Month: May 2011 (page 1 of 5)

A Beginner’s Guide to Westeros: The Night’s Watch

May 31, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Courtesy HBO

The Game of Thrones is now showing on HBO. The production and promotion of this series has been fantastic, but not everyone tuning in may be familiar with the series of books upon which it is based. A Song of Ice and Fire, currently spanning four expansive novels, introduced us to the world of Westeros and provides a plethora of extensive information. Presented here is a bit of that information to help newcomers to this lush and living world get and keep their bearings. All information is presented free of spoilers and describe the circumstances at the beginning of the series…

The Wall was built some 8000 years ago, at the end of the Long Night when the Others and wildlings menaced the land of Westeros. Brandon the Builder laid the foundations along the heights anywhere he could. The result was a wall 800 leagues in length. Over the years it’s grown to 300 feet in height and enough width for several mounted knights to ride abreast in comfort. The men responsible for its growth are the same men tasked with guarding it and the realms to the south of it: the men of the Night’s Watch.

Courtesy HBO
Two of the newest Brothers of the Night’s Watch – Jon Snow & Samwell Tarly

There was a time when the entire realm considered membership in the Night’s Watch a high honor, and accorded any Brother wearing the black every courtesy and comfort. However, times have changed. Now, taking the black is an alternative to punitive punishment for any number of crimes, as well as a means for those facing the machinations of cannier or more ruthless family members to escape and live just a little bit longer. What was once an elite brotherhood of dedicated, noble defenders is now largely composed of thieves, rapists, murders, cravens and ill-tongued schemers nearly hung by their own ropes.

Still, the core of the Night’s Watch remains noble and steadfast. Men of the North still hold the Watch in high regard, with lesser sons of noble houses taking the black out of obligation, duty or a sense of honor rather than as an alternative to losing body parts. A wise Lord Commander looks to these noble Brothers to assist in training new recruits and impressing upon them the nature of the oaths they will take, oaths that will change and ultimately end their lives.

The Night’s Watch is divided into three distinct paths. Rangers scout north of the Wall and are the martial arm of the Watch. Builders maintain the Wall and its various strongholds, from the Shadow Tower to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Stewards tend to the menial tasks of the Watch to keep it running and serve Brothers of higher rank when asked. All of them are necessary for the Watch to be maintained, especially as its numbers dwindle.

The oath that every Brother takes, from the basest criminal to the most noble sworn knight, is as follows:

Courtesy HBO
Lord Commander Jeor Mormont, “The Old Bear”.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins.
It shall not end until my death.

I shall take no wife,
hold no lands,
father no children.

I shall wear no crowns
and win no glory.

I shall live and die at my post.

I am the sword in the darkness.
I am the watcher on the walls.

I am the fire that burns against cold,
the light that brings the dawn,
the horn that wakes the sleepers,
the shield that guards the realms of men.

I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch,
for this night and all the nights to come.

If you would like to know more, please consult the official HBO viewer’s guide or the Wiki of Ice and Fire (beware of spoilers). Also, if you find anything amiss or incorrect in these guides, please inform me.

In Memoriam

May 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

American flag

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

We have the country we have today because people got pissed off enough to fight for it.

I discussed the reasoning behind our fight for independence back on our last Independence Day, and I still think this country has a long way to go before it fixes all the bridges that have nearly been burnt to the ground because of the actions we’ve taken in the name of securing our borders. That doesn’t mean that the men and women who died in service to the country should not be remembered, or that their sacrifice should be downplayed or marginalized. They were called upon to do their duty, to fight while others stand idle, and they answered.

America’s military is based entirely on volunteer service. People enlist for various reasons, from pure-hearted desire to serve the country to paying for a college education. And those who can already afford college can embark upon a career as an officer right from the start. The important fact, though, is that none of it is compulsory. Nobody is making these young men and women sign up for service that could ultimately mean they’re going to die far from home, in some foreign land, possibly alone with no one to remember them save for a line item in a report listing them as “Missing In Action”.

Other countries compel their citizens to join the military from an early age. There’s no choice in the matter. Regardless of how you feel about your country, you’re going to be serving in its military. As much as I admire Heinlein, the idea of compulsory military service being the only route to citizenship is a pretty scary one. But unless I’m mistaken, no country has gone completely that far yet.

Here, though, every person who puts on that uniform, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, left or right, does so for the same reason. They want to serve. They chose to answer the call to duty. Nobody made them.

And if they died on a foreign shore, they did so as the ultimate result of that choice. As lonely, painful, cold and dark as it might have been for them, it is a deep hope of mine that they do not consider themselves forgotten.

We have not forgotten.

Wars are horrible things. The necessity of force to further political or economic gain is an indication that cooler heads and well-spoken reason have not prevailed over base, animalistic instincts. Canny leaders and generals will at least do what they can to end the fight as quickly and directly as possible. Sun-Tzu teaches us “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.” He was right 2000 years ago and he’s right today. However, this doesn’t mean that those that fight in wars are as horrible as the wars they fight.

Indeed, war can show the very best of human nature. Comrades helping one another through the battlefield, nobility in the face of unstoppable odds, compassion for one’s enemies; these are all things I feel we do not see or read often enough. In the pages of dry, procedural after-action reports are many such stories yet untold. In finding and telling them, we help to remember what it is to be a volunteer soldier, to choose to fight, to exemplify in our conflicts who we are as a country and what we stand for.

It’s probably my idealism creeping back into my rhetoric, but I’d like to think that, more often than not, on the front lines in foreign lands, the men and women of the American military ‘being all they can be’ means professionalism, respect, audacity and resolve. These volunteers should represent the best and bravest of us. They chose to defend our interests and our country, and we in turn are compelled to remember. For them it was voluntary; for us, back at home, living our lifestyles the way we are due to countless sacrifices born of their choices, remembering feels compulsory.

To all the men and women of the past and present who have chosen to serve America, making sacrifices from a few lost years to the one that means you’ll never see us again:

Thank you, and God bless you.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Last Action Hero

May 27, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Logo courtesy Netflix. No logos were harmed in the creation of this banner.

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

The fourth wall is a long-standing term for the concept of separation between an on-screen performance and its audience. Most straight productions act as if the fourth wall is a concrete barrier, entirely encapsulating the fictional world within. Comedies, especially parodies and spoofs, tend to treat the fourth wall with as much irreverence as anything else. They can paint it, lean against it or ignore it entirely. 1993’s Last Action Hero is one of the few films that bodily throws a guy through the fourth wall.

Courtesy Columbia Pictures
Even the posters are hilarious in retrospect.

Arnold Schwartzenegger is Jack Slater, a supercop best described as the illegitimate love child of John McClain and Dutch from Predator. He blows up Los Angeles on a regular basis, chases goons into spectacular gun fights and explosions, and messing with his family is, as he tends to say often, a big mistake. Jack Slater is the hero of young movie buff Danny Madigan, who cuts class and stays out late just to watch Jack Slater do what he does best. His favorite theater is shutting down and, as a last quiet hurrah, the aging projectionist offers to show Danny the new Jack Slater film (brilliantly titled Jack Slater IV) before anybody else gets to see it. He also gives Danny a golden ticket, a gift from Harry Houdini, which happens to possess magic powers in the presence of cinema. Next thing Danny knows, he’s in the back of Jack Slater’s car during the action movie’s first major chase scene. Nobody’s more surprised than Danny, except maybe Jack.

Last Action Hero is perhaps one of the most thorough deconstructions of the action movie genre I’ve ever seen. When Danny is in Jack Slater IV, he’s very quick to point out tropes and plot points to the point that he quickly goes from endearing to irritating. He’s not a dumb kid, though, so he does mellow out as the story goes on, much to Jack’s relief. Jack, on the other hand, spends most of the second act denying that he’s a fictional character until circumstances catapult him back into the real world with Danny. So while the second act is a deconstruction of the genre, the third is a deconstruction of the hero, as well as an exploration of a concept that the world is myth.

Courtesy Columbia Pictures
Is he taking aim at the goons, or the writers?

If all stories do in fact exist in some form, that would mean that someone is writing your story, right now. What would you say to them, if you could? Last Action Hero addresses that question, as well as what might go on inside the mind of your stereotypical action superstar between the gunplay and cheesy one-liners. While nobody was going to win Oscars for what’s going on here, the writers do give Jack a surprising amount of humanity and depth, considering how most of the movie’s a light-hearted action romp, while the villain Benedict has a chillingly gleeful revelation when he, like Jack and Danny, cross over from the world of their movie to the world of the movie we’re watching. It’s a world much closer to our own, where cars don’t explode when you shoot them, it hurts to punch things, and bad guys win all the time.

The sudden change in mood between the nature of Jack’s adventures and his experiences in the ‘real’ world might put off some viewers expecting a straight-forward action comedy. There are also some rough spots in the execution, a couple of jokes that might be more ridiculous than necessary and some problems with overall tone. It’s hard to tell in places if Last Action Hero is simply being tongue in cheek about things or wants to be downright cheeky about the action movie roots of its star and director. After all, Arnold was best known for his big, loud, ultra-macho action movies. John McTiernan was also known for the big, loud, ultra-macho Die Hard. I think that, in 1993, these two coming together to do a big, loud, ultra-macho genre deconstruction took a lot of folks by surprise.

Courtesy Columbia Pictures
Honestly, he’s probably my favorite kind of villain.

There’s also the fact that it opened the same year as movie juggernaut Jurassic Park. Be it due to box office receipts, actor confusion or critics blasting the movie for some decisions in execution and its necessary contrivances, Last Action Hero was not seen as a great success. In fact, many feel this was the movie that was the start of a downward spiral for Arnold, the following year’s True Lies being a notable exception. His puns and general beefiness would draw him into movies far worse than this one and ultimately he ended up in politics. And yet there’s a measure of self-awareness that some might miss. In what might have been intended as a throw-away gag, Jack Slater comes face to face with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the character tells the actor “You’ve brought me nothing but pain.” He echoes the sentiment of future movie-goers and some of the population of California in 2011.

Despite its box office performance, Last Action Hero holds up better than some of its contemporaries. The fact that some of the tropes played with, averted, invoked and downright torn to shreds here are still alive and well in action movies today underscores the laziness inherent in relying upon such conventions. Had it been a straightforward action comedy, it likely would be unmemorable and boring. Framed as it is and leading into its crucial third act, it instead defies typical classification and exists as a rare specimen that’s fascinating and strange. It stumbles in a couple of places and it’s never certain if McTiernan and the writers really love the action movie genre or want to rip it to shreds out of spite, but it’s a fun movie with some really interesting concepts at work. Fans of deconstructionist work, TV Tropes or actors having a laugh at their own expense should check this out on Netflix. As time goes on, and more ridiculous action movies come out while their stars become imitations of themselves, Last Action Hero will, I feel, continue to age with grace. Like a fine wine. Full of explosions.

Courtesy Columbia Pictures
“Have a nice day.”

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.

Getting Published Sucks

May 26, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Red Pen

Let’s say you’re a writer. You like, love, need to write. Ideas, characters, plots and events chase each other around in your noodle while you’re collating TPS reports, shoveling coal or telling morons the bleedingly obvious. You want to bring them to life, invite other people into the worlds and lives you create, provide a small measure of escape and solace to your fellow man through the art of the written word.

Or maybe you just want to make a quick buck. You’re tired of the commute, the daily officer routine, the dirty or suspicious looks from your boss and you believe you can write your way out of it.

Well, I commend your ambition and can sympathize with whatever sentiment that’s motivating you, but you need to be aware of a harsh truth that might be difficult to swallow. You might be aware of it, peripherally, or because writers much better than me have already issued similar warnings. But here it is: Getting published sucks.

If it were easy, everybody would do it. A thousand gamers and a million housewives and a billion Harry Potter fans would be getting their work published and making money if the process weren’t soul-grindingly difficult. And it’s not difficult in the way algebra or biochemistry can be, it’s difficult in that it curts right past the idealism and imagination that got you writing in the first place and dumps you without preamble into the ice-cold shower of reality.

Let me hand you the soap. You don’t want to bend over.

Finding an Agent Sucks

I hope you like rejection.

Who am I kidding? Nobody likes that. I can’t think of a single person who breaks into a smile when they’re told something they’ve worked hard on sucks. Even when the creative person can admit it to themselves, it’s a tough thing to face and harder to overcome. And just when you think you have overcome it, refined that lump of coal into a diamond, polished that work until it shines?

“Sorry, this isn’t good enough.”

Not good enough for the market. Not good enough for the agency. Not good enough for the individual agent’s taste. Just. Not. Good. Enough.

It’s what every form rejection letter boils down to. And let’s face, agents are busy as hell. They get flooded with queries, full-out manuscripts, love letters and blatant bribes every day. They can’t respond in person to every single one. So they use the form letter. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t personal. They don’t mean to come off like they don’t care. It’s not their intent to act like your hard work will never amount to anything.

But boy, the write can certainly feel that way.

The payoff, though, is that when you do get the attention of the right agent at the right time, you have a voice in the publishing community. Somebody with established credentials is now on your side. They have the pulse of the market. They know who to talk to, where to go, what to say to get your work into the hands of someone willing to put it in front of readers everywhere.

They will go to the mat for you and you will love them for it.

You just have to find them first. If you can.

Publishing Yourself Sucks

Fuck that! I have sent queries all over the place and gotten nowhere. I’m even more miserable and broke now than I was a year ago when I finally finished my seventeenth draft! I’m hip! I’m with it! I’m a digital native! I’m gonna publish myself, dammit!

Not so fast there, Sparky.

First and foremost, let me point you in the direction of someone who’s been out there, who’s seen what it’s like to face the demons on Amazon and those Barnes & Noble guys, who wrestled with what to do and what not to do with his bare gorram hands while bringing a child into this world.

BAM.

Get it? I hope so. You take a walk down the road of self-publication, you are in for just as much work and heartache as finding the right agent, if not moreso. There are a thousand things an agent will do for you in the course of a day if you’re fortunate enough to retain their services. There’s networking, marketing, promotion, pricing and contracts, a heaping handful of moving parts that keep the machine of your dreams humming along towards actually getting paid for your work.

Without an agent, take a guess who needs to do all of that.

If you guessed yourself, give yourself a No-Prize.

Let’s compare the two tracks. If you pursue an agent, after months (if not longer) of rejection you finally get one’s attention and they like your work enough to represent it. You might need to do a couple more edits before the work is ready for prime time, but once it is you and your agent can work together to get it out there.

Go your own way, and you’ll need to bother a lot of people on your own. Relative strangers to give you honest test readings. Maybe an editor if you’re pressed for time. Definitely a professional cover artist (you do want people to check out your book, right?). You’ll need to set the type yourself to make sure the finished product looks good on mobile devices. Then you need to get it onto the marketplaces people use and promote the hell out of it. Offer incentives. Get reviews and post them everywhere. Shill until your voice hurts and your fingers are sore.

Neither of those seems like very much fun, do they?

Doing Nothing Sucks

There’s a third option, of course.

You could just do nothing with your work. Write for your own enjoyment. Maybe post your work on a blog or a forum, if you have time. After all, who needs that aggravation? It’s a huge expenditure of time and energy and it’s going to frustrate you, depress you, enrage you and wear you out. You need that energy and time for things. Chores. Trips. Games. Chatting up attractive members of the opposite sex.

Of course, if you do nothing with your work, nothing will come of it.

You get what you give. Just give it to a forum or a blog with a couple viewers and you’ll get a couple encouraging responses and little else. Take a chance on finding an agent or put in the work to put it out yourself, you’ll get a lot more. Possibly some extra income. And that can’t do anything but help the aforementioned activities.

Those are the paths open to the writer. The path you choose is entirely up to you.

An Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment

May 25, 2011 / / 3 Comments

Courtesy WoWHead and sorronia
*sniff*

Dear Blizzard Entertainment,

I’ve been a fan of your work since the days of Warcraft 2. I’ve played games in all three of your major IPs and enjoyed every one. I’ve begun playing StarCraft 2 in a competitive sense (even though I suck) and I’ve watched the development of Diablo 3 with interest. However, I have let my World of Warcraft subscription lapse, and in light of the latest major patch, I doubt I’ll be re-subscribing any time soon.

When I pay for World of Warcraft every month, my expectation is not that the game will be exactly what I want. My expectation is that the game will allow me to explore the extensive world you’ve created, interact with like-minded players and face challenges in the form of dungeons and raids. It’s that last part that’s been lacking for some time now. Cataclysm began with some promising steps in the right direction, but in light of many, many complaints from some of the more vocal members of the community, you have taken World of Warcraft down a path I can no longer follow.

I’m reminded of a scene from the movie The 13th Warrior. Antonio Banderas is traveling with a band of Vikings looking to protect their homes from vicious savages, and one of the Vikings gives him a large sword. “I cannot lift this,” says Banderas’ character. The Viking shrugs and says with a smirk, “Grow stronger.” The solution to the problem is not handed to Banderas; instead he must find the solution for himself. Granted, he eventually has the sword shaved down to a scimitar-like size and balance, allowing him to use speed he possesses instead of strength he does not, but it was still a solution he developed on his own.

Instead of letting your players grow stronger or adapt to face the challenges you present on their own terms, you’ve swapped the big heavy sword for a butter knife.

By lowering the difficulty of encounters, you do several things that I feel will be to the ultimate detriment of the game. You remove the challenge that is part of the appeal of dungeon and raid encounters. You encourage players to be lazy and not improve their skills. Most importantly, you foster the notion that a player or group of players who complain loudly enough about something they feel is unfair or to which they feel entitled will gain them what they want, without them having to expend any real effort. Get a bunch of like-minded friends together, post on the forums about how unfair or overpowered or unbalanced something is, and next thing you know stuff is less difficult and it’s easier for you play. It’s magic!

I’ve been frustrated by encounters before. I’ve gotten into absolute fits over not being able to clear a particular boss. I’ve been short with guildmates, yelled at my wife, startled pets. But not once did I think any of my difficulties needed to be fixed with a wave of Blizzard’s magic wand. No, my frustration came from the idea that my skills were not good enough, so I would need to improve them. I can be impatient, and crave my shinies just as much as any other adventurer in Azeroth, but I want to earn them, not have them handed to me. Developing the skills to earn something is difficult and time-consuming, not to mention carrying the possibility of failure.

Rather than letting players fail more often, you lower the requirements for success to near insignificance. I know I’m not the only player who feels this way, but as I don’t complain regularly my voice is one of the many that goes unheard. These concerns and worries go unspoken, because we’d rather work on our problems within our own reach rather than wave our arms in hysteria and grab attention, screaming as soon as we have it until we get what we want.

I was hoping to come back to World of Warcraft soon. I met my wife there, after all. But I’ve realized you can’t hope for things to go back to the way they were. I met my wife during The Burning Crusade, long before this sense of entitlement crept into the player base and the development team was producing multiple raid dungeons for every tier of progressive content. We had a great guild that worked well together, from role-playing to raiding, and it was a great time we’ve thoroughly enjoyed.

But those days are gone. And no matter how fondly I might recall them, wishing for a thing does not make it so. You have decided that a vocal minority demanding you change is more important than the majority of the player base who want to progress, improve and succeed on their own merits. I feel this is an incorrect decision, and all I can do is call attention to the whys and wherefores of my own decision not to return to World of Warcraft. I hope I have done so and that this criticism is taken in the spirit with which it’s written.

I will continue to play StarCraft 2, but I must admit to being wary of doing so. I am aware that many of the official forums for that game are also full of complaints about balance issues and how one unit is more overpowered than another, how this matchup is unwinnable or that one needs a nerf. I’m also now nervous about Diablo 3. While I still look forward to playing it when it launches, I fear that within a month of its release players will complain that a boss is too hard and your response will be to lower its difficulty until all challenge and excitement from the encounter is lost, reducing the experience to the repetative process of “click enemy once, recieve loot.”

I’m certain that Blizzard Entertainment is not overly concerned with the complaints of a single customer who will no longer be using a particular service of theirs. It’s entirely possible that this rather verbose dissertation on the state of the game will fall on deaf ears and go largely unread by anyone in a position to correct the course World of Warcraft has taken. I accept that, yet I could not let my feelings go unvoiced. It is my hope that as I and others of a like mind try to bring this very real and unfortunate situation to light, you might understand the position we are in and look into ways to make World of Warcraft great again. I guarantee you’ll see players coming back if you make the right decisions for the sake of the game, rather than pandering to players who feel entitled to their loot instead of being willing to work for it.

Thank you for the years of entertainment. I wish you nothing but success.

Yours very sincerely,
Josh Loomis

Older posts

Legal Stuff

Creative Commons License

BlueInkAlchemy.com by Joshua E Loomis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Some rights reserved.

Categories

Archives

© 2024 Blue Ink Alchemy

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑