Are now up for your viewing pleasure here. The “best of” awards, which will generally be more positive and friendly and cuddly and encourage us all to be better, will be up tomorrow.

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

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I wanted to say something about this, and luckily I found an excuse to in our lord’s post about PVP, wherein MGK observed that liking comics doesn’t mean you like video games, which led to some comments about whether or not this is true.  I think the disagreement is largely semantic: Obviously a great many comics fans tend to like video games, but Bird’s point is that being a comics fan does not mean you must like video games.

I’m pretty sure the statement “all people who like X always like Y” is never true for any value of X or Y, even when X ⊆ Y.  The only people who seem to believe otherwise are those seeking to define “nerd culture.” And these are inevitably the same people who want to clearly fall either inside or outside of that definition.  The “gatekeepers,” as Bird put it, on either side of the gate, are the only ones with any motive to enforce this artificial distinction.

Think about it for a minute, and you’ll see that nerd culture is a complete crock.  You’re a geek if you’re passionate about nerd culture, and it’s nerd culture if geeks are passionate about it.  It’s an arbitrary, circular concept, defining a “genre” so nebulous that we have to call it “genre entertainment.”  It’s why every comics convention I attend has booths devoted to such random subjects as jewelry, used pornography, Japanese candy, and historical costumes.  Because all comics fans are nerds, and all nerds like other nerdy things, and kilts are the exclusive domain of nerds because I guess they were on Monty Python once.

Nerd culture sounds great to people who feel they perfectly fit into that pigeonhole (or people seeking a context to identify and ostracize nerds, I suppose).  But it’s pretty shitty for the rest of us–the people who just want to be hardcore fans of some things without conforming to some standard of nerdiness about all things.  I don’t want to like all the things a nerd is supposed to like.  I don’t want to tell people how to be better nerds.  I don’t want to be a better nerd.  I don’t really consider myself to be a nerd.

Distancing myself from nerd culture isn’t a hard choice because it represents nothing I want to associate with.  Millions of people watch Star Wars, for example, without being nerds.  Being a Star Wars fan is only distinct from being a Star Wars nerd in that a Star Wars nerd seeks to aggrandize the act of liking Star Wars into some sort of lifelong discipline that should be respected.  That’s all nerd culture truly owns; not the fandom, but the self-absorbed douchebaggery within it.

This is the only issue that I think really matters in all the discussions about fake geek girls and geek primers and geeks canons.  Nerds keep trying to define the exact boundaries of their exclusive gated community, but arguing about whether the gates should be more or less open misses the point.  Nerdiness is not a quality people aspire to; it is what people settle for when they give up aspiring to be anything else.  So the gatekeeping is as pointless as posting guards at a landfill: It may make the guards feel special, but it doesn’t make what they’re guarding any more precious.

I’m in court tomorrow morning (it is my job, after all) and that combined with a couple other things means Al’Rashad won’t get published Monday morning as per usual. We will get it up as soon as possible! (I think this is only the second time we’ve been late, which is not bad for a comic that has been going for… holy shit, over two and a half years? Man, the time gets away from you, don’t it.

Way back at the beginning of my time on this site, I waxed rhapsodic about ‘The Elongated Man’, but I think it’s been long enough that it’s worth repeating: The old ‘Elongated Man’ backup strips in the Silver Age ‘Flash’ comic, which have been collected in DC’s ‘Showcase Presents’ series of big black-and-white trade paperbacks, is absolutely brilliant.

For those of you unfamiliar with the “classic” version of the character, The Elongated Man was a contortionist who discovered a secret plant extract called “gingold” that amplified his natural abilities to Plastic Man-level powers, and proceeded to become a super-hero. At first it seemed like his primary goal was to show off how much better he was than Barry Allen, but after a few stories, he settled into a nice guy, revealed his secret identity (which, since this was the Silver Age, did not result in his gruesome death at the hands of a well-organized band of ruthless supervillains) and married Sue Dearbon, a rich heiress. The two of them settled into a regular back-up feature in which they traveled the world, bumping into strange and unusual mysteries that they solved a la Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

The mysteries are not “fair play” mysteries, but they are clever and they always have inventive hooks. One story, for example, opens with them going to a sold-out play…only to find out that they’re the only people in the audience, and yet the sound of laughter and applause rings through the room and the actors play as though to a whole crowd. (The solution to that one involves an eccentric billionaire, but I won’t divulge more.) Ralph and Sue are both clever and charming, and clearly in love, and they use their wits together to solve the mystery and find the culprits.

At which point a fistfight usually ensues, because this is a superhero comic, and it’s here that you understand why Carmine Infantino is such an amazing and legendary artist. His solid draftsmanship makes every scene look good, but his pencils in the fight sequences really make you understand how a character with super-stretching powers can be less of a cerebral thinker or a whacky comic-relief character and more of a bad-ass one-man whirlwind of flying fists and feet. Ralph uses his stretching abilities to launch villains into walls, punches six guys at once, or twists like an unwinding rubber band to literally hit everyone in the room at once. I never thought of Ralph Dibny as a tough guy, but after reading this I’m seriously convinced hat he could take Batman in a fight.

Every story is charming, funny, and casual-reader friendly. Each mystery is fun to read, and while it’s not a “fair play” mystery (one in which you could reasonably deduce the ending from the clues provided by the author), it isn’t one that out-and-out cheats, either. The collection is 500 pages of pure fun, and now that all of the mistakes that made the character unworkable post ‘Identity Crisis’ have been undone by the reboot, DC could do worse than revisit the character…assuming they did so in the same spirit as the original, of course. Which, in the interests of staying positive as I always try to do for these entries, I will not discuss here.

As I have said previously, I don’t read PvP regularly any more, mostly because I don’t find it particularly entertaining, and I’ve talked about that before. Other people do, and that’s fine. We all like different things. But this week somebody emailed me and said “you have to check out the current guest story by Dylan Meconis because it will make you flip your shit“, and this person generally knows what makes me flip my shit, so I said “oh, all right” and went and read it. And my shit, while not quite flipped, was certainly bestirred.

To be fair to Meconis: the art is generally good and she clearly knows how to construct a strip properly (and so many people don’t). But the story elements harp on one of my major pet peeves that has emerged out of nerddom over the last decade or so.

Quick summary of the plot: There are two characters named Marcie and Francis, who recently got married. Marcie is a relatively normal person who likes a lot of “nerd things.” Francis – as anybody who reads PvP knows – is one of the worst examples of a stupidly common trope in nerdesque literature, e.g. the ubernerd who is basically an amoral sociopath but who periodically “redeems” himself by recognizing that he is a dickhole and making a grand gesture to apologize. (Every nerd comic strip seems to have at least one of these. Some of them have multiples, because nerd comic strip makers seem to think that these people are, in some way, quixotically admirable. SPOILER: They never are.)

Anyway, prior to getting married, Marcie took off elsewhere and was single for a while, and the premise of this particular story is that during that time she dated a dude named Arjun Khan (who from the moment of his introduction telegraphs the eventual “KHAAAAN” joke, of course) who was an architecture grad student there. It rapidly becomes clear that Arjun is a cool guy in all respects: he’s polite, friendly, good-looking, charming, smart, lots of other good things. His one flaw is that he does not know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek: he is not a nerd!

(I just want to pause the plot here for a second. Putting aside, for a second, the fact that anybody who makes it to grad school is going to be at least slightly nerdy in some way – it doesn’t happen otherwise, folks – is anybody else really sick of the “oh he can’t tell the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek” shorthand for “mainstream”? Fucking everybody knows the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. My sixty-five-year-old mother, who does not follow science fiction in the least – she really likes Downton Abbey, though – knows that Star Wars is lightsabers and Jedi and Darth Vader and the Rebel Alliance, and Star Trek is Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise and the Prime Directive. Which is to say: this bit of storytelling shorthand is stupid and needs to go away forever.)

Francis, because he is a dickhole, flies into a jealous rage, and then he makes his Grand Gesture, which is to play Skyrim for so long that he can get all of the cheese wheels in the game together. Putting aside the fact that a video gamer playing a video game for a long time is a pretty weak-ass Grand Gesture, I really want to comment on Francis’ sullen, angry-looking “will you just look at the shit I do for you” expression here, because it is fucking creepy. If somebody glared at me like that while they were supposedly apologizing, I would not be inclined to take their apology seriously. I am just saying. But anyway, Marcie breaks down crying because somehow this is now her fault for not telling Francis about her ex-boyfriend when she knew perfectly well he would freak out like a stupid asshole.

Anyway, the two of them make up, essentially, and Francis asks Marcie why she picked him over Arjun, who is so clearly better a person than Francis it is not even funny, and her explanation is that Arjun is not a nerd – he doesn’t like comics or video games or going to cons. And this is the part that drives me nuts, because this isn’t just questionable story writing – this is something I hear people say in real life all the time, especially from nerds, and it’s always silly.

Look, I have had my share of relationships. Some of them liked some of the weird stuff I liked. Some of them did not. (None of them liked professional wrestling, despite my pointing out that it was homoerotic as all hell, honestly, and come on, babe, you love slash fiction… but I digress.) Certainly none of them liked all of the stuff I liked, which is fine, because that is called “being an adult” and recognizing that while shared interests can certainly strengthen a relationship, they are arguably the least important part of one. Being considerate of your partner’s emotional needs, for example. Helping them with their daily logistics. Being something that generally makes their life better rather than being an emotional trial. Or, and I am just throwing this out here, not being a massive dickhole all the goddamn time.

“Liking the same stuff” is so far down the list as to be negligible, especially when “showing interest when your partner tells you stuff they are excited about” will do just as well ninety-five percent of the time (and if you genuinely like the person, then it’s never hard to be actually interested because they’re interested, even if afterwards you won’t bother following up with your own independent research on the topic) and when, if we’re being honest, “liking the same stuff” can be as basic as “sports,” “movies,” “eating out” or “doin’ it.” But Jebus, telling this to nerds is only slightly more difficult than… I am running dry on analogies here, so you can just pretend I mentioned Doctor Who or something, but my general point is that “nerd subculture” – which, really, is a thing that should not exist, because there is no logical reason that people who like comic books should also like video games except for the fact that they are intensely marketed to the same demographics – places too high a priority on its gewgaws of nerdformation.

This is, when you get down to it, another facet of the mindset that created the “fake geek girl” brouhaha last year – the belief that somehow, knowing what THAC0 is or being able to hum the Doomy Doom song from Invader Zim is in and of itself precious, rather than the fun-but-meaningless-crap that it clearly is. It’s all about the same gatekeeper mentality, that conflation of “nerd identity” to something akin to race (which, while also an entirely social construct, at least provides clear visual identifiers when the people being identified aren’t cosplaying), but in the PVP story, Meconis has actually gender-reversed it – which is, I suppose, sort of a blow for geek girls? Except it means that geek girls have to settle for horrible Francises rather than decent and good Arjuns, so actually never mind, that’s not a blow for geek girls at all when you think about it. Someone more talented than me should write a sociological essay or something about that.

(And, of course, the denouement to the story shows us that Arjun, all along, was willing to try and learn about Marcie’s interests anyway, because even as he is being cast as a potential future villain, he’s still basically a decent guy. Also, the gag line in that particular strip is very good.)

EDIT TO ADD: Discussion in the comments is going astray from what I was trying to talk about as people defend the necessity of shared interests in a relationship – and yes, shared interests are important, of course, but that wasn’t my point so I’m going to expound a little more.

The issue here is, as I said, about the gatekeeper mentality that envelops nerdity. It’s the nerds-as-tribe dynamic (and, in another aside, when nerd parents do their best to get their kids into the nerd stuff they like, that’s part of it too). Shared interests are important, yes, but your average nerd presumably also likes things that are not-nerdy! You can share those interests, which is my point: in the strips, Arjun and Marcie clearly have lots of stuff in common that they like. It’s just not the nerd stuff, and the statement being made is that the nerd stuff is more important somehow. Which: everybody values their own obsessions differently, of course. But choosing borderline-sociopath over decent-human-being because of those obsessions – because the decent human being, while decent, is not one of us per se – has all sorts of wrongness attached to it. And that’s what bugs me about the strip and the larger thought process it represents – because even if you really, really like playing XBox, we are all more than our individual Xboxen.

Ginkogopolis was fun the first few times I played it, but eventually I found the novelty to wear off. For those unfamiliar, Ginkgopolis is ostensibly a game where you are building a futuristic city, but realistically it is a sort of area-control tile-laying game – except it also incorporates drafting cards (in order to lay the tiles to build the city), resource management (as you need to generate the thingies you need to build the tiles – plus the tiles themselves – plus victory points, which are a resource in and of themselves) and palette building (because as the game progresses and you build higher towers, you will get more abilities and need to strategically synergize the abilities you get by building the appropriate towers). If this all sounds complex, that’s because it is complex – I find it generally takes even veteran board gamers at least one play to get used to the rules, but once you do, the rules design is actually quite masterful and elegant (really, it’s quite a triumph for so many mechanics to flow together so seamlessly).

That having been said – I’m not that wild about it. It’s okay with three players and gets worse with four and five. Why don’t I like it that much, you might ask. Well, it’s an area-control tile layer like Carcassonne is, but where Carcassonne spreads out over an entire table, games of Ginkgopolis tend to build upwards and be extremely vicious (since you are therefore building over each other’s tiles a lot). “But Chris,” you say, “you like vicious games.” True, but I like them to be strategic, and due to the way the rules work and the game generally plays, this is far more a tactical game of “what is the best play available to me on my turn” than anything to do with long-term planning, because the game’s design actively prevents you from planning long term: often you will find yourself simply picking the least worst option on multiple turns, which makes the game feel as though it is particularly luck-driven. This is because the game is particularly luck-driven. So is Carcassonne, of course – any turn-taking tile-layer will have a luck element to it – but Carcassonne’s design means you can always go start something else in an effort to score points. In Ginkgopolis, that option is not really present to you. Worse, in Ginkgopolis, some of the upgrade cards you can get over the course of the game are just plain better than others (tower-building cards are better than outward-expansion cards, generally, because towers are less easy to build over), which makes the game feel even more luck-driven.

I don’t mean to trash the game overly. As I said: the design is very clever indeed, and frankly, it’s only a 45-minute game or so once everybody knows how the rules work so it being luck-driven is hardly a killer factor. But my weakness for boardgaming is city building games – I desperately want the “Sim City in a box” experience (where you have to worry about taxation, and the environment, and keeping citizens happy), and I buy every city-building game that comes out, and invariably they disappoint. (I may just have to design that game myself.) So Ginkgopolis gets graded on a curve, which might not be entirely fair, but who said life was fair?

I had been looking forward to CO2 for over a year. It had so much going for it! Designed by Vital Lacerda, who did the excellent Vinhos (one of my favorites of 2011), and with a killer theme – you’re trying to build renewable energies to stop global warming from annihilating the planet. (As a side bonus, the game’s theme caused an immense amount of butthurt to conservative board gamers who took the game’s existence as a personal insult, to which I can only say HA HA HA HA HA.) I was totally expecting a home run here.

And… yeah, no. The game is complex – not killer complex, but complex enough that there are strategies, obviously. And Lacerda’s clearly tried to incorporate the theme into the mechanics in many ways (ramping energy demands as time progresses means that if you don’t build renewable energy plants fast enough, countries will just build fossil fuel plants to meet demand instead, for example). And the board itself is honestly just lovely to look at. But the problem with the game, for me, is that the core mechanic doesn’t really feel right. The core mechanic in this game is a three-step process: on your turn you either start a energy plant research project, convert a research project into a pilot energy plant, or convert a pilot plant into a full-on power plant. Except you can convert other people’s things. Which from a game standpoint is necessary because otherwise the game doesn’t work, but thematically it doesn’t really make sense and from a gameplay standpoint it just feels so arbitrary that it kills the mood – and this is the opinion of everyone I’ve played the game with. Which is a damn shame, because I really wanted this one to be good.

I got the chance to play Terra Mystica a few weeks ago and then again last week. This was the critical darling of the Essen game fair this year, so I was interested to give it a go. And… it’s not bad, certainly. It’s basically a riff on the sort of area control you might find in Through the Desert, where you place pieces on the board and then control those areas forever. Terra Mystica is a lot more elaborate, though – each player has a different fantasy race with different powers that affect the game differently, and each player gets, like, inns and castles and monasteries and all that sort of thing, and everybody’s castles and inns and monasteries do different things, and there’s a sort of power meter which you can use for additional free actions, and…

Terra Mystica isn’t a bad game – far from it. It’s quite a pleasant brainburner, and the game is perfectly solid. But after playing it twice, while I would play it again without complaint if people wanted to play it, I feel no need to own it or suggest it be played ever again – because, really, it’s just Through The Desert with more bells and whistles (and fewer camels), and in this case I think the simpler game is the better experience because Terra Mystica’s challenge is mastering the logistics of your own species faster than other players to get your pieces on the board, while Through The Desert’s challenge is getting in other people’s way with your pieces which you just PUT on the board. And I prefer that second one.

People were asking for my opinion on the Rob Ford appeal decision and well, there it is for you.

A thief is getting away in a high-speed motorboat! Whatever will we do to catch him?

What, indeed. For there exists no skill in any human living that cannot be instantly acquired and bested by Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

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

I’ll admit, I haven’t been playing nearly as many boardgames as I’d like these days; after storing up an entire wardrobe full of games for a rainy day, we’ve been in a situation for about two or three years where someone’s always working nights and/or weekends. Plus the little one is only now getting to an age (7) where she can play a lot of games. Unless we wanted to limit our game selection a lot, games had to happen after bed.

But I did want to mention a board game that’s worked really well for our family, and which is a lot of fun in general. ‘Castle Panic’ is by Fireside Games, and is a cooperative game (there’s actually a clever competitive scoring mechanism, which I’ll get to in a moment, but we generally don’t use it because of the aforementioned seven-year old) where you take the role of defenders of the Castle from a horde of monsters. Each turn, you play cards from your hand to hit monsters, and each turn, you are required by the rules to place and move monsters. Players are allowed to trade cards, which is important as each card can only hit the monsters in a specific part of the board, and each monster takes a certain number of hits to kill. (You rotate the piece to show its current hit point total. Some monsters, called “boss monsters”, have special abilities when played.) When and if the monsters get to the center, they destroy first your Castle Walls (which are replaceable) and then your Towers (which are not.) If you can wipe out the entire horde before they destroy all your Towers, you all win! If not, you all lose.

The competitive bit, which is as I say quite clever even though we don’t use it, is that only the player who scores the last hit gets credit for the monster. If the Castle survives, you total up the hit points of the monsters you kill, and the winner is the one with the most points. But if everybody loses, nobody gets the points, on account of it doesn’t really matter who made the most kills if you’re all murdered by a vicious horde of orcs, trolls and goblins. So the trick is to find ways to avoid helping players in ways that would actually benefit their score, while still helping them enough to avoid gruesome death at the hands of the monsters.

The nice thing about a cooperative game, especially when you’re playing with a child, is that it takes advantage of the natural friendships that you already (presumably) have with the other players. With everyone working together against an honestly pretty brutal monster placement system (at least once a game, you will draw the monster tokens in a way that makes you genuinely feel what it’s like to be at Helm’s Deep before the Riders of Rohan showed up), there’s a strong feeling of teamwork and camaraderie that builds up quick. Plus, if you have a player who’s not quite in tune with the strategy in the game (like, say, a seven-year old) the game allows you to show each other cards, trade cards, and offer advice.

The expansion, ‘The Wizard’s Tower’, opens up the horde with a lot of creatures with new powers (flying monsters, super-boss monsters, and fast moving cavalry), but levels the playing field a bit with a Wizard’s Tower that grants you access to a second deck of cards with more powerful attacks and special defensive cards. The new super-bosses are game-breakingly tough at times, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of taking out a Dragon with a Hammer of Light.

It’s a fun game, best for an atmosphere of non-intense play (which I feel is honestly the best way to play any game, but that’s just me…) and you can be pretty loose about the “10 and up” age requirement. I’m definitely looking forward to another expansion.

Today is the last day to vote in the 2012 Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards! So if you started a vote and did not finish it, or if you haven’t voted at all (and this assumes that you like pro wrestling, of course), get on that, because there are a number of races right now that are very close and a couple more where a last-minute strong showing by one candidate could cause a major upset. DRAMA!

(Also, we have received very few voter submissions for comments, so you all still have the opportunity to have your opinions IMMORTALIZED ON THE INTERNET along those of such luminaries as myself, Chris Sims, Brandon Stroud of Best and Worst of Raw, and Danielle Matheson of Best and Worst of Impact. Anything I find particularly insightful or funny about your votes I will probably use, so send them along to this email.)

BOARD GAMES:

• Virgin Queen. Most people here will never be inclined to play VQ, given that a proper game of it lasts anywhere from five to nine hours – I managed to play it three times in 2012 and consider that a mammoth accomplishment. But it is a near-perfect game if you want to do what it does, which is reasonably simulate Elizabethan-era Europe within a not-insanely-complex game structure. It’s still quite complex, of course, because this is a game where all six factions (one of whom isn’t even a country, but simply “the Protestants”) have their own ways to win and their own distinct advantages, and where you can earn victory points in any number of ways – by promoting or crushing Protestantism, by colonizing the Americas, by advancing scientific discoveries or great works of art, by arranging politically-beneficial marriages with other players, or of course by going to war and stomping face. But all of it requires that you delve into truly deep diplomacy on a level that few games ever approach. What an experience.
• The Manhattan Project. Too many new worker placement games just leave me thinking “well, why didn’t I just play Caylus instead of this, because it’s a better game than this was.” TMP bucks that trend by actually doing something very novel and different with worker placement – instead of having organized rounds of “okay, we all place workers – and now we resolve the workers,” TMP goes free-form and makes placement of workers and removal of workers a player choice. This, combined with gameplay that encourages players to metaphorically punch one another in the face, made it a definite favorite for the year. Tzolkin, recently out, does much the same thing but with a giant gimmicky set of plastic gears, and Tzolkin is a fine game, but I still prefer TMP.
• Hanabi. I generally am not interested in most cooperative games because they tend to end up being a thing where the loudest/pushiest player dominates everybody else’s gameplay. Hanabi neatly kills that off by making it impossible: this is a cooperative card-laying game where you never see your hand and where the other players are strictly limited as to what they may tell you. It’s a brilliant little design that rewards ingenuity and deductive skills. Great game.
• Android: Netrunner. Unlike many I am old enough to remember the original Netrunner CCG, which was brilliant in theory but brutally flawed in practice – it arrived at the dawn of CCG design when people still didn’t quite realize how to balance games, so Richard Garfield’s excellent two-player asymmetrical bluffing duel CCG, which was superb right out of the starter deck, collapsed when you started designing actual decks. The modern revamp basically fixes all of that and adds some new, interactive mechanics to up the tension level, but other than that is still the same great game – just better on all counts.
• Love Letter. AEG takes a genius design from Japan – a deduction/bluffing game with only sixteen cards that plays up to four players – and then inexplicably rethemes it to their stupid new pre-made Tempest setting, on the assumption that anybody will care about their stupid new Tempest setting. Whatever, the game is still amazing.
• The Twelve Doctors. A print-and-play asymmetrical two-player dueling game based on Doctor Who where one player is the Doctor and one player is the Master, reaching into every corner of the Who mythos for its cards, and which manages the almost-impossible combination of both being a richly thematic game about Doctor Who while also being a very good game in its own right, a tactical blend of area control and San Juan-style hand management. And yes, there is a Jelly Babies card.
• Colonial. An aggressive 18th-century economic/exploitation game with a lot of clever mechanics. It’s abstract, but the good kind of abstract that exists to simplify rather than make overly simple – and it of course has numerous brutal diplomatic options as well. Terrific fun, with gorgeous components and cheerfully amoral gameplay.

MUSIC:

• Skrillex feat. Ellie Goulding, “Summit.” Skrillex gets possibly more undeserved shit than any musical act going, whether it is cheap WUBWUBWUB jokes or stupid gags about his nom de plume, but this is a perfect counter to that – it’s not dubstep at all, but instead a contemplative and somehow epic bit of melodic trance. It’s gorgeous.
• Lumineers, “Ho Hey.” On the non-technological side of things, we have this almost painfully simple and earnest love song, a love song stripped down to bare essentials, if you will – if it were a car, it would be one of those barely-a-cars where you have a seat, an engine, an undercarriage and wheels, and nothing else. But it works. Basically it is like listening to Mumford and Sons except, and this is the key bit, you don’t actually have to listen to Mumford and Sons.
• Pegboard Nerds, “Revenge of the Nerds.” Lovely crossover between 16-bit chiptuning and dubstep. I think that is enough to say right there, except that I will add I first heard this as part of a fake “Wreck-It Ralph” soundtrack and I like this better than anything on the actual soundtrack (which is hardly bad, come to think).
• Florence and the Machine, “Spectrum.” (Also the Calvin Harris remix.) Because every generation gets the Tori Amos it deserves – and every generation deserves a Tori Amos, really – and Florence Welch is apparently proof that this generation is particularly deserving for some reason I do not yet understand, but I’m willing to run with it if I get to snag stuff like this for my iPod on the side.
• July Talk, “Paper Girl.” This song is so. Fucking. Dirty. Loved this Tom Waits-meets-Dido brawler months ago, still love the fuck out of it. Feel like I need a shower after I listen to it, every time, and that is the highest compliment I can pay it.
• Azealia Banks, “1991.” Because it has been too long since I heard a true machine-gun female MC spit out rhymes like that.
• Everything from Madeon’s new album this year but especially “Finale.” Because it’s great. This is what I wanted electronic music to be twenty years ago and it is just getting to doing it now. Took you goddamn enough, you broad musical genre you.
• Japandroids, “The House That Heaven Built.” Because duh.

Got an email yesterday, basically asking: in light of the recent ending to the Wheel of Time series and Robert Jordan’s mammoth experiment in worldbuilding that was that series, did I create the world for Al’Rashad in advance or write it as I go, and do I have a preference – both for that work and generally when I write? The answer is “a bit of both.”

You will hear all sorts of stuff from many, many people about how their characters “surprise them” and how they interact with the world. And let me be clear: I’ve got nothing against the idea of writing a character consistently. That’s just basic sense. But writing is not like DMing a roleplaying game: you determine what your characters do. If something is out of character, well, change the character. You’re the writer, you’re allowed to do that – I am getting a bit off-topic here and it is partially the fault of my memories of this past NaNoWriMo – or, rather, other people’s NaNoWriMo – still not having entirely faded. But the roleplaying game thing is actually fairly apt, because writing a story isn’t like writing an RPG. You only get to peek at the faintest corners of the larger world, unless you want to do, like, a bonus Almanac Of The Universe Of Your Story or something on the side. (Which some people do. Tolkien certainly did. You couldn’t stop Tolkien from writing about the obscure side histories of his world. But Tolkien also had the luxury of more or less inventing a genre, which you will probably not be doing.)

The bottom line is that, if you are writing a story, you probably aren’t writing a travelogue or a guidebook, and thus details get left out. Go back and look at yesterday’s comic page. Alric mentions six countries there that haven’t been mentioned yet in the story. It is entirely possible1 that you will never know anything else about them ever again in the course of the story. They are little more than window dressing at this point. Conversely, however… you know a lot more about the Free Kingdom of Gundring and the Rashadi Caliphate, if you’ve been following the story.

Gundring, for example. You know that Gundring’s government is, effectively, a sort of broad combination of an Althing/parliament and a clan-based monarchy; you know that the Gundring use gunpowder (and you’ve probably noticed that the Rashadi don’t, and suspect that there are reasons for that) and place particular importance on engraving runes into anything they think is important. You know that they’re probably undergoing something of an Enlightenment at present. You know they’re probably not too keen on slavery. All of this informs Alric’s character, and pointedly so because he is very much the primary viewpoint character for the story, so, yes, he comes from the society most analagous to yours.2 The Rashadi? Well, you know they *do* have slavery, but there are deep divisions within their society about it. You know that that society is also tribally based, and likely much more cosmopolitan than the Gundring are – but survives basically on a system of mutual distrust. You know it’s a fairly brutal, dog-eat-dog social structure, and more overtly religious than the Gundring are by far. And you know their architecture is elaborate, even fantastical – which probably says quite a bit about how historically powerful they’ve been. And all of this informs the character of Kahal (who by appearances isn’t even of traditional Rashadi descent like Rayana or Fezay – were this comic in colour, his skin tone would be much darker than theirs – and that tells you something, both about him and about them) and the other Rashadi characters.

The point I am trying to make about worldbuilding is this: you can always bullshit when you need to, and nobody will ever know. If somebody asks me something about some aspect of Pizarri culture I will cheerfully make it up on the spot if need be, and HEY PRESTO it’s canon until I decide otherwise. But your world is an onion. You don’t care about the outer layers – that’s dead skin. You care about the core, which is your characters, and what immediately surrounds them. That’s what you need to know in advance, what you need to build. Everything else is a luxury, and quite often a waste of time.

1. I am avoiding spoilers here [↩]
2. Assuming you don’t live in Somalia. [↩]