Operating Thesis

This is barely more than a postlet, but, six months later, it's probably best to put some distance between the front page and the previous post.

A random file search lead me to the folder where I kept all my notes for my 2007 Master's Thesis. The story I've told myself and others for years is that my Master's project was a ridiculously close reading of an author's oeuvre of a dozen books, with next to zero secondary sources. But the folder has notes on about fifty different secondary texts, ranging from psychoanalysis to gender theory to genre theory to ecocriticism. Funny how the story in your head about the past drifts from the truth, even when the drift frames you in a less positive light.

Funny indeed. Later Days.

Anxious

It's 2000. I've been invited to a high school house party, which a rare thing. I get in the family van, turn the key--and nothing. During my previous trip earlier that day, I forgot to turn off the headlights, and the battery is drained. I stay home.

(I'm relieved.)

It's 2002. I'm part of a program where university undergraduates take high school students with them to classes for a day, to give them a taste of college life; I'm on the undergraduate side of the equation. When I get to the room where the undergraduates and high schoolers are being paired up, I'm suddenly struck by how many people are there, pressed against each other, laughing, shouting. I run to the washroom and throw up. I stare at myself in the mirror for a full minute. Then I go out, collect my students, and go about my day.

It's 2003. Another house party, of the college variety. A friend I've known literally all my life asks me why I never drink at these things. My tongue stumbles on an explanation, that if I did I'd never--what? Never learn to handle these situations otherwise? Never know if I could fit in without drinking? Never stop? I turn it into a joke. The conversation shifts. I leave soon after.

It's 2006. I'm drinking (I do that now) with a group of MAs and PhDs. We're joined by another group, full of people I don't know. I'm suddenly convinced I'm surrounding by strangers and people who would rather talk to them than to me, and that my presence would only inhibit them from doing so. I finish my drink, make my excuses, leave. I'm not sure if anyone noticed.
(and I spend the walk home debating whether that's the worst or best outcome)

It's 2007. A friend is getting published, and she throws a party in celebration. I get to the party and I see a backyard full of people--but no one I recognize. I circle around the block once, twice, and walk away. I didn't want my brother back home to know I didn't go in, though, so I spend the next three hours walking aimlessly, until I feel enough time has passed. I send her a nice facebook message, congratulating her on her achievement.

It's 2008. I'm at my first big academic conference. It's in Orlando, and my family came too, for the themepark trip. I love the panels, and I give my presentation to a room full of people. There's no problem there; there never has been. I've given academic talks, led classrooms, delivered eulogies, toasted married couples, to a dozen, or dozens, or hundreds of people. Talking to a crowd is easy; being in a crowd is awful. I spend the time between sessions reading a book and avoiding eye contact. How was the conference, asks my family, returning from Disneyland. Great, I say. (And it was, pretty much.)

It's 2009. I'm in a PhD program. Whole new place, whole new group of people. I drink A LOT and indulge in certain behaviours: bursting into loud song, taking breaks from drinking to run laps around the pub. Would someone experiencing extreme anxiety draw attention to themselves in such flamboyant fashion?
(Yes.)

It's 2011. I'm meeting a friend for coffee. They reflect that when they first met me, I seemed aloof and arrogant, with the way I stood apart at parties and didn't talk to anyone. I smile thinly.

It's 2013. I'm still drinking to fight down the "flee" response at parties. It works, sort of, but only as long as I keep drinking. And I resent that I need it, and start resenting the people around me too, and lash out.

It's 2015. I finally figure that out and put binge-drinking behind me. It's a young person's game anyway.

It's 2017. A colleague (friend always seems presumptive on my part, including--especially including--every single time I've typed it in this post) gives a semi-formal public talk, in a place that's just a few minutes walk from me. I consider going, I want to go, but when the time comes, I'm seized with the worry of an unknown crowd, of a mix of unfamiliar faces and familiar that don't want or need me there, and I stay away.

I've thought, obsessively and repeatedly, about all of these instances, and others. But I've never typed them out in one place. This blog is nine years old, and I've never felt so bleakly awful in putting one of my posts out there in world. I have extreme social anxiety, and doesn't get explained away, or disappear once I've found my confidence. I don't know if talking about it will help. I know not talking about it wasn't helping.

Later Days.

Time Travel Cthulu subquest

Torment : Tides of Numenera spoilers below the tag.

10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine

A friend of mine had a birthday recently, and she had a general Star Trek theme. For the purpose of the event, I wrote up a TNG/DS9 crossover fanfic comedy routine, and I wanted to post it somewhere enduring. Thus, without further ado...

10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine

1) Lieutenant Reginald Enidcott Barclay swore off holodecks, but decides that he can see one just once--he's on vacation, after all. So he goes down to the station to rent one of Qark's holosuites.
"Are you sure you can handle this?" asks Quark. "These simulations... they're a lot more intense than the ones you Federation people use."
Barclay scoffs. "Listen, I, I have put in more hours on the Enterprise holodeck than any three people combined. I... I can handle this." He says it again, to himself. "I can handle this."
"Well, ok." Quark hands him the disc for "Vulcan Love Slave, Part II: The Revenge." Barclay steps into the suite for his half hour session. No one on the Enterprise ever sees him again.

2) Odo asks for Deanna's advice in the gift he picked out for her mother. It's a replica 20th century flapper-style feather boa. Deanna, in the style of every first grade teacher who's had to evaluate a macaroni "I Love You Mommy": "..... She'll love it because it's from you."

3) Judzia and Worf invite Deanna and Riker to their quarters for a private dinner--or rather, Jadzia invites Deanna against Worf's better judgment, and Riker overhears and invites himself. Jadzia and Deanna quickly find they don't get along; they debate politics, and Jadzia finds Deanna's approach too manipulative, too passive, too indirect. Deanna, for her part, believes that Judzia is too aggressive and deliberately antagonistic. Finally, Worf intercedes, telling them there is no need to fight over him, as Jadzia has already won, and that they are both embarrassing themselves. There's a moment of silence, and then Jadzia comments, "you know, Worf, for someone who can be such a smooth talker when it comes to romance, you sure can put your foot in it." She turns to Deanna. "Did he try his line on you too? About being afraid of hurting you?"
Worf interjects. "Klingon mating is very physically--"
"He did!" says Troi. "Which is odd, because in actuality, he's such a tender lover."
They spend the rest of the night debating Worf's sexual prowess. Worf is so mortified he is still sitting silently at the table an hour after the dinner ends, frozen in embarassment.
Years later, Riker will remember the dinner as one of the best nights of his life.

4) DS9 Operations Chief Miles Edward O'Brien sneaks onto the Enterprise during the night shift. He goes to the transporter room, sets out his tools, and gets to work behind the console. The next day, the Enterprise transporter chief finds a surprise. Someone has welded a leather chair to the spot in front of his console, and left a big bow and a note: "You're feckin' welcome."

5) Qark runs into Guinan, and is instantly terrified. Years ago, she gave him some advice on running a bar, and by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, she's entitled to half his profits unless he can convince her to admit he earned his success on his own. He attempts to wow her with his state of the art holosuites, his Tellarians-eat-half-off Tuesdays, his dabo tables. She is thoroughly unimpressed, until she runs into Morn, who orders his usual. Guinan: "Quark, I have been tending bars for longer than most civilizations have had star travel, and I have never, never met anyone as demanding, as particular, as downright picky, as Morn. I don't know what you're doing here, but if you've got him as your regular, you must be doing *something* right. Consider the rule satisfied." (Because of course Guinan knew exactly what he was trying to do the whole time.)

6) Ro Laren and Kira have a series of long talks about their hopes and dreams for Bajor, and start a friendship that will last the rest of their lives. Not everything has to be a joke.

7) Riker contracts a STI from a dabo girl, and gets it treated on DS9 because he doesn't want Crusher to know. Unfortunately for him, Dr Bashir is miffed that Riker doesn't immediately acknowledge him as an equally smooth ladies' man, and "accidentally" lets slip the information. Beverley knows how to let a good joke mature, though, so she waits until Riker's next annual check-up to say "and tell me, Will, are you still experience a burning sensation in your armpits?".

8) Q pays a visit, unable to resist the two teams in one place. He runs into Garak, who introduces himself and tricks Q into doing some low level magical favors him. Q figures it out, promises to ruin Garak's family and disappears, but this was Garak's plan all along: from the beginning, he figured Q would turn on him, which is why he gave his name as a member of a rival house in the Obsidian Order. Point for the tailor spy-master.

9) Jake tries to bond with Wesley Crusher (who is still on the Enterprise, despite it being at least season 4 DS9 if Worf's on the station--don't worry about it), but even he's annoyed by Wesley's know-it-all-ism. In desperation, he tries to get Nog to talk to Wesley, but Nog's own Starfleet-born competitiveness places them in a loop of one-upmanship. Finally, Jake abandons them both, and a month later, his essay on how Starfleet instills an atmosphere of unhealthy competitive elitism in its cadets gets published in a space-zine.

10) On the last day of the Enterprise's docking, the two teams play a friendly game of baseball. Geordi and Data get really into sabremetrics; Riker absolutely destroys his body to make amazing catches; Deanna gets really competitive and uses her empathic abilities to play mind games with the enemy team (Rom eventually needs to be carried out in a stretcher.) The Enterprise crew illustrates why they're the best and the brightest, perfectly fusing together as a team and effortlessly winning the game. But the Deep Space Nine crew have a lot more fun.

Later Days.

Fish, Please: A Spoiler-iffic Review of Finding Nemo

I'll try to keep this one actually short. I watched "Finding Dory" on Netflix last night, and... it was fine, I guess. I think I came into the film with a net neutral opinion: I'm inclined to support Ellen DeGeneres in a lead role, but I also thought her character in Finding Nemo was pretty one note. She's given a bit more depth here, but overall, there's not a lot of depth to go around.

Elevating the sidekick to the main act isn't an uncommon choice for a sequel movie, but it is more uncommon for a sequel that gets fully supported by the studio. You can point to a lot of Disney products that spawned sequels, but the sequels themselves are almost always treated like spin-off products. I wouldn't say the world of Finding Nemo had a story left in it that was screaming to be told, but Finding Dory's premise--that Dory has remembered her parents, and wants to try to reconnect--is fine.

The format is more or less the same as the original--you have two groups that are majorly separated from each other, and both have adventures trying to get reunited. In the original, it's Dory and Marlin and Nemo; here, it's Dory and Marlin and Nemo. They meet occasional threats, but mostly just complicated scenarios, and a lot of colorfully weird ocean life. There's even the sidekick who steals the show--Dory in the original, and Ed O'Neill as Hank the octopus here.

The movie's approach to disability is kind of mixed. On the one hand, Dory's memory loss is presented as a condition she has to learn to deal with, and a lot of her flashback scenes with her parents involve them helping her develop strategies for that. That's... well, realistic isn't the right word for a movie where fish can breathe in any sort of water regardless of salt content, and a father fish calls his daughter cupcake in a world that clearly has no reference for him to do so. But at least it shows disability isn't a burden, but a part of your life. On the other hand, it's also strongly implied that if she works hard, her problem will go away, which is less reflective of real experience.

There's also an interesting tension between humans and animals here that never quite gets resolved. The marine center Dori's parents lived at focuses on "Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Release," which is nice, and suggests a virtuous, ethical approach to marine life that emphasizes human responsibility to take care of those who we can. (Would that our own healthcare start with such a philosophy.) But it's worth noting we're told about this mission by Sigourney Weaver, and the celebrity involvement with the center illustrates how commercialized it is. Is there a conflict between caring for sealife and profitting off of them? Given the mass escape at the end of the movie, it seems to imply there is. (though surely some of those sea creatures were *not* suited for a return to the ocean, and just as surely, there was some human death involved in the octopod's aggressive driving. If nothing else, someone's going to suffer for the loss of the truck.)

The film raises these issues, but doesn't go very far out of its way to say anything about them. It's just a backdrop for general goofiness. And it does that goofiness pretty well, all things considered.

Later Days.

Film Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of Hell and Back

This was really distasteful, all in all. Just... ick.

CW: sexual assault

All right, plot: three friends work at a downward trending amusement park. After borrowing an evil book from the fortune teller, they jokingly make a blood oath on it, only to have the friend who reneges on it (by not giving a mint to the other upon request) get dragged into hell, with the other two in tow. The oath-violating friend is kidnapped, and the other two set out in a bumbling manner to rescue him. Subplots include the Devil being in love with an angel and trying to trap the other two to pass off to her, and a half-devil, half-demon woman searching for her long absent father, Orpheus (AKA, an expert in getting people out of hell). The whole thing is an a semi-claymation style that should be more endearing than it is.

Ok, so not a great premise, though in general, I'm always willing to give the "deal with the devil" archetypal plot a go. But the voice cast is an excellent array of some top level comedians: Bob Odenkirk as the devil, T. J. Miller as Augie, one of the two friends (Nick Swardson plays the other; I don't know him, but his performance was good enough); Rob Riggle as Curt, the friend whose soul is in trouble; Susan Sarandon as an angel; Danny McBride as Orpheus; and supporting roles from Maria Bamford, H. Jon Benjamin, Jennifer Coolridge, Kumail Nankiana, Brian Posehn, Paul Scheer, Greg Proops, Dana Snyder, and Paul F. Tompkins, and, while not exactly a comedian, Mila Kunis as Deema the female devil . It was basically that cast list that convinced me to try the film, despite its low Amazon rating.

Nope. In terms of plot, it doesn't work because of the sheer number of times a character acts without any particular reason, or changes their mind on a dime. Every character in the movie is kind of gross, with the exception of Deema. How much you care about the outcome depends on wanting the leads to get out of hell and rescue Curt, and I was actively rooting for failure at points. It's demeaning to all its female characters--of the four significant ones, two are supposed to be comical because of their grotesque bodies (fatness and age), and the other are ridiculously sexualized. The male characters in regards to the women are either "Good Guys," horndogs, or alternate randomly between the two. And Orpheus' backstory and the movie's climax hinge directly around tree rape.(The worst thing that can ever be leveled at the Evil Dead series is that it popularized tree rape as a comedy trope.)

Let's unpack that last one. By far the most interesting idea the film has is that Orpheus is an action hero/smuggler type, but in person, he's also a self-important asshole. Danny McBride in general is hit or miss for me, but I think he does pretty well in the role. But it's heavily implied that the reason for his behaviour is a tree molestation. And at the end of the story, our heroes lead the devil into a tree rape ambush. It's all gross, and doesn't improve with repetition.

A frequent debate in comedy is what, if anything, should be off limits. On the one side, you have people arguing that comedy that's racist or misogynist or turns rape into a punchline trivializes and normalizes certain modes of thought. On the other hand, you have basically the free speech argument, that comedians should be free to say what they want, and that humour can be a useful tool for critiquing social issues.

In virtually any circumstances, I'd defer to the former argument, and absolutely understand anyone who refused flat out to tolerate jokes on one of these subjects. For me personally, my response to the second argument is that yes, you're free to say that--but being free to say something doesn't also free you from the consequences of saying it. And yes, humour can be a useful tool, but in that case, message, execution, and audience come into play.

For example, let's compare this movie to Amy Schumer's "Friday Night Lights" sketch in 2015. (And yes, there are a lot of valid arguments that can be leveled against Schumer too, but for the argument at hand, the focus is the sketch.) It's a sketch about the prevalence of rape culture in sports, and it works for me. The humor makes a statement about the connection between rape culture and sports, by exaggerating the players' sense of sexual entitlement. In Hell and Back, it gets a decent amount of humor around Orpheus, through the juxtaposition of our notion of an ancient Greek hero known for his devotion to love against his actual character as a jackass fratboy. But the tree rape doesn't have that humour. Basically, it seems to be playing on three ideas:
a) it's funny because it's a reference to Evil Dead
b) it's funny because men being raped is inherently funny
c) it's funny because powerful men being raped by trees is inherently funny

a) is really more a substitute for humor rather than actual humor. b) and c) are basically just ways of trivializing rape against men, which just perpetuates really awful notions about masculinity. It's gross, and I think a lot less of the film for including it, and a little less of the people associated with the film.

Incidentally, my favorite gag of the film is a repeated gag where Paul F. Thompson voices a soul undergoing very small amounts of hellish torments.

Demon: "Welcome to Pizza Hut Taco Bell. What'll you have?"
PFT: "I think I'll have a medium pizza with pepperoni."
Demon: "All out! Only tacos! Because you're in hell!"
PFT: "Oh, I see."
Demon: "Now ask for a cheese pizza."
PFT: "All right. Could I get a---"
Demon: "No! Welcome to hell! Order again!"
PFT: "You know,  I think I see where this is going."

More of that. Less tree rape.

Later Days.

Movie Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of Black Christmas

With a lot of older entertainment, or technology, or what have you, after a certain period time, you stop appreciating them in and of themselves and appreciate them more for their historical association and context. For example, I absolutely don't have the patience for using a typewriter, but I can appreciate its significance to the 20th century, and to artistic movements like block poetry or the avant garde, ala Johanna Drucker's work.

 This shift can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy--you encounter something in the mindset that it's more valuable as an artifact than an experience, and that colours the experience you actually do have. For me, the biggest blindspot that creates is with film. I have this mental stumbling block where I know intellectually that pre-1980s film is full of works just as popular and entertaining as a lot of current stuff, but I almost always go into an older film assuming its greatest value for me will be its historical significance. As such, I start off thinking that it'll be the cinematic equivalent of brussel sprouts--I know it'll be good for me, but I certainly don't expect to like it.

And that's largely been the mindset under which I've undertaken my great Tour of Horror. For almost a year now, I've been surveying horror films and horror film theory, allegedly in the name of research for One Particular Game (see the other blog). But the earliest I was willing to go was the 1978 Halloween. I just couldn't convince myself that anything earlier would be relevant, especially with my subfocus on the slasher film genre. I was wrong. And it took the 1974 Black Christmas to show me the light.

The plot is certainly slasher at its core. A sorority has emptied out for Christmas Vacation, reducing its members to those about to depart--the alcoholic housemother Mrs Mac, and the puritanical Clare--and those with nowhere else to go--the Jewish student Phyllis "Phyl" Carlson, the British exchange student Jess, and Barb Coard, the verbally explicit sorority sister whose mother has unexpectedly cancelled her trip home. Throughout the film, they are tormented by prank calls that escalate into misogyny and death threats, but unbeknownst to them, the call is--famously--coming from inside the house.

That's a probably a good moment to return to my original point, by way of a videogame analogy. For the longest time, I thought of the 1998 game Baldur's Gate as the starting point for the modern Western RPG. It spawned a number of very successful sequels and spin-offs (a list potentially including one of my favourite games and dissertation topics, Planescape: Torment), it's clearly present in the DNA of BioWare, one of the most successful RPG developers still in existence, and its overall emphasis on choice and good/evil alignment has been majorly influential on videogames at large.  It wasn't until I sat down last year and actually played a few hours of the game for the first time that I appreciated how meta it was, how thoroughly self-referential the game was in its use of genre tropes that were already well trod. Thus, the potential problem with viewing it as a point of origin, that such a perspective obscures BG's own predecessors.

You can probably see where I'm going with this, or you will by the end of the next sentence. Before I started this Horror project, my earliest film foray into horror (discounting a probably-too-young viewing of Macaulay Culkin in the Good Son) was the 1996 Scream. Again, we have a major milestone for a genre--Scream set the tone for the postmodern horror film, and spawned imitators and influenced films from I Know What You Did Last Summer to the diminishing returns of  Scary Movie to full tilt postmodern horror like Cabin in the Woods or Last Girls. And again, perhaps even more obviously, it's not the origin at all, as its infamous starting phone scene clearly echoes Black Christmas, with a tech upgrade from multiple phone lines to the cell phone. (And yes--there's a good chance the urban legend of the caller in the house predates Black Christmas as well.) My watching of Black Christmas was a very vivid reminder that my preconceptions hold me back.

This post is veering into essay length, and I've barely scratched the film itself. So let's switch to bullet point.

• The whole reason I watched Black Christmas now is that I wanted to start the horror film podcast Faculty of Horror, and their first episode is Halloween vs Black Christmas. I still haven't listened to the podcast, but I have at least now seen both films. I'll say, then, that I think Black Christmas wins out. Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent in Halloween, of course, and there's some fun with the supporting cast, but overall, Black Christmas uses its cast to better effect. It also helps that there's less pontificating about people "born evil" and fewer "ugh why are you doing that it is the stupidest thing" moments.
  
• The Internet has decided that Lethal Weapon and Die Hard are Christmas movies. In that case, Black Christmas should totally get counted before them, right? I mean, Christmas is in the name. The plot is centered around the holiday (ie, as an explanation of why there's so few people in the house). And, via the carollers scene, I think it does a much better job juxtaposing the supposed innocence of the season with the violence of its events.
  
• Deviation from Slasher tropes #1: the "innocent" girl is the first one killed. (Hey, the word "spoiler" is in the post title for a reason.)
  
• And what they replace her with is so much more interesting in terms of what the film does with gender. Instead, our final girl is not just sexually active, but pregnant, and steadfast on getting an abortion.  I appreciate that the film doesn't vilify her for this stance, and instead presents her boyfriend's insistent claim on her body as extreme. (Granted, it needs to do this, for the ending to work and to make plausible the idea that the boyfriend is the killer, but it's still appreciated.)
  
• Deviation from Slasher tropes #2: Mrs. Mac. Ever notice how slasher killers are weirdly fixated on teens and 20-somethings? Mrs. Mac, the veneer of respectability for the sorority house, is a wonderful character who you'd never find in a later slash flick. Her alcoholism and general resignation mixed with pride over her station at life is simultaneously tragic, comic, and awesome. She loves her sorority and acting as mother to the group, but is also aware that she's a farcical character and somewhat a pitied one, for her failure to create a "real" family and move beyond the sorority. Gender again--the way we undervalue and mock the spinster figure.
  
• Watching a horror movie about a familiar place made monstrous through a stranger's presence takes on a different resonance when you do it in a building where the pipes bang randomly.
  
• I think it was Friedrich Kittler who discussed how uncanny the gramophone was before people became familiar with it. If there's one thing horror film has shown us, it's that any piece of technology, especially communicative technology, can be rendered uncanny if it's pushed in a way we don't expect. Modern cinema has thoroughly--oh so thoroughly--explored this unfamiliarity with the camera, from the Blair Witch Project to the Paranormal series, but I love how the "call from inside the house" does it the household phone. We've come to expect some degree of distance that the telephone (or smart phone) provides; when that distance is eroded, when a female space like a sorority house is violated, the result is horrific.
  
• Deviation from Slasher tropes #3: No gratuitous sexuality. It's a film set in a sorority house, but there's no bikini pool scene, no panties shots, no pointless nudity. There's two nighties: one appears during an asthma attack, and the other is wrapped around a fully clothed Mrs. Mac. Honestly, if anything disqualifies it from slasher status, it might be this one.
  
• It's kind of surprising how little information we get about the killer and his motives. Again, that's partly necessary to make the ending work. And again, I prefer it to Halloween's approach, which was to give a potential origin AND the explanation of the killer being "born evil." I wouldn't say it's a deviation from slasher tropes, but it's certainly different. It keeps the focus on the cast, which I appreciate.
  
• It bears remembering that this entire film is premised around an explicitly gendered threat--the danger posed by sexually threatening phone calls. (And that's a big a problem now as ever. Maybe even worse, given the options open to internet trolls. They don't need to be physically present in your house to ruin your life.) As such, if there's a theme here, it's the mistreatment of women. I like how that's present in everything--not just in our lead and her boyfriend and implicit in Mrs. Mac, but also in details like the police not taking the matter seriously until an assertive male comes and insists on their action. The ending is possible only because all the men around feel it's ultimately okay to leave alone the one woman left standing. If anything qualifies it for ur-slasher status, it's the attention it pays to gender, which is a major part of the subgenre.

So, thanks to Black Christmas, I've gained a new respect for all older movies (mutters under breath: "That were released after 1973.")

Later Days.

YA drive-by

I'm teaching a course on Harry Potter this term, and gave a recent lecture on the roots and themes of YA literature. One of the articles I wound up not using was by a scholar named Mike Cadden. For the most part, Cadden gave a fairly interesting breakdown of YA literature--I particularly liked his discussion of YA as transitional literature and how the notion of length becomes intertwined with quality, but I was much less impressed by this passage:

“For girls, then, our fake realism of today comes largely

from Alloy Entertainment. These are the folks who bring

the tweeners the wildly popular series about Gossip Girls,

The Clique, The A-List, and It Girls—and what seems to

be the whole YA gossip-oh-my-gawd-he’s-so-cute-butcan-

you-believe-what-that-bitch-said industry. It’s clearly

an entertainment company and would be a target for those

concerned with representations of adult behavior and what

is/should be important to adolescent girls. I guess you

could say that they’re the guilty beach-reads for adolescents,

though we could argue that it’s without the guilt.

But hey, at least those kids are reading, right? These are

novels that, unlike more clearly comic and contemporary

realism like The Princess Diaries, haven’t a tongue within

miles of the cheek—at least not one’s own."

I'll confess, I haven't actually read any of these books, which is a definite limitation to my counterargument, but I have seen nearly every episode of Gossip Girl, which I feel gives me some ground to push back here. The accusation that Cadden implicitly levels at teenage "chick lit" is basically the same that was once leveled at the early gothic novel or the 19th century romance, genres which are now arguably read more by academics than anyone else. These books, critics complained, corrupt our girls, filling their minds with trashy drivel and sexual misconduct. You can deal with them at that level if you want, but they're also reflective of the society they're written from, and in that sense, they're almost across the board a deconstruction of how women are empowered and disempowered by societal norms.

The "tongue within miles of the cheek" line is a good line, but that's all it is. For someone who has watched Gossip Girl and read critiques of Gossip Girl (Jacob Clifton's old Television Without Pity articles were brilliant, and what got me into the show in the first place), I can say he must not have been paying attention, because the series was all about the ridiculousness of teenage extremities. Maybe the books were different, but given that the series includes Psycho Killer, a slasher parody that recasts the series' leads as serial killers, I'm thinking not. Yes, they're of a very different kind from young adult  novels exploring realism and engaging directly with social issues,  but to dismiss them so firmly is to perpetuate the same sort of literary snobbery that has long been YA's lot.

Later Days.

Make Room, Make Room

Empty Shelves

Pardon the self-indulgence (honestly, what else is one going to do with a blog?), but I'm going to wallow for a moment and pour one out for my old graduate office space, which I finally locked up for the last time today. Not a moment too soon, and probably slightly late--ten minutes AFTER the next tenant comes in is cutting things officially too short. I know the room is property of the university and department, and not meant to be thought of as belonging to any individual students (or groups of students, or post-students). And I know it was selfish of me to continue squatting in the space when other graduate students were fighting for space. And I know that the space, and my attachment to it, are somewhat symptomatic of a degree it took me Too Long to complete. 

And yet... I feel a twinge of real loss at giving up access to it. It's silly to call it a home, but it was a space, a place, that was mine for a very long time. I spent eight years, give or take, in that office; I've dwelt there longer than any other place since moving to Kitchener-Waterloo. In fact, I've dwelt there longer than any place since moving out of my parents' house sixteen years ago. It was a bit of continuity in a changing life, and I'll miss it.

So it goes, and time marches on. Onwards, upwards, and so forth to whatever comes next.

(And yes, I see the resonance between a graduate space that I've clinged to for too long and this blog. So don't think pointing it out is clever or something.)

Later Days.

A Book, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou--and no offense, but the Bread and the Thou are optional

I just had one of the most relaxing Sunday afternoons of my life. It was very simple; I walked around for a bit, I stopped, and I read for a while. Once at a coffee shop while I had lunch, once on campus, once in the park, and once in another coffee shop while sipping on a frappaccino. And each time, I'd rotate between reading a chapter in one of four books: Brian Staveley's The Providence of Fire (high fantasy fare--also, incidentally, a great title); Darowski's The Ages of the X-Men (an edited essay collection discussing the X-Men chronologically); Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (my first foray into classic literature in a LONG time); and Enevold and MacCallum-Stewart's Game Love (an edited essay collection on play and affection in games).

All of the books were satisfying. The Providence of Fire had various maneuverings and fights, and The Brothers Karamazov had the first but not the second; in general, BK has proven to be a book that's not really about anything but a very close look at the lives of the title characters. The bit I read today covered a long monologue from Ivan about an imaginary confrontation with God to Alyosha returning to the monastery. Ages of the X-Men had four essays about various aspects of the X-Men early years--the cultural understanding of mutants in America leading up to the X-Men's debut, the way the 60s comics depicted Cold War negotiiations and promoted the commune (two separate essays there), and the way the 70s Claremont-relaunch was driven initially by market concerns. I read an essay from each of Game Love's sections, which meant one from Waern on how players express love for NPCs in Dragon Age: Origins, one from Brown on interviews from erotic role-players in World of Warcraft, one from Lenio taking an exceptionally ontological view of what it means to love an NPC, and finally, a rather lengthy essay criticizing the way sustained videogame play is framed in terms of addiction, whether that's in terms of cognitive science, psychology, or holistically as compensation for a lack in the player's lives.

But to be honest, very little of the above had any impact on why I found the day so relaxing. The content of the books didn't matter. The exact locations didn't matter. The rigidity of the formula--four readings, four locations, repeat--didn't matter. What matters is that I sat in a public space for a while and read a book. And that act, in whatever variation it might unfold, is like a cup of tea straight to my soul.

Reading alone at home doesn't put me in that state; neither does reading on the bus, or playing videogames, in public or private. Neither does walking through a place, or talking with someone else on a park bench or hanging out at a coffee shop. Don't get me wrong; I like all of those things, quite a bit. But none of those are relaxing in the same way that today was. If I had to put it into words, I enjoy being in one place while the world flows around me, and the world and I are content to let each other be. I have a hunch that this would be my ideal vacation too--go to somewhere exotic and, instead of seeing the sights or doing adventurous stuff, simply sitting in a corner and watch a different part of the world unfold without worrying about a deadline or whether I should be doing something else.

I've known this about myself for quite some time, and in the spring especially, I like to stop in the park on a bench on the way home from work and indulge for a half hour or so; spending basically a full day at it like today is nice but not necessary. And it always puts me in a good mood for the evening.

I'm curious, though, if it extends the other way. If I get up in the morning and spend a half hour on a park bench before I reach work, will that tranquility be instilled into the whole day? Will it give me at least a morning boost? Or would morning crankiness and work grind chip away at my zen?

Might be worth finding out.

What's your secret to tranquility?

Later Days.

Movie Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of The Final Girls

The Final Girls is a film with a good hook, but bad follow-through. (Does that work? I guess the metaphor is that the film is a boxer.) The elevator pitch is decent--a group of five modern teenagers find themselves trapped in a 1980s horror film, complete with stalker monster and a camp full of horny counselors. And it's got a great cast, suited for its tongue-in-cheek approach to the material--Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), Tom Middleditch (Silicon Valley) and Taissa  Farmiga (American Horror Story). And the 80s counselors include Adam DeVine (Modern Family, Work Aholics, Pitch Perfect; it's a similar asshole performance as Pitch Perfect, but he's really good at it) and Malin Akerman (Children's Hospital). The problem isn't in the premise, or the actors, but the details.

If you're going to have a film that mocks the plot of horror movies, even 1980s horror movies, you need to have a reasonably rock-solid plot yourself. And there are some gaps here. I spent the first half of the movie assuming Gertie, Alia Shawkat's character, was Max (Farmiga)'s aunt, because while Shawkat is great in this and I want to see her in more movies in general, she is playing high school age, or freshman college--ditto with Tom Middleditch. You can kind of squint and make the case that this doesn't matter for DeVine, Akerman, and the rest of the 80s crew, since they don't have to be believable as teenagers so much as it needs to believable that someone in the 80s would cast them as such, but for the modern group, it doesn't work. The actors are, again, great, but the roles they're playing could use some re-definition.

The other problem is the emotional core at the center of the movie. In the movie within the movie, Akerman plays a scream queen, whose role is to lose her virginity and die horribly for it; in the movie at large, she's also Max's mother, who gets killed in the first scene. A lot of the film is devoted to the daughter working through the mom's death through interactions with a fictional character that looks like her mom. It's kind of a clumsy set-up: Nancy, the in-film character, has to be elastic/shallow enough to bond with someone she just met, but real enough for Max's emotional struggle to matter, AND fit in as a stock horror trope for the film within the film. It takes a lot of hoop jumping to make it happen, and I'm not sure it works. A better way to go about it, I think, would have been for Akerman as Max's mom not die in that first scene, go with them into the film, and be forced to replace Nancy after she accidentally dies too soon, to keep the plot going.

There's a lot of little logic jumps too, where the plot's compromised to make a joke of questionable quality--that's the peril of trying to be a meta-horror film and a comedy. But there's also some really coo bits, both meta and otherwise. The moment where the modern group realise that they're about to meet Max's deceased mom is wonderfully creepy (and would admittedly be a loss if they changed it to my suggestion), and the first half of the fight against the slasher is really cool as it threatens to go against and in their favour. On the meta level, finding out that the entire film universe loops every 92 minutes, being caught up in a flashback, and I can see the humour in trying to restrain the ditsy oversexualized character (Angela Trimbur does a real fun job with the role, putting a lot more into it than it really deserves), even if it doesn't quite get there. 

It's not a bad movie, and it does the aforementioned meta-horror/comedy mix better than, say, the entirety of the Scary Movie franchise. It's not as good as Cabin in the Woods, though it fits light popcorn film a lot better. It has some strong performances from really great comedic actors. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for more. There's room for more play, and more critical play, than what's here.

Later Days.

In My Defense

My defense is next Friday. To say that I am anxious about it would be a severe understatement. I can hardly bear to spend more than an hour or so away from it. I am having an onslaught of dreams where I accidentally sleep through the whole thing (which takes a lot of sleeping, since it's an afternoon defense). The biggest sign of all is that the anxiety has even brought me back to my poor, neglected blog. So this post is going to be a stream of consciousness hodge-podge that will hopefully let me vent some steam.

The preparation itself is interesting. Up to this point, I managed to avoid most of my worry by focusing on smaller events that were happening between the time the date was set (back in late September) and now. First, I was giving a guest lecture on narrative and ludology for my supervisor's first year course. Then I had another guest lecture on masculinity and game culture for another professor's class (this is turning into a humble brag about my guest lectures, but I'm going somewhere here, honest). Most recently, there was going to Wordplay 2015, a one day event in Toronto showcasing games that feature words predominantly in one way or another--a must-go event for someone whose research area is videogames and text. (I met Emily Short! I made a no to slightly negative impression!) In each case, the dissertation defense was something I was working on in the background and preparing for, but it wasn't until it was the Next Thing Coming that it suddenly started to really affect me.

The prep is going... all right, I think. I've met with the tech people, so I'm nominally familiar with the equipment in my defense room. I've done enough presentations to know that being familiar doesn't stop things from going wrong, but at least I'll know what to troubleshoot when it does. I've read over and over the dissertation draft, finding all the terrible typos that somehow evaded me before the dissertation went out. 

Actually, I have some advice on that note. For financial and moral reasons, I use Open Office, an open-source word processing program, over Microsoft Office, but I really wish I had converted it into MO before sending it out. The big problem was formatting it properly with the table of contents and page numbering. To make a table of contents, you need to set up headings and subheadings, and there's a bug where OO automatically adds about half a dozen lines of blank space to the first footnote of every chapter, regardless of how many times I take it out. The other problem was the page numbering--university regulations say that everything that comes before the table of contents has to have roman numeral page numbers, and arabic numbering for the TOC and everything after. And again, that's a pain to do in OO. (Maybe a pain in MO too, but it's OO I'm working with) I finally wound up having to copy the whole document into a new sheet entirely so I could start from scratch. And THAT wound up, for some reason, erasing all the alignments I did for my long quotations. I had to go in and re-align them manually, and as a result, I missed about a quarter of them. Suffice to say, OO is not maximized for 300+ pages of formatting.

I've also met with two out of the three members of my internal committee, which has been a huge source of relief--I'd really recommend it to those prepping for their own defense. Even apart from the useful advice on how to handle the defense, talking with them has reminded me that, at this point, I am the expert; I'm not just the expert on the subject, but on the defense itself. I will certainly have read it through more than anyone else in the room, and it takes a priority for me more than anyone else in the room. That second part in particular is a useful reminder, in that for everyone else, this is a routine thing--while everyone's there for the dissertation, I'm the one with the greatest emotional investment. It's a big deal in my head, but less so for everyone else. I don't think I'm fully expressing what I'm trying to say here, but I find it comforting on some level to remember that the dissertation is less burdensome from other frames of mind.

It's still going to weigh pretty heavy on my frame, though. The major task left is to prepare the slideshow. That's easier said than done. All in all, I've got a minor or major focus on approximately forty different games throughout the course of the argument, and that means a lot of screenshots that I need to line up. That's a practical aspect of game studies that isn't discussed enough, I think--how presenting a lecture on a videogame differs from more traditional media. Luckily, I have a small bank of images ready to go from previous presentations--video game manuals, Doom, Myst, and Planescape: Torment are already covered. That still leaves, however, two dozen or so games from the second and fifth chapters that need more substantiation. I spent about four hours last night watching walkthroughs of Final Fantasy: Tactics, only to realize that was watching the remake, not the original, just to get a shot of a cutscene that occurred about 3/4 of the way through the game. Film studies doesn't have this problem! (It has its own, I imagine. But not this one, specific problem, in exactly the same way.)

Anyway, I'd better get back to the work. I have promises to keep, and hours of Ni No Kuni walkthroughs to go before I sleep.

Later Days.

Story Idea: the ol' f ⊕ f

Quick story idea: a fantasy trilogy called "Fight or Flight." First book is "Fight," wherein, immediately, a crown prince type character is ambushed by a potential usurper. The rest of the book is a study of the culture in the grips of a civil war. Epic war fantasy type stuff, ala Game of Thrones. 

 Book 2 is "Flight." Same starting point, but instead of responding by raising his own army, the crown prince type goes on the run. Instead of the war fantasy, the operative mode is the thriller novel, with the prince one step ahead of his pursuers. This time around, though, I play with the readers' knowledge of the first book, confounding it in some places, allowing them to predict events in others, by using the same cast of characters, but to different effect. Also include some revelations that shed new light on motivations in book 1. Both books end, somewhat anticlimatically, for a fantasy book, in tragedy. 

The third book is "Or....?". There's a number of different approaches for this one. One would be to take literally, a number of different approaches, sketching out a plethora of alternatives for crown prince beyond those explored in the first two books, and using the readers' knowledge of the fictional world derived from the other two books to fill in the blanks. Or stretch out a single one, that deliberately incorporates parts of one and two. The real question is how far to make explicit the overall model in the last run. Should the narrator play coy about the repeated structure, or is that the point where they nod conspiratorially to the reader? Could the character be made aware of "the multiverse" without it feeling too hackneyed?

The idea of multiple time lines is pretty common in science fiction, and the retellings of such universes is pretty old hat--I mean, we've even got the "evil = beard" star trek cliche. I think it's a little more rare in fantasy. The closest is the "this story has many tellings" that you get through repeated variations on fairy tales and the like, or the approach where the fantasy world is deliberately constructed as a videogame, and is thus open to restarting and replaying with different approaches. (Vivian Van Velde's books are my childhood go-to for that sort of thing, though others have utilized it as well.) I guess Robert Jordan does it too, in some of the earlier Wheel of Time books, though not to this degree.  All right, so it's a hack idea. I still think it would be a fun exercise in plotting. The trick would be to engage the reader in such a way that the repetition is a feature, not a bug. 

Anyway, just an idea to toss out there. But it's mine, dammit, and if any of youse steals it... Well, then I'll have to think of a follow-up.

Later days.

Chrono Trigger Warning

As in, a warning I'm going to make a terrible Chrono Trigger pun. Also, flippancy aside, I think trigger warnings are a useful thing, and I encourage people to do them. I was proctoring for an examination today, and that means essentially three hours of standing around not using your phone or reading. It was an English test, so cheating is generally at a minimum, which meant I was largely there to escourt male students to the washroom. As the prehistoric pelican said, it's a living. It's not a particularly exciting living, though, so to keep my mind occupied, I thought I'd spend the time going mentally over the ins and outs of a favorite series. I came into the quick problem, though, that I'm not really a repeat viewer anymore. There are books I'll read again, and episodes I'll rewatch, but an entire series overview isn't where my media interest is these days. So I needed something lengthy that I'd been through so many times that it was more or less embedded in my brain. I waffled a bit, and wound up with the 1995 Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. I'm sure I've talked about Chrono Trigger before, though I'm not in the mood to track down those entries. And I'm also not in the mood to offer much by way of explanation of the game's basic plot or mechanics. So the rest of this post is one for the Chronoheads (as I'm sure they call each other despite me just making the term up). --I could go through most of the plot in my head, with two exceptions. First, how the party learns about Melchoir--I'd totally forgotten about his Millenial Fair appearance. Second, how the party gets to the Antiquity time period--Lavos' arrival creates a convenient crater. So there you go. --Unlike its contemporary, Final Fantasy VII, the party-characters of Chrono Trigger don't really have an arc to them. They're just a bunch of happy-go-lucky folk (and Magus) who resolve to save the world from apocalypse. I'm largely ok with that, because they're still fairly fully-realized characters, if a little one-dimensional. You give me a bit of dialogue, and I could still probably determine which character said it. That's memorable character writing, in my book. --Ozzy's a perfect mid-boss character. He's scheming, manipulative, but not really good at it. He's distinct enough and difficult enough to be acceptable as a repeat character, and hits just the level of annoying you need to make beating him satisfactory, but also sufficiently annoying that it wouldn't be dramatically acceptable for him to be any more significant than that. Other JRPG characters fill similar roles: Liz and Ard in Wild Arms 2, Geshp in Shining Force II, and Ultros in Final Fantasy VI. Disgaea lampshades the mid-boss role to amusing effect. I'd have to go back to check this out, but I think one of the points in Final Fantasy VI's favor is that Kafka is largely presented as a mid-boss (albeit a particularly murderous one) until half way through the game. --And while he's largely a joke, I always felt sorry for him if you bring Magus in the party to fight him the final time. He expresses anger at Magus betraying the Fiends, and Magus utterly dismisses him: "Hear that? It's the sound of the reaper." Under Ozzie's goofiness, there's some untapped tragedy. --(I really, really hate to say this, but given the Reptites' and the Fiends'struggle against humans, and how Chrono and co are utterly uncaring about either except for how it gets in the way of their larger goals, Chrono Cross does a much better job of exploring the uneasiness of that dual existence. And given that the fiends seem largely extinct in the future (maybe they're the mutants and such?), their struggle does seem necessary.) --Two really fun longform accounts of Chrono Trigger:Reverse Design blog's version, which as you'd expect, focuses mainly on design; and Michael P. Williams' book Chrono Trigger from the Boss Fights book publisher, which digs more into the cultural and philosophical sides. --Re-using enemy sprites is pretty common in videogames, and Chrono Trigger is as guilty of this as anyone. (Though I do like the subtle visual suggestion that the Fiends are the descendants of the Reptites.) But what the game does really well is offer variations on monsters you've already encountered that require the player to shift tactics. For example, it becomes pretty clear immediately that Queen Zeal's final form is like the much earlier Giga Gais--a central head, and two appendages. But with Giga, the strategy is to take out the powerful hands and go after the defenseless head after. with Zeal, attacking the hands results in a devastating counterattack. Similar things going on with Guardian and, much later, Mother Brain. --When all's said and done, my favorite part of Chrono Trigger (besides the time travelling, maybe) is Lavos as a villain. It exists on such a larger scale than any other creature in the game, it played a pivotal role in shaping the history of civilization, and for the most part, right up until the final battle, it bares acknowledges or can acknowledge that the heroes even exist. It's just too alien to think in terms of individual humans. --I wonder if the giant decomposing corpse of a space monster in the earth's core will create any problems. Also, the whole point of the Antiquity era is that it's a society built from channeling power from Lavos, but where is Lavos getting the energy? Presumably, it's feeding off the earth in some way--if it wasn't, it wouldn't need to inhabit the planet's core. OK, looking at the game's script, it's not clear that that's what Lavos is doing; it may be sucking the earth's vitality, but the big work is harvesting the DNA of its organisms, which it does by... hanging out at the earth's core? At any rate, when the player goes to 1999 to fight Lavos on the day it arrives, it occurs to me that this is the worst possible time to fight Lavos--it's already harvested the life force it needs, and now all it has to do is bust out and leave. Is the earth in much better shape if you fight Lavos (via the Black Omen) in an early era? Or since the difference between antiquity and the future is so much less than prehistoric and any other time period, does that mean the damage has already been done? Chrono Trigger sequel: the Lavos energy crisis. --Speaking of Chrono Trigger sequels, going back and reading that Lavos (somehow) shaped all evolution on earth does lend some credence to the plot of Chrono Cross. But to say that it was responsible for humanity only, as Chrono Cross claims, is still off. We *see* humanity exist before Lavos arrives, and characters claim that it manipulated more than just humans in Chrono Trigger's final fight. So there and take that, decades-old videogame that is still rightfully considered a classic! So thinking through Chrono Trigger took up about half of the two and a half hour exam. I spent the rest thinking about this blog post. And here it is. Later Days.

Edit: I guess this is what happens when you do your whole post in HTML mode over compose mode; it eats up all your spaces. Well, I kind of like the ridiculousness of the lack of spacing, so I'll keep it as is. It makes the whole thing feel like an out of breath declaration, which fits, given my fannish obsession with the subject.

Random Thoughts, May 2015 edition: Futurama, dissertations, informed consent in fantasy, and match 3 games

This is going to be a combination of updates, and things that have occurred to me.

* "Not sure if _____ or ______"
"You're _____ is bad, and you should feel bad!"
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
"__________ do not work that way!
"I'll make my own ___________! With blackjack, and hookers!

Not an original observation, but Futurama's clearly going to be more remembered as a meme generator than a TV show. There's a Buzzfeed article in there, somewhere."
Just posted this on Facebook. I don't really feel like fleshing it out too much further at the moment, but it's an interesting issue.Arguably, Futurama has had more cultural value as a source of memes than as a TV show. That probably still holds if you talk financial value too--but only if you factor in the ad revenue generated by the hundreds and thousands of sites that have deployed variations of these memes to get clicks. It's not money that's going to the show creators. Then again--who creates a meme? Its original coiners, or its major circulators? If I ever have a spare couple of days, it's a new media area I'd like to delve into more fully.

*The dissertation's reaching a boiling point. My defense is projected for September--though I've only got permission for one more term of grad school, so that's a fun future hurdle--and I'm still coping with the notion of what comes next. I should be applying for things and submitting other things like crazy but... I'm not there yet. It might be the same sort of procrastination that led to the degree delays to begin with, but I feel like something still needs to click. Soon, hopefully.

*Speaking of clicking, I've been reading Rachel Aaron's The Legend of Eli Monpress. I'll probably have a full review somewhere at some point, but an idea in regards to the series popped into my head today, and I want to preserve it. The magic system in the novel is essentially the animus version, with a genie twist. That is, every object in the fantasy world--manmade or natural--if it's of sufficient size, is inhabited by a lifeforce, a sentient spirit. Wizards can communicate with the spirit, and bind it to them and make it serve them, ala the genie/master relationship. So far, so good. But what Aaron adds to the concept that really makes it interesting is the idea that the current dominant group of wizards, the spiritualists, believe that it's unethical to bind a spirit against its will. The only spirits you can call on as servant, then, are the ones that you enter into a willing relationship with, where both parties supply the other with what they need, and both may break it off, if they wish. In short, it's a fantasy universe where magic is based on the idea of informed consent.  That's kind of amazing, and makes the series really relevant in terms of greater cultural issues. Yes, there's a huge difference between consent as relates to sexuality and as it relates to magical spirits, but framing the relationship in terms of ethics and moral responsibility over personal desire creates some really interesting parallels.

*I gave a talk this week based on the third chapter of my dissertation. I got some good feedback on it, but in a lot of ways, it's the wrong point in the dissertation process to be soliciting feedback from outside of my committee. I'm really glad I did it, and I understand my own argument and how it's perceived a lot better now, but it would have been better to have pursued this sort of thing earlier. At that point of writing, I was too caught up in the idea that I couldn't put anything out there until I had my committee's seal of approval; more experimentation could have been helpful. That's something to remember.

*Conversation overheard on the bus today: "When I was a kid, I used to read while I walked around, with my nose in a book." "Me too! It really bugged my mom. She thought I'd walk into a tree, or something."
Me, in my head: "I AM ONE OF YOU."

*This weekend is all about prepping for the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and writing the paper for the Canadian Game Studies Association. I've got some draft notes, but it's time to flesh them out. If I was a better planner, it'd be a presentation on dissertation-related material, or even a revised version of this week's talk. Instead, it'll be a look at the cultural, economic, and design-related issues involving Match-3 type games. Basically, it's a chance to take some of things I've said  about Match-3 games and put them before a larger audience. I'm thinking five minutes on the social and economic aspects of Match-3 games in general, five minutes on how some of them incorporate narrative skins, and five minutes on how Marvel Puzzle Quest in particular approaches these issues.  If anyone's interested, I might put the piece up here when it's done.

Later Days. 

Build A Better Frankenstein: Teaching a Sci-Fi Class, Short Story edition

Yes, for the pedants in the crowd, it's build a better Frankenstein's Monster. But that felt like too far a departure from the "Build a Better Mousetrap" allusion I was going for, so here we are.

Friday Quotations: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents' eyes he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade--E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books--moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age. (It was his good fortune that the libraries of Paterson were so underfunded that they still kept a lot of the previous generation's nerdery in circulation.) You couldn't have torn him away from any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains. In these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insited was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in accute detail, know more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. (If only he'd been good at videogames it would have been a slam dunk but despite owning an Atari and an Activision he didn't have the reflexes for it.) Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to.">
Díaz
This struck a bit closer to home than I'd like to admit. It's never too far below the surface, is it? And it matters so much more to you than anyone else. Later Days.

Retrospective: Warioland II and THE DISCOVERY OF GREEEEED

Often, between playing big, long videogames, I try to seek out a shorter or older game as a sort of palate cleanser. After Bravely Default--I'm providing a link even though it's just a short scroll below on the main page--and before I lovingly toss my time into Pillars of Eternity, I decided the game would be Warioland II. A discussion of the difference that the money-loving anti-hero makes, after the break.

Restrospective:Does Bravely Default Bravely Rise Above Default?

Normally, when I finish a game--especially a game that spent over a hundred hours of my life, from beginning to end--I've got something to say about it, even with JRPGs, which, when not doing something noticeably different, tend to cohere to a small set of cliches. Nier has its ruminations on genre and violence. Chrono Trigger is still cool for the way it depicts a struggle against a being who literally doesn't comprehend that the heroes of the story exist, because they exist on an entirely different scale of being. Radiant Historia encourages the player to think in terms of a sequence of events instead of connections in space.

But Square Enix's Bravely Default doesn't have any of those things. Everything I can think of to say about it is interesting largely in the way it came from somewhere else first. Even the fact that it has killed my interest in playing  JRPGs AND the fact that it is a pastiche stitched from other JRPGs are both the major talking points I used for crafting my response to Ni No Kuni.

Part of this I have to admit is my fault; I've played many JRPGs over the years, and that has worn into me certain expectations and familiarities, which if I didn't have, it would have made BD seem a lot fresher. But really, so much of the game seems a rehash of other things I've seen. Repeating large portions to shake up what we take for granted about the plot was Nier's big schtick. Playing with temporality in turn-based combat was Radiant Historia (as was the reality hopping in later). The build-a-town mini-quest has been done from Dark Cloud to Breath of Fire (although I'll give points for adding the 3DS' Street Pass functionality to the mix). Even the plot is jumble of JRPG cliches about restoring the four crystals to save the world, and yes, there's a twist, but again--conventional JRPG story with a last act twist is a cliche at this point too. It would help if the characters were a little more developed, but really, they're just typical stereotypes with a weird fixation on--

Wait, no! I've got it! The unique part of the game is its party chats concerning food!  ...Except Dragon Warrior has had the same party chat function, and it's no more food-oriented than Star Ocean. Carry on, then.

More on the search for anything worth searching for after the break.

Nierly Done with this Pun forever

I had to play a few hours of Nier today to get the point where I could talk about its book-like interface system for the dissertation. And I had to play to that point because Nier's endgame (spoiler, I guess?) doesn't really leave things in a state where doing that is possible.

What I found is that Nier is a wonderfully complex game (albeit somewhat graphically low for a mid to late Xbox 360 game), one whose eventual story is set up right from the start, and design choices that contribute to the overall aesthetic in a meaningful way all build on each other. It's an unusually rich, creative game for a JRPG low budget (for AAA, anyway) game.

I never want to play it again.

I felt the same way going back to Ni No Kuni (which is much more diminishing returns than Nier) for its dissertation section; there's a point in lengthy games where enthusiasm is displaced by entropy, and trying to research the game at the same time only makes it worse. Nier's a wonderful game, and I could (and have) written pages and pages extolling its virtues, but I really, really don't want to subject myself to having to go through it again. Ah well; I'm an hour or two in and at the shrine where Weiss becomes a party member, so the end's in sight.

Later Days.