#oh were making niche 80s character edits now

[nostalgicsneeze]

Terry from Just One of the Guys ★ just unbelievable amounts of gender…

( Run DMC - It’s Tricky ♫)

[earlgraytay]

*drops this into your inbox*

[ID: box of Deluxe fair trade earl grey tea with fifty tea bags]

Please elaborate on how Twilight and JoJo have similar strengths and weaknesses. I really want to hear what you have to say about both of them regarding their similarities.

Thank you for the tea!

So... okay. Nota bene that I'm still only on Battle Tendency/Part 2 of JoJo, and that I haven't properly read Twilight in... a while now. But.

The thing that these series have in common, more than anything else, is that they're the product of one person's very specific creative obsessions, baaaaasically unedited.

Since both writers were working in less-than-prestigious markets when they started out (80s manga/early 00s YA), they could write Weird Dumb Shit without anyone stopping them. And then when JJBA and Twilight started printing money, any editing that either might have had went out the window, because clearly this person is doing something right, right?

Araki and Meyer are both very good at worldbuilding, for specific given values thereof; they're both good at coming up with bonkers-but-halfway plausible ideas. They both created a weirdly compelling take on basically-unkillable vampires, and manage to keep tension going despite the vampires being unkillable. In some ways they even managed to create foundational works for their genre- if you want to understand how shonen adventure anime got started you kinda need to watch JoJo, and if you want to understand why YA is Like That you need to read Twilight.

They both struggle with some pretty major parts of writing- Araki, bless him, has yet to create a heroic character with more than two personality traits, and Meyer at the time of writing Twilight could not pace a plot to save her life. And yet- somehow- the stories they created are compelling enough to keep you on the hook for a while.

Twilight and JJBA are, unfortunately, both sexist and racist in ways that say... Things... about their authors.

In JJBA's case, Araki is clearly taking inspiration from 19th century adventure stories and pulp fiction- and using that inspiration completely uncritically. You've got racist stock characters that you wouldn't even see in Western fiction in the 90s, because everyone agreed we don't do that shit anymore. And... look, I am not going to say anything about Araki's sexuality, but... he's clearly uninterested in writing women, yeah? It comes off as really homoerotic, even though it's totally unintentional.

In Twilight's case.... well... look, if I say "Stephanie Meyer is Mormon and was most likely raised that way", I think that covers it. Just about everything that's fucked up about Twilight boils down to "Meyer's Mormonism makes her think things that are Very Much Not Okay are a normal part of the fabric of [hetero] relationships" and "Mormons grow up believing Weird Ass Shit about Native Americans anyway, the weird bullshit in Twilight is respectful by comparison". Both of which are pretty fucking major flaws with the writing!

On a more neutral note: both Meyer and Araki have some very niche interests that turn up everywhere in their writing.

If you know anything about JJBA, you know that random characters and powers are named after 80s music for No Fucking Reason. as early as part 1 you've got characters named Dire and Straits, and in part 2 you've got Cars, Wham, and AC/DC. (oh, scuse me- Kars, Wammu, and Esidesi. COPYRIGHT, WE'RE NOT VIOLATING IT). And of course Roundabout has become an iconic part of JoJo to the point it's a meme just because it's what Araki was listening to while writing...

Similarly, in Twilight, one of the first things you know about any character is the make and model of car they drive. The characters spend a hell of a lot of time having conversations while they're driving around, for no real reason. For heaven's sake, Meyer's favourite character is a mechanic! It's a part of the world that's tonally unfitting with everything else she's trying to build, it's definitely the author's interest peeking through, and it's really endearing.

There's no good TLDR here, it's just an infodump, but ... yeah, the similarities are there, and I'm enjoying the mashup on the merits, if nothing else.

[slothcritic]

Dragon Ball Z Abridged - Episode 7 Review

Humor that doesn't let up. This episode is non-stop, action-packed, and delivers on everything it tries to do.

The cold open for Saiyans? On My Planet? (It's More Likely Than You Think) has a continuation to the "are we there yet?" skit, capped off with the Saiyans collapsing a building and cratering into the concrete, thus finally arriving on Earth. It's simple dialogue but the pacing, the delivery and the fact that it closes off a running joke makes it a wonderfully effective opener.

[Title Sequence]

Most of this scene has comedic and plot-relevant heft to it. Nappa glasses a city because he hates awkward silences and we as viewers are reminded that the Saiyans are here for the Dragon Balls. The "epic foreshadowing" joke however just feels needless and clunky. I wouldn't say it's out of character, Vegeta constantly begrudges Nappa's idiocy, but perhaps this line should've been written with less flashing bells and alarm signals reading "HEY GUYS, WE'RE MAKING A JOKE OVER HERE."

After a brief back-and-forth with Gohan and Piccolo, Krillin shows up, and... goodness me his voice is squeaky. Let me take a timeout from discussing this episode in a self-contained context. I'll criticize the microphone quality or the writing or the weaker visual gags or the editing missteps, but it's important to point out that not all of the show's improvements have been made through technical means. The cast has also improved personally as voice actors over the years. These contrasts are most notable in characters like Vegeta, Krillin and King Kai. Their modern voices are rounded out much better on delivery, whereas from the outset they're scratchy, unrefined, or even muddled. This also matters partially in-context of the episode itself, because goodness did that voice take me out of my viewing experience.

Krillin and Gohan catch up on how their respective year of training has been. While Gohan has no qualms about his stay with Piccolo, we're treated to distant laughter and an ominous pair of eyes in the background while Krillin undergoes what I can only assume is a PTSD-induced flashback.

One Fight Club reference later, the Saiyans finally meet the main ensemble of Piccolo, Gohan and Krillin.

"Hi."

Appreciating Nappa's role in this series is not exactly an uncommon or niche opinion, but I don't feel the urge to dismiss his humor or succinct, faithful-to-character writing just for the sake of being a contrarian or trying to get a reaction out of people.

I can see it now - "Nappa's characterization as a bumbling oaf is wildly inconsistent with the idea that he would've been a Saiyan General, or one of the most respected military mights in the universe. Vegeta would've been well aware of his character and annoying tendencies from a very young age and would've gotten the hell out of dodge the second he was capable. This depiction is nothing but a transparent flanderization of an originally unremarkable character created for the sole purpose of having a quotable, marketable personality with viral potential in a show that has so far been 'mildly entertaining' at it's peak."

Let me be clear. This is a parody. It’s meant to be pointlessly funny about certain topics. It’s meant to breathe life into creative interpretations of characters for the sake of humor. If I don’t think it’s funny, I will be critical of that. But I see no point in disliking something that I think is funny purely because it is either “popular” or, dare I say it, a “mainstream” opinion.

Vegeta is the kind of person who needs a strong sidekick who's subservient, loyal, and doesn't question orders. Nappa checks most of those boxes across both the original series and this one. Additionally, unlike a lot of other jokes or attempts at humor in this series, Nappa's very simple writing has consistently been a hit. Aside from the Arlia montage with no music, I can't think of a single line of dialogue or joke that Nappa has said that was a complete, useless dud. If it works, it works.

"So, you guys are the Saiyans?" "No."

I want to put on the record that I paused the episode after Nappa said "Hi", wrote for ten minutes on that, then resumed the episode and this line played. I immediately had to pause it again because I was laughing. Just the sheer childishness or petty playfulness that constantly surrounds Nappa and his counter-play with Vegeta injects something completely new and wonderful into this series.

The jokes don't stop after this one. This skit continues with the rule of threes, a callback to Vegeta being a prison bitch, a nerd joke, a eunuch joke, and more. I don't want to talk about all of these individually or I'll be here all day, but let's put a bookend where Nappa reads their power levels. These are all excellent jokes that keep up with the consistently funny pace set by Nappa's introduction. Perhaps the weakest skit is the two Saiyans snickering at Piccolo. It would probably work better if redone now, but the delivery on the laughter isn't entirely convincing enough to flow like everything else does. That said, the joke that an asexual race wouldn't have genitals lands pretty neatly within Nappa's ballpark of humor.

The idea that the Saiyan's power levels are measured based on units of Raditz, and the notion that they can actually grow beings with the same power level as Raditz, is hilarious. Nappa's "Taa-daa" after the Saibamen are revealed is like icing on a very dramatic cake.

I've gotta say I'm with Tien on this one - As someone who grew up in the city where they filmed the Fraggles, I take offense to the implication that they're obscure!

"More bald people!" - I have no idea what Toriyama has against drawing hair (let alone facial hair), but this is a very recurring trend in his art style and I'm glad TFS made fun of it. A cameraman earlier had made the same joke, but it wasn't Nappa saying it, so it was automatically less funny.

Another extremely iconic scene, and at the time a complex visual gag for what the series has done so far, is when Nappa throws the Pokeball at Chiaotzu. The fact that Vegeta deals with so much of Nappa's annoying shit but plays along here just makes this scene so much better.

"That's because you have to damage it first."

This joke has questionable veracity with only Nappa and his “lul so random” take on Chiaotzu’s appearance, but these concerns are immediately dashed by Vegeta, and this is why the dynamic works - Nappa on his own would just be too much stupidity, but Vegeta's deadpan counterbalance provides a nice anchor to reality and solidifies this joke even if Nappa is the one carrying it.

I'm actually rather surprised they didn't draw any comparisons to the Saibamen being Pokemon either. There's six of them, they're all vaguely creature-like beings of adequately short stature, and could quite literally be described as pocket monsters because they can be grown by seeds you keep on your person.

Yamcha lands on the scene with his big damn hero speech, and then immediately one of the Saibaman uses Self Destruct on him. No fight scene, no escalation, just immediate death for you good sir. The scene lingers on Yamcha's corpse while Krillin sheepishly cheers in the background, and that's where the outro plays.

Conclusion

Holy hell this was a good episode, even in retrospect. Almost all of the jokes landed, the pacing and consistency was on point, and we finally have some dramatic gravitas with the Saiyans arriving on Earth. A lot of this episode disappears fast because of how much it draws you in with the interactions and back-and-forth between all of the characters. It's succinct, it's well-written, and the balance and coordination of different kinds of humor play into each other wonderfully here.

If I had to say anything negative about this episode at all, it might be that some scenes played out for too long. While the "humor floor" and "humor ceiling" are definitely a lot higher in this episode than in almost every other episode, there is some variation in joke quality. As I said, nearly every joke in this episode works, but how much does it work? We've reached the point where if the jokes were athletes in a 100m dash, they're no longer breaking both of their legs at the start, but someone still has to cross the finish line first and last. This is also a very dialogue-heavy episode. That can be a good thing, but there's little attention elsewhere in the production of this episode. Things like non-obligatory or joke-dependent sound design come to mind. The video quality is also rather poor. KaiserNeko does switch over to high quality footage for Season 2 and onward, but in Season 1 it's very easy to see the frames shaking or jerking as they spice entire scenes back and forth for their lip flaps. Everyone still has cheap mics.

With that said, I feel like this is a landmark episode for TFS finding their style and settling into a confident stride for the rest of the series.

Score: 80

Passing Thoughts

"You're a prince?" "No." "Fuck you Nappa."

"Oh my god, he blew up the cargo robot. AND THE CARGO WAS PEOPLE!"

"Those readings are useless." "You mean like YouTube friends?" - OOF. That was a great line in 2008, and I personally still think it is, but does YouTube even have a friend system anymore? Or did that get integrated by some other Google platform?

[katsutomos]

hello, i’m kosmo (she/her) and i’m v excited to be here hehehe! thank u for having me! ;; also i didn’t realise that both kosmo and tomo end the with the same letters & now i wanna d*e but oh well pls ignore that! (: anyw, i’m here introduce TOMO!! there’s probably some stuff i left out here but it ended up having a word count of almost 2.5k so i’m just going to stop myself while i’m ahead! i’ll finish off my stats & bio pages soon and then i’ll try to think up some plots but here’s all this for now!

(tw: suicide mention, brief drug mentions)

BASIC STATS

NAME / tomo katsumura; his full name is tomohiko but nobody calls him that except his mum & grandparents like literally everybody else knows him as tomo NICKNAMES / technically, tomo IS a nickname but he’s so used it that not using a nickname with him is :knife emoji: -- also katsutomo but that one’s more of fan-title-nickname rather than one he actually uses (as much as he came up with it himself tweeting it out like ‘you guys can call me katsutomo from now on if you like ^^’ before changing all his handles to that exact name). other than that, he’s a bit iffy about nicknames. he likes them if HE came up with them but giving him a nickname is usually Yikes City (unless he decides it’s cute and lets u do it, i guess) AGE & DOB / twenty-three & 6th november 1995 BIRTHPLACE / LA, USA ETHNICITY / japanese OCCUPATION / actor! he dabbles in modelling but it’s more of an ‘i got asked to model this thing bc i’m famous and they’re paying me (:’ type deal than it being something he’s actually personally into. whereas acting is his PASSION.

EARLY LIFE

to start with, let’s talk about his parents; his dad, born and raised in america, was an actor who eventually made a move into directing but ultimately committed suicide at age 38 & his mother, born and raised in japan, is a socialite who had started off as a teen idol in the 80s. his parents had also divorced when tomo was still young, a few years before his dad’s death, so he uses his mother’s surname. tomo does not get on with her but, thanks to the sense of guilt she’s raised into him, he can’t bring himself to cut her out of his life completely. 

basically, she’s got hang ups about the way her idol career ended so she kind of pushed tomo into the spotlight (which was fine for him because he wanted to act) but she grew envious of him after he got out of his teens and doesn’t like the decisions he makes. it’s a mutual issue. they mostly don’t get on because they can’t see eye to eye or really speak to each other at length without arguing.

his mum actually wanted him to break into acting when he was about nine because he’d already taken an interest in it by then. because her career had ended early, she took the approach of ‘he won’t be cute forever, what if we wait too long and he loses his chance?’ but his father, who had his own issues with the industry, strongly disagreed. this disagreement was one small contributing factor for their divorce; they had plenty of other issues as well but this didn’t help. their compromise was that tomo could wait until he was in his teens and this deal was mostly held up because tomo thought it was wrong to break a promise with a dead guy.

to be clear though, he’d probably have issues with his dad too if he were still alive (and he’s not exactly super fond of him as it is; he doesn’t hate him but he doesn’t like being asked about being his son). he was kind of a shit husband and, if it weren’t for the fact he didn’t see tomo as often as he’d like, he’d probably be a pretty distant father as well. his work was pretty much his main priority and he had a lot of personal issues that he took out on other people.

tomo grew up in LA for the most part but also spent a lot of time in japan, mostly jumping between osaka, where his mother’s family lived, and tokyo, where his mother’s friends and connections & his father’s extended family lived. the family stopped travelling quite as much after his father’s death and tomo’s reaching high school age. he grew up bilingual.

CAREER

he started acting professional when he was 16, mostly with a few smaller tv roles but he had good connections and was able to get a small but still substantial role in the film directed by a friend of his dad. his big break came at age 18 when he landed a leaded a role in the main cast of high school drama. it was exciting at first, being on tv and being famous, but he hated both the show and his character so the whole thing got tired fast. he wasn’t allowed to quick so he went out of his way to get himself fired. there’s a whole story behind that but i’ll leave that for the bio hehehe! (he wanted his character to get killed off bc he thought it’d be fun to act out but they wouldn’t let him do that ): boooo)

one of his biggest issues with the tv show was that he didn’t like being sold as a product / character that wasn’t anything like him. he hated being shown off as this squeaky clean teen heartthrob type and not being allowed to have his own emotions & tastes. he found it mentally exhausting and, since then, he’s had a lot of issues dealing with the contrast between how he is as a person and how he’s seen by the media. he tries not to admit it but he’s terrified of being swallowed up by what other people think of of him and losing track of himself in the process. it’s made him a little paranoid.

since then, he’s avoided tv as much as possible. he prefers working on films in general but he finds the idea of playing the same character for too long incredibly unappealing. he enjoys taking on new roles and absorbing himself in that character & sometimes to the point of bordering on obsession so playing the same role not only plays into his fears of people seeing him as someone he’s not (i.e; whatever character it is) but he’s also scared of seeing HIMSELF the wrong way. he needs the separation.

tomo likes working on indie films or more artistic/niche studio films most of all. the promotion cycle isn’t as intensive and the characters tend to appeal to him more. he has appeared in a few blockbuster-type films but mostly because his bosses have pushed him into it or he’s had to taken on a multiple film contract with a studio in order to land a role he really wanted. (he once got int trouble for calling his own character in a blockbuster a ‘dumb bitch’ on twitter)

the bratpack article had a pretty heavy impact on him. it kinda just spoke to all of his worst fears of not really being a Real Person or being Sold A Certain Way. he wanted to get away from it without having to actually stop working because it’s the one thing that really keeps him stable. his eventual means of escape was a role in a japanese film. he’s been living in japan since then, having moved there to specifically hunt out a film to work on, to get used to the japanese industry/prepare himself and then get to filming. he’s come to milan straight from tokyo, not having seen any of the other brats in person during that time, but he’s had time to relax. sort of. 

PERSONALITY

for the most part, tomo’s a friendly and energetic guy! (living up to his name a lil bit here bc tomo can mean ‘friend’ in japanese hehehe) when he’s at his best, he’s great company. he likes to stand out in a crowd, has a winning smile and enjoys a little bit of attention but also knows when to step back and look out for other people. he likes to play as hard as he works. the trouble is that, when things aren’t going well and he’s distressed, he tends to collapse in on himself. behaviour that seemed playful before looks straight up stupid and reckless instead. he’ll avoid attention but get frustrated because he craves it and do more reckless shit for attention. yet he’s pretty good at pretending shit’s fine, he’s still weirdly positive for a guy who feels all messed up — maybe he gets away with it because he’s a good actor. tomo has good days and bad days but there’s little warning as to which is which. it wasn’t always this way; it’s like something has broken his spirit. (i copied this from my app but asdghgsdf)

that’s why his archetype is The Contradiction,,,bc he doesn’t make any fuckin sense, woooeee! he’s this very bouncy, upbeat person and he likes having fun but he’s not really a very positive person in terms of outlook. he’s too high energy! his general vibe is everything’s going to shit but i’m going to have a good time anyway :D

actually, on that note...he IS :D

he doesn’t like crying in front of people which is rough bc he’s v emotional all the time. he’s a total crybaby when he’s drunk. if you drink with him, there WILL be a point at which you have to scoop him up off the floor because he’s found something over which to start weeping. OR he’ll end up calling you to panic about how he can’t find his way home, only for him to realise like 5 minutes later he’s phoning you from the steps outside his apartment building.

the kind of guy who can have a full-on breakdown in his room by himself and then just reappear & ask u if u wanna go for ice cream or smth bc he’s bored. like ok that’s done with, that already happened. it’s over.

anyw he’s always willing to give ppl advice if they’re feeling stuck. it’s not always great advice bc he’s basically shit at dealing with stuff himself. he’s not one of these ppl who gives great advice but can’t follow it himself, he’s more...he gives advice bc he’d feel bad if he didn’t TRY so the advice itself definitely varies in quality. he means well though.

don’t watch funny films with him because he will do one of either things; 1) not find it funny and sit through the whole thing like : | or 2) he’ll find it so funny that he’ll end up on the floor at some point. there’s no in between. it’s all or nothing with this fucker.

he really likes cute shit. he’s rich so there’s nothing stopping him from buying those overpriced limited edition hello kitty goods.

let’s not talk about how he enjoys acting bc it’s an escape where he can be Somebody Else but he can’t cope with himself being promoted as something that doesn’t feel like Tomo. that’s its own mess. i’m p sure he’d just unravel if anybody said anything about it.

OTHER STUFF

his hair is currently bright red. it’s a recent change but he was like ‘uhhhh if i’m going on this trip, i’m making a visual statement’ and that was that. he likes to go for more interesting colours when he’s not filming anything because it’s the only time he really gets to. i mean, he still has dyed hair in a lot of his films but it’ll usually be brown or blonde or something else more ‘realistic’.

tomo cares a LOT about the way he dresses and styles himself. he’ll probably complain if he has to do a promo/magazine shoot and he doesn’t like the outfit he’s been given. it doesn’t actually help him half the time and he just gets told to shut up but it’s the PRINCIPLE of it !!!!!!!!

he posts on his finsta probably way too often but that’s because his public social media is pretty filtered, given that he’s caused fusses on social media before. there have been multiple cases of him having to delete tweets and instagram posts because somebody in charge decided he was pushing the limit just a little too much and, granted, most of it wouldn’t be seen as risky (bc it’s mostly utterly pointless stuff that gets flagged up as risky, e.g; ‘i need to pee and i can’t find a bathroom. death is coming for me.’) if he hadn’t publicly complained about the tv show that made him famous several times on twitter but he did do that so, y’know, he’s seen as a liability. the unfortunate outcome of this is that his finsta story is often littered with fairly inane thoughts.

he’s not very good at watching himself in films. it depends on the film and he can do it but uhhhh let’s just say he once watched the one horror film he was in at the cinema (and didn’t like most of it bc he’s a wuss about that sort of thing) but he laughed during his own death scene. there were tears in his eyes. real tears.

he doesn’t like dating because...well, he likes the IDEA of it but he’s the type to really fall for someone and BASICALLY? he’s scared of being dumped! he’s a bright & appealing personality with just enough edge to balance it out but he’s a bit of an emotional screwball and getting people interested is easier than keeping them interested, leading to mixed experiences with dating so he’s settled for sleeping around a little instead. oh well, whatever works! (does it actually work? shhhh it’s a secret...)

he’s very much involved in the party scene, whatever country he’s in. it’s not something he talks about much (privately, i mean, bc DUH he doesn’t say it publicly) but he doesn’t exactly avoid drugs in anyway (code for...yeah, he’s done stuff). it’s all casual, he says, but he still does it. he does smoke cigarettes though and he’s a little dependent on that.

also i guess he got involved in that kinda thing deliberately because he wants to distance himself from the clean-cut, shiny heartthrob pretty boy image as much as possible. eventually, it just became a natural way of de-stressing and dealing with the constant frustration of his career. the unfortunate consequence of that is that he’s now got a bit of a Bad Boy/Wild Child image and he’s not entirely sure he likes that either. (the shift in image also means that some journalists will talk about him as though he’s ‘gone off the rails’ and, yeah, he hates that as well)

[obscuniverse]

Obscu comments: Ready Player One, Part 1.

This is @derinthemadscientist‘s fault. Chapter 0

“I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons“ Okay you’re either a grizzled old veteran with an actual hideout who watches cartoons because they can, or an awkward child who calls their room a ‘hideout’.

“globally networked“ unlike all other MMOS, apparently.

“At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death.“ Awkward child it is.

“so the unwashed masses“ Could you maybe try harder to sound aloof and superior? I’m just not getting your disdainful sneering coming through as clear as I’d like.

I’m all of three paragraphs in and here and I can feel the neckbeard.

“But that was the rub. James Halliday had no heirs.“ And if this was set in a feudal monarchy, that would be an issue.

You’re gonna make this an issue, aren’t you Ernest?

“He’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in self-imposed isolation, during which time—if the rumors were to be believed —he’d gone completely insane.“ So the board of directors voted to remove him as CEO of the company like 14 years ago, right? Because massive global corporate juggernauts that have somehow established a telecommunications monopoly are not run by one person pedalling a bike to power a single computer in their own locked room.

You do know that, right?

Right, Ernest?

That’s okay though, I mean Halliday is probably having fun willing away his personal fortune.

“had everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in their cornflakes” is this entire book going to read like a forum post? It is, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Ernest?

“His video message was actually a meticulously constructed short film titled Anorak’s Invitation“ A quick google tells me that, aside from being a kind of jacket, ‘Anorak’ is British slang for a person with obsessive niche interests. The global billionaire’s Final Message is basically entitled ‘Letter from a huge fuckin weeb’.

Also, how else would it be constructed? What purpose does ‘meticulous’ serve here? Is that unusual for a global tech billionaire? Was it especially meticulous? What is this description contrasting with, Ernest? Your own writing?

I’m going to sail right past the part where he had global admin rights to what’s literally the internet despite being AWOL for 15 years and this didn’t concern anybody at all. Let’s just say he ‘built a backdoor’ into it that has somehow gone unnoticed for several decades in a system that would be continually maintained and updated by thousands of sysadmins. Okay, it’s fine, he’s the creator of the core system. I’ll suspend my disbelief that his personal backdoor didn’t end up in the bin every time they upgraded something in the core build. Maybe it did and he rebuilt it, stealthily, all over again. Fine, but I’ve got my eye on you, Ernest.

“surpassing even the Zapruder film“ Just call it the Kennedy Assassination tape so nobody has to google it, Ernest.

Ernest, buddy, why am I seeing an ast-- oh, it’s a footnote. You’ve written your prologue chapter with fucking footnotes. Could you not figure out how to write more words with the rest of the words, Ernest?

My. God. There are seven footnotes. Of them, six say some version of “this was photoshopped in from an 80′s movie to confirm that this was, in fact from the 80′s. Did I mention the 80′s?” and the seventh is “this is a photo of the Rich Man of the Internet from the 80′s”. I really feel like Ernest has set up a much more interesting story and then elected to ignore it in favour of writing the gamergate manifesto of a 16-year-old boy. There’s apparently a nuclear war going on in the background, and one nerd somehow became the God-King of the Internet despite the fact that literally any first-world government would immediately try to seize this kind of centralised infrastructure away from him. Does this mean governments are a thing of the past? Is this entire story taking place in some kind of children’s creche in the Shadowrun continuity? I have so many questions, and none of them are about this book.

So God-King Jimmy is a 40-something-old man dancing in a re-edited scene of an 80′s highschool movie dance. I don’t know why it takes six sentences to say this, except to say that he danced flawlessly, and also:

“But Halliday has no dance partner. He is, as the saying goes, dancing with himself.” Is he now, Ernest? Is he really? To be fair to Ernest, I also wrote like this. In highschool. While desperately trying to inflate an essay to reach the wordcount.

“A few lines of text appear briefly at the lower left-hand corner of the screen, listing the name of the band, the song’s title, the record label, and the year of release, as if this were an old music video airing on MTV: Oingo Boingo, “Dead Man’s Party,” MCA Records, 1985.” We know how music videos work, Ernest.

“He breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer, and begins to read“. Is that what he’s doing by addressing the viewer, Ernest?  I’m so glad that you clarified that for me, Ernest, that when a character is breaking that fourth wall that they are explicitly breaking the fourth wall. What would we do without your propensity for re-describing your own descriptions, Ernest?

“I, James Donovan Halliday, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.…” *record scratch* I’m not sure this is legally binding. I mean you’ve gone through a truly painstaking amount of effort to describe how heavily-edited this video is. Maybe Emperor Jimmy is fraudulently edited in? Maybe that’s not a binding legal will? Maybe if he’s been a missing person for 15 years then he can’t be assumed to be of sound mind just because he suddenly shows up and says he is? Okay, maybe it’s just seemed like he’s been gone to the general public rather than the C-level of his company, who are somehow okay with the stock crash this is going to cause. “My entire estate, including a controlling share of stock in my company“ Hold up, buttercup. I have exhausted my supply of willing suspension of disbelief, Ernest.

There is just so much wrong with this entire premise. The awol hermit somehow retains control of The Internet. An entire corporate conglomerate and every country that may or may not exist is either okay with this or has no recourse to do anything about it somehow. Not a single one of the thousands of people who maintain the backend bothers to comb through the code to find where this ‘easter egg’ has been slipped in. You know about code, right Ernest? I mean I take it you’ve at least seen The Matrix, yeah? Remember how people sitting outside the matrix can scan through the code, even in that hellscape where they’re not even the ones that control it? Sure, OASIS probably isn’t open-source... but how many people do you think have actual backend access? Spoiler: It’s not “Just Emperor Jimmy”, Ernest. Nobody at that company needs to play through what I can only imagine is a painstakingly convoluted puzzle quest that you’re about to explain to me in several levels of unnecessary detail.

Look, this entire premise reminds me of Breaking Bad. Not any of the good bits, mind you but the bit where the entire plot could only take place in the USA because in the rest of the developed world Walter White just goes to a fucking doctor and gets treatment for his cancer because healthcare actually exists.

That’s what this is like. The number of arbitrarily nonsensical things that must be true for this premise to work is... Incredibly distracting. Nothing about this is a reasonable situation. Nothing that you’ve established about this world suggests that anything about this makes even a little bit of sense. Now I’m aware that ‘eccentric millionaire leaves money in some kind of convoluted contest’ is a trope and I remember some very silly 90′s movies based on this premise but come on Ernest. There’s a much more interesting novel hiding between the lines of the premise you’ve ham-fistedly implied just so you can list for me the brands of 1980′s televisions. Out of curiousity, I googled every person who wrote the advance praise comments inside the cover. I had a sneaking suspicion about the demographics of people who enjoy this book. Here’s a brief summary (since Ernest loves lists so much) 1. White American Male, Age 48

2. White American Male, Age 47

3. White American Male, Age 52

4. White American Male, Age 68

5. White American Male, Age 49

6. White American Male, Age 40

7. White American Male, Age 41

I then googled Ernest, an action I deeply regret. Demographically speaking, let’s have a look: White American Male, Age 46.

I’m detecting a pattern is what I’m saying here. I’m only halfway through the prologue, mind you, and perhaps this really picks up but I feel like I absolutely did not need to be told the brand of the television that Young God-Emperor Jimmy had his Atari 2600 into. Nor did I need to be told that his Atari 2600 was, indeed, an Atari 2600 about 10 words before God-Emperor Jimmy then actually says that it’s an Atari 2600. Maybe this book is for people who get a real kick out of seeing the words ‘Atari 2600′. People who are (and I’m just throwing wild, unsubstantiated theories out here) about 40+, white, male, and American?

I’m going to stop now because I’ve started writing my thesis just to procrastinate from having to read the second half of the prologue to this book.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

A Defence of Spider-Girl

Spider-Girl by Tom Defalco. It irritates me how the people who worship this book just assumed that it was continuously on the brink of cancellation either because people weren't giving it a chance, or the word hadn't gotten out enough, or that Marvel wasn't doing enough to promote it. Actually, I think the sales numbers showed that people were giving it a chance and were dropping it, I don't think there was a problem with people being unaware that the book existed (I knew about it before I even started reading comics), and Marvel gave this book way more second chances than any sensible company would give to such a proven financial failure. For me, the problem is that Tom Defalco has not evolved his writing style since the 1980s. There are plenty of writers from that era, like Peter David, who have managed to keep up with modernizing their voice. When I read X-Factor, the characters act and sound like they could be real people, so I can get attached to them. But when I read something by Defalco, it's all stilted 80s dialogue and tedious captions. It makes me want to claw my eyes out. I don't mind dated styles when they appear in comics that were actually produced back in the day, but a book in the 2000s should seem like a book from the 2000s. 

CrazyChris 

Let’s talk about how imbecilic and ignorant this is shall we?

  The most important thing to bear in mind is the series during it’s early years in the way it was written was NOT utilizing an unevolved writing style.

 The book was created in 1998 and became an ongoing series in 1999.

 People forget this but the decompressed, omniscient narrator-lite, no exposition per issue, written for the trade writing style of superhero comic books was NOT the norm at the turn of the millennium.

 Oh it existed and was used in certain places back then and even long before that point.

 But it was categorically not the standard practice of the day.

 When Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man book came out his writing style was actually ABNORMAL to the way most comic books were written. As he and the USM book rose is profile along with other writers who also used similar style (like Morrisson) that eventually BECAME the norm. But it was absolutely not for the first few years of Spider-Girl.

 Furthermore it is NOT the case that ANY given comic book series MUST conform to the writing styles of the day.

 Ultimate Spider-Man itself rejected that notion and did something different that was much more realistic and applied that to the Ultimate Universe at large. It was done because the intention for that alternate universe was for it to be deliberately more realistic, grounded and frankly cynical.

 Spider-Girl as it’s own sandbox alternate universe series was also at liberty to adopt it’s own style and opted to maintain an older and more traditional sensibility  to go along with the MC2 universe’s overall more traditional view of superheroes and superhero storytelling.

 Then you have the fact that the dialogue honestly is only stilted when delivering exposition. Which the comic did because unlike crappy modern 2000s comics the series was actually written with the intention that every comic is someone’s first and as such there was an obligation to fill them in.

 Now sure there are recap pages, but frankly internal story exposition is far more effective as it comes from the characters themselves, creating a better connection between  them and the readers, developing the characters somewhat as you don’t just find out what’s been happening recently but a specific POV of said events and overall making it feel more engaging.

 The omniscient narrator was also something that Spider-Girl eventually dropped altogether only using it like I said during it’s early years when it wasn’t ‘unfashionable’ and then later on sporadically.

 The omniscient narrator isn’t even an inherently bad storytelling tool within comic books. It can allow for quick details to pepper a scene and give backstory which makes it mean more without diverting the entire pacing or flow of the story towards that purpose. Check out these scenes from Amazing Spider-Man #315, Spider-Girl #18 and Amazing Spider-Girl #11.

  See people forget this but ‘modern standards’ do not inherently mean BETTER standards. Back in the 1990s the ‘modern standards’ demanded that this constituted acceptable body proportions.

Or that this was kewl

Or a more recent example, this scene from Invincible Iron Man #9

 And then a letter’s page touching on the page from Invincible Iron Man #10.

 See that?

 That is Brian Michael Bendis (the guy who’s 100% the most responsible for influencing the modern style of comic book storytelling) and the people editing him saying deciding that because of ‘modern standards’ it’s better that Spider-Man swing around Tokyo and drop clunky expositional dialogue to himself whilst speaking out loud rather than just have the more organic internal.

 Think about that.

 Modern standards demand that this modern comic book be written in this scene in a clunkier way, that is less engaging between readers and the character and rejects the use of one of the advantages comic books have over other mediums.

 If that’s what ‘modern standards’ dictate then ‘modern standards’ suck shit and should be ignored.

 Moving on Spider-Gilr’s style was written and aimed at young readers on the mass market much like traditional Archie comic books whch thereby invited that style.

 Spider-Girl did incredibly well as digests sold to that audience on that market as opposed to the insular direct market which demanded it adopt crappy written for older audiences used to buying comics written for the trade.

 Basically it was more or less a 1960s-80s (eh, maybe 90s) comic book published in a market which moved on and hadn’t existed in a long time; and it knew that. It was a complete niche and could’ve potentially updated it’s writing style but that was not really the point of it; to do that would kind of take away from it’s identity. Heck it was one of the relatively few Marvel comics in the mid 2000s which made a point to NOT be decompressed and WAS aimed at the younger audcience Marvel claimed they wanted but never tried legitimately reaching out to.

Now look I personally prefer a writing style that is a BIT more up to date than DeFalco’s Style on Spider-Girl, but the modern style we have now is utterly weaker than the styles of yesteryear. Like I said when your standards are saying it’s bad to go inside a character’s head you’ve spiralled into madness.

 Then you have the bullshit about ‘Marvel gave it plenty of second chances and it was afinancial FAILURE!’

 1)      Marvel are jackasses who place a book’s success entirely upon single issue sales and never count trade or digital sales (and Spider-Girl was one of the earliest digital comics ever)

2)      Marvel are jackasses who are shitty at promotion and did not give Mayday half the promotion she deserved. Spider-Gwen and Silk got more promotion despite one being a near universally panned character at the time of her creation and both being far weaker characters and series than Spider-Girl creatively speaking

3)      Like I said it was a solid seller in digest format

4)      It wasn’t given second chances out of charity it was given second chances because it kept DEFYING sales expectations! Idiotic marketing people within Marvel kept saying it should be cancelled at X point or Y point because it’s ‘expected’ it’s sales would dive below a certain threshold and it didn’t

5)      Marvel’s criteria for financial success is idiotic and unreflective of the modern market place. Their cancellation threshold is way too high and not adjusted on the curve of series like Spider-Girl. Alternate universe, all ages comics with female leads (in the 2000s, which is NOT like being a female lead TODAY)

 Finally...I’m sorry...the omniscient narrator and stilted dialogue = this comic is shitty?

 Yeah because...a comic book should solely be judged on that I guess.

 The lead character’s personality and character development, the relationships between the supporting cast, the battles with the villains, the general substance of the stories?

 Fuck that I guess. All that matters is HOW they express the sentiments they are feelings.

 This was an incredibly shallow assessment of the series.

But it’s not really surprising coming from a guy who in other comments said 

The Lee/Ditko run holds up but Gerry Conway’s ASM run sucks because the presence of the Kangaroo inherently negates any meaningful emotional character drama I guess.

Carnage is better than Venom because he has no motivations therefore the motivations cannot be stupid

Dan Slott might be the best Doctor Octopus writer ever

[devilishdewitt]

“Real Variety Show”, April 2019

Ah, dearest darling, hello!

Missed me?)

I feel like exploring new territory, care to join me?

A new format, to be precise.

I’m gonna call this…Short’n’Sweet.

First things first, the most important part of any review I shall ever write:

~The Eternal Disclaimer~

It is hereby declared that this little nook of the world wide web shall be devoted to the praise & critique of the art of Burlesque, specifically in Russia.

Let it also be known that I am first and foremost a benevolent force, and every single criticism is documented solely for the purpose of evolution, growth and inspiration, darling.

Never forget - it is fantastic that the burlesque scene in Russia has grown so much in the last few years. Brava, ladies! As a fact and a statement, it is absolutely fabulous.

However, I volunteer to wear the heavy crown of expertise, having seen many a show in many a place, and having a keen eye for detail and a heart hungry for that wow factor.

I always come with an open heart, am quite easily entertained, and know how hard the craft is - I can overlook many a fault when there’s stage presence, charisma and that fire of passion.

Oh, and self-irony.

All is sickly without self-irony.

Now, onwards! To fabulousness!

As we’re all busy, busy bees, my darlings - and I have already pirouetted my penmanship talent in before you in quite an unapologetic way, I shall indeed keep this short’n’sweet.

Though there’s not that much sweetness in this edition…

Leelah Zharkaya & Lyalya Bezhetskaya have now ventured into the tumultuous waters of dark cabaret, creating  the “Real Variety Show”. 

Same team, new...concept?

Being an avid admirer of the genre, I’ve been keeping an eye on its progress in Moscow and I must say, it’s not quite as fruitful as one could hope.

The Dark Cabaret Festival did not live up to expectations - mostly because of the confusion of the producers. It seemed like only 2 out of 10 organisers actually understood what Dark Cabaret is all about.

Well, in this case it’s more like 1/10.

I keep wondering why Dark Cabaret is having such a tough time in Moscow. It would seem that we have the perfect formula for it - the layers of natural national darkness, self-irony, a plague-feast mentality…what are we lacking?

Good taste, perhaps, and the understanding of the tender, intricate nuances.

Scroll up, darling, and take a look at the poster. It does indeed convey the atmosphere quite accurately.

The venue? Tolerable.

Imagine that you walk in, make your way to the auditorium, and find yourself encountering a lady singing with a noose. Singing with a noose? Kitty Orlova is uber-talented, and the noose did no one any harm (I hope), but somehow it just fell flat. 

What was the intention? This is left unclear.

The story. The Narrator is the son of a legendary circus performer who mysteriously disappeared

(you’ll never guess who plays her) 

(hint - it’s the director). 

He takes us down memory lane, showing the quirks, kinks and kindness of each new character (usually Uncle Something or Aunt Someone).  

Why not, darling, why the hell not.

This time round The Narrator was actually tolerable. As if he found a muscle of sincerity and tenderness that worked with the (extremely poorly written) story. In fact, he had moments of sheer brilliance when ad-libbing with the audience. He is no doubt a talented fellow, perhaps he just needs to find his director.

It must be said - Leelah’s creativity is ingenious at times. Some of her acts have incredible and well-executed ideas, a coldness that makes German divas of the 30’s envious and true emotion to captivate the audience. But there is something deeply off-putting about 80% of her stage presence, a nerve that adds a tinge demanding adoration…and not in an exciting way. At times there’s something porcelain about her, and at other times - something so self-absorbed, you’re not sure why you were invited.

Bezhetskaya, on the other hand, is warm. She adores (most of) her audience and the audience responds. Some of her ideas are fantastic, and you can see her beautiful attention to details, humour, playfulness, enjoyment of her own body and craft…but then what leaves a sour taste? Somehow the atmosphere just doesn’t come together. It sometimes feels as if she pretends to be something she is not - but what is this object of pretence?

Whoever put that wig and costume on Din-Din is either phenomenally cruel or innocently blind. But if they are blind, all of the people around them, who can in fact see, are phenomenally cruel. Give the girl a break!

Xana. Brilliance. Her Harlequin act is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Marrying acrobatics, heartfelt narrations and a bombacious attitude makes her an absolute feast for the eyes, mind and senses.

Now, I am quite biased about the poet Zkhous. I must admit I love him fondly, since the Dark Cabaret festivals! As always, he was he dear neurotic self and the poetry was as crude as it was lovely.

Orlova, Chess Queen, Lipsync?! What?! On a stage as tiny as this?! With her gorgeous voice?

Also, this act always confuses much, There’s so much going on, she always gets lost in the multitude of actions and doesn’t actually breathe in the story.

Janina Barabash…the voice gimmick was good.

That’s all.

That Silent Movie act…I don’t even know what it was. She’s surrounded by experienced mentors…couldn’t anyone ask her what the hell she was doing? Amoebing around with a velvet ribbon…okay.

Elisha the poodle! Excellent. As always. A story about purpose told through the sex appeal of a Furry. Elisha certainly found his niche and excels at it.

Marilyn Monroe’s “Daddy”. A song CREATED for an enticing act.

Apologies, my vocabulary completely abandons me here. This was unapologetically dreadful. I won’t even bore myself with analysing it. Amateur at its worst.

Madame Irenushkin as the trench-coated shooter…triumph of vulgarity. Shooting at the audience is mauvais-ton in any professional theatre, but if only that was the only sin…One word - sloppy.

Oh, how the audience perked up at the magical word Шашлыки (barbecue)!

KittenTits McGee! Shaving act! Sheer GENIUS. That girl is a marvel and I’ll never tire repeating it. The music, the rhythm, the concept, the layered references - FLAWLESS.

If I’m being nit-picky, the only thing I’d add is playing the pain of epilation more precisely - no one can escape the 4-second agony when that wax comes off.

Agneta Lincheskvaya, a rare guest in Moscow, made an appearance as Aunt Blanche with her “Streetcar named Desire” act. She is unapologetically her own brand and it works - her mix of confidence and fragility, her unique features, her dance skills and her gorgeous depth made the performance stand out. Enticing.

Long Live Aristocratic Erotism!

“Oh, I know! Let’s take the backing track of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and write a whole new song about SHOES!”

Well…hm.

Beautiful neon concept by Lyalya. Gorgeous self-irony.

But Kitty and Lyalya had ZERO chemistry. Kitty was just…standing there, by the side, kind of out of the lights, singing a song with very mediocre lyrics, seemingly uncomfortable.

Why must it be so?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - endlessly re-playing the most banal gender stereotypes is exhausting. Re-affirming society of it’s deepest, roughest shortcomings (especially in Russia), is part of reason why society is in a state it’s in.

The final thought was poetic - “you must treasure hearts”. If only someone for a second thought of taking care of our audience hearts…

And, as always, the bow and the dreaded kiss.

Ladies, no one enjoys it apart from a few troubled, greasy men in the audience and you (which I doubt). A hint of a chance of a kiss would be more in tune with the nature of Burlesque, Dark Cabaret and the gorgeous culture of variety show.

 Subtlety.

Teasing…

But I guess it’s all a matter of taste, isn’t it?

PS

The next instalment of this groups creativity is called “Vampires on the beach” and is announced as “the best HElloween in town”. 

I’m afraid the only word that comes to mind is...yikes.

Though the artwork is excellent.

PPS

Curious how this “short’n’sweet” idea actually turned into a decent sized text. Apologies! My muse could not be tamed, darling!

[nerdarchy-blog]

Your stalwart old lady grognard finished her first fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign last night! And my character survived!

First, a little backstory. A little more than a year ago, I read about Nerdarchy on Facebook and watched some of their videos. I learned they were right across the river in New Jersey! At the time, I hadn’t played (as a player) a D&D game in decades, and I’d never played 5E D&D. However, the popularity (it seemed everyone was playing it) and my desire to play D&D again caused me to reach out to the Nerdarchy guys. But how to make myself stand out from the thousands of emails, comments and fan mail they received each day? Hmmm. I know! I’ll rattle off my gaming resume! (TSR, GW, etc.) And they responded!

header1

After some initial texts and such I was invited to a game forming that would be played once a month. I’d never met any of these people, and for all I knew Nerdarchist Ted (who was hosting) was actually a serial killer who had chained Nerdarchist Dave in his basement to make the videos. (Is Nerdarchist Dave blinking “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code in that video?) In any case, I drove from the Philly ‘burbs to meet the guys and sit in on a game in an edition that was far different than the one I knew. Damn millennials. Get off my lawn.

Fortunately, the other players as well as Ted (henceforth DM) were very patient with me as I fumbled through character creation, etc., and humored me when I insisted in *gasp!* actually rolling my character stats instead of taking the standard frame thing. *clutches pearls!* The rest of the group looked on bemused as I rolled the 4d6 method from ages past, with the condition that I get one shot at this and must accept the character as rolled…

7 11 16 13 18 16 (not in that order)

Holy crab! Best character I’d ever rolled! I, of course, played it cool, extolling the virtues of the Old Ways while, inside, celebrating like crazy. As it stood, I had the best stats in the party. So of course I decided to play…

A cleric.

I was going to play a human cleric (WTF is a “warforged” anyway?) but Dave suggested an aasimar. A what??? That’s a human with divine blood who gets really powerful boosts and stuff to start, and progressively gets more powerful. Hmm… cleric with angel, I mean “celestial” blood? I could work that. I’d heard 5E D&D had wildly overpowered characters but… wow. The DM allowed us use of D&D Beyond, which was an immense help to this novice. I found a suitable picture online that fit the character description.

So was born unto the table, Emerald of the Light. She was a Light Domain cleric (duh) as this fit the idea I had for her. She was going to be young, drop dead gorgeous and very good at ministering to the flock and converting others to the Light. The DM even allowed me to design her deity, whom I named Selah, commonly the known as “the Light.” I designed the priesthood, the paladins (the Service of the Light,) the temples, relics, etc. In addition, I designed a beggar deity in the pantheon: NohWhey.

The rest of the group were a motley crew (cue ’80s music) and we spent the first session deciding on our group backstory (we started at 3rd level), and between the DM’s two campaign ideas. We even were able to name the big bad — a generic wizard name from my old campaigns: Zoltar. Our group named itself the Seven Who Stayed (as we were the only seven desperate enough for a job to stay for that first quest, which was to rescue a family from a cult of goblins who worshiped an owlbear. It got far more complicated, but that’s the basics). It bears mentioning I was the only female character, and the only woman at the table.

In March 2019 we began the campaign. Over time we fought giant stirges, settled a town dispute without bloodshed (thanks to my… Charisma and Wisdom) encountered Ipskig Fizzletop, genasi, an invincible undead dwarf, a booger flying across the table and landing on my character sheet (really!), various monsters made from pieces of multiple beasts (that was Zoltar’s bag — making combination monsters that steadily became more Lovecraftian and bizarre) including a tentacled two headed T-Rex, got gold teeth for a shriveled goblin shrunken head, discussed scaly lizard nutsacks, traveled through multiple planes and, in the end, saved the city-state. During that time, Emerald healed the party while dispensing Holy Justice. Oh, and she never died.  Her stats at the end?

7 STR, 11 INT, 16 CON, 13 INT, 20 WIS, 18 CHA

The players (I’m not naming them as I don’t have permission) were wonderful roleplayers, much to my character’s chagrin. They did so many frustratingly stupid things that were so in character I was fascinated. Emerald was often the straight woman to their jokes. I don’t think we had a true party leader but the group often did what I suggested. Not always. Sometimes.

Okay, I loved the campaign itself. Now… I’m removing my emotion hat and am now looking at the system objectively from the point of view of a person who’s been playing D&D for over 40 years.

Pass the Geritol.

I’d heard from many Players of Experience that the new edition was very simplified, didn’t resemble the original game in most ways and had overpowered characters.

They are correct. Aside from the monsters and the class names, there really isn’t much of the original game left. Character generation is oversimplified to the point of being generic, as are character hit points and experience (your characters gain a level every two sessions — no experience points). Also, occasionally when levelling, a player could add two points to an ability score (or a feat). (Max: 20.)

Math has been completely eliminated from the game. The other players were again shocked I always insisted on rolling my hit points when we leveled instead of taking the average. Usually it worked out in my favor (praise the Light!) but not always. In the end, Emerald’s hit points were 10 points higher than if I’d taken the average (plus Constitution bonus).

Okay, even with the generic stats the characters are far more powerful than back in the day. They start with feats, which give them incredible abilities. The races also have jaw dropping abilities to start as well. I can’t speak for the other classes but the cleric spells and abilities were also incredible. By the end my 10th level cleric was throwing fireballs (previously a wizard only spell) while flying over the battlefield with wings of light created by divine power, and had a 10% chance of calling for Divine Intervention once a week! And I was far from the strongest character in the party! (Best spellcaster though. Hee hee.)

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Zolar, the big bad of Nerdarchist Ted’s campaign

The terrible two-tentacled T-Rex

The DM compensated by throwing monsters (like the aforementioned T.T. T-Rex) that we really had no business defeating. Zoltar ended up as a lich with two beholder eye stalks (damn clever if you ask me, and yes, the DM converted the model!), which was immune to fire. Also to compensate, magic items were exceedingly rare for the players, but not for the monsters who, when defeated, often had their weapons vanish or such.

Combat with the large group sometimes dragged, as it will with a large group, but… I felt it lacked the flavor of previous editions. Weapons did damage, but were really interchangeable. Emerald’s mace may as well have been a broad sword. Or a wooden club. While slightly more complex, the old versions’ damage by weapon type and bonus/penalties vs. certain armors really added to the flavor of the game. Oh, and forced the player to *lightning and thunder crash* do math!

In the new edition’s favor is that with all the computer programs, companies churning out amazing play aids (like Nerdarchy’s Out of the Box Encounters) and YouTube videos helping people learn the game, as well as just videos of people… just …playing… zzzzzz… Oh, sorry… really helps.

D&D was definitely a niche thing back in the day: nerds and outcasts only, even during the heyday of the early ’80s. Now it’s chic and all the cool kids are playing it. Is this because it’s so streamlined? Probably. It plays like an online video game, which I’m sure helps with recruitment.

Older editions were more complex, required math and deductive reasoning (due to the books being poorly organized in the original edition — yes, I’m looking at you, first edition DM’s Guide!), but had an air of wonder. Everything was new then and as a player one felt like part of something special. I felt that way working for TSR in the ’90s, even though the company was becoming very corporate. Fifth edition is falling into the trap that second edition did — there’s so much material and rules out there that things are becoming convoluted and hard to follow, even with computer assistance.

Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe part of my memories of first and second editions are tinted with the golden light of memory and nostalgia — of old friends, great adventures played in unfinished basements or cramped cinder block dorm rooms.

I DMed a second edition campaign briefly last spring, which ended when one of the players (a Gen Z) said the game was boring, and two of the players went back to fifth edition gaming. The scenario wasn’t boring, she said (Keep on the Borderlands, if you’re curious) but the system was. I was deflated. And hurt. Took it personally.

I’m not here to piss in anyone’s corn flakes — if you enjoy fifth edition then play it! Enjoy the camaraderie, enjoy the settings and making the DM curse when your unexpected action completely derails their plans (that hasn’t changed in any edition!). I’ll play if offered a seat (which as a transgender woman is rare — but that’s another column for later) sure. But to DM?

My heart will always be in the early editions.

Get off my lawn! I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids! *passes out Werther’s Original candies.*

Be well!

With her first 5E D&D campaign complete now that Nerdarchist Ted's game ended, a longtime player compares the experience to earlier editions of the game Your stalwart old lady grognard finished her first fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign last night! And my character survived!

[viralhottopics]

Six-month-long stretches of seven-day work weeks and looming deadlines: What it takes to be a strategy guide author

Image: Christopher Mineses/mashable

Ancient map-making required mastery over the disciplines of mathematics and astronomy, the means and courage to venture into dangerous uncharted territories, inhuman patience, artistry and attention to detail, and the ability to perch on the cutting edge of every new technological advancement your cultures most talented minds could muster. David Hodgsons job is arguably more difficult and certainly more tedious.

Hodgson makes video game strategy guides which, much like ancient cartography, is a lost art of primitive methods and painstaking processes.

Not that Hodgson would complain. He started working at gaming magazines in the 90s, but was always drawn back to the world of strategy guides. Currently working on contract for Prima Games, the largest strategy guide publisher in the US, he gets access to some of the biggest games in the world months before the public. And he slaves over their every detail, spending months and months gorging on each new obsession.

I think it’s one of those jobs that you kind of have to pinch yourself, he told me in his workshop a converted guest house behind his Spanish-style Southern California home. The room is equipped with comfortable seating, a large wraparound desk housing three monitors, countless books most of them strategy guides lining floor to ceiling shelves on one wall, and various macabre knick-knacks, from Lovecraftian posters to the crown jewel: Two replica Egyptian sarcophagi flanking the flatscreen like golden guardian deities.

It’s one of those jobs that you kind of have to pinch yourself.

Exact statistics about strategy guide sales are closely guarded info, Douglas Walsh, another longtime strategy guide author, told me over Twitter. As you can imagine, the sales today have consolidated around a few big hits: Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, things like that, he said. [Sales] have also dropped off considerably, especially for shooters. The Call of Duty and Gears of War books sell a fraction of the copies they used to. But a big hit, especially as a Limited Edition hardcover, can crack Amazon’s top 25. Fighting game books in particular (and Skyrim, GTA, etc.) have even cracked the top five.

Despite those isolated successes, the number of guides produced each year is down along with sales to about 60 every year, half of what the figure was in the PS2 era, Walsh said.

Like vinyl records, the strategy guide as we once knew it all but died as a medium with the internets rise, transforming by necessity into a niche market for hardcore collectors and hobbyists. Hodgson said hes one of around a dozen remaining strategy guide authors.

In the middle of the afternoon, the rays of golden California sunlight barely grazed the exposed rafters of Hodgsons lair. He wore a black t-shirt with the words Who are you a ghost of? a reference to his brother Ian Hodgsons experimental musical act, Moon Wiring Club, described on its own labels website as confusing English electronic music. Hodgson often speaks wistfully of his succulents, and hes frequently sarcastic, though in the dry English way that you barely register after a while.

Each guide Hodgson authors is a massive undertaking involving a six-month-long stretch of seven-day work weeks and looming deadlines, gargantuan organizational conundrums, word counts and page limits, two-week spans of 12-hour days spent hunched over monitors far from home in a game studios back room, trying to beat every quest in a 100-hour RPG. Hes been doing this long and well enough with somewhere over 100 guides to his name (he lost count around 80) that he gets to pick what games he tackles. He mostly chooses massive role-playing games like The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4, simply because he loves diving deep into overwhelmingly huge projects. These are the types of games that seem to get more complex with every release. Each new feature Hodgson must chronicle and quadruple-check is another grey hair in his tangled beard.

I have a very understanding wife, Hodgson said.

***

The process of creating a video game strategy guide is shockingly complex. Look, for example, at what it takes just to make the hundreds of maps that go into the average guide on which Hodgson works.

In the old days the 90s hed draw maps freehand on graph paper and hand them over to a designer. But the games back then were significantly smaller than the ones he writes guides for now.

He starts by doing fly-overs in a special debug version of the game that still contains developer tools, taking screenshots of every single inch of the games exterior locations. In the case of Fallout 4, that included 3.82 square miles of irradiated wilderness and crumbling city streets.

What I’ve done is I’ve flown over the entire tiles of the map, multiple times, inch by inch. I do a north-south pass, I do an east-west pass, over the course of a week, he said. This isn’t playing the game. This is me floating above each sector in the game and plotting it out.

This isn’t playing the game. This is me floating above each sector in the game and plotting it out.

The game wont be out for several months, and its still very much in development, which unfortunately means that dozens of the points he and his assistants and co-authors have plotted in these exteriors could change.

Then you have 500 maps that need to be drawn of all of the different interiors in the game, he continued. You have to figure out first how many interiors there are in the game. So you go to every location in the game, and you see how big it is, then you estimate it, then you tell [strategy guide maker] Prima, ‘It’s going to be about this big. Find more mappers please.

At this point, hes still far from done. I’ve figured out how many primary locations there are. I’ve then figured out how many secondary locations there are that don’t appear on your worldmap. Those are just like, Oh, it’s a shed. Does it appear as an icon on the world map? No. Shit. Well, it has to go in the guide, he said. I’m talking about stuff that isn’t even a quest-related location. I’m talking about a pond with some barrels in it. Maybe he doesnt have to be that thorough not all strategy guides take inventory of every nonessential part of the environment the author can find. But thats just his personality, and its part of the reason hes so good at this job.

With the exterior and interior maps more or less complete, the rough versions based on screenshots are sent to a team of around 20 designers. Its now been weeks since Hodgson first received the early build of the game, and he hasnt even written anything yet.

He hasnt catalogued, sorted and described every single gun, sword, helmet, potion, blueprint, material, artifact, food, enemy, character, spell and skill in the game; he hasnt completed every possible branch of each and every quest, mission, side-quest, bounty, treasure hunt and optional objective; he hasnt compiled strategies for every mini-game, tactics for every boss, solutions to every puzzle and tricks for every fight; and he hasnt taken the hundreds screenshots that need to accompany it all.

A lot of it isnt playing a game necessarily its just checking something in a game and then checking it against an Excel document or a map or something like that, he said. If Im playing Skyrim for 6,000 hours over ten months with a co-author, Im not Woohoo! playing Skyrim; Im going here and checking to make sure that the guides accurate at that location.

The part of my brain that says ‘You don’t need to be this meticulous’ doesn’t work.

The games change in sometimes major ways, even after the guide goes to print. In that case all they can do is update the guides online component and point readers to the web should anything in the final book prove inaccurate. Whenever possible, though, Hodgson redoes a lot of work every time he gets a new build. For 2001s 007: Agent Under Fire, for example, he had to retake all of the screenshots two days before the game was going to go to print because they changed the color of one of the lasers, he said.

The part of my brain that says ‘You don’t need to be this meticulous’ doesn’t work, Hodgson told me.

***

Hodgson began working in the video game industry in the mid 90s after graduating with a history degree from the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. Hed wanted to become a history teacher, but instead used a PlayStation fan zine hed started called PlayStation Frenzy to get a job at Maximum, a new gaming magazine from a media company called EMAP.

He wrote massive 40-page features on individual games a precursor of things to come in his career while living on a disused German fishing trawler called the St. Michael that he says was moored illegally on the River Thames in London. They had to siphon power from a nearby car scrapyard.

It sounds quite idyllic, but it wasn’t, he remembered. It was dripping with different weird poisonous acid from roofs that hadn’t been sealed, and it was sort of slowly dissolving.

I kept my PlayStation, but not my sanity, he continued.

Maximum folded after seven issues, and Hodgson went on to a brief stint at Official Nintendo Magazine before receiving a call from Dave Halverson, publisher of the popular GameFan magazine.

Hodgson moved to LA and worked on his first strategy guides at GameFan for games like Super Mario 64, Soul Blade and Doom 64 under the magazines GameFan Books division. He flitted among various publishers and magazines until 2000. He called Prima, at the time one of the biggest strategy guide companies (its main competitor, BradyGames, would later be bought by publisher Penguin Random House and folded into Prima). He sent Prima his Metal Gear Solid guide, and they assigned him Armored Core.

That was 16 years ago and I’m still doing it right now, he said.

***

Hodgson flipped lovingly through his creations as we chatted, pointing out where hed embellished a simple description with some flowery joke, or where hed really gotten into it and written entire sections in the voice of a character from the game.

That love goes both ways CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher 3, built Hodgson his own tribute in the form of book merchant Marcus T.K. Hodgson, a character in the games Free City of Novigrad.

We just wanted to honor David for all the awesome work he does, CD Projekt PR Manager Radek Grabowski told me over email. This is just a tribute.

The Witcher 3 tributes Hodgson in the form of book merchant Marcus T.K. Hodgson

Hodgson seems to always go above and beyond. His humor is often self-deprecating, but hes also proud when he talks about some of the things hes accomplished within the limited medium of strategy guides, like the note he received from Hideo Kojima about his Metal Gear Solid guide in 1998.

Strategy guides were usually just go here, do this, go here, do that. I wanted it to be a bit more of an ‘official mission handbook.'”

He loved the guide. He liked the fact that I’d put box-outs for the history of the forklift truck in the first level, Hodgson said. Strategy guides were usually just go here, do this, go here, do that. I wanted it to be a bit more of an ‘official mission handbook,’ we called it. Kojima said hed shown the guide to his mother, who didnt really understand video games but of course knew what a book was.

For 2004s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II Hodgson planned and orchestrated an easter egg on the strategy guides DVD pack-in: Pressing a secret combination on your DVD player remote results in a special menu where you can access videos in which the voice actor for HK-47, a popular droid from the games, quotes other famous fictional robots and AI. Hodgson was excited to get the voice actor involved for a secret he deemed so obscure although his assertion that Nobody A) cares or B) has ever found that, because we never published the easter egg code is more self-deprecating than accurate, based on the above YouTube video and this forum thread.

But he nevertheless lit up when he talked about it, or about the more creative work hes gotten to do, like A Fractured Land: Tales of the Northern Realms, a 96-page lore book that came with the hardcover edition of the official The Witcher 3 guide, or The Improved Emperor’s Guide to Tamriel, a 224-page illustrated guide to the lands of Bethesdas The Elder Scrolls Online that was packed in with the games Imperial collectors edition.

Hodgson wrote the Emperors Guide in character as the scholar Flaccus Terentius, conjuring the characters imagined journal entries as he walked the games fictional lands. It has annotations like Strange to find such Daedra worship among the devout, nestled next to detailed sketches, diagrams and paintings.

I studied history. Its sort of finding the evidence for something and then writing about it, and that was my transferrable skill, Hodgson said. If I wasn’t going to become a history teacher, I was going to maybe become a travel writer or something like that. And in a sense I am, except the places that I write about don’t really exist.

But travel writers dont go to Paris and painstakingly catalog every street sign and boulangerie.

Though travel writers much like strategy guide authors have been made obsolete. Why read a book about a place when you can simply search for photos of it on Instagram? Likewise, why buy an expensive book when everything you could want to know about every game ever made is a Google search away?

For one thing, you only have to look at one of Hodgsons guides to see the value for collectors and hardcore fans. And while the internet is always playing catch-up to catalog new releases in YouTube guides and Wikis, the official strategy guide arrives on day one (or earlier). That makes the physical strategy guide, ironically, the first choice for players who want instant, day one gratification.

“There’s a nice archaic nature to strategy guides that I enjoy. I can write about something that’s cutting edge, like Fallout 4, but I can publish it using 16th century technology.

Hodgson has his own reasons. I can’t show you the writings I’ve done for Maxim.com and Gamespy, because those sites aren’t there anymore, he said. Stuff disappears when you’re on the net. But this Akuji the Heartless strategy guide on paper, or in fact the Fallout 3 strategy guide that’s in the Library of Congress. So even after the bombs drop and we’re in the future apocalypse, you can go to the bunker down below the Library of Congress or even now, if you’d like to do it properly [and] you can search my books out. I think I’m the only person who will ever do that, but there’s a nice archaic nature to strategy guides that I enjoy. I can write about something that’s cutting edge, like Fallout 4, but I can publish it using 16th century technology.

***

Hodgson works on guides ten months out of every twelve, and he rarely plays video games for fun anymore. At the end of a long stretch, Im just sick of staring at screens, so I just go outside or I go and buy another aloe tree or an agave or a different type of succulent, he said. I maybe go on Facebook, but just to see what some of the people that I never get to see do. Friends.

You are suffering from extreme fatigue, and the dogs looking at you going I need to be fed and walked. Immediately, he said.

But if he quit tomorrow, hed still play games after a six-month sabbatical, at least. After your first week [off] youre just like Ah, sort of semi-retirement, this is great. This is fantastic, he said. And then another week goes by and youre sort of starting to get an itchy feeling. Cabin fever sets in. Youre like, whats next?

Hodgson recently wrapped up work on the Complete edition guide to The Witcher 3 and the official Watch Dogs 2 strategy guide, and at the time of writing hes putting the finishing touches on his Ghost Recon Wildlands guide. You can find his work wherever strategy guides are sold.

Mike Rougeau is a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and two dogs.

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