I can get in spreading the word would be appreciated.

(ETA: I just got back from a one-hour drive around the block and figured out two problems. Number one, the city has done nothing with the streets here. They plowed Pine, the main street in these parts, but the secondary streets have nothing, not even sand, and the residential streets have less than nothing. And number two, I hadn't realized how bad my tires were. I got a really good look at them while I was shoveling ice and snow out from underneath them, and they need replacing. Problem is, I can't even afford basic living expenses right now, let alone tires.)

And In Other News Which Isn't News

2011-02-03T11:45:00.002-06:00

This story is making the rounds now, that an art historian is making the startling claim that the model for the Mona Lisa was actually a man.

And I would probably be saying, "Whoa, that really is startling," if it weren't for the fact that, when I visited the Louvre over 30 years ago, the tour guide said exactly the same thing as if it were a long-established fact, and even pointed us to the other painting featuring the same model, hanging in the same gallery.

This is news?

Death Wave Is Here

2011-02-02T10:37:00.003-06:00

Finally took the plunge and published Death Wave for the Kindle. It's a tale of adultery, betrayal and revenge set in the days of the Great Depression. And there's a death ray.

The novel is a throwback to the gritty paperback thrillers of yesteryear, short and sweet and a very fast read. It starts out light and turns brutal as it goes, so don't expect the sample chapters on Hero Go Home to give you an idea of the tone of the entire book.

If you don't have a Kindle, don't worry. Amazon has software you can use on your PC or on other mobile devices and smartphones. The book is in mobi format, so you can also use Mobipocket reader software, if you have it. Best part of all (for you) is that because the book is short, it's priced at a low $2.99. That's less than a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carls Jr., and because it's an electronic file, there are no delivery charges added. You can't beat that.

In My Heart, I Believe His Name Is Smeaton

2011-01-30T20:14:00.002-06:00

But they don't give his actual name.

Man Survives Fall.

2011-01-27T22:48:00.001-06:00

Went to the launch party tonight for my friend Eilis O’Neal’s The False Princess. It’s her first novel, so it’s a special occasion. I haven’t read the book yet, but the excerpt I heard her read tonight was intriguing, something like The Prince and the Pauper with magic. Not only is she one of the nicest people I know, but she’s also a really good writer, so if you like YA fantasy, check it out.

I Am Tony's Complete Lack of Surprise

2011-01-26T17:09:00.002-06:00

I usually steer clear of politics in the blog, because it raises my blood pressure and loses me friends. For instance, I stayed quiet when people, including people I know and like, were saying all sorts of insulting and ridiculously untrue things about the lack of civility on the right compared to the left after the recent shooting.

But this is just ignorant. Some of Barack Obama's supporters are complaining that there was no substantive plan for job creation in his SOTU speech last night.

Well, what did they expect? Number one, Obama's never had a substantive plan for anything. At all. His foreign policy plans have all boiled down to "I'ma talk them into stuff cause I'm, like, awesome."

And number two, he thinks he is focusing on jobs. He just doesn't know how. The boilerplate he regurgitated last night was substantially the same as the economic "recovery" plans he spouted during his campaign for President--clean energy, infrastructure, health care--with the exception that he got the health care part passed.

That's what's been so simultaneously frustrating and amusing about disillusioned moderates and independents complaining that Obama spent so much time in his first two years pushing health care and cap-and-trade instead of focusing on the economy. He was focusing on the economy.

When Obama was asked about economic issues on the campaign trail, he would inevitably end up talking about health care and clean energy as necessary prerequisites to building a stable, prosperous economy. He never really supported his contention that these things needed to be done first. He would simply say, "The first thing you've got to do..." and then go into his plans for medicine and energy and infrastructure "investments" to put the economy on a "solid foundation."

Maybe people figured he was just doing that media-consultant-driven thing where you turn any question to your big central theme, like Jack Kemp somehow turning a question on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a call for a flat tax. But I always figured that on some level, he really did believe what he was saying, no matter how stupid. What's sad for the country is that so many people were lulled by the mellow tones of his voice into ignoring the very ignorant crap he was saying.

So let's get a few things straight about Obama's nonsense. Number one, the health care law he got passed is not going to make health care better or more affordable, nor will it help the economy or job production. Even the people on his side have abandoned that fiction.

And number two, clean energy is not going to be some economic salvation, certainly not in the short term, and possibly not in the long-term either. Just the opposite, in fact. And I'm not just talking about the fact that any job gained in the "clean energy" industry is a job lost in the current petroleum and coal industries, making the whole thing a wash from the start.

Wind and solar energy are more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels, which is why they aren't more prevalent. The only way to make them cost-effective barring some amazing imaginary future technical breakthrough is to drive up the cost of fossil fuels through regulations and punitive taxation, which Obama admitted in rare moments of candor on the campaign trail. This drives up the prices of all goods and services, depresses the economy, causes more job losses. Worse still, it disproportionately hurts the poor, those downtrodden masses the left are continually throwing up as the justification for more and more government excess. The truth is, the left cares nothing about the poor except as a bludgeon to lash out at the things they're mad about.

The problem is not that Barack Obama has not been concentrating on the unemployment disaster. The problem is that he has no idea what a real job is, nor how to create one. He's like a cargo cultist, building something that looks like a runway in the jungle in the hopes that planes will land there once again. His speech last night was not an abandonment of the "laser-like focus" on jobs he's been promising every couple of months since he was sworn in. It was a demonstration of what his idea of focus on jobs looks like.

Super Movie Monday - Superman III, Part 2

2011-01-24T21:06:00.000-06:00

Just testing the widget

Super Movie Monday - Superman III, Part 2

State of the Site-January

2011-01-24T20:12:00.002-06:00

So it's been a slow January for posts here, as I've been concentrating extra-hard on Hero Go Home. I'm worked ahead for two weeks on Movie Monday and about to hit a section of the novel that will allow me to reuse a lot of material from the previous drafts, because it's the big 2nd Act climax.

Still no real income from the site. I did get one donation, which was awesome, not only because of the money, but because of the validation and the sense that if one person's willing to donate, others might be, too. I tried putting up ads from Project Wonderful, but that didn't work so well; it runs on bids, and if no one bids to be on your site, you end up with a big hole on your page.

So Project Wonderful is history, and I'm back to building up traffic as I try to figure out a new approach to monetizing. The Girl Genius ads are bringing in a small, but steady amount of traffic, and a few people have actually stuck around to read some chapters, which is good. Now I just need to kick it up a level to get more eyeballs in. I'm thinking of upping my advertising budget (which would not be hard, since so far, I've spent less than $5.00), and I've also added a widget to make it easier to share the posts on social media. So if you are active on Stumbleupon or reddit or delicious or Digg, and anything I've written catches your eye, please feel free.

I'm also thinking of putting Part III behind a paywall. In other words, you can read almost 30 chapters for free, but you'll need to pay to see how it ends. Not unfair, I don't think, but when I was considering the idea before, it was all academic speculation because almost no one had read more than the first two chapters. Now a few people are reading through, so I'll see if I can't get a couple of donations for the ending.

And in the meantime, I want to put otgether some T-shirts and/or other merchandise, as well as another couple of secret projects that I'm trying to fit in around the edges for other revenue streams, and seriously, it's hard keeping my mind moving in all the many directions it needs to go at once. So not everything's getting done, which is another reason why I'm pushing to get worked ahead. I just hate the sick feeling that all this work I'm doing is never going to pay, that I'll never be good enough at this for more than five or six people to actually like it.

Still Breathing

2011-01-19T12:43:00.002-06:00

Was off-line for several days, but I'm back now. It's weird coming back after a few days away. On the one hand, I've gotten the chance to do other things that I wasn't spending time on before (I meant to get a lot more work done than I did unfortunately--instead of working last night, for instance, I ended up listening to 80's music for hours, almost like traveling back in time, and the day before that, I watched three or four crappy vampire movies from a DVD set I got for Christmas).

On the other hand, everything has piled up with amazing speed: emails, game requests on Facebook, spam comments needing to be deleted, and after only three days away, I'm almost afraid to look at the news. Is the world even the same anymore?

Breathing Room

2011-01-07T01:41:00.002-06:00

This week's chapter in Hero Go Home was a hard one to write. As the story has been serialized, I've been made more aware week by week of the need to press forward with the plot. In the earlier drafts, not much happened in the first two thirds of the book. It was all a gradual build-up to the frantic action of the last third. In many ways, it felt like I was just padding things out, having aimless conversations while waiting for hte word count to reach the magic number where I could start the climax to Act 2.

But this time, I've been more plot focused. So much so that sub-plots that had been important got almost completely dropped. And as the characters are headed into the big action climax to Part 2, I realize that I haven't really let people get to know the supporting cast as well as I should. So I decided to write a chapter in which not much happens, but the characters get a chance to breathe and just be themselves without pressure for a while before the hammer drops.

It wasn't easy. Because even though not much happens, I still needed to weave things together and make it flow. I had to try and make it interesting, illuminating not just the characters, but the world the characters inhabit. I hope I succeeded.

2010 In Review

2011-01-04T21:57:00.002-06:00

This is not really a look at the year in any depth. More just a reflection that, my lack of submission to publications notwithstanding, I produced a hell of a lot of work last year. 33 recaps for Movie Monday (both on this blog and at Hero Go Home), along with 35 comics recaps for Out of the Vault. In addition, there were a bunch of Big Game Wednesday posts , along with almost 50,000 words of novel content for Hero Go Home, along with 21 Extras and at least 10 variations on the header image. And then there were the reviews for examiner.com for a couple of months there. And of course, the radio play (or audio drama, if you want to be technical).

It's not the machine-like flood of work that some other guys are doing, but for a guy who's so far been doing it strictly for the love, as it were, it's not bad. And I'm starting to get slightly more attention. So now I'm trying to put together a more organized and disciplined approach to this year's work, so that I can get the job done better and more efficiently, and maybe coax more work out of myself (as well as plan ahead better for things like Halloween--I want this year's to be *spectacular*).

I'm not calling it a New Year's Resolution or anything like. Just a modified approach that I hope will work better than what I've been doing. Fingers crossed that it will work.

Oh yeah, and somebody actually read all the way through Hero Go Home a couple of days ago. I hope they liked it and will tell friends.

The Year to Come

2011-01-02T13:07:00.003-06:00

Cross-posting this to Hero Go Home as well, because a lot of what I'm talking about applies there.

I'm starting off the year feeling pretty energized about things. Things are coming to a head in Hero Go Home, the novel. They are about to kick into high gear in just a few weeks, and when I say high gear, I mean you haven't seen anything yet. That alien invasion back in Chapter 11? Small potatoes. Our heroes are about to get tested in a very big way, and after that... well, after that, look to Chapter 1 for a clue.

The current novel is a little over halfway done, I'm thinking, which means that it should be finished sometime in May, maybe. Since the donation model hasn't been working, I'm thinking of different ways to generate revenue. But that's contingent on getting people to actually read the story and be interested in how it turns out, which doesn't seem to be happening much. I'm getting more visitors, but not a lot of hits on the actual novel pages.

Still not sure what's to be done about that, although I may go back and revise the earlier chapters. Some chapters combine several unrelated scenes, because I wanted to provide a minimum level of content each week. I may break those down into shorter, punchier chapters. I'll also do some smoothing, because as the plot has adapted, and as I've run into deadline crunches, some chapters were rushed and are not as good as I'd like them to be.

When it's all done, though, in the second half of the year, there will be a Kindle edition with everything included, plus some extras, as well as the option of an actual dead tree edition. And I'll be starting another Digger novel, which will probably be the prose version of the aborted webcomic story from a couple of years ago. I'm hoping to actually not bog down on the damn car trip to the hotel this time. There was some funny stuff you never got to see, and some characters I really want you to meet.

And in the meantime, sometime within the first three months of the year, I'm going to be adding something new to the site. I'm not going to say what it is just yet, but it's darker than Hero Go Home and will not be serialized in the same way. Ideas are still being firmed up.

Weekly Extras are going away. I still have some Extras in the works, but trying to come up with one every week in addition to all my other obligations has resulted in some less-than-satisfactory work, in my opinion. So the Extras are to be more sporadic, but better quality.

Out of the Vault and Super Movie Monday will continue like before, though, and this year, I'm getting a little more organized and planning further ahead in the hopes of both avoiding a crunch and putting together some really special things for Halloween and Christmas. There will also be an occasional non-super movie featured on They Stole Frazier's Brain.

And that's basically it, for now. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot. And I haven't even mentioned my whole other Secret Project. Whew.

Happy New Year, 2011

2011-01-01T01:53:00.002-06:00

So I went out earlier in the week and bought some champagne, then I got invited to a party, then I bought a cigar, because I really wanted one and the two I have are both quite expensive holdovers from an earlier era and I want to save them for something special.

I went to the party and had a good time, but at some point, being the single guy (sort of) among all these couples gets sort of tiring, especially given how much everybody talks about sex, which I'm not getting any (for years now). So I left early, thinking I'd come home, pop the cork on my champagne and light my cigar and reflect on the year past and the year to come or something.

Instead, I discovered that this had finally happened, and any plans I had went out the window for a couple of hours. Mr. Plinkett is no longer the amazingly fresh thing he was, and the red meat in the reviews comes accompanied with a lot more fat than before, but still, he makes some really salient points, including some I hadn't expected. Kick ass.

Irony, Thy Name Is... Well, OK, Irony, But Still...

2010-12-30T22:18:00.003-06:00

So I go out and place the ad on Girl Genius (a really fun webcomic by Phil and Kaja Foglio), and get a little bump in traffic over at Hero Go Home. Then I'm checking my traffic numbers and I see I'm getting a (relative) ton of traffic here at Frazier's Brain. What gives?

Freaking Foglio. The esteemed Steve Bissette (who was the kick-ass penciller on Swamp Thing back in the Alan Moore glory days) has linked to my article about D'Arc Tangent in the midst of a discussion with Dave Sim on Creators' Rights in the context of shared works. And on the one hand, I think it's really cool. And on the other hand, I'm sort of embarrassed by my uninformed BS'ing all the way through the article.

And I really wish I had the cojones to shill for Hero Go Home in his comments, but that would be in bad taste. Shit.

Tiny Progress

2010-12-29T15:25:00.006-06:00

So I've dipped a tiny toe into the advertising waters by placing a tiny button ad on Girl Genius. Which is to say, I never see the ad when I click over there to check on it, but I have gotten some traffic in from it, so I know it's there sometimes. Apparently, even though I bid one price worldwide, the system breaks the bid down into regions, so basically, my ad is showing on Girl Genius everywhere but in the U.S., where the majority of my target audience is. I'm not sure how to fix that.

I'm placing the ads through Project Wonderful, which seem to be only wonderful for webcomics so far (in fact, I originally started the account when I was putting together the Hero Go Home webcomic, but never used it).

Here's the cool thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so you're bidding for space on the site, and your bids are automatically regulated so you never pay more than you have to.

Here's the bad thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so if your site has really low traffic (like mine, though growing slowly), you may get no one bidding on your site, and therefore make no money from ads.

So traffic is the key. And the two steps I've taken recently--adding Movie Monday and Out of the Vault, and placing the Girl Genius ad--have noticeably increased traffic, though it's still barely comparable to this blog, let alone a successful one. Networking would be good, except that I've pretty much cut ties with most of the people I should be networking with. The closest thing I've got to a networking arrangement was the guest appearances by naamah and sargon, who are also serializing a novel (an idea I shamelessly stole from them), but I haven't linked it because our audiences don't really overlap at all. I need to fix that; they did help me out, after all. So I'll just put a big NSFW label on it or something.

And all the things I'm trying to do to increase the viewership of the blog take away time from producing content for the blog. This is really hard, and I worry, now that a couple of people have read the first chapter and no further, that I need to go back and punch up the beginning to keep people reading. But I also need to be moving forward. Aaaarrggghhh, too many things to do and no idea whether any of them will do any good in the long run.

Aftermath

2010-12-27T13:43:00.003-06:00

So there was no Christmasiness around the blog, because I put it over on Hero Go Home. And really, as I've probably said before, I'm not much of a fan of the holiday season. And if anything could make me even less of a fan, it's working retail.

My God. The day before Christmas was a frantic rush, with people grabbing whatever they could for last-minute gifts (and just as often, picking up something, changing their mind, and leaving it in another part of the store--that always happens some, but that day, there were just carts and carts full of it). The day after Christmas, when we put all the Christmas stuff on clearance, the crowds descended like locusts. The Christmas corner looked like a bomb went off back there, and there was a huge pile of discarded stuff all around the nearest price scanner, where people couldn't be bothered to take the things back to where they found them after deciding they still weren't cheap enough.

As for Christmas itself, not terrible. Dressed up in tie and hat again, like last year, and took my daughter her present. I was really proud of this year's choice: an art instruction book called Dragonart Evolution. Daughter likes to draw and is on a big dragon kick, so this seemed like a natural. And she seems to really like it, so I'm glad it worked out.

Went to Muskogee later to have dinner with my family. And that was nice, too, although everyone's getting older and frailer.

Present-wise, well, I have a car and a job (for now, at least), so I don't really need presents. Which is fine, because I couldn't really afford to get anyone else anything, either. But I did get a really nice antique plate from Japan from my mother-in-law, and a really unexpected gift from my stepbrother, which was awesome.

Now we just cruise into the New Year, and then I'll fill you in on what's happening with the other blog. I think it's staying.

Awesome Is Measured In...

2010-12-19T01:11:00.002-06:00

(ETA: In case you don't know what this is referring to, you can read about it on Wikipedia here. I just thought it was kind of silly. The original artist is the same guy who inflicted this on us, though, so don't this is some kind of blanket endorsement of his work, though if he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have had this)

Hello?

2010-12-16T11:22:00.002-06:00

Sorry, just listening to the echo. Without Out of the Vault and Movie Monday, it just seems so empty around here. It's my own fault, I know. The funny thing is, I did more posts this year than in any previous year on this blog, and yet now, it has fallen to almost nil.

The move has worked a little, though. I'm getting a little more traffic over at Hero Go Home from people searching out either the comic featured on Out of the Vault or from people searching out the featured movie. It's a bare trickle now, but traffic was so sparse that it's really noticeable.

My next step (assuming I'm able to renew the domain) is to get some ads out. That means I have to make up the ad banners, which means I have to come up with an interesting idea for an ad banner. And I'm debating whether to make it an animated GIF. Which would mean I have to learn how to make an animated GIF.

I doubt it's all that hard, and one of the things I've enjoyed about the whole Hero Go Home process is all the new things I've learned to do, but at some point, you just get tired of doing it all yourself. Plus, there's just so much work involved--every week I write a chapter, put together a new Extra, read-scan-write entry for Out of the Vault and watch-screencap-write entry for Movie Monday, plus most weeks revising the banner as well--that it gets mentally draining after a while. I would like to get back to some Big Game Wednesday, as well as doing some non-superhero-related Movie Monday over here again, but there's no way I have that much energy.

The holidays add their own kind of crazy on top of that. I've not been much of a fan of the Christmas season since I was a kid, anyway, and working retail during the holidays doesn't help. And with the present economic woes, I know several people who are hurting this Christmas season. At least I was able to get my daughter an affordable present that I think she'll really like. I hope.

Not sure where I was going with that, actually. Just venting a little, I guess. Go over to herogohome.com for the entertaining content. Nothing to see here, at least for a while.

Christmas 2010

2010-12-12T11:27:00.003-06:00

Another OSFW Christmas party last night, and while it was a good one, it felt kind of strange. The group has really changed. Many of the folks who were regular attendees when I started no longer show up with any regularity (if they haven't moved away entirely). Of the 20-odd people who showed up last night, less than a third were regulars when I started a little over, jeez, seven years ago now.

Which has me questioning the whole writers group thing, really. The first few years there, the group was an exciting place to be, with several old pros mixed with newer up-and-comers like Matt Reiten and Richard Cox and me. I was writing stories in different genres, stretching my wings, finding what worked for me and what didn't. And I was getting to know people in the sf/fantasy community.

But over the years, everything has changed. I lost confidence in everything and mostly withdrew from the writing community again. I rarely write short stories anymore, and don't submit the ones I do write for publication. I'm concentrating on blogging and on the occasional novel, though I'm really not submitting them either. Plus the disintegration that has happened in my personal life.

The point is, when I joined the group, I had a reason for joining. I wanted to step up to the next level in my writing career, and the group seemed like a way to do that (which it was, quite frankly). But now that reason's no longer there, really, and now it has just become sort of a social obligation. Now I just show up but rarely contribute, except with an occasional chapter or the roughly one short story per year I write now. I'm just questioning whether the group is worth the effort any more.

Anyway, as usual, here's my fragment from this year's contest. But first, a word about how it came to be. Several years ago, a bunch of the group's members colluded behind the scenes to write their fragments around a single theme to tweak K.D. Wentworth, who as coordinating judge on the Writers of the Future contest, was seeing a lot of stories with the same elements over and over again (I was not in on the joke, so my fragment was one of the few that didn't fit in). It was so much fun that in subsequent years, we decided to formalize a theme for all the entries--bad science one year, robots the next. Last year was steampunk.

This year, they decided to have everyone write from a plot seed rather than a theme. The seed: the phone rings, and no one's on the other end, but the person answering knows what the call is about anyway. I wan't a big fan of the specific seed, nor of the general plot seed concept, and was considering blowing the whole thing off this year. But one member who was also not thrilled with the idea proposed writing around a counter-theme, that being pirates. Which gave me the hook I needed to actually work in the seed and the theme, as well as probably breaking an unwritten rule by writing about the holiday itself, however obliquely. Because the Christmas fragments are almost never actually about Christmas.

Anyway, here's the fragment, entitled FORTUNE: DANGER!

The lozenge of plastic was only a couple of inches long, pink with the white face of Hello Kitty at a jaunty angle. Nikolai picked it up with blunt fingers and looked at the scarred man across the table from him. "And this is all of it?"

Junkers nodded. "IFF transponder codes for every air force in the northern hemisphere," he said.

"What about the southern hemisphere?" Nikolai asked.

"Exactly what major air power were you worried about down there?" Junkers asked, and Nikolai laughed, baring yellow, uneven teeth. "You should know," Junkers continued, "Warlord Motumbo has his men looking all over for you."

"He's still mad about the drugs," Nikolai said.

Junkers nodded. "It's harder to quash a rebellion when the rebels have access to medicines that the government withholds. People's loyalties can turn against you. He got wind of our meeting somehow, has had men tearing up the quarter looking for you. They're led by someone I've never seen before."

"What does he look like?" Nikolai asked, though he feared he already knew.

Junkers squinted, twisting the puckered scar under his right eye. "I've never used the word 'beautiful' to describe a man before, but this one is. Beautiful and scary, with blond hair that..."

The door burst open and several armed men ran inside, followed by a beautiful man with flowing blond hair. "...looks quite like that, actually," Junkers finished.

"Nikolai," said the blond man, "at last I have you."

Nikolai's smile was perhaps even more disturbing than the blond man's beauty. His round face twisted, making his whiskers jut out in random spikes, and there was a glint of wild madness in his eyes. "It's been a long time, Scratch, you old chicken-counter."

Nikolai's arm moved and there was a magnesium flash, accompanied by a ball of acrid smoke that forced tears from the assembled men. Machine pistols clattered, echoing harshly in the small room, and a man's scream was quickly cut off. Scratch wiped at tear-filled eyes and saw one of his men on the floor. Nikolai was gone.

"After him," Scratch shouted, "quickly!"

Nikolai thundered down the back stairs. Two men tried to block his way, but Nikolai was larger and had momentum on his side. He batted them aside as easily as if he were a bowler picking up a split. He heard footsteps coming from above and below and cut into the second floor corridor to try to confuse the pursuit. He dashed for the elevator, but it dinged open before he reached it. Three men stepped out with machine guns.

Nikolai ran the other way with the men in hot pursuit, when suddenly, a door flew open just as he ran past and a huge, scaly wing stretched out across the hallway, clotheslining all three pursuers. They fell to the ground, senseless.

Nikolai turned as a tall man stepped into the hallway, the squamous wings stretching up from his back brushing against the ceiling to throw both men into uneasy shadow. "Miguel," Nikolai greeted the man.

"Nikolai," the winged man greeted in return. "Let's go."

Nikolai followed the winged figure through the room and out onto a fire escape. In moments, they were standing on the ground in a narrow, dirty alley. Miguel turned to Nikolai and said, "That'll throw them off for a couple of minutes, at least. You're welcome."

"I didn't need any help," Nikolai said.

"You always say that, but it never looks that way," Miguel said.

"Looks can be deceiving," Nikolai answered. "Just ask your brother."

"Oh yes, Scratch. What was he after you for this time?"

Nikolai held up the Hello Kitty flash drive. "IFF codes for the Solstice Run."

"Are you still doing that?" Miguel asked in disbelief.

"It's a tradition," Nikolai said. "I've got to go. My ride's waiting."

Nikolai set a finger to one side of his nose and shot into the sky. Miguel looked up to see a sleek craft turning north before zooming out of sight. "Vaya con dios, my friend."

As Nikolai stumbled into his office, later, the phone rang. He picked it up. "Hello?"

There was no voice on the other end, no sound except for the creak of wood, the lapping of waves and the distant cries of gulls. "Captain Geisthammer, if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, I don't work for pirates," Nikolai shouted into the silence. "No-ho-ho!"

The Future of Hero Go Home

2010-12-08T23:51:00.001-06:00

This is copied from an identical post appearing at herogohome.com

Okay, here's the deal. I'm enjoying Hero Go Home myself. And I had hoped that the story and the site would find an audience, but I have about three weeks before I have to pay a little over $200 to renew the domain and the hosting. And to date, I haven't gotten a single donation.

So on the one hand, though I really like the idea of the site, and think I've been doing some interesting things with it, they're things that have been of interest to me only. And I'm wondering if $200+ is too much to pay to continue what is essentially a vanity site.

Then again, I've got plans for the future of the site if it continues. I'm going to be putting ads on the site very soon, and perhaps advertising on other sites as well. And then there's the crazy plan.

What's the crazy plan? Well, how does another novel sound? And not another Digger novel (although I have another story planned for after Hero Go Home), but a completely original story set in an unrelated continuity. The absolutely insane plan is, two days of Hero Go Home content (until the current storyline is finished--it's about halfway done now) a week, plus two days of columns (Out of the Vault and Super Movie Monday), plus another two days of the new novel, a Sam Spade meets Cthulhu/Godzilla story set in the 1930's. That's one chapter and one multimedia extra every week for two novels running concurrently, plus two weekly columns.

Now how much would you pay?

But wait, there's more! Because that's only six days a week, and there are seven. What would I do with the seventh?

That's a surprise.

Okay, actually, I don't have a plan for the seventh day, yet. But if herogohome.com turns into a money-making venue, you can bet I will. So, the terms:

If I get at least one donation before the end of the year, even if it's only $5, I'll renew the domain and continue the experiment. If I make enough to cover the $200+ renewal cost (a long shot, I know--that would take over 40 people at $5 a shot), I will launch the new novel on the first Wednesday of the year (January Fifth). And if I get enough to launch the second novel, the biggest donor will get the option to pick what feature will run on the seventh day.

This doesn't mean I absolutely won't renew the site if I don't get any donations--I'm still willing to reconcile with my wife after 2 1/2 years apart, after all, so I'm an easy mark--but a donation, no matter how small, would certainly take out the guesswork, wouldn't it?

These Are Not the Movies You're Looking For

2010-12-06T01:00:00.000-06:00

Movie Monday has moved to Hero Go Home. Today is part one of a huge, picturiffic recap of "Superman, the Movie," starring Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman and 15 others. Learn about relativity and big blue Kryptonian balls!

It's Time

2010-12-04T10:43:00.003-06:00

If you think things are looking a bit bare here, you're right. Out of the Vault has moved to Hero Go Home, along with Movie Monday. Today's title: Action Comics #402, one of the oldest Superman Comics I own, along with a special bonus featuring a certain writer's secret origin as a superhero fan (hint: it's genetic).

BTW, having listened to all the hype, I decided to try a Four Loko the other night. To start with, it tasted nasty. But man, it really did knock me on my ass. I drank about 3/4 of the can (it's a pretty big can), decided to go to pass out (though to be fair to my own male ego, I was only operating on about 2-3 hours of sleep because of my weird Target schedule), woke up about 4 hours later with a weird coffee smell coming out of my pores. So from my one experiment, I'd say the hype is real, but I'm not on the side of banning it. And bring back ephedra while you're at it. That stuff worked.

Smeatons and McClanes

2010-12-01T01:12:00.004-06:00

Had to move our game night around this week due to my crazy Target holiday schedule. So we gamed Monday night and it was a doozy. We were involved in a huge battle that was a combination of Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields which ended up a bit like Task Force Smith. Smeaton rode out with a chariot sortie into the thick of battle, while the rest of our group stayed on the walls.

And suddenly our resident witch, who has lately been growing all kinds of awesome from the higher level spells she's been learning, performed a face-heel turn which made Smeaton's look about as convincing as Dave Foley's conversion to "pure...... evil" on Newsradio.

Our leader was taken captive, the rest of our group was knocked out of commission, but Smeaton fought on, killing a couple of giants to rescue a fallen king and commandeering a war mammoth to help his comrades escape.

Because although Smeaton may suck at being pure.... evil, he is still teh awesome. In fact, as I got stuck in a "Die Hard" quoting loop last night, let me state right here and now that awesome is a measurable quantity, and the unit of measure for awesome in America is the McClane.

But in Europe, where they operate on the metric system, awesome is measured in Smeatons. And there are roughly 2.1 McClanes to a Smeaton (cause Smeaton's a really big guy).

That is all.

Movie Monday - Superman and the Mole Men

2010-11-29T00:00:00.004-06:00

In the previous series of entries detailing Batman's films, we saw that the character's media history in his earlier days was a bit spotty. Introduced in 1939, he got his first on-screen appearance in the serial Batman in 1943. Six years later, he appeared in another serial, followed fifteen years later by a live-action TV series and movie, followed over twenty years later by the Tim Burton film that finally established the character as a media giant with legs.

Superman was different. Introduced in 1938 in Action Comics #1, he appeared three times on screen during the 40's, in a series of theatrical cartoons and two live-action serials. But it should also be noted that during that same span, he was appearing continuously on radio, five days a week, from 1942 through early 1949 (not counting an earlier syndicated series that ran from 1940 to 1942, or a couple of retoolings in 1949 and 1950). Batman also appeared on radio, but only as an occasional guest on Superman's show. Superman was a fixture of mass media in the 40's in a way that Batman simply was not.

So it should come as no surprise that Superman's return to the big screen after his second serial came sooner than Batman's. A lot sooner, in fact. It was only a year later, in 1951, that the feature film "Superman and the Mole Men" hit theaters.

The film starred George Reeves as Superman and Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane, and served as the pilot for the subsequent TV series. And it's only fitting that it should be the product of the combined efforts of the folks who made the movie serials and the radio serial.

"Superman and the Mole Men" was written by Robert Maxwell (under the pseudonym of Richard Fielding), the writer of the radio series, and directed by Tommy Carr, who had co-directed the first Columbia serial. It opens with a brief nod to the Superman origin story, mentioning that Superman is the last survivor of an alien race who has come to Earth. This opening sequence features visuals that look much like the opening of the cartoon series.

The story opens in the town of Silsby, home of the world deepest oil well. Clark Kent and Lois Lane arrive to do a story on the well, only to learn that the well is being shut down. Not only that, but Kent notices that even the tools used to work on the well are being buried. Strange.

Must say at this point that Reeves cuts a dapper figure as Clark Kent. And though Lois berates Kent as cowardly, Reeves portrays Kent as a smart and no-nonsense fellow, much like Superman himself, a far cry from the warm and fuzzy portrayal of Kirk Alyn.

Later, Kent decides to visit the mine, but Lois, ever fearful of being scooped, elects to go with him.

Meanwhile, at the mine, strange creatures emerge from the well shaft--a couple of bald midgets wearing furry Dr. Denton's.

They creep up to the window of the night watchman's hut. Later, Clark and Lois arrive to find kindly old Pop Shannon dead of a heart attack. Clark calls the sheriff, then leaves to have a look around. Lois then spots the two creatures in the window and screams.

Later, when the sheriff and Corrigan, the well foreman, arrive, Lois tells them about the two creatures, and it should be noted that she is the source of all the trouble to come later. When asked what the creatures looked like, she describes them as beasts with mole bodies and human heads (which they were apparently supposed to look like per the script, but the make-up man couldn't bear to make them look so grotesque) and says, "Those creatures killed that poor old man, and they wanted to kill me."

So the sheriff and Lois head back to town, while Clark stays with Corrigan to wait for the coroner. And once they're alone, Clark asks why Corrigan really shut down the well and buried all the tools. Corrigan relates the story of how the samples brought up displayed increasing levels of flourescence, and how he worried that they were drilling through pure radium. When Clark suggests that the glow may be simple phosphorescence, Corrigan says he couldn't take the risk that it was otherwise, so he shut down the well. Then Clark notices that the oranges the night watchman had in his hut are glowing. The creatures have brought the radiation with them!

As Clark and Corrigan are hashing things out, the Mole Men are investigating the wonders of the surface world. They encounter sunflowers and a snake, then peer in a window at a little girl. And of course, the girl is not scared at all. One of the actors does this really perfunctory head tilt, like he's supposed to be curious, but isn't really feeling it. And then in a scene reminiscent of the original Universal "Frankenstein," they play with the girl.

Anyway, as Clark Kent is trying to stop the townsfolk from forming an angry mob, they are interrupted by a scream from the girl's mother, and everything falls apart.

An angry mob stampedes toward the little girl's house, grabbing whatever weapons are handy. One guy even breaks off a barber pole.

I don't see how he's going to scare the Mole Men with that, seeing how they're already bald, but whatever. Clark switches to Superman and flies ahead of the crowd to head them off. He tries to talk sense into them, saying that the girl and mother are unharmed, but the crowd, led by a troublemaker named Luke Benson, is not easily swayed. Luke and his friends use their bloodhounds to track the creatures.

Luke and his boys corner the Mole Men on a dam, and one of them is shot, but Superman catches him before he can fall into the water and contaminate the water supply with radiation. And in this early effects shot, we see the return of our old friend, Cartoon Animation, for the flying scene.

Then it cuts to a close-up, featuring George Reeves catching a dummy hanging from a fishing pole.

Superman flies the wounded Mole Man to a hospital as Luke Benson and his boys chase the other one.

We then see several scenes of the lonely Mole Man fleeing. He encounters a grizzled old hobo cooking a pot of beans on a fire, and though the man flees in terror at one glimpse of the Mole Man, not only is his appearance not scary, but we can clearly see the zipper running down the back of his footie pajamas, proving that this is an outfit, not his natural body. Anyway, the Mole Man is trapped in a shed, which Luke Benson burns down. But the Mole Man escapes through a floorboard, unnoticed by Benson and his men.

When Benson returns to town, he tells the sheriff that he has killed both Mole Men, but the sheriff informs him that the one his buddy shot is in the hospital. So Luke organizes a lynch mob to go seize the creature and kill it. But they are hindered by Superman, who likens them to Nazi stormtroopers, then starts throwing them around as he confiscates their guns.

Meanwhile, the Mole Man who escaped the fire has headed down the well shaft and returned with buddies. One of them carries an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with a funnel on the front as a ray gun. They head for the hospital to pick up their lost buddy. Superman intercepts them, and the one who has seen him before does an interpretive dance to tell his buddies that Supes is a good guy, since these creatures apparently can't vocalize at all.

But as Superman is fetching their buddy, Luke Benson shows up with a shotgun, and the Mole Men zap him with radium-filled paint balls or something. Superman leaps in front of the deadly ray, saving Luke's life, then carries the wounded Mole Man back to the well shaft, which the Mole Men climb down and blow up behind them. Their worlds are separate once more.

As a pilot for the show, it's not bad. The personalities of Lois and Clark are sharply defined, and Reeves makes an interesting lead. On the other hand, this makes the Atom Man serial look positively profligate with special effects. With the exception of the one super-catch and a couple of gags featuring prop guns, there's nothing super on display at all.

But one thing is different from the serials. When Superman takes off, he's actually lifted on wires, making for some dynamic take-off shots.

A few episodes into the first season of the series, an accident with the wires would cause the show to stop using them, and then Superman's take-offs would all be portrayed with a springboard and a quick cut.

The show would eventually run for about six years, and in another interesting nod to the serials, Phyllis Coates would be replaced as Lois Lane after the first season. Her replacement?

Noel Neill, who had played Lois Lane in both Columbia serials.

Next week, Movie Monday will be moving to www.herogohome.com, although there will be at least one more movie featured here sometime soon. See you there!

Out of the Vault - Rust #2

2010-11-27T00:02:00.005-06:00

Another of the dozen or more small comics publishers with big dreams who crashed and burned in the 1980's was NOW Comics. NOW tried to establish themselves as a profitable company in the same way that others, like Comico, had tried before them: by producing comics based on licensed properties. In the case of NOW, they produced comics based on Speed Racer, The Terminator, and even Married... With Children.

But they also tried their hand at original properties, which is where Rust comes in. Rust, scripted by Fred Schiller from an "original story" by Steve Miller and Bill Harrison, tells the story of Scott Baker, a cop who is the victim of an industrial accident involving toxic waste or something. It coats his body with rock-hard "skin" and makes his touch toxic. And between his own misadventures and the machinations of the evil Benzodyne Corporation, which was apparently the origin of the toxic waste in question, his life goes downhill rapidly. He was kind of a low-rent cross between Swamp Thing and Concrete.

That's what I'm gathering from the second issue, anyway. As the issue opens, Scott gets a visit from a group of good-hearted street people, at least one of whom is a Vietnam vet. Scott then decides to go for a walk, where he seems to levitate some aluminum cans (?) while opining about how everything he touches either rusts or dies. At which point a couple carloads of gang bangers drives up and decides to hassle the freak. First they try pounding him with a baseball bat, and when that does nothing, they pull out guns and shoot.

Six guns fire, and seven guys die from the ricochets. It's seriously idiotic.

Anyway, there some other nonsense about the homeless people being people and not freaks, and there's some sort of subplot where Benzodyne is offering a reward for information about Rust. The homeless folks vow solidarity with their bud Scott, but $50,000 bucks is a lot of money.

Meanwhile, Scott's being broody in his trashed-out house, so he tosses his teddy bear Rupert into the river.

There's a few more pages of boring filler featuring the Chief of Police taking orders from Benzodyne and more soul-searching from the homeless about the reward. And then we see Scott playing with Rupert, who is looking seriously trashed and nasty after his float in the river or canal or whatever it was. No explanation about why Rust took him back.

So Scott's conteplating suicide when some folks from issue one show up--Sherm and Jessica, the former owners of a diner that got burned down, along with their daughter Cheryl, who thinks Scott is the greatest. They're homeless now (it's a theme, apparently) and need a place to stay. And since Cheryl thinks Rust is neat, they ask to stay in Scott's nasty hovel.

There's a review here of a later issue in which the reviewer thinks Cheryl is retarded or something, but I think it's just that Fred Schiller can't write little girls, because seriously. Toxic zombie teddy Rupert is not going to be enthusiastically received by any little girl.

The art is by John Statema who made a career out of filling in for better artists on books like Evangeline, Grimjack and Prime. He was also the subject of an odd on-line death hoax. Inks were by Bob Dvorak with muddy, muddy colors by Cygnet Ash.

Rust ran for seven issues, although you can probably tell from my comments above that I didn't stick around for them. And unlike other characters who went on to be revived at other companies or on-line, Rust never returned.

Splinter In My Mind's Eye

2010-11-24T13:18:00.004-06:00

So there this gaming blog I sometimes read, and Jeff Rients was talking a while back about how different the Star Wars universe would look if you knew nothing about any of the films past the first one and all the retconning Lucas did. And a few days later, while it was still obviously on his mind, he mentioned Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the Star Wars sequel written by Alan Dean Foster and published in 1978, the year after "Star Wars" came out.

I didn't remember much about the novel except that I didn't much like it, so I reread it last week. And I still don't much like it.

The novel takes place on a planet called Mimban. Luke, Leia and the droids are on their way to a secret rebel meeting on a neighboring planet when Leia's Y-Wing fighter develops an engine malfunction and she sets down on Mimban to effect some quick repairs. Problem is, Mimban is a savage, mostly unexplored planet, and both Leia's ship and Luke's are irreparably damaged in the descent. Even worse, the settlement they thought was a repair station or scientific outpost is actually a secret Imperial mining facility. And the planet holds another secret, a fabled mystic gem called the Kaiburr Crystal that can magnify a person's ability with the Force.

According to Wikipedia, the novel was written as a proposed low-budget sequel should "Star Wars" perform as Lucas apparently expected and tank at the box office. There's even mention that Foster had a space dogfight sequence in the book that Lucas nixed because it would cost too much to film.

In other words, even though books have no effects budget, Foster was apparently obliged to write his to the budget of a TV show. So that, for instance, not only is there no space dogfight (leading Leia's Y-Wing to crash-land because of a coincidental and unidentified engine malfunction), but later scenes in an Imperial jail feature metal bars that disappear and reappear instantly, like most of the special effects on the Lost in Space TV series. Also, since Lucas apparently did not have Harrison Ford signed for a sequel yet, Han Solo does not appear in the book and is only mentioned in passing a couple of times.

There are also clear elements of sexual tension between Luke and Leia, though they don't go anywhere. It appears pretty clear that Lucas had not yet decided to make Leia Luke's sister. This is further supported by the fact that, though Leia fights Vader with Luke's lightsaber, she displays no Force sensitivity at all. The presence of the Kaiburr Crystal, which both Vader and Luke can sense pulling at them, doesn't affect her at all.

Not that I mind the fact that Luke and Leia appear to have a budding romance in this book. That's not my complaint with it at all, nor that it departs from later established canon. After all, I didn't like the book upon first reading, when there was no other canon.

So what didn't I like? A few things. Number one, it didn't really feel like "Star Wars." The scope of the story, limited almost completely to one swampy Dagobah-like planet, felt cramped and small compared to the sweeping interplanetary action of the movie. Also, although the first film built tension by intercutting often between parallel storylines--Luke and Ben trying to get to Alderaan, Vader and Tarkin interrogating Leia to find the rebel base--the book doesn't really do that. Luke and friends flee through the woods, knowing that Imperial troops are in pursuit, but the reader never sees the pursuit. It's kind of boring.

Number two, I didn't like the way Foster used Vader. Foster first sets up the local Captain-Supervisor of the mine as this bad-ass villain, then brings in Vader, but holds him back until the final confrontations. It felt kind of cheap and exploitative to have Vader, such a constant menacing presence in the film, reduced to a cameo walk-on in the sequel just so fans wouldn't feel cheated. If Vader's going to be the bad guy, bring him in early and let him do his thing. If not, then let the other bad guy be the bad guy. As it is, the villainy is spread too thin between two minor figures.

And yes, by "minor figure," I'm speaking of Vader, because he's a chump here. Another big problem I had with the book was the way Foster writes the Force. Taking heed of Kenobi's admonitions to "Let go your conscious self," Foster has Luke using the Force instinctively and unconsciously. Luke blacks out, and when he wakes up, people are telling him, "Wow that was awesome." And despite having only a few hours at most of instruction from Kenobi (on the Millenium Falcon from Tattooine to Alderaan), Luke faces Darth Vader, a Jedi Knight who's been using the Force longer than Luke has been alive, and beats him in a lightsaber duel. At one point. Luke even repels an energy sphere attack by throwing up his arms and closing his eyes like Lois Lane fainting at an imminent flying saucer collision. Please.

I also expected the MacGuffin to come into play in the end. Although I didn't really buy the idea that Luke could beat Vader on his own, I certainly was prepared to see Luke whip Vader's ass with the help of the Kaiburr Crystal, which doesn't even come into play until the fight is over. Halla the crazy woman makes off with Crystal during the fight, and neither Luke nor Vader really seem to care, even though the Crystal is the reason they were all there.

And worst of all, I hated the ending, in which Hin and Kee, the two faithful alien allies who supported Luke throughout the book and were pivotal to his success at several points, were basically forgotten and left to rot once Luke had what he wanted. Luke didn't try to save them with his magical healing crystal, nor did he even consider it. Once Vader was defeated, Luke didn't even offer a moment of regret for the loss of his friends. Instead, the book ends with everyone amused at Threepio's cluelessness. It's very weird and off-kilter.

But it is a fascinating look at how the "Star Wars" universe might have developed. Luke going to a swamp planet to develop his Force abilities is clearly a foreshadowing of Dagobah, with crazy Halla and her magic Force crystal standing in for Yoda. And the big battle between the Imperial soldiers and the native alien Coway tribe clearly scratches the same itch for Lucas that the Ewok battle in "Return of the Jedi" and the Gungan-Droid battle in "The Phantom Menace" did, with primitives pitting themselves against the most advanced technology and prevailing.

Movie Monday Supplemental - Parting Thoughts on Atom Man vs. Superman

2010-11-23T23:59:00.006-06:00

So now that the second serial is over, what more is there to say about it?

First and foremost, of course, is that despite taking so much inspiration from the radio serial, this serial bears absolutely no plot relationship to one of the most popular and long-running storylines of the radio series, in which Superman fought Atom Man, the Nazi agent powered by a Kryptonite solution injected into his veins.

Second is that this series managed to jack up the spectacle by cheating as much as possible. By reusing as much effects footage as possible from the previous serial along with using stock footage of several natural disasters, the producers were able to pack every episode with action while saving up their money for the really big effects in the last few chapters: the flood, the flying saucers, the missile, the rocket ship. Between that and the futuristic menace of the teleporting villains, Atom Man vs. Superman feels a lot more super than the first serial.

Also, and this is pretty significant, this serial may be the only comic book adaptation of the serial era to actually use a villain from the comics. Captain Marvel, Captain America, Batman, and even Superman in his first outing battled generic serial master villains who had never appeared in the comics. And though Superman would next star in a long-running television series, not one villain from the comics appeared there. Brainiac, Luthor, Toymaker, Mr. Mxyzptlk: they were all ignored in favor of generic gangsters. Not counting any of the animated series, Superman would not face another villain from the comics onscreen until he faced Luthor again in the Richard Donner film we'll discuss in two weeks. So that was one significant thing this serial did right.

That being said, Kirk Alyn still makes an underwhelming lead. It's not just the way he moves, either. There are scenes where he's got this goofy grin on his face like he's not all there, and there are other scenes where he seems to be having trouble with his teeth or something; his mouth twists funny when he delivers his dialogue.

And that's not counting the inconsistencies in the writing, when the writers seem to forget that he's just as super when he's Clark Kent as when he's in costume as Superman. One of the cooler moments in the series is when Clark uses his super-thumb to dent a coin to make it look as if it was struck by a bullet. One of the dumber moments is when Clark spends 25 seconds changing clothes when a plane crash is imminent, just so he can rescue a fainted Lois and change back before she wakes up.

Not the mention all the times the writers simply invent new super-powers to get Superman out of a jam, like being able to divine the combination of a safe merely by spinning a dial or control an electric typewriter with the power of his ghostly mind. This wasn't unique to the movies, of course. They did it in the comics of the time as well. Superman gets cornered by Lois who's sure she has proved he is Clark Kent, and whoops, suddenly he has the power of Super-Ventriloquism! Nor was it unique to the 40's and 50's. Superman was still coming up with weird one-shot powers even in the films of the 70's and 80's, like ripping the "S" shield off his chest and using it to trap Ursa (but we'll get to that in a few weeks).

One other thing that becomes apparent is that, at the time, Superman was way cooler than Batman. I mean, since the late 80's, when first the Tim Burton movie and then the Bruce Timm animated series redefined Batman in the eyes of the viewing public, Batman has been perceived as this edgy, cool character while Superman was this boring whitebread straight arrow who only got any kind of attention at all because he could just do anything. Batman had the interesting origin, the psychological hang-ups, the cool gadgets, the epic villains, and the moody atmospherics. Superman was a farmboy who could fly. Yawn.

But back in the day, it was Superman who was by far the more interesting character of the two for audiences. I mean, compare these serials to the two Batman ones. Superman stopped fires and floods, got sent into space, bounced bullets off his chest, got zapped with heat rays, shot by missiles and electrocuted. Though both Luthor and the Spider Lady had a pretty shallow menu of plot options (announce your plans over police band radio, then capture Lois Lane to lure Superman into a trap), the chapter endings themselves featured a wide range of perils. By contrast, Batman and Robin were constantly getting into fistfights (that they usually lost), then running their car off a cliff. It got old.

And why was this true? Two reasons. Number one, despite the adage that Superman stories were intrinsically boring because Superman's only dilemma was figuring out who to hit, his powers gave the writers great flexibility in coming up with varied situations to throw him into. And more importantly, number two (cue sound of broken record), his supporting cast--the one developed for and lifted from the radio series--was more interesting. Lois, Jimmy and Perry formed a group dynamic of varied personalities that you just didn't get with Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, and whoever Batman's girlfriend was this week.

Which is why it was over 15 years between the second Batman serial and his next live-action appearance on a weekly television series, while for Superman, the transition was almost immediate.

But more on that next week.

Movie Monday - Atom Man vs. Superman, Chapters 12-15

2010-11-22T00:00:00.000-06:00

This is it! The titanic conclusion to Atom Man Vs. Superman, the second Columbia serial from 1950, starring Kirk Alyn. And before we get into Chapter 12, "Atom Man Strikes," I must say I'm confused so far. I mean, I thought sequels were supposed to be bigger and more elaborate than their predecessors, but so far, this sequel has been cutting corners at every opportunity. I mean, even more than your usual serial. Reusing special effects, exploiting stock footage of natural disasters, and even inserting several minutes of Superman's origin from the previous serial into one chapter. What gives?

Speaking of exploiting stock footage, in the last chapter, Superman had headed upstate to rescue people from a stock footage flood. Then Lois, in an attempt to make an "epic of TV reporting," ended up trapped in the truck as rushing waters from a burst dam rushed down at her. As the new chapter opens, Superman swoops down and...

So that's where all the money went. Given the way the miniature truck flies, I'm guessing this miniature was not reused footage from some other movie but was built especially for this production. So Superman saves the truck and Lois, and for once, she's not smiling inappropriately seconds later. She actually seems to have a reaction to this near-death experience.

Superman notices the secret compartment inside the truck and asks Lois to keep an eye on it, then flies away. When Lois and her crew return to Metropolis, they win Luthor an award for awesome journalism and public service in the TV coverage of the flood, which I guess compensates him for the loss of the TV camera Lois abandoned. As soon as they leave his office, Luthor radios his headquarters. And he's no longer identifying himself as the Atom Man, but now using the call letters "XL." In fact, the whole Atom Man persona with the robe and the glittery mask never appears again. For the rest of the serial, it's just Luthor.

The next day, Lois and crew are doing man-on-the-street interviews again, while the thugs in the secret compartment use the special X-Ray viewer to read the combinations on safes inside stores in the area. Helluva zoom on that thing. Lois ends her live remote spot by sending the viewers "back to the main studio for the time signal." And I know TV news still does the same thing, occasionally giving the time, but wow, the way she says it sounds so formal and antiquated.

The next day, Lois becomes suspicious when she learns that three stores were robbed in locations where she had been doing her live interviews. She calls the Daily Planet to tip off Clark, but Jimmy says he's still upstate covering the flood.

Upstate, Clark is listening to an emergency radio call with the same cop who warned Lois's crew about the bursting dam. There's a fire in a chemical factory and there might be an explosion! Time for Superman to battle some more stock footage!

Superman flies over the burning stock footage factory and lands inside. And I must say, it's pretty cool that the animators had such an eye for detail that they added highlights to account for the light from the fire.

Switch to live action just long enough for Superman to grab a box conveniently labeled "Explosives" and Superman takes off again. And that wonderful eye for detail I just complimented? Not so much this time.

Lois goes back to Luthor's office for her next day's assignment, where she sees him tear a page off a notepad and put it in his pocket. So she surreptitiously swipes the notepad. But as she leaves, two thugs come in from the secret elevator and say they saw her swipe the pad. It has more safe combinations on it, so it must be retrieved.

The thugs chase Lois down the street, where she foils their pursuit by ducking around a pillar, then running into an insurance company where we encounter the Batman corridor!

I don't have screen grabs of the corridor from the other serial, but trust me, this is the same set used for the Norton/Markham building in Batman and Robin. I've missed you, old reused set. Anyway, after another tricky bit with a fire escape, Lois escapes into the Daily Planet building with the note, where she shows it to Clark and Jimmy. Now every schoolkid knows the way you read impressions on a notepad, right? The thing where you lightly color with a pencil lead across the surface of the paper? Lois, Clark and Jimmy have never heard of this trick. Clark suggests letting the photo department somehow try to read the impressions, then simply defaults to super-fill-in-vision.

Meanwhile, the thugs report that Lois got away, so Luthor does the only reasonable thing. He orders his thugs to use the Thermo-Ray to destroy the Daily Planet. The thugs drive out to the Planet building, where they open a panel in the roof and aim the Thermo-Ray... Hey!

It's not the same ray cannon from the previous serial, which was the reused Atomic Disintegrator from the first Batman serial. But it is the same prop as the Teleport Ray we've seen used throughout the serial whenever someone coin-teleports, only with a different mount and barrel.

Anyway, they start zapping the building with it, which causes sparks to fly and papers to burn. Clark changes to Superman and flies out to stop the menace, so the thugs turns the ray on him. He is stunned and falls from the sky onto an electricity generating station. Ouch.

But as Chapter 13, "Atom Man's Flying Saucers," opens, we see that Superman is merely stunned rather than killed. He gathers his wits and leaps back into the sky to fly in the window of Perry White's office, where he announces the danger is over. I have no idea how he thinks that. I mean, he just got zapped out of the sky by a heat ray, then electrocuted. The danger would appear to be far from over.

Back at the truck, it turns out that... the danger is over. As always happens when ray guns are used against Superman, the power has somehow reflected back to the gun, causing it to overheat and shoot sparks. So okay, Superman was right. But how did he know?

Superman points out the departing truck to the Planet gang, although for some reason, the truck's roof is solid, without the sliding panel the thugs used to shoot the Thermo-Ray from. Superman recognized FGD-Alpha standing outside the truck, so he knows they're the Atom Man's men, and the sheet of paper with the safe combinations on it prove Luthor's crooked (although it probably burned when the Thermo-Ray struck). Nevertheless, Superman believes he has enough evidence to haul Luthor in. He tells the Daily Planet folks to follow the truck while he flies to Luthor's office.

At the same time, though, Luthor has already been informed that the destruction of the Daily Planet was a no-go, so he decides to make himself scarce. He grabs some essential papers and tells his secretary that he has been called away "indefinitely"--he's such a considerate boss--then teleports to his cave. Superman's too late!

The thugs call in to Luthor that they're being chased by the police. Luthor orders them to ditch the truck, but leave the power circuit on or something so he can blow it up remotely. They follow orders, abandoning the truck and watching from cover as the police arrive with Lois and Jimmy. As Lois reaches for the door, Superman yells from the sky not to touch the truck. The police and reporters retreat just as the truck is exploding.

Superman then tracks the vibrations of the Destruct-o-Beam back toward Luthor's headquarters, causing the Destruct-o-Beam to (what else?) back up and begin sparking and smoking. Luthor decides he's going to have to abandon the mountain caves soon and use his spaceship to go into orbit (what spaceship? the one he never mentioned before but is almost finished building, apparently).

Back at the Daily Planet, Superman confers with Perry, Lois and Jimmy. He decides that the best way to locate Luthor's lead-lined lair is to have Clark Kent and Lois Lane do an aerial search in an attempt to draw a response from Luthor that would give away the location.

Now, I can see him suggesting Clark go; Clark would be safe from any attack. And I can see him suggesting Lois go; he could fly along and shadow her to make sure she was safe. But what possible reason could he have for suggesting they both go together? It makes no sense.

Anyway, Superman flies off, and Lois for the first time in any chapter of either serial throws a wistful look after him like she's pining for his love. When did Noel Neill decide to turn on the acting chops? And what about poor Jimmy? Oh well, after taking a cheap shot at Clark Kent's cowardliness, she goes out to the newsroom to hunt him up and take him flying. Moments later, they're in the sky over the hills, and Luthor isn't happy about it. So he orders a flying saucer be sent up to take care of them. The flying saucer (singular, despite the chapter title) is fearsome and deadly.

Okay, maybe not fearsome. But certainly deadly when it crashes right into the plane, blowing it up.

But like a lot of serial chapters, the opening of Chapter 14, "Rocket of Vengeance," takes us back in time a step. As the flying saucer approaches, brave, brave Sir Lois screams and faints, leaving Clark free to act. He runs to the back room of the plane to change clothes, then runs back up to the cockpit, grabs Lois, carries her back to the door (this airplane interior, btw, also appeared in Batman and Robin) and jumps out seconds before the saucer collides with the plane.

Got that? Lois not only faints, but faints a full 25 seconds before the collision. And Clark's the cowardly one. Or maybe it was bullet time.

Anyway, Lois comes to just as Clark's zipping up his pants (okay, no, but it would be funny), and Clark tells her that Superman saved them again. Lois asks Clark if he's jealous of Superman, but before Clark can answer, a cop pulls up, and it's the same damn guy, the cop who warned Lois and crew to flee the flood, then told Clark about the fire with the explosives (he has a very distinctive voice). Man, they got their money's worth out of this guy.

Lex Luthor's spaceship isn't ready yet, so he decides to bluff the police into backing off. He broadcasts on the police band that unless the police abandon their search, he's going to destroy the city in an earthquake from his Sonic Vibrator. He then arranges a brief demonstration, including many stock shots of urban destruction.

The Police Chief is in Perry's office debating how to handle this situation, and son of a bitch, the Chief's cigar is lit while poor Perry's sits on his desk, ignored.

Perry can't catch a break. There is a public outcry over the Luthor situation. The men of Metropolis demand the police comply with Luthor's demands so he doesn't turn the Sonic Vibrator back on, while the women are demanding he turn it on for just another minute, because they were so close...

Luthor threatens to destroy the Daily Planet building next, so Clark offers to take a look around outside and changes to Superman. The earthquake strikes, and Superman tries to save the Planet building by hugging it, but it doesn't work as well as it did for the bridge in chapter 1. The Police Chief accedes to Luthor's demands, and the earthquake stops.

Luthor orders that his men redouble their efforts to finish the spaceship, and after he leaves, one of the men mentions that Luthor's starting to go off the deep end. Alber replies that Luthor is the greatest genius in the world and "we're in it with him to the end." Somebody has a crush (shameless plug).

Superman refuses to give up the search, however, as do Lois and Jimmy. They decide to drive around the Culver Hills to search for Luthor's HQ while Superman searches from the air. Luthor is at his desk when he is informed of the searchers. And Luthor's desk has an ashtray on it, which is funny, because Luthor has never been shown smoking. The good guys, like Perry White and the Police Chief, smoke, but Luthor doesn't. That would be completely reversed nowadays.

Anyway, Luthor orders that his men deploy the Atomic Projectile, and here we have yet another bit of reused footage from the previous serial, as the "Atomic Projectile" is the same weapon as the Kryptonite Missile the FGD fired at Superman in the previous serial. Like before, the missile is fired, and Superman catches it and throws it back at them. The two thugs duck into a cave, and the explosion seals them in.

Now Luthor's angry, so he gets on the police band again and says that since the search is still proceeding, he is going to destroy Metropolis with a giant rocket. Huh, launching the rocket uses the exact same controls as the Sonic Vibrator. Who'da thought?

So after a stock footage launch, cartoon Superman jumps onto the cartoon rocket. Back in the studio, Kirk Alyn sits on a rocket mock-up and makes faces as smoke blows past him. Perry orders Jimmy to take a picture, so he grabs the camera and takes it to the window, then drops it and says "You can take it yourself" before running away. And I've got to say this for Tommy Bond. He may have had a grotesque little pushed-in face, and his character may have been an incompetent foil for Superman, but he was the only actor in the entire series to get me to laugh intentionally. Clark's and Lois's attempts at humor were invariably lame, but Jimmy made me laugh a few times. He could sell a joke.

Perry grabs the camera, but doesn't take the picture either, as he is frozen in terror at the sight of the rocket heading right for him. Could this be the end?

Not quite. We have finally arrived at the final chapter, "Superman Saves the Universe," which is a pretty grandiose title. I mean, so far, all Superman has done is foil the plans of one admittedly brilliant inventor , but mediocre crook. It's quite a leap to jump from that to saving the universe. I'm guessing the title might be a slight exaggeration. Let's see.

After making faces doesn't work, Superman decides to use his cape as a sail to turn the rocket off its course.

And what do you know? It works! The rocket flies over the Daily Planet building and out to sea, where it collides with some stock footage of an A-bomb test. Luthor's gang start to panic, because there's nothing to stop Superman from coming after them now. But Luthor says he still has a trick up his sleeve and cuts loose with a brief, but pretty creditable attempt at a crazy evil laugh.

Later, a package is delivered to Lois, with a note that says, "From an Admirer." Lois opens it and oops, it's another teleport coin. And it's not even her birthday. She disappears and materializes in Luthor's cave. He informs her that she is fortunate in that she may end up being the only surviving human woman. Of course, looking at the guys Luthor intends to be the only surviving human men, "lucky" is probably not the word she'd use. The only halfway good-looking one is Alber, and he only has eyes for Luthor.

Luthor orders Alber to take the spaceship into orbit while he sets the Sonic Vibrator to destroy Metropolis. And since Alber's not there to throw the switch, some other nameless henchman does it. Seriously, this guy has not appeared in the serial at all up to this point. It's probably just a random guy from some other serial that they just cut in there.

Of course, before Luthor can start the earthquake, he has to brag about it on the police band radio. Then the vibrations start. Buildings fall and women scream, perhaps even in fear. Superman saves a few people here and there, then heads for the mountains to join the cops in the search for Luthor's machine.

When Luthor learns that Superman is just outside, he decides to call in an earthquake on his own position. FGD-Alpha and sidekick, realizing that a world in which the only woman is Lois Lane is not exactly a fantasy come true either, rebel and try to stop Luthor and shut down the machine.

Meanwhile, outside, Superman is climbing the hillside when a big boulder rolls down toward him. He nimbly steps aside, watching it roll by to crush the cops (okay, we don't actually see it crush the cops, but they were right behind him).

Luthor pulls a gun and manages to keep the henchmen at bay long enough to beam himself and Lois up to the ship. Yes, this cheap serial may have been the first screen depiction of a man beaming up to a spaceship. Put that in your pipe and look for a match to light it with.

Superman arrives seconds later, ignores the useless synthetic Kryptonite and knocks out the henchmen, then flies up after the spaceship. He catches up with it moments later and leaps in through a hole in the floor!

What the hell is that? Is that supposed to be, like, the moon pool in a submerged platform or something? Whatever. Superman grabs Luthor and Lois and leaps back out of the ship, leaving henchmen Alber and Baer, who die when the ship is hit by a meteor and explodes seconds later. Wow, Luthor's lucky Superman arrested him.

Superman drops Lois and Luthor off in Perry White's office so the Planet can get the reward for the capture or something. And later, as Clark and Lois discuss how everything is resolved, Jimmy comes in with a little box of Luthor's Craptonite. Lois immediately opens it and holds it up to Clark's face, not having heard the news that it has lost its mojo. Clark is unaffected and Lois's suspicions are once again proven silly. As they leave the office, Perry searches his pockets for a match to light his cigar and finally finds one. He strikes the match, and it malfunctions, hissing and shooting off sparks. After 15 chapters, the gag finally pays off. Ha!

The End. Finally.

Out of the Vault - The Scorpion #3

2010-11-20T10:54:00.006-06:00

In the mid-70's, Marvel Comics founder Martin Goodman started up a new comics company called Atlas Comics. The company attracted a lot of big-name talent thanks to generous rates, secured nationwide newsstand distribution and put out a flurry of interesting, if derivative, titles. It folded within a year, with most of its 23 titles running fewer than 4 issues. You can read the entire story here, if you're interested.

But one phenomenon occurred as the company was flailing: what is referred to on Wikipedia as the "Third Issue Switch."Basically, publisher Martin Goodman demanded that several titles be changed to become more like Marvel, because he knew that Marvel titles sold well. The issue pictured here, The Scorpion #3 cover-dated July 1975, is one example of the switch.

You see, the Scorpion, as created by Howard Chaykin (who has made appearances in Out of the Vault before, and will again), was a 30's era pulp-style man of action, an immortal hero-for-hire named Moro Frost who fought crime with fists and pistols. But Chaykin left the character after two issues and a new team was brought on board.

Writer Gabe Levy and artist Jim Craig begin their mission to modernize and Marvelize the character by killing him off on the first page. Moro Frost is shot down by Nazis over Italy, though no body is ever found. Thirty years later, The Artist Formerly Known as Moro Frost is now crusading journalist David Harper, editor and publisher of the Daily Times. By night, he fights crime as The Scorpion!

Having explained away the changes on page one, Levy and Craig begin the story proper on page two, as a rabbi and his daughter prepare for Sabbath. But suddenly, armed intruders break in, wearing very familiar outfits.

Yeah, I know the caption says "the familiar Gestapo uniform," but the uniforms themselves look more like agents of Marvel's Hydra. But even that is not what prompted me to scan this panel. The daughter's face on the right is rendered in a very familiar style, and it's not that of Jim Craig, whoever he is. That is totally a Jim Mooney face; his style is unmistakeable (Mooney was a long-time comics artist who worked on, among other things, Omega the Unknown, featured in the very first Out of the Vault). Mooney apparently inked the issue without credit.

The Nazis, led by a Red Skull-type figure named the Golden Fuhrer, kidnap the rabbi with the intention of forcing him to resurrect the dead leaders of the Third Reich. The rabbi protests that even if he could, he would refuse to help Nazis. So the Nazis go back and kidnap his daughter to pressure the rabbi into helping them.

Why not just kidnap both at once? Because then the daughter, who just happens to be a reporter for the Daily Times, would not be able to bring the Scorpion into the story. Before she is kidnapped, Sara pays a visit to David Harper, who is wrestling with the state of the world.

A little historical perspective: President Richard Nixon had just resigned the year before as a result of the Watergate investigation. And because the President had used the CIA to facilitate the cover-up, the CIA itself fell under increased scrutiny, which brought more disturbing details to light over the next couple of years.

So having David Harper fume about the "fascistic" CIA was just lazy shorthand for "he cares deeply about the state of the world." Although you have to wonder, if he's powerful and important enough that he can just have his secretary call up the President on the spur of the moment, why is he wasting his time putting on tights to fight crime?

Then again, we don't ever see him actually talking to the President. Maybe the President won't take his call. Maybe he's just thought of as a muckraker or a crank. Maybe he's simply delusional to think he can just give the President a stern talking to and suddenly, the CIA will be fixed.

But for now, he listens to Sara's story about Nazis and advises her to let the police handle it. He also plants a tracking device in her purse to keep tabs on her in case she ignores his advice. She returns home, having fulfilled her plot function, and is promptly kidnapped by the Hydra-Nazis, dropping her purse.

Meanwhile, the rabbi, who really can't resurrect the dead, decides that his only option is to play along and pretend to resurrect the men, while actually using his magical powers to summon forth a golem he's been building in his basement (he's been worried about neo-Nazis, you see, and he was right).

Back at the paper, David Harper checks his tracker to see that Sara is at her home. He decides to drop by in costume anyway, and we get our first glimpse of the new Scorpion in action. Does this remind you of anyone?

The Scorpion arrives at Sara's house to find her purse on the pavement outside. After briefly comparing his bugging skills to those of the bungling Watergate plumbers (yes, again--what can I say? this was just part of the national consciousness then), the Scorpion wonders how to find Sara and her father when the golem bursts out of the house. The Scorpion tries to stop the thing, but it is too strong, and soon, he is helpless in its grip. But instead of killing him, the golem transmits an image into his mind, of the sewage to energy converter in the basement of the World Trade Center (which was also fairly new at the time, the second of the towers having been completed only four years before). The golem then tosses the Scorpion aside and takes the subway tunnels to the WTC complex.

The Scorpion races ahead and starts fighting Hydrazis as the Golden Fuhrer rants ineffectually. When the golem shows up, controlled by a mental link with the old rabbi, things get messy.

These panels illustrate what's good and bad in the art for this issue. On the one hand, the figures in the bottom panels are stilted and the layout's a little off. On the other hand, I really like the panels at top right where the Golden Fuhrer's being dragged away. I love Mooney's inks on that outstretched arm.

Anyway, the Golden Fuhrer, about whom we learned nothing interesting, dies not with a bang nor a whimper, but a splat. And then the golem smashes open the sewage pipes, causing the underground complex to flood. The Scorpion saves the rabbi and his daughter and then swings away to spend one panel contemplating intolerance. A note at the bottom of the panel says to look for the next issue on June 1st (newsstand comics generally came out a couple of months in advance of the cover date), but it was not to be. This was the Scorpion's final adventure.

But in an irony to end all ironies, the character survived in another form. Not the generic Batman-Spiderman clone created to make the character more like a Marvel comic, but the original 30's adventurer created by Howard Chaykin. Chaykin renamed the character Dominic Fortune and took him to, you guessed it, Marvel Comics. At around the same time as the Scorpion's final issue was coming out, or not long after, Dominic Fortune made his first appearance in the black-and-white magazine Marvel Preview.

Ninja Robot Super Battle

2010-11-19T01:22:00.001-06:00

Fists and feet are flying at Hero Go Home this week, featuring not only a fun chapter, but my favorite Easter Egg so far. Go check it out here.

Game Break

2010-11-17T15:58:00.002-06:00

You may have noticed that there was no Big Game Wednesday today. It turns out that due to the new job I'm taking a forced break from my weekly game, and since I had reached the end of the California stories, it seemed like a good place to break for a while altogether. I'm having to take inventory of my current blogging activities and decide how best to maintain in the future.

The big question mark I'm dealing with now is herogohome. There's not a lot of traffic there, which is understandable, because there's not a huge flow of content. With only one weekly chapter of about 2500 words, plus one small Extra on Tuesdays, it's just not active enough to become a habit-forming destination.

But I can't really do more than I'm doing over there, because of all the content I'm committed to over here. Movie Mondays and Out of the Vault take up a huge amount of time and energy during the week, which keeps me from being able to commit to any new on-going features over at herogohome.

So, since the bulk of Movie Mondays and Out of the Vault are superhero related, I'm contemplating moving both of those features over to herogohome, to drive more traffic there and make the site a better value. I would then save this blog more for commentary and non-superhero related stuff, which means that I would update this one less frequently.

I haven't made a decision yet, but I've got to start drawing and retaining traffic if I want to be able to maintain the site. I'm going to have to pay to renew it at the beginning of the year, so anything I do needs to be done quickly.

Something Different

2010-11-16T13:56:00.002-06:00

Today's Extra over at Hero Go Home is something a little different, and it was a lot of fun to put together. I'll probably end up doing more like it in the future. We'll see.

The job is okay, although the hours are shorter than I'd hoped so far. One thing that surprises me is how sore I am. I'm not doing the stockroom thing like I was before, so the job is far less strenuous. But I am on my feet for several hours at a time, and given just how inactive I've been for most of the year (between the very sedentary desk job I had for most of the first half of the year, plus all the chair-time I've put in creating features for the two blogs, plus just stupid stuff like playing games on Facebook), my body wasn't ready for it. It's a sad reminder that I'm approaching 50 and my body, never very fit to begin with, doesn't bounce back as quickly as before.

Movie Monday - Atom Man vs. Superman, Chapters 8-11

2010-11-15T00:00:00.002-06:00

Here begins Part 3 of our extensive recap of 1950's Atom Man vs. Superman. And in the tradition of Batman and Robin (and since it's Saturday night and I don't begin my first official day on the new job until 3:30 tomorrow afternoon), I'm going to designate this episode as the official Atom Man vs. Superman drinking game. For the sake of self-preservation, I'm not going to drink a whole shot every time I drink, but just take a swallow from this Nyquil I've mixed up (vodka, Chambord, Blue Curacao, and Grenadine--It's purple and really tastes like Nyquil).

So, the ground rules: Drink when the narrator mentions that Superman is "once more" using his X-Ray Vision. Drink when a sequence reuses footage from the previous serial, or when it uses stock footage from a real disaster. Drink when Jimmy is knocked out. Drink when Lois smiles inappropriately. Drink when Perry White can't find a match to light his cigar. Drink when Luthor announces his plans on police band radio. Drink when the Planet plants a fake story. Drink when either Superman or Luthor recognizes a trap, then decides to walk right into it. I could come up with more, like when Superman invents a new power to solve his current problem or when they reuse sets or props from other serials, but those eight will do.

So, when we last saw Superman, he was being dumped into the back of a fake ambulance after being knocked out by Luthor's fake kryptonite. As Chapter 8, "Into the Empty Doom," opens, the ambulance wails away, watched by a mysterious stranger. Could it be the deadly Professor Stone, come to be a real villain?

Nah, just an Innocent Bystander, apparently (gratuitous plug).

Once in Atom Man's secret cave headquarters, Superman is revived and forced to stand under the Main Arc. As Atom Man is preparing to send Superman into the Empty Doom, he asks if Superman has any last words. Superman channels his Inner Arnie and says, "I'll be back."

After Superman has disappeared, Atom Man begins to remove his mask. Will we finally see on-screen proof that Luthor is Atom Man, or will the director continue to play coy? Coy.

Back at the Daily Planet, Lois and Jimmy realize that both Superman and Clark are missing. Then Lois has a frustrating bout with her "darn newfangled typewriter," so Jimmy plugs it in for her. Yes, this will be important later.

With Superman out of the way, a new crime wave strikes Metropolis, and though ghostly Superman tries to stop it, he can't actually do anything.

Meanwhile, Perry White has also noticed the missing Clark, and decides this means that Clark Kent=Superman. He orders Lois to write up the story, which Lois surprisingly balks at. Apparently, all those times she tried to prove Clark was Superman, she was just a dog chasing cars. She heads out to her desk, and Perry searches for a match. DRINK!

So Lois heads out to start on the story. Ghostly Superman tries to grab the paper out of her typewriter, but fails. I think they meant him to seem insubstantial, but the film is misaligned, so he's clearly grabbing several inches to the side. The Empty Doom screws up your depth perception!

She finishes the story and hands it in, but before Perry can get the front page replated, Clark calls in to say he's on the trail of a hot story. Turns out Jimmy Olsen can imitate Clark's voice perfectly, almost as if Kirk Alyn were doing a voiceover. Jimmy and Lois flirt a little afterward, because there are still flashes of romantic chemistry between the two. I wonder if Noel Neill and Tommy Bond ever hooked up off the set?

Suddenly, Lois's typewriter starts typing by itself. Superman has apparently visited that creepy old ghost in the subway, because he can now concentrate his superpowers to move the keys of Lois's electric typewriter. He tells Lois that Atom Man's HQ is in Cave Mountain (the same one where they found "bare rock walls" before). He tells her to go to the police, but she just grabs Jimmy and heads there herself. She even channels her inner action hero by knocking out a guard with her purse.

But once in the cave, she and Jimmy are caught by Atom Man and his thugs. He gives Lois a sporting chance, telling her one of two switches will free Superman, while the other will doom him forever. She tries reading the thugs' faces while reaching for the switches, but one thug stays stone-faced, the other smirks no matter which switch she contemplates, and Atom Man is just a glittery helmet. So she chooses lady AND tiger and throws both at once.

BOOM! goes the Chapter 9, "Superman Crashes Through!"

Lois and Jimmy are knocked out by the blast. Atom Man orders his thugs to dispose of the bodies. So they drag Lois and Jimmy outside, where they run into a couple of repairmen from the electric company. Atom Man has apparently been tapping into power lines illegally, the fiend. The thugs learn not to mess with the power company. These guys obviously belong to the union, because they beat the crap out of the thugs, who run away. And once again, when the union toughs explore the cave, they only find bare rock walls.

Back at the Daily Planet, Superman types another ghostly message to Lois with the power of his crotch.

When Perry sees the message, he phones up a friend at the press association and says he needs help. Soon, headlines appear that Superman has returned from the Empty Doom and will appear on television live to prove it. Luthor doesn't believe it, but he turns his fancy big-screen TV on anyway.

We see Superman stop a couple of thugs in footage reused from the previous serial. DRINK! Is Superman really back?

No, it's just a fake story planted at Superman's request--DRINK!--abetted by a television station (not Luthor's) showing old newsreel footage of Superman's exploits.

But Luthor wants to be sure, so he sends one of his henchmen into the Empty Doom to take a look around and see if Superman's still there. Which of course, he is. There's a chase in space!

Superman catches the thug and tosses him away into oblivion, then rides down the beam back to Earth. One of Luthor's thugs pulls out the synthetic Kryptonite, but it has lost its potency over time. Superman slaps it out of the thug's hand, then knocks Atom Man's head clean off!

DAMN, Supes is hardcore! Oh, it's okay. It's just a robot (convenient). Later, Clark Kent shows up at the Daily Planet, claiming he was saved from the Empty Doom by Superman. He and Perry cook up a plan to prove Luthor is Atom Man.

Perry chews Lois out in front of the entire newsroom, so Lois quits and goes to work for Luthor's TV station. On her first day, doing man-on-the-street interviews for the cameras, there's a robbery in a nearby jewelry store. Clark and Jimmy run off after the robbers, while Lois hands her mike off to a random bystander and steals the Planet car to give chase. Thugs shoot the tire out, and Superman has to stop the car from crashing. Lois gets out, thanking him while smiling as if nothing has happened (DRINK!), and Superman says, apropos of nothing, "You can thank Clark Kent." For what, exactly?

Meanwhile, Jimmy has chased the thugs to a trainyard, where he gets his foot caught as a train approaches. He's doomed! Doomed, I tell you!

Oh, look, Chapter 10, "Atom Man's Heat Ray." Wow, we don't seem to be drinking much so far. The opening theme music has changed slightly for some reason. And Superman once more stops a train instantly without derailing it. But while he's busy saving Jimmy, the thugs coin-teleport away. Clark and Jimmy suspect it was no accident that the robbery happened so close to one of Luthor's TV trucks, or as Clark says, "Luther's" TV truck.

Luthor suspects the same thing and pledges to help catch the crooks. He hires a couple of mooks to get caught robbing a payroll trailer the next day.

Lois visits the Daily Planet, where it's revealed that her quitting was all a ruse. Only now,Lois thinks Luthor is telling the truth. Unfortunately, a thug standing outside the door overhears and tries to blackmail them. He orders Clark to open the safe. Clark tries to fight, but is knocked through the door to Perry's office. Jimmy is knocked out, too. DRINK!

Clark changes to Superman and confronts the thug. The thug shoots, but Superman just lets the bullets bounce off his chest. And looking at his smile, I'd guess he's been drinking a lot more than I have. Plus, he decides to ricochet one of the bullets off his hand, knocking a light fixture down on the thug's head. Ouch!

Superman races out and changes back to Clark. When Lois finds him out on the window ledge, he gives the lamest excuse in the history of lame Clark excuses, which is not something I say lightly.

The next day, the mooks and FGD-Alpha rob the payroll trailer. The mooks get caught, but Alpha flees, pursued by Clark, Lois and Jimmy. Alpha calls Luthor, who tells him to let himself be seen, then lead them into the trap. He lets the trio see him, then ducks into a doorway. As the three reporters enter the room, Alpha hides behind a crate marked "Rubber Life Raft" and coin-teleports away. A steel door slides down to trap the three reporters, and then Luthor pumps in poison gas.

Now, I know I'm not a brilliant criminal mastermind or anything, but it seems kind of counter-productive to me to set up a fake robbery to prove my innocence, only to kill the reporters who were set up to be the witnesses.

Oh, well, who cares? Welcome to Chapter 11, "Luthor's Strategy." Glad to know he has finally come up with one. And I'm still (mostly) sober, darn it.

Clark changes to Superman and inhales all the gas in the room. Then he punches a hole in the steel door and blows the gas outside. He forces the steel door open and carries Jimmy and Lois outside onto a sidewalk covered with dead pigeons and passers-by (okay, not really, but that would be funny).

Later, Clark and Jimmy try to convince Perry that the entire scheme is a big scam being pulled by Luthor to divert suspicion away from him. Perry toys with his cigar and says he doesn't believe it. Could we be about to drink?

Nope, it cuts away to two of Luthor's thugs in a TV truck outside listening in. Drink denied! They report the conversation to Luthor, who is unhappy that Kent is so smart. Funny how Clark is so smart while Superman is so stupid. In order to throw Clark off the trail, Luthor gives a press conference in which he displays letters he claims to have received from Atom Man, threatening him. And then Atom Man's voice sounds in the room and stuff starts blowing up!

Notice Lois on the left, wearing a Flash Gordon-looking outfit. She's practically a superhero herself in that dress. BTW, is it drink-worthy if it's Luthor planting the fake story in the Planet? I think so. DRINK!

Back at the Planet, Clark is telling Perry he's still not convinced of Luthor's innocence when Jimmy rushes in with a teletupe (sorry, teletype) story about a lfood (sorry, flood) upstate. Cue the stock footage! DRINK! Okay, maybe I got a little buzz going.

Lois and her cameraman set up to film, while Superman flies around sving people from hte stock footage. Look, more crates marked "Rubber Life Raft." They actually have a purpose this time, tohugh, as Superman uses them to save people from the rising waters.

Then a cop drives up to Lois's crew and tells them to clear out because the dam's about to burst. The men want ot leave, but Lois offers this rousing sentiment: "Let's make this an epic of TV reporting." Not quite a St. Crispen's Day speech, but what do you want on this budget?

So the dam bursts nad Lois's crew flee to higher ground (it appears to only be about a foot higher, but still...), but Lois stays womanning the camera until hte water is rushing down upon her, at which point she leaps into the truck, and can't get it started.

Oops.

To Be Concluded Next Week!