Comic Day, Again

Last week my regular posting schedule shifted a bit because of the holiday, and plans I had did not exactly suit themselves to blogging.  But now I'm going to try to get back on track, which means it's Wednesday, and that's comic day.

I had a lot of internal debate about what song Cthulhu would have stuck in his head. I wish I could remember the entire list, but I know "Charles in Charge" was one of them. But then I realized that the song is only horrific and scarring to me...

Internet Endurance

     Thanks to the holiday, I have a bit more free time this weekend, so I thought I would catch up on some Internet Stuff. 
     First off, I realized I realized that looking at things on the internet was becoming a chore. I check my mail, pay the bill that has been sitting in my inbox for about two weeks, check Facebook, and check this blog. That's the normal stuff, the things I can normally remember to do on a daily basis. Then I start thinking that I should catch up on the handful of webcomics I read, maybe look at the news and see what's going on in the rest of the world, and possibly finally getting around to checking out all those other sites that people are constantly telling me I should visit because I'd love them. Then it all starts feeling like work and I want to go lay down and read for a bit to clear my head.
     This is going to seem odd for virtually everyone else. And I'm not talking about the people who do nothing but play around on the web all day. My wife, for instance, will follow dozens of comics and online installment-stories and meme-based pages and several blogs. She keeps up with them quite well, and still has plenty of time to work her 50-hour a week job and do domestic projects like painting the house and sewing me awesome pajama pants from Avengers-print flannel. She does more than me, just in general, yet I still need her to filter the internet for me so I know what is worthwhile and what isn't. I know she's not alone in these abilities, either.
     At first I was going to claim that the reason is that I'm of the generation that grew up when the Internet was just first getting big. There wasn't any internet when I was a kid, and it didn't really start being useful to the general public until I was in high school. We were still using dial-up then, too, so you limited your internet use because it tied up the phone line for the whole rest of the house. That was back when people used landlines; ask your parents about it. So I feel like I got used to a world where you didn't have all this entertainment and information to distract you.
     Except that's BS, and I know it. Case in point, my wife is the same age as me, and she doesn't feel like time spent on the internet is the pain-in-the-ass I do. And it's not that I'm a Luddite. I like technology, really I do. I like my cell phone (even if it isn't a smartphone) and my Netflix coming through my Wii into the TV. I like the fact that it only takes me a second to find directions to a place and that I'll never have to play "what-have-I-seen-that-guy-in" again thanks to IMDB. I can't imagine life without these things. But pouring over pages on the internet--even pages of things that I should ostensibly love--just makes me feel exhausted merely thinking about it.
    For instance, I've been writing this post for nearly 30 minutes, and I think I need to go take a nap now.

Cantrips Are Your Friend

     It goes without saying that if magic actually existed it would be a very different world. But I don't think I ever considered how drastically things would change. This week I was working on a D&D adventure and I was picking spells out for some NPCs. Now, usually I don't bother when it comes down to the lowest-level spells (which are considered 0-level, otherwise known as "cantrips" or "orisons"), because the effects are so minor that it shouldn't matter. For some reason, though, this week I decided to actually pick some out, and it got me thinking. Even if the only magic one could do were measly cantrips, it would be world-shakingly significant. Consider:

     Cure Minor Wounds: Probably the most obvious use of magic would be healing. Cure minors are the emergency stabilization patch of the D&D world; sure, it only does 1 hp, but according to the rules, any amount of magical healing automatically stops someone from bleeding out. So no more dramatic ambulance rides to the ER. EMTs would just be 1st-level clerics who drive up, poke a guy with a cure minor, then stop off for lunch on the way to the hospital (or temple, more likely).

     Detect Poison: Like cure minor wounds, this could revolutionize the medical field by making it simple to find out what is wrong with somebody. I guess we’d still need House to diagnose disease, but this would certainly make Poison Control’s job a lot easier.

     Create Water: You get a minimum of 2 gallons of water per casting. It almost seems cruel that this spell doesn’t exist, what with all the parts of the world where drought and clean drinking water are an issue. Even assuming you’re the worst caster ever, you could still do this several times a day. Considering a normal person needs less than a gallon of water a day to live (according to the Mayo Clinic), you could do the world a whole lot of good with this cantrip.

     Mage Hand: A very limited telekinesis that lets you move 5 pounds from 25 feet away (or more). While it's not fine-tuned enough to manipulate your iPhone or a gun, 5 lbs is still an unexpectedly large amount. Of course, I imagine that this magic power would be used more to annoy people (imagine playing keep away when the object in question is floating 20 feet over your head) and to facilitate us lazy fatties (no more bothersome getting off the couch to get a candy bar or a bottle to pee in).

     Mending: Mostly I put this in here for all those crafters and sewers out there. Because really, how much easier would costume-making be if you could just fix your mistake with a simple word?

Someday, LEGOs

    There's a LEGO store in the mall by my house, and it taunts and teases me with its bricky goodness. All of my LEGOs are boxed up in a closet in my house, similarly calling to me with visions of building castles and spaceships and filling them with perpetually smiling yellow-skinned people. I can't wait to have children so that I have an excuse to play with my LEGOs again.
     Note: this is not the only reason I want to have children. There are lots of other fulfilling aspects to parenthood (I assume). But being allowed to play with toys again is just a more tangible benefit. 

I'm pretty sure we built that wagon in a campaign, once.

     Especially because they have all these cool sets now that I would have killed for when I was a kid. For the Castle line, they were just coming out with wizards, dragons, and undead. Now they have dwarves and orcs, too, not to mention all sorts of weapons that are a lot more
impressive looking. If I consider the Woodsmen to be elves (and lets face it, they all wear jaunty green feathered hats and carry bows; they're already pretty elfy), I could put together pretty much an entire D&D campaign.
     And the space set is even better. First, there are aliens now. I can't tell you how much I wanted there to be aliens when I was a kid. I always wanted an alien menace for my spacemen to fight. Sure, they could fight each other, but maybe I just wanted to believe my
futuristic space-colonizing civilization was more unified than that. Second, there's all the Star Wars stuff. Say what you want about the prequels, but I have to admit I love that the marketing force behind the movies has lead to having aliens and lightsabers in my LEGOs. And there's nothing George Lucas can do to ruin the stories you create in your head with the toys.

I wonder if its belly opens up and you can fit a guy inside.

     I think that's part of my love for the toys. LEGOs were instrumental to making me the storyteller I am today. Not only would I build the castles and the spaceships, but then I'd have to start telling the story as to why they were fighting, which leads to history and world-building and all the other elements of a story. I can also see now how this led me down the path of roleplaying. I remember putting together armies of LEGO men and going to war with my sister, only to have the whole thing descend into arguments as to what was allowed and what wasn't. My sister, with the Woodsman army, decided that their princess was a sorceress (on account of the glowy staff she built) and could then put my entire army to sleep. And damned if I couldn't think of a good reason why not.
     So, for all of you who have ever played with me and complained about me being a rules-lawyer, now you know who to blame.

Escapist Fantasy...Kinda Redundant

    Continuing with my series (meaning that I've done it once or twice before) on "dirty" words, I'm going to look at another one today.
    Escapism.
    Now, this might not seem particularly bad to some of you. But as a sci-fi/fantasy writer, I hear this a lot. And it is pretty much never used in a positive light. The reasoning is usually that escapism is bad because all it does is provide people with a way to avoid their problems and/or the problems of the world. It does not help confront or solve issues, and therefore does not contribute to the betterment of mankind.
    Mostly I got this kind of tripe from my writing workshops in college. My stories weren't "literature;" they did not address important socio-political issues. My professor seemed willfully unable to grasp the concept of writing as entertainment, and very often my speculative fiction was deemed "escapist" (as synonymous with "garbage"). It sounds silly now, but it took me a long time to get over this and realize that the elitism of Academia was just as pointless and arbitrary.
    There's nothing wrong with escapism. Life is hard, and sometimes what you need is a few hours away from it. I think the great fear is that people will draw themselves completely away from the real world to immerse themselves in the fantasy world of some book, movie, TV series, or game (especially roleplaying games). While I'm sure this happens every once in a while, you can hardly blame the genre or medium for the individuals mental instability. If some kid gets completely wrapped up in WoW and forgets that's he's not an elf, well that kid clearly wasn't well to begin with. If it weren't the game, it was going to be something else eventually.
    I also balk at the idea that proper "literature" changes the world with its challenge of important issues. Does that strike anybody else as conceited on the part of the literary world? To claim that your writing is the cause for social or political change is like saying the sun came up because you woke up this morning. Isn't it more likely that this was going to happen anyway? Let's face it, issues like racism and sexism weren't challenged because people read Jane Eyre or Native Son. Rather, these books were the results of social trends that were already in the works. And nowadays, with the speed of information being what it is, there really isn't any way to create a piece of literature to address an issue that isn't already on the forefront of some socio-political movement.
    I like escapist media, because it helps me not be quite so cynical and pessimistic. If I spent my whole life in the real world, I don't think I'd have any hope left at all. The economy sucks and doesn' t seem to have any chance of getting better, and the common man's attempts at protesting this have essentially faded into obscurity. Should I be spending all my time writing things that rail against corporate greed or corrupt government? Newsflash: everybody already knows. So instead of getting all depressed by this, I'm going to create a fantasy world where things make sense. Yes, cities will be razed by armies of monsters, but at least I know that the good guys will prevail in the end.
    Which actually brings up the point that escapist media can make some things seem a lot better. No matter how much you might think your life sucks, it could be worse. There could be hordes of zombies beating down your door or a fleet of alien warships hovering overhead.
Just keep that in mind the next time you're stuck in traffic: at least it's not because you're rushing out of the city that Godzilla is destroying.

Funnier Than People

     When I first started getting really into writing and drawing comics, way back in junior high, my first two series (that weren't just blatant Calvin and Hobbes or X-Men ripoffs) featured aliens almost exclusively. See, I knew that I wasn't much of an artist, and I figured that if I made all the characters aliens, it would be okay that they were funny looking. They're aliens, after all. Additionally, I could avoid the parts of human anatomy I had trouble with, like noses and ears, by simply avoiding them. 
     Eventually I got to the point where I could draw some recognizable humans, but I still hold a fondness for my nonhuman characters. Maybe I also think there is extra comedic effect in having these aliens and/or monsters doing mundane things and acting like normal "people." There's a bid of absurdness when an alien being makes references to things like Corn Flakes (for example). Obviously, Corn Flakes are a purely human convention, so why would an alien be eating them? Is breakfast cereal one of those universal constants of any civilization, like the need for shelter and the company of others? Or maybe it's the only bit of human culture that survives in the vast stretches of a futuristic interspecies galaxy. Maybe Corn Flakes are humanity's greatest, longest-lasting legacy.
     I also wonder if that's why it's so effective to anthropomorphize animals as characters in children's books and cartoons. It makes normal things seem hilarious. For example: if a human with a speech impediment and rage issues walked down the street wearing only a shirt and no pants, he'd be locked away. But a duck? Comedy gold. And would Wile E. Coyote be nearly so hilarious if he was just some sap who continued to injure himself with untested explosives? Probably not. Of course, there's the Three Stooges, so I guess slapstick is funny no matter what the species.
     Anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic, but here's the comic. I start to get into storylines that I think are actually funny here, especially with the GOOs (what I call the Great Old Ones). I generally like these ones better; maybe, as mentioned above, because they're the nonhumans. Because when Cthulhu is a drunken lout, it's funny. When it's your uncle at your birthday party, not so much.

The Forbidden Game

     I'm going to talk today about a dirty word. It is a word that all us gamers cringe upon hearing:

     LARPing.  
     Live-Action Role Playing is generally considered to be the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low in terms of gaming. They play the same kind of games we do, only they dress up and run around in parks throwing tin-foil lightning bolts at each other and insisting on speaking only in bad British accents (because that's how everybody old-timey talked). They're the ones who go into the steam tunnels and get lost because they aren't in touch with reality enough to realize they're not actually adventurers and don't know how to navigate "dungeons." LARPers are the ones that the rest of us shun. They're the ones that cause us the most embarrassment, because they represent everything we don't want people to think about us. They're like furries; yeah, we might like some things that the mainstream would consider weird, but we're not freaks.
     Why bring this up? Well, my wife and I went to a party the other week which was Dollhouse themed (set in the time of the Epitaph episodes). We dressed up and spent the entire time in character. I was a paranoid survivalist, my wife was a butch hard-ass, there was an ex-doctor, etc. The entire thing went like a game of Werewolf or Mafia, as we tried to figure out which one of us was a Butcher. Last year, a bunch of us also did one of those How to Host a Murder games. Both of these events were a lot of fun.
     But when you think about it...they were awful close to LARPing. I mean, what's the real difference. We are still hanging around, playing as amateur actors, trying to solve mysteries and unravel plot. And the murder mystery type games are pretty popular even with non-gamers. So what's the difference? Is it a matter of rolling dice? Is it okay because it doesn't take place in a medieval fantasy setting?
     Myself and the people I game with pride ourselves on our roleplaying. We like to think that we spend more time "in-character" fleshing out personality and backstory than we do just hacking and slashing. We will definitely build characters that might not be the strongest stat-wise, but will stay true to their themes and personal history. There's a fair bit of acting involved. Yet we think of ourselves as better than LARPers, why? Because we have the common decency to keep our asses around a table instead of going out into public to display our geekiness? What, are we ashamed?
     I'm not saying I'm going to start donning a robe and a point hat and spraypainting "fireball" onto the side of Nerf balls. But I do think we need to take a step back when we look down on others' hobbies. We're none of us cool kids, and we'd do well to remember that.

NPC Blues

    Sometimes, us gamers succumb to temptation and start playing around with the idea of "what would we be if this were real?" I.e., if we, as our real-life selves, were to suit up and go adventuring, what class would we be? Normally, the point of roleplaying is to step out of your own head and explore other worlds and people. But sometimes you just can't help but wonder.
    I don't recommend diving too deep into this particular thought exercise. I did, and it was just depressing.
    It was pretty easy to rule out some classes. I'm clearly not a warrior, as I have nothing that comes even remotely close to weapon proficiencies. Anybody who has ever seen me try to do anything even as "attack-like" as chopping firewood can attest. I'd do more damage to my own teammates than I would the enemy.
    Likewise, I'd be a terrible rogue, because I have virtually no manual dexterity. I have fat, clumsy, sausage-like fingers. To illustrate the point: in high school, I had to give up on playing bass guitar because I found the strings too small and close together. Putting me in charge of delicate work like picking locks and disarming traps would be asking to get a poisoned dart in the face.
    Cleric (or some other manner of divine caster) is right out, because I don't nearly have the level of faith or piety required to get on my god's good side.
    Like many people who consider themselves intellectuals, I immediately leap on the idea of being a wizard. They’re all nerdy and physically laughable, but command a lot of power based on their brains, right? Maybe so, but with a more honest examination of myself, that won’t work. I might be nerdy, but I’m not very good at studying. There was a lot of “winging it” that went on in high school and college. I don’t think that’s what you want out of your wizard. “Yeah, yeah, I read most of the spellbook. The end got kind of boring so I just skimmed it. I totally got the gist of it, though.” Not what you want to hear from the guy about to attempt a fireball. So I might ostensibly have the workings of a wizard, but in practice I think it would just be terrifying.

     The sad thought is that I might be a bard. Not even a cool adventuring bard who weaves spells into song and boosts allies and enchants enemies. I don’t think I’m even diplomatic enough to be the Face of the party. No, I’d be the type of bard who has focused on bardic lore; the most useless bar-trivia ability ever created. At best I’d be the NPC who the players encounter once to get some bit of info to solve a piece of the puzzle. Then they’d be off, and I’d be stuck trying to see if any of the townsfolk want to hear me recite dirty limericks.

Only not this much fun.

     See, my wife would be a rogue. She’s just full of skills, and has been known to sneak attack me on occasion. Whether it be cooking or sewing or painting the house or chainsawing fallen trees, she can do it all. I often say that my survival plan for the coming apocalypse is my wife. She’s the one with all the useful skills, and my only hope is to say, “I’m with her! If you want her in your fortified compound, you have to take me, too!” Now I’m realizing this is my only chance to get to go on the adventure, too.

     So, take it from me. Be happy that you’re not yourself in the D&D world. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck at the inn with me while everybody else goes off to get the experience points and gold pieces.

Really, Though, She'd Roll 3d6

While there are a lot of things I don't like about the Call of Cthulhu system (as a roleplaying game), I can't help but appreciate some of the concepts. Such as, your Investigator (the player-characters) will inevitably go insane or die. You lose sanity points by rolling under your current Sanity on 1d100, which means the more you lose, the easier it is to lose more. It's a hilarious spiral of crazy. You just can't get that kind of fun with D&D.

I Will Turn This Table Around

     I don’t have any children, but I have a D&D group, which in many ways functions in the same capacity. Now, before I get any irate comments, I am in no way comparing the rigors of child-rearing to that of GMing a roleplaying game. Clearly those of you who have struggled to actually raise a child have had a harder time of it. But here me out; the similarities are disturbing enough to make me wonder about creating my own brood.

     1) It’s a thankless task. You do a lot of work for your game: drawing maps at multiple levels—from the cities to the countries, creating interesting and interactive NPCs, weaving story and guiding them through intrigue and plot, maintaining a mastery over the bookkeeping and rules-lawyering, all while playing referee between their petty squabbles. And most of the time, they have no idea how much work goes into just getting them up and out the door in the morning…er, figuratively speaking.

     2) You want them to learn and grow, and you want them to challenge themselves, but most of the time when you push them to get better, they just resent you for it. No, dear, the spiked pit in that hall was so you learn to always check for traps. And the rust monster was really just a metaphor for the transience of wealth and the meaninglessness of material belongings. I’m trying to make you grow as a person.

     3) One word: discipline. The fighter’s getting pretty aggressive, time to remind him of his crappy Will save with some Otto’s Irresistible Dance. The rogue’s all cocky, so toss in some golems and watch him weep without his sneak attack dice. What about the wizard, looking all complacent there in the back? Time for some monsters with spell resistance and the most annoying enemy in the world: the sorcerer who has specialized in counterspelling. And when the cleric’s getting all holier-than-thou, introduce them to a street urchin pickpocket who swipes their holy symbol, and watch the lesson sink in as they try to prepare spells the next day.

     4) They always want a bigger allowance. “What do you mean there’s only 10,000 gp in this chest!? I’m trying to put vorpal on my +3 holy greatsword!”

     But in the end, no matter how much they annoy you and make you pull your prematurely graying hair own, you love ‘em. Because they might be a bunch of socially-awkward misfits who don’t have a complete grasp on reality, but dammit, they’re your bunch of socially-awkward misfits who don’t have a complete grasp on reality. 

The Dead Genre

     I'm going to come right out and say it: zombies have become the bane of my horror-fan existence. I know, I know, just last week I was gushing about Cabin in the Woods which heavily features zombies, but that's different. The zombies in that movie were incidental to the larger theme, and that's tolerable. But my work as an editor for a horror magazine has made me cringe everytime I see a story that even hints at the Z-word.
    The problem is that the genre has nowhere to go. A zombie piece (be it movie or book) always follows the same formula: there is an outbreak of some kind that causes a zombie apocalypse, a handful of survivors bunker down somewhere but then realize they have to abandon the place, and most of the survivors are killed in the flight. Sometimes there is military-based salvation at the end, but that detail is unnecessary. Even when a new "angle" is presented (such as injecting black humor a la Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland), the plot is still rigidly the same.
    Of course, it's not just the zombie sub-genre that gets this kind of repetitive treatment in horror. Slasher movies are just as bad. Anybody who was alive enough to remember the 80s and early 90s know Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers, although anymore they are more of a joke than anything. That's because their cliched, formulaic movies became so predictable that it was just sad, and now people watch slasher movies usually on the basis of "so bad it's good." For a brief moment there was a revival with the introduction of the Saw movies, but now torture movies as a sub-genre have become just as trite (the term "torture porn" just illustrates how seriously it's not taken).
    I understand why these works keep getting produced. It's the same reason that record companies still insist on churning out records that are either synth-pop or four-piece rock bands. They think the buying public are afraid of anything new (and, of course, they might be right), so they're just going to keep exhausting every conceivable iteration of the same old stuff.
    Zombies really bug me, though. It might be because that's what's "in" right now, an therefore that's what's being driven into the ground (although Hollywood at least seems to have gotten the point and hasn't produced a zombie movie in a while). But it's also because there's really no other option for what to do with the genre. At least with slashers, you could play with some of the details. It could be completely "realistic," where the slasher is just some psycho with a sharp object, or it could be supernatural like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The fact that Saw was able to spawn a sub-genre just shows that there is potential for evolution.
    But what are you going to do differently with zombies? Change what makes them zombies? Well, 28 Days Later gave us "zombies" who are actually plague victims. It's still a zombie movie, though, and follows the formula religiously. You could try having zombies without there being an apocalypse involved, but without the hordes of undead taking over the city, you've just got a slasher movie or creature feature.
    I don't want to just bitch and moan about the current state of the genre, though. Let's be productive, instead. I'm going to challenge myself (and you're welcome to join in) to come up with a way to make zombies interesting again. It may be an exercise in futility, but at least we'll try.

Sometimes I Wonder About the House Floating in Space

It's comic day, and this one makes me chuckle even now.

As a side note, I started using the term "drunken shenanigans" again in the last few years, completely forgetting that I learned the phrase back in college. Serendipitous, I know.