Hi all,

Sorry about the long delay in posting. I’ve been kind of busy with my hobby of curling up under an electric blanket and sobbing at the endless cruel, frozen hell that is Minnesota winter and wondering whether this thing called “spring” is merely a delusion, something that I imagined during the fifteenth year of the endless cold in the same way that people trapped in sensory deprivation chambers start to hallucinate simply in order to keep their brain from shutting down altogether from apocalyptic despair. And that sort of thing takes up a lot of time. By way of apology (or possibly punishment) I’ve written a short fiction piece for you after the cut!

continue reading "First Time for Everything"

I was sitting at Snakes and Lagers a couple of days ago playing a game of Revolution! – which, it turns out, is not very good at all: it has a serious runaway leader problem in that, if you “win” a round of bidding in the right way, you are more likely to “win” the next round. (And I say this as the person who won the game handily.)

Afterwards, the general agreement around the table was that the game was not very fun, but one player explained that this was all right, because he would rather play five or six games in a night rather than one long one. This is a fairly common sentiment among boardgamers, especially as we get older what with the babies and the adult responsibilities and all: if you’re going to have a game night, better to spend it playing a variety of things rather than one big long thing.

I don’t really agree. This is not to say that I don’t like short games; there are plenty of short games that I really like, and over the last year or two in particular mini-game design has really gone to a new level with games like One Night Werewolf and Mascarade and Coup and Love Letter and Council of Verona and… well, I could go on at length. There are lots of fun short games out there.

But short games are like appetizers. They are a wonderful little prelude (or an after, if you prefer the metaphor to be a cheese plate or something, bear with me). But if all you play is short games, then you are effectively doing the gaming equivalent of a tapas restaurant. And tapas restaurants are all terrible.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Bruxelle 1893. It’s a remarkable design as Euros go – a tense combination of bidding and worker placement and area control and point accumulation all at once, with a lot of interaction and a lot of variable strategy. It also takes about 30 minutes per player and plays best with four, so as a game it tops out at two to two and a half hours, which puts it at the upper end of what most gamers are willing to play on a regular basis.

But here’s the thing: that play length is what allows for individual plays of the game to have their own narrative, which I find to be more and more important to me as time goes on. I don’t just want to interact with people, I want to create my own story through the game. That story doesn’t have to be exclusively driven by the game’s internal narrative, mind you – that’s a reason a lot of people like “Ameritrash” games, and while it’s fun for me to make Warhammer references when I’m playing Chaos In The Old World, the narratives I enjoy more are “I dominate the entire game and then have to fend off a three-person alliance in the last turn” or “I do my best to come from behind but fall just short.” Those narratives are universal, which is why they can come from Euros or Ameritrash games or abstracts or what have you. That’s what I love about board games.

It’s one of the reasons I own every expansion for Battlestar Galactica, a game that almost always takes longer than three hours; it’s why I own six different 18XX games, the quickest of which starts at three hours as well; it’s why I make a point to play Virgin Queen twice a year even though a full game of it takes anywhere from eight to ten hours. (Almost invariably after those games I sit down and have a beer with people who were playing other things and we just swap game stories.) You get out what you put in.

…because apparently people think “greywashing” somehow sounds unethical. I don’t even know, folks.

Anyway, some more samples of what shadework would look like, and I wanted a cross-section of pages here so:

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This is another night-time page, but I’ve lessened the shadows (we have here a 20 percent grey and a 40%) because it’s indoors in a lit room. This time the shadework’s purpose is to illuminate two things: Fezay’s expressions and Alric’s hands, both of which weren’t quite as prominent on the page as they could be in a straight black-and-white. (I also note that shading potentially lets Davinder go back and add details that otherwise would have detracted from his linework in the foreground.)

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This is a good example of shadework for a daytime page: here it’s a 10% grey and a 20% grey for the clouds. These aren’t very dark greys but I think they’re just enough to make Vurmik really pop in panel three. Also note that using the grey on the clouds allows for some additional emphasis linework in white, creating additional texture on the crowds via negative space.

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This is an example of a three-tone page: 10% grey for the basic background (both the sails and the sky – neither are terribly important to the panel so I want them to become background), 20% for the ship deck in the first three panels (to differentiate them from the surrounding sky on the page, and to push that Gundring sailor into the foreground and attract the eye to him as you start reading the page; the 20% grey isn’t necessary for the deck on the page’s feature panel because that panel is being lit up by the fire) and 45% grey for shadow effects created by the fire (which – yes, it’s daytime and realistically the shadows wouldn’t necessarily be that deep, but that dark grey really sells the fire).

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site. And so concludes Book Seven! Only one more book to go! We might not be the fastest, but we’re reliable.

Well, sort of. This is just a canvassing-interest post.

One of the things we’ve been considering as a bonus for the collected edition of Al’Rashad – and the collected edition only – is the use of greywashing to make pages more dynamic. It’s not too complex but it can really make pages pop sometimes. As a comparison example, here is Book Four, Page Eighteen, both the original and a rough greywash applied:

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Greywashes like this can work as a semi-replacement for colouring in black-and-white comics (and truthfully, unless someone throws a truckload of money at us, colour is probably prohibitively expensive at this point given the number of pages that would have to be reworked). The effect can be quite useful on pages like this one to make individual figures “pop.”

So, comic readers: is this a value-add for you, or are you thinking “man, this is like Lucas and the Special Editions all over again?” Feedback appreciated.

UPDATE: So right now it appears that the majority of comments so far favour the greywash, but people who hate it really hate it. A few notes here:

1. Like I said: this was an extremely rough greywash, using two tones (a 60 percent grey and a 30 percent). I did it in about 45 minutes in Photoshop and I’m still not sure about the values – I really like that 60 percent to flesh out the night sky on this page, for example, but would want to test lighter greys for the buildings. If we end up using greywash in the collection, we’ll be putting a lot of thought into individual pages and consider using three tones or even one tone rather than two on a page by page basis (you have to be careful with three tones, though, since three distinct greys can muddy the page; the third tone has to be used very sparingly). More to the point, there will be plenty of pages (the tunnel sequences in Book Four, for example) where the greywash simply isn’t necessary or desirable.

2. There’s no question that greywashing changes the reading experience of the book; it simulates, to an extent, the effect that color has on the reading experience, and what color does to a reading experience is create greater emphasis on the individual elements of the scene. (It should be noted that Davinder’s inking style means that the other major method of creating greys in black-and-white art – stippling and linework – isn’t really available to us as an option.)

3. If we ultimately decide to go with the greywash, we’ll find a way to collect the original edition as well – most likely bundling a digital version of it along with the digital version of the greywash, maybe include a coupon for the digital with the physical collection, etc.

Anyway. Right now we’re leaning towards it, but I’ll do some tighter greywashing on a few more pages next week so we can get a second round of opinions.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

– Blossom ran for five seasons, from 1991 to 1995. It was originally planned to run seven seasons, but after Perfect Strangers ran for eight seasons, the Gods of Television decided that there should not be a second “average at best, let’s be honest” sitcom that would run longer than I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, Barney Miller, Taxi and Sanford and Son. The producers wisely obeyed the Gods of Television, who awarded the producers of Blossom with manna and honey.

– “Opinionation” is actually a scientific term meaning “I think so, but I am not willing to stake my professional credibility on that belief.”

– Michael Stoyanov, who played Blossom’s older brother Tony, has no connections whatsoever to the Spetsnaz and it would ludicrous to suggest that. Ludicrous.

– “Blossom Russo” is an anagram of “Our Moss Slobs” and maybe this means something.

– There were 114 episodes of Blossom. Of these, 173 were “very special” episodes dealing with real social issues in a comedic yet respectful way. This discrepancy has never been fully explained. A mathematician, Henry Snord, who attempted to study this mathematical quandary committed suicide in 2002. His suicide note is simply the phrase “…but Six?” repeated eleven times, with his handwriting growing looser and less defined with each repetition.

– Joey Lawrence was forced to stop saying “whoa!” in 1998 following an honor-duel with Keanu Reeves.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I started a bit of a minor nerd kerfuffle yesterday on Twitter when I said this, but I’m standing by it.

First, a few caveats. It’s an excellent trailer on numerous levels. I’m gonna go see it when it comes out, and not out of a sense of nerd-obligation either; this looks genuinely amazing and it’s filled with actors I really like and plus, come on, it’s frigging Godzilla.

But.

The trailer does one thing, and I hope the movie reverses on this at least a little: it removes the central allegory that was at the heart of Godzilla movies – namely, that Godzilla represents man’s hubris in using nuclear weapons. Even the horrible 1998 American Godzilla didn’t get rid of that. But in this one – or at least as per this trailer – man’s use of nukes aren’t what create Godzilla; instead they’re something that mankind uses to try to kill Godzilla. We go from man’s nuclear sins to nukes-are-useful-weapons just like that.

I got responses about how “people aren’t as scared of nuclear weapons as they used to be” but that’s really only a valid point from a marketing perspective, because nuclear weapons are still a huge problem; just because the Cold War sort of ended (and depending on which historians you ask, it’s only mutated somewhat). The Doomsday Clock is still a thing and it’s still set at five minutes to midnight; there’s nothing stopping another Stanislav Petrov scenario from happening except, one hopes, future Stanislav Petrovs. Just because our fear of nukes has grown less immediate or we’ve grown more used to them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to acknowledge that. (I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that nukes stopped being scary in part because we all stopped talking about them and just pretended they weren’t an issue any more.)

A few people also suggested to me that this represents a shift in the Godzilla metaphor to being about climate change or asteroid armageddon or the like because of when, in the trailer, Ken Watanabe says “the arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control… and not the other way around.” And there’s nothing wrong with a horror concept being adapted for use as a different analogy. It happened with zombies multiple times, for example: zombies started out as atomic panic, then shifted to being a metaphor for commercialism and consumption, and nowadays appear to be the fear of the mob and/or poor people depending on how cynical you are. (Yeah, yeah, “infectious diseases,” my ass.)

But Watanabe’s line doesn’t work for climate change at all (and I think it’s fair to say that for whatever Godzilla might be a metaphor, it’s going to be massive in scale because come on, Godzilla) because that Watanabe line, while still addressing human hubris, rejects human responsibility. The power of the original Godzilla metaphor was that nobody made humans use nuclear weapons, and whoops you weren’t expecting Godzilla now were you – Godzilla becomes about not opening Pandora’s box lest there be a giant murder lizard in it. But climate change is A) primarily human-driven and human-created, and B) has been a known consequence of carbon emissions for decades. A climate change murder monster metaphor has to be about selfishness, not helplessness, so Godzilla doesn’t really work for that.

Anyway: none of this is going to stop me from seeing the movie. But it’s definitely something to think about while waiting.

So a lot of wrestling nerds are really upset because instead of doing what basically every wrestling fan alive wants – up to and including Mick Foley – and simply putting Daniel Bryan in the main event, last night’s RAW was used to try and sell the idea of D-Bry going up against Triple H at WrestleMania instead. Which is stupid, because nobody thinks Triple H is a main-event level match any more except Triple H; that was part of the reason CM Punk walked out in the first place, and the Twitter reaction was decidely skewed towards “no, we don’t want this.”

However, now we are at the point where, to book a satisfying main event for WrestleMania, you have to satisfy the following conditions:

1. Daniel Bryan wins the title
2. Batista is involved (because his contract stipulates that he main-events WrestleMania this year)
3. Randy Orton is involved (because Orton needs to get his comeuppance)
4. Triple H is involved somehow (because whatever)
5. It is a good match

The problem here is obvious: right now you have one babyface (Bryan) and three heels. Batista is a heel no matter what awful promo he gives about respecting the fans, because absolutely nobody wants him around – I know, it’s hard to fathom that wrestling fans wouldn’t be enthusiastic about a 45-year-old wrestler who can barely go for five minutes without collapsing in heaving gasps, returning to the ring after almost four years, during which time he pursued a failed MMA career and a mostly-failed acting career1, and during which time he took every opportunity to mock wrestling and wrestling fans. I mean, who wouldn’t want to cheer for that guy, really? And of course that ties into the second problem, which is that Batista can barely wrestle any more; his recent matches against Alberto Del Rio were embarrassing, with Alberto doing his absolute best to wrestle for two and cover Batista’s inability to do anything at all capably.2

Because it seems unlikely that Bryan and Orton, both excellent wrestlers, can cover Batista’s flaws entirely during this match – he’s that bad now – and because the face/heel imbalance is problematic, we can’t simply have an Orton/Batista/Bryan three-way dance for the title, because you’ll have all sorts of problems: when Orton and Batista are in the ring together for an extended sequence without Bryan, which has to happen in three-way matches, the crowd will be dead or chanting DAN-IEL BRY-AN, which isn’t the reaction you want particularly.

The answer, however, is very simple indeed: put in another face.

Next week in Chicago, redirect the HHH/Bryan challenge to HHH refusing Bryan’s challenge and then pivot it to D-Bry demanding he get a title shot – and then HHH says “fine, if you want to be in the title match at WrestleMania? At WrestleMania, you’ll first have to beat me – AND Kane.” And then up the stakes (always up the stakes) by saying if Bryan loses, he has to retire (“I’m tired of your little career and your chants, it’s time for you to go away and be irrelevant forever”). So now we have the most unfair, stacked-against-the-babyface situation possible: Daniel Bryan has to beat two guys in a handicap match and risk his career ending in order to get a second chance to beat two guys for the title.

But THEN what you do is you have HHH or Kane get cocky and say something like “nobody in the locker room REALLY supports you” and say that if Bryan can find a partner, then it can be a tag match against HHH and Kane at WrestleMania, but the same stipulations apply: Bryan’s partner is putting HIS career on the line too, but will also get a title shot. And that’s how you get either CM Punk (the obvious choice, but one that may not be available) or Dolph Ziggler (the perfectly acceptable alternate and a major crowd favorite) into the main event at WrestleMania.3 And of course Bryan goes over, because duh.

That’s how I’d book WrestleMania at this point. You know, if I wanted it to be good.

(Also, here is a freebie: introduce a fourth Wyatt Family member, and then you have an eight-man tag at WrestleMania: the Wyatts against the Shield and John Cena. You get a second match out of the insanely hot Shield/Wyatts feud, you get all the dramatic tension of bitter enemies teaming together to defeat a greater evil, you can use it to further the Shield breakup angle because Dean Ambrose doesn’t want to team up with Cena but Rollins and Reigns want to be practical and beat the Wyatts, and the superteam of Cena/Shield can credibly beat the Wyatts at WrestleMania without the Wyatts losing any heat in the process.)

1. Guardians of the Galaxy was a Hail Mary pass for Batista, assuming it succeeds. Incidentally, don’t be surprised if the marketing for it drops off, because Disney originally decided to do Guardians because they wanted a Marvel answer to Star Wars – and then they bought Star Wars, so Guardians is now the lame duck of the Marvel Cineverse. [↩]
2. He came close, because Del Rio is a damn good wrestler – but only close. [↩]
3. If Punk doesn’t want to wrestle – which may well be the case – I would use Ziggler and then STILL offer Punk money just to show up and interfere on Bryan/Ziggler’s behalf at WrestleMania in the main event, have him give Kane and HHH a half dozen chairshots to the back so the crowd can go atomic. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.