December 2009 – Page 4 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Month: December 2009 (page 4 of 6)

Programmatic Mission Statement

My career path has been, to say the least, an odd one. I knew that published fiction was a tough field to enter, and that attempting to make a living from it directly out of university would be difficult, if not impossible. That knowledge, coupled with a challenge issued by a flatmate, pushed me in the direction of honing my nascent skills with computers into usable and marketable skills.

Things didn’t go so well in that regard. I worked for a few years in customer service, specifically tech support for a company in the wilds of Pittsburgh. I managed to squeeze in some freelance web work here and there, but never really found the time to truly develop my programming skills. A renewed search for the expansion of my knowledge and marketability lead me to a course in King of Prussia for Microsoft certifications.

It turns out the network administration environment and I don’t get along. There’s a great deal of stress and immediacy, no margin for error and no room for creativity. I struggled with the job daily until I lost it. Finally, after months of searching, I found my first true programming job. I’ve moved from there to another position and it’s come time to define what I want out of this particular branch of my working life. The more I work with PHP, the more I develop object-oriented solutions in Flash, the more I realize I need to be specific about my idea of a good career if I want to be happy to hop in a car or on a train to head to the office.

Don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a writer first and foremost. It’s the creation of new worlds, putting interesting characters into those worlds and setting events in motion that affect those characters that gets me up in the morning and makes me feel alive. Programming, however, is something of an extension of that. To that end, here’s something I’d like to call a ‘programmatic mission statement.’

The creative mind is like a thoroughbred horse – it requires a firm but flexible grip, one that does not allow the beast to run wild, but also one that permits some leeway, lest the creature rail against its control and fight to be free. Just the right balance of control and detachment puts new ideas on the path to greatness. You know what you want, but permitting your trajectory to follow its own course allows for growth, stays agile in the face of inevitable setbacks and lends a sense of adventure to the overall process.

They’ve called it “the information superhighway.” If you want to travel on it, you’ll need a good vehicle. ‘Good’ is a subjective term – maybe you want something you don’t have to worry about, or perhaps you’re looking for a high-precision machine stuffed with power and bursting with cool gizmos. Either way, you need someone who understands both the beating heart of an Internet vehicle and how the paint’s going to look to visitors after everything is said and done.

That’s where I come in.

I take the ideas that float around the subconscious mind and make them manifest. I find new ways to get things working. I get my hands dirty. It’s messy and magical all at once. I turn dreams into gold – one jot & scribble, one line of code at a time.

I think that makes things pretty clear. It’s a shame it took me the better part of a decade to finally put this notion together. I’ll still be pitching to the Escapist, working on stories and columns and chipping away at the latest iteration of my first novel. But in the meantime, I have bills to pay and mouths to feed and, unfortunately, I haven’t quite earned the writing stripes to leave the day job behind. Until I do, I’d still rather do something I enjoy than flip burgers or stand on a street corner.

Jotting in the Margins: On Toilet Paper & Pigeons

December 15, 2009 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Storytellers are creative folk. They create something out of nothing. The entire world of Middle-Earth, for example, sprang from the notes jotted down by J.R.R. Tolkien in the trenches of the first World War. The magical world parallel to our own that seems to have a school called Hogwart’s at its center would not exist save for the imagination of J.K. Rowling. People who tell stories, from the most successful and lucrative of novelists to the humble Dungeon Master creating obstacles for a party of adventurers, make the attempt to be creative and innovative in some small way. Even if a dungeon or story is based in part on something the storyteller’s seen or read recently, it’s still their prerogative to take that notion in a new direction. After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. These creative people can be very attractive to an employer.

For business people looking to leverage the profitability of creative people, here is some advice.

Building Character: Quiet Strength

December 14, 2009 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

I know I said I’d be doing a post on adversarial allies next, but a few episodes of House & NCIS completely derailed that line of thinking. To me, at least, what makes for a good character is just as much what somebody doesn’t say as it is what they do say. As an example, I’d like to point towards just about any character played by David Morse.

This guy has been all over the place. He’s played both heroes and villains. Just a year after playing the arrogant, self-centered prick of a cop who acts as a foil to the arrogant, self-centered prick of a doctor who gives House it’s name, he showed upon on the John Adams mini-series playing George Washington. Surprisingly, these characters have something in common. And it’s not Tritter’s habit of chewing nicotine gum in a way that tells you he’s angry at just about the entire world.

It’s quiet strength. There’s a restrained ferocity about most of Morse’s characters. Instead of bellowing one-liners and chewing on the scenery, Morse conveys, in just about all of his characters, a sort of insular and confident demeanor that seems to say “I’m awesome, but I’m not about to toss my weight around to prove it.” Seriously, watch a couple of the ’06-07 episodes of House, then watch the portions of John Adams featuring Washington. The similarities are uncanny.

Another example of this sort of quiet strength comes in the form of Leeroy Jethro Gibbs.

Mark Harmon gives Gibbs his trademark stare, his direct and sometimes almost sotto voce way of pushing his team and the passion he has for those he cares about, which only rarely explodes out of him. He knows how to sweat people in interrogation, without having to resort to strong-arm tactics or much shouting, though he does raise his voice from time to time. In any given episode of NCIS, you can see what I’m talking about. There are certain looks, stances and moments where no words are spoken but Harmon communicates Gibbs’ emotions much louder than any scenery-chewing could ever hope to convey.

Especially if somebody messes with Abby.

Anyway, it’s something to aspire towards as a storyteller and an author. Just about any hack can put words in the mouth of a protagonist in an attempt to make them heroic or macho and end up having them be hammy or even ridiculous. Sometimes camp can be a good thing, but if you want to build true dramatic tension and have people craving more of a particular character, it pays to show rather than tell, to describe a character’s expression in a few words rather than have them rant for a page. This might mean you’ll write fewer words, and while this is a detriment to projects where one gets paid based on word count, in longer works the brevity of these efforts might prove invaluable.

Then again, that’s just my opinion, and considering I’ve only been published a couple times, I could be wrong.

…No, I didn’t just put Abby in another post because she brings in hits like mad, why do you ask?

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Seige Tale

December 11, 2009 / BlueInkAlchemist / 4 Comments

[audio:http://www.blueinkalchemy.com/uploads/dungeon_siege.mp3]

The more new movies come out, the more it seems that Hollywood is almost completely out of original ideas. Even James Cameron’s Avatar is only slightly original, as we’ve had the “humans are assholes invading peaceful aliens” plot as recently as earlier this year with Battle for Terra. And then there’s the news that they’re planning to make the board game Battleship – Battleship – into a feature film. If you want an example as to why this is a bad idea, why you shouldn’t take something with no plot and very straightforward gameplay into the realm of cinema, look no further than In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. The film features Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Ron Perlman, Claire Forlani, Kristanna Loken, Matthew Lillard, Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds.

With a badass like Jason Statham, a fantasy veteran in John Rhys-Davies and the years of experience under the ever-expanding belt of Burt Reynolds, there should be something here to save this film. But alas, all of this talent from the four corners of the globe is under the direction of Uwe Boll. Before this, Dr. Boll directed House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Alone in the Dark II, BloodRayne and BloodRayne II: Deliverance. He had established a track record of taking video games and turning them into bad movies. With Dungeon Siege, he’d gotten his grubby hands on what is essentially a clone of Diablo stripped of the well-written plot and composed entirely of repetitive hack-and-slash gameplay. There aren’t that many dungeons in the game, and nothing resembling a siege, which makes the title a little bewildering. So instead of making a movie out of a video game with a hackneyed or paper-thin plot, he’s made a movie out of a video game with no plot whatsoever.

Anyway, Jason Statham plays a farmer named… well, Farmer. The names in the movie are awfully creative, as you can tell. His village is attacked by nightmarish creatures called the Krug. Elsewhere, the King (Burt Reynolds) is dealing with an uppity and annoying nephew (Matthew Lillard) who is in cahoots with an evil magic-user (Ray Liotta) who is – get this – responsible for the Krug attacks on the populace! It’s a SHOCKING twist!

Okay, the only thing that’s really shocking about this film is how awful it is. I went into it knowing it’s an Uwe Boll film, the same way I went into Revenge of the Fallen knowing it was a Michael Bay film. But even knowing that, overall, I liked that film. Yes, there was gratuitous fan service with the heaving bodies of svelte slender women, even more gratuitous explosions and characterizations that didn’t make much sense in light of the previous canon of Transformers. On the other hand, the action does work on some levels, some of the jokes did make me laugh and the visual effects are impressive enough to smooth over some of the rough patches. While that movie’s blown out of the water by District 9, it isn’t a total failure.

This film is a total failure. The story is cribbed almost entirely from margin notes of old D&D adventures from somebody’s high school campaign. As a matter of fact, I think the idea of the evil wizard projecting himself into a suit of armor to act all macho is something I came up with – when I was TWELVE. Seriously, did the screen writing team employed by Dr. Boll need to put this stuff down on paper protected by plastic so they wouldn’t constantly get Cheetos stains on the script? It’s predictable and bland – kind of like a packet of unflavored oatmeal. It’s also hackneyed. It makes some of the more dreadful episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise look like they were written by Ronald D. Moore.

And then there’s the direction. Now, Dr. Boll isn’t going to care about what I’m going to say. He finances his own projects and regularly tells people like me to fuck off. After all, opinions are like assholes – everybody has one, and they all stink. Regardless, I feel justified in saying that, in my opinion, Dr. Boll couldn’t direct kittens to scratch a piece of furniture. He has no idea of how to frame shots, show compelling action or underscore dramatic tension. In this film, the shots cut at odd times, the action is so disorganized that the combat in Revenge of the Fallen seems like the scripted but clear engagements of the WWE by comparison and you cannot get dramatic tension out of actors when you’ve injected them with tree sap. By that, I mean the acting is wooden. It’s so wooden I could take these people into a workshop and emerge with a dining room set complete with end tables and a china cabinet.

Each of these sins drives the film deeper into the depths of failure. But there’s something that causes it to sprout a drill bit the size of a dinner plate and bore a hole even deeper beneath the basement to place it at a new low. You see, In The Name Of The King came out in the wake of the Lord of the Rings films. Apparently unsatisfied with video game trappings and D&D notes that smell like an adolescent boy’s sock drawer, Dr. Boll thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea to make sure we had sylvan elves, orc-like enemies, powerful wizards and John Rhys-Davies to tap into that market. Now, tapping into an established market isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but you do it by extracting some of the good bits with a fine syringe, and injecting it into your work in a subtle fashion, and smooth it over with original ideas so you avoid being derivative. Dr. Boll taps into Tolkien’s work with a God-damn shovel, burying any enthusiasm we might have had and making anything intended to be dramatic or awesome turn out comical. And it’d be comical in a good way, even campy in the way of Flash Gordon, but this movie drags on. And on. And on. For two and a half hours, Dr. Boll assaults our vision, our hearing, our intelligence and our good sense without a hint of irony or tongue-in-cheek execution. Everything is to be taken completely seriously, like this is some sort of fantasy epic that Peter Jackson needed three movies to tell properly.

Dr. Boll, you are not Peter Jackson. You’re not Michael Jackson. You’re not even Andrew Jackson or Latoya Jackson. You, sir, are an asshole. And In The Name Of The King is the biggest, smelliest, most disgusting steaming crappile you have ever produced. I may never have the money to finance my own films, snort drugs off the body of a prostitute or even have the security to tell Internet critics they’re full of shit – which, in this case, is the pot calling the kettle a turd. If this is what it takes to have those things, I’m better off without them. And if you have all the money and power you contend, Dr. Boll, I want just one thing from you.

That two and a half hours I spent watching this shit? I want those back.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.