Traveling with the new setup

Written late last night in my spooky hotel room

Well, the reason why you haven’t heard much from me over the past few days is due to travel.

You see, I’m in Missouri. I’d like to post some sort of clever joke about Missouri here but I’m afraid the unrelenting fried food and dead animal has sapped much of my creativity. The closest thing to a truly healthy meal I’ve had was the dinner my mother-in-law cooked for us last night (which was awesome).

Is it sad that one of the reasons I’m looking forward to being home is a salad? A big salad, full of leafy greens, chopped carrots, and the only meat in sight is cut up chicken…oh, wait, blogging.

That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the other food I’ve had while on this trip. Far from it in fact. My friends from the Midwest all said that I had to try Waffle House’s hash browns and I will go out on a limb to say they’re the best I’ve had that weren’t made at home (or a home). We had some very good steaks on Sunday night when we got in and tonight we had authentic, genuine Kansas City BBQ.

You know that urban legend about how John Wayne died, stuff to the gills with half a cow’s worth of meat?

That’s how I feel.

We’ve been staying in a hotel called The Elms. A historic building, it looks like the younger sibling to the hotel from the Shining only with fewer blond twins holding hands and staring at you spookily. I’ll see if I can’t post some pictures once I’m back.

Other than traveling to “the middle” and experiencing being stuffed with enough pork that a pig farm could be resurrected from the contents of my stomach (hopefully after being removed from me in a non-Hostel-like manner), I’m also trying a new travel set up: iPad & Bluetooth keyboard.

So far the setup is working kind of nicely. My iPad is great when it comes to stuff like looking at e-mail and my google reader, Facebook, quick blogging, and tablet games. It is crap, on its own, for writing lengthy bits like this. One, I hate the touch-type on-screen keyboard; it’s awkward, slow to use, and I feel like it takes up too much screen real estate. Another thing I find irritating is that the iPad will not let you place the cursor in the middle of a word, so if you mistype and misspell a word your only option is to delete the whole thing and start over.

The Bluetooth keyboard solves all of that quite nicely. First, it eliminates the need for the on-screen keyboard. Secondly, it allows nearly all the functionality of a standard keyboard. Three, it’s super light and the weight it adds to my backpack is negligible.

Between WordPress’ app and QuickOffice I can do pretty much everything. The only frustrating thing about this is that QuickOffice, for all it’s nifty features (being able to connect all of my cloud storage so I have instant access to any of the files stored there, all from one app, plus be able to generate new MS Office docs on the spot, AND be able to save said files to .pdf if I need to? Hell yeah!), has no spell checker. Seriously, no spell check; apparently it’s a feature they haven’t integrated yet. Why such a nearly universal tool was not part of the original app, considering its purpose, is beyond me, but there you have it.

However, such a thing is rather small in the grand scheme of things; it just means I should consider everything I do in that app a rough draft not fit for being viewed by the world at large. (Still kind of irritating though).

For the keyboard I just went with Apple’s Bluetooth model. I went to a few places and tried a different models and didn’t like them so much. I thought Logitech’s fold-out model was kind of cool but, with it being connected to the iPad, it added more weight and thickness to the device; with the Apple model I can just turn off the iPad’s Bluetooth and walk away with the tablet.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can’t go back to bed. I never sleep well in hotels and the time difference, plus my wife and child sleepily snoring in duet in the same room, makes it difficult for me to fall asleep.

You want fiction?

I’ll give you fiction.

My story “Sense” from Cthulhurotica with my blessing from Dagan Books. Check it out, let me know what you think.

Book Review: Kobold Wizard’s D*ldo of Enlightenment +2, An Adventurer for 3-6 Players, Levels 2-5 by Carlton Mellick III*

I only wish the title of this book was a joke.

I want you to consider your reality.

Think about your life. About how you get up in the morning, about how you go about your daily existence, the chores you do, the jobs you complete. Maybe you have adventures and lead a life of excitement or perhaps yours is a more mundane, every-day-normal sort of affair.

Now I want you to consider what it would be like if you were sodomized by a magical d*ldo that opened your consciousness to the fact that you are nothing more than a fictional construct of a socially maladjusted, hormonally horny teenager, created for his amusement, and that every shitty thing that’s ever happened to you was because he made it happen. That you are nothing more than a mental masturbatory puppet for him to live out his own fantasies through your exploits and what this revelation might feel like.

Having considered this, now you know a little about the concept of this horrible, horrible book

KBDoE+2 is the story of Polo Pipefingers, a Halfling fighter, and his companion Delvok, an Vulcanelf who has been multi-classed to the point of complete incompetence, and the “adventure” they are forced to go on to first secure the aforementioned kobold wizard’s d*ldo of enlightenment +2, which has the power of revealing the true nature of the world to the characters inside it, and then later a more classic dungeon crawl. Along the way they meet two slutty elves (this is not a judgment statement against them, it’s how they are actually described in the book), rapacious orcs, gnolls who are very much into nonconsensual DP, and a host of other horrible characters.

I’m not going to go into details because, really, you don’t need to hear them. Except for the one dragon in the book who has fire-breathing penile dentata, that detail I can’t suffer with alone, but the rest, just trust me, you’re better off not knowing.

In general, KBDoE+2 is a story about D&D characters having the existential crisis that stems from the knowledge that they don’t really exist. Well, they exist in the context of their world but that they are works of fiction created by nerds and that they are not “real”. Or are they? This issue, along with questions regarding the nature of free will, are explored during what is sort of a stereotypical dungeon crawl. The conclusion of the story is that the adventurers, which now consist of Polo, Delvok, one of the slutty elves, a goblin (both of whom have been enlightened by being stuck with the d*ldo), and the kobold wizard who started this whole mess, conclude a magical ritual that somehow brings the players and the DM into the game.

Where they are summarily killed, either by murder in the case of Polo and Delvok’s players, or devoured by dragon penile dentate in the case of the DM.

Repeatedly saying “penile dentate” will do awesome things for my blog’s SEO. *sigh*

KBDoE+2 just doesn’t work in any of the ways you could interpret it. Let’s say you take it as a criticism of gamer nerds. Ok, I can see that, but the criticism seems cheap, easy and weak considering how horribly stereotyped the player characters are, like you packed the barrel so full of fish it’s at capacity and you then shoot it with a bazooka. The DM is a grossly overweight, wheel chair-bound nerd of the obsessive category, Delvok’s player has a learning disability and is the type of kid who likes to pretend he’s intellectual while failing to be even moderately intelligent. Mark, Polo’s player, is the most normal of the players but even he comes off as a stereotype of the kid who is only using the other gamers for something to do but would ditch them in a heartbeat if he had anyone else to hang out with. The only character with any real depth is Mark and even he isn’t all that deep, so, what really can be said about these characters that haven’t been said before?

KBDoE+2 could be a criticism of the negative aspects of escapism, using the first-person accounts of the experiences of Polo to highlight the negative connotations of it. I mean, the book opens with him and Delvok being sexually assaulted by she-trolls who use various pieces of equipment, and the magic d*ldo, to rape the two characters. And this isn’t the only rape that takes place in the book; Polo is raped by the two elves (who tell him, as they high-five each other, that they’ve given him an STD), the elves rape Polo and Delvok again, all of the adventurers are raped by gnolls. I really don’t know if I’ve seen so much rape in a book that wasn’t about war crimes or specifically about sexual violence. The criticism of escapism could come from the viewing the characters as victims of the perversions of the players, that the characters are individuals being exploited for the enjoyment of others not unlike gladiators in death sports.

It could also be further criticism of gamer nerds and their escapism, of the harmful, creepy fashion that it can take. The fact that the game is little but the DM’s sexual fantasies with a thin veneer of player-participation is put forward in the book with all the subtly of a brick to the face and so all of the negativity of what happens in the game, every rape, death, and shitty thing that happens (and, really, that’s the only word I can use for having two NPCs high-five each other over giving a PC an STD via unwanted, nonconsensual sex) reflects on him as an individual, and by extension gamer nerds in general. My problem with this is that the characters he’s then criticizing are so stereotyped, and flatly one-dimensional, that it’s more of a smear than saying anything interesting or smart about gamer geeks or their culture.

As a story KBDoE+2 kind of falls flat. You have a very meta story, with characters, who know they are characters, being played by players who are playing them as knowing they are characters (confused yet?), but the story is written from the perspective of Polo so even when the character thinks he’s exercising free will, he’s not. Only Mellick writes, several times, that the players start to get frustrated that their characters aren’t doing what they want. How, exactly, does that work? And then you have the climax where the players are somehow brought into the game, which is never really explained beyond “it happens”. Players entering a fictional game world is not a new concept but usually some explanation is given to satisfy the question of how they were able to do so and this book lacks it.

But, what really got to me and turned me off about the book was all of the rape and sexual violence. There is so much of it that, at one point, I sat staring at the page and thought, “Another rape scene, really?” Not in any kind of outraged sense, but because there had been so much of it I’d become numb.

Rape and sexual violence have their place in fiction, just as anything that happens in real life does; they are, unfortunately, threats and fears that exist for us in reality and so they could possibly be dealt with in fiction. However, it’s my opinion that such things should be dealt with in a serious fashion, not just because such things are serious in nature, but also out of respect for someone who has experienced those horrible events. I mean, think about if you were a rape survivor and had been possibly given an STD by your assailant. How might it impact you to see two characters happy that they’d done the same to a character? I mean, the DM, and by extension the author, is gleeful in the rape. It’s almost like Mellick thought, “How can I make this edgy? I know, we’ll have gnolls gang rape a female character! That’s totally edgy!”

I know it’s bizarre fiction but I don’t agree with the use of it.

And, really, what was the point of all of it, the sheer amount of it? Was it to illustrate that the DM was a screwed pervert who dragged his players as nonconsensually through his sexual fantasies as he forced those fantasies on the characters? If so, then one or two instances of such things would suffice without having to have it happen again and again and again.

I’m not even going to go into the illustrations. I don’t have the heart, or the cruelty, to do so.

Regardless, this book wraps up with a trite ending that now, with their players dead, the characters truly control their own destinies and go off into a section of the world the DM hadn’t written to see if anything was there.

Do yourself a favor, don’t pick up this book.

Note: D*ldo has been written in such a way so I don’t accidentally block my own blog on certain systems.

Plagiarism is “Bull$#!t”

Many years ago I joined the internet the same way that many other people did at that time, by taking their first baby-steps into this wild frontier from the safe and loving arms of American Online. We were like children let loose, full of innocence and ignorance of what was out there having been raised on soft foods in padded rooms, and being only sixteen and private school-educated I think I was even worse off than many other people. So, when AOL offered up free websites I jumped on the opportunity, making my first (and really, really bad, I mean, I think I even used the flash HTML tag at one point…) website. I scoured the web for badly done animated .gifs, had a wretched layout not seen since the scuttling of Angelfire, and was quite proud about it. I was sixteen and a newb, what do you want?

Now, back in those days I used to put up my fiction. Really bad fiction (think The Crow fan fiction as written by a mopey teenager with no writing skills of any sort kind of bad) but I was proud of it; they were stories I’d done all on my own and I was happy about them.

And then came the strange day where I got an e-mail from myself. Or, more accurately, from someone with the same name as me.

Like me he was a high school student but living on the East Coast. Bored one day, he did a web search of his name to see what would come up. One of the hits was my lowly website filled with stories.

Several of which, he told me, he submitted for assignments in his English class.

At the time I didn’t know really how to take the news. I mean, on one hand here was this unscrupulous jerk with the same name as me stealing my work and taking the credit for it. On the other hand I got an A on his assignments. I can’t remember what I said to him if I said anything at all (what I’d say to him now I wouldn’t put here) and in the years since I’ve thought about who he was and what kind of person would do that sort of thing and then admit it to the person they stole from. I know that his admission of plagiarizing my work made it so I stopped putting my fiction on the website because it was the only way I could think of to keep people from ripping me off.

I think there’s this sense on the ‘Net that whatever is there is for the taking because it’s been “left out”, like the old, curb-side couches with a “free” sign on them. I’m sure that some people are aware of things like copyright, or common courtesy, and just don’t care and I have to wonder about the rest, whether it ever crosses their mind that taking something that someone put out there, be it a blog post or a picture they posted or some piece of fiction, is wrong. I don’t think it does, and I think, for some of them at least, it doesn’t cross their mind because they actively don’t consider it. They don’t want to think of it as theft so they don’t think about it at all and just take and take and plead ignorance if they are ever caught.

Well, it makes me happy to see that one such individual, an older gentleman responsible for publishing a newspaper in Oregon, got caught, was called out for it, and made to pay for his theft.

The thing that gets me about this video is that at no point does this gentleman, who points out he’s forty years older than the blogger like that means he’s entitled to his theft, apologize. He gets upset, he makes excuses, he even tries to physically intimidate the other guy by getting in his space and glaring but he never, not once, owns up to what he did and says he’s sorry. He does a lot of pouting and sulking but never offers an apology. His assistant or wife at one point says “And here you get to make an easy $500 bucks” (the amount he invoiced the paper for the article they appropriated) and the blogger points out that no, it wasn’t easy, because he did all of the work reading reports and writing the article and bravo to him for doing so. They’re the ones who made easy money off of work they didn’t do and they have the gall to get upset about it.

And when is all said and done and the newspaper guy realizes he can’t weasel out of the situation, how does he further illustrate his opinion on the matter? Their attitude is summed up quiet simply by the reason for the check written in the memo section on it (for you kids out there who have never written a physical check, old-timey checks had a space listed as “memo” for you to put a reason for the check so, when it was sent back to you, you knew what you wrote the check for): “bullshit”.

Plagiarism is never bullshit, whether it is some kid’s horrible, teenage fiction or a professional blogger’s researched article. We need to make sure that we protect ourselves as much as we can from it while continuing to get out the message that plagiarism is theft, plain and simple, and, when we catch a plagiarist, calling them out for it. It’s the only way we’ll ever get things to change.

On this Mother’s Day…

Back in 2008 I did not know that I would be writing a post like this about my wife, Michelle. Well, for most of 2008 she wasn’t my wife, she was my fiance, but still.

At the time we were very firmly in the “children are a nice idea in concept as long as they belong to other people.” I wouldn’t say we were childfree because that term carries with it a whole raft of negative connotations from the people who identify as CF but instead could be better classified as “child-haters”. Mostly, we enjoyed the presence of children and liked being able to take them, feed them sugar, rile them up, and then send them back to their parents so we could watch the fireworks.

A number of things happened that changed our minds.

Our friends R & L had a son who I will simply refer to as JT (they don’t like having their names out on the net). JT spent a lot of time with us, unsurprising since it wasn’t like they were going to leave him in the car when they came to faire, and I have to say that kid is pretty awesome. Getting to know him, watching him grow up, put a dent in the “kids are nice but I don’t want one” wall. Michelle often said that watching me play with JT made her ovaries hurt in a “ok, if I get to see him [me] like this then I might want one too.”

The second, and largest thing, that changed Michelle’s and my thoughts on having kids was in 2009 when she became unexpectedly pregnant. I think we got knocked up while she was on antibiotics for a cold, antibiotics having a negative impact on hormonal birth control’s effectiveness, because we’d never had any issues before or after when she was on the pill. But, one evening in October, she came down to my desk as I played video games with a look of shock on her face and a positive pregnancy test in her hand and we spent the rest of the weekend discussing if we wanted a baby, if we could care for a baby, and in the end decided it was a yes to both.

To be brief, that pregnancy didn’t end well and there was no child. We know she was a girl and we call her Pod. Her birthday would’ve been next month.

The end of the pregnancy hit us both hard and we fluctuated between not wanting a child and wanting to get pregnant again. I thought about my former child-less existence and we both realized that now we had a baby-shaped hole in our lives, that we’d made space in our family that wasn’t there before and now we felt that emptiness. We talked about it more, talked about our fears and pain and thought about if we wanted to give it another shot.

Obviously, we did because now we have Connor and I think it was probably the second best decision I ever made (after asking her to marry me).

Dad, I’m only plotting to take over the world

Pregnancy was not fun or easy on her and being a parent is not always the most enjoyable experience. A friend of mine asked me what being a parent was like about a month or so after Connor was born and I told him that it was an experiment to see how much you can get done on as little sleep possible. And that’s just my experience, for Michelle things were difficult with being a mom, the food source, and, in the eyes of society, responsible for Connor. Men, in general I think, get more of a pass when it comes to child raising; we’re still seen as the breadwinners and raising a kid is still seen as women’s work (which I think is bullshit but then I’ve been told my opinions aren’t very typical to society).

Michelle also has the added bonus of being the breadwinner for our family. Without going into specifics she makes almost double what I do and she is very, very good at her job. This puts a pressure on her in that she has to work for us to be able to afford the life we have and she, at times, would like nothing more than to just spend the day with Connor. It also takes her an hour or more to get home some nights and it’s not been easy getting to see us for as little as she does sometimes; at times the sacrifice she makes weighs very heavily on her.

In the past year and change my wife has, as we call it, leveled up in so many ways I’ve lost count. She’s responsible, loving, caring. She worries so much about making sure that our burden is shared equally. She is devoted to her family in incredible ways and the amount of love she shows us every day is nothing short of amazing.

I looked through racks of cards and decided that they were all crappy, trite sayings on cheap paper that don’t encompass everything I’d like to say you, Michelle, and this post only comes a little closer. Thank you for marrying me all of those years ago and thank you for being the mother of my child. You are excellent in both roles and I couldn’t imagine doing it with anyone else. I mean, who else would take head-bitey, zombie pictures with me? I love you.

Nerd Tears

This post contains spoilers about The Avengers that I already spoiled in my previous post regarding the movie so if you skipped that post then you might want to skip this one too if you’re staying spoiler free.

Let me tell you a little story about a phenomena I call “nerd tears”.

It was 2005 and the moment Browncoats had been waiting for was finally here: Serenity was hitting the movie theaters. Many flocked eagerly to the theaters to go see it and I was no different. I think it was a Saturday and I was seeing an early matinee of the movie with some friends. We were really enjoying the movie, cruising along happily until…

After we picked our jaws off the floor and our eyes returned to their normal size, I turned to my friend Nate and said, “Wow, Tyler is going to be pissed.”

Tyler, my fellow collaborator over at Your Book Is Why Daddy Drinks, was a HUGE Wash fan. Huge. Wash was the character he most identified with, the one he talked about after our short-lived, weekly doses of Firefly. Tyler, also, was seeing the movie that same day, only a little later.

Sure enough, two and a half hours later to the dot, I got a text from Tyler with three words: GOD DAMN IT.

With The Avengers coming out, Tyler was once again faced with the possibility of shedding a few nerd tears. You see, he’s a big fan of Agent Philip Coulson and while I never said specifically to Ty what happened, I implied it big time, poking him about how Wash basically got killed by a toothpick the size of a sycamore tree.

To which he calmly replied, “SHUT THE FUCK UP, MATT!”

Nerd tears happen when a geek, so invested in whatever they are geeky about, has an extreme reaction to something involving whatever they are geeky about, typically an angry or sad reaction. If you’re a gamer then you may still be bailing out the geek tears over the Mass Effect 3 ending (the tide of which was so high Betheseda had to go and create more content just to stem the flow). Star Wars fans the world over have shed enough geek tears over Episodes 1-3 to fill the world’s oceans. I’ve shed my own geek tears when I got to the end of Jim Butcher’s Changes, my brother had hot nerd tears of rage when he read what happens to Jon Snow in A Dance with Dragons. Geeks, by definition, are passionate about their interests and nerd tears are a product of that passion.

So, what have you shed nerd tears over?

Movie Review: The Avengers (Assemble)

This is not a movie review about superheroes.

This is a movie review about what it is to be human, a flawed, weak, noble human, because in many ways I believe that is what The Avengers is about.

Oh, BTW, spoilers below.

The Avengers begins with Loki’s attack on SHIELD’s headquarters in order to take the Tesseract, last seen in the hands of SHIELD in the Easter egg scene at the end of Thor and before that in Captain America. During this attack he pretty much destroys the SHIELD base on his own, brainwashes Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig, and steals the Tesseract. This causes Fury, Agent Coulson (from previous Marvel movies such as Iron Man I and II, Thor, and A Curious Thing Happened On The Way To Thor’s Hammer (a brilliant short film that’s an added feature on the Thor DVD), and Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, to go out and recruit some of Earth’s most brilliant talent in the form of Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner. Together, they, along with Thor who joins them after Loki allows himself to be captured, form “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” as the Avengers are referred to as during the comic.

However, that does not make them a team.

Each one of them is broken in such a fashion that it gets in the way of them gelling together. Tony is his abrasive, smarmy, superior self as we’ve seen in the previous Iron Man films. Bruce is constantly haunted by “the other guy”, the Hulk, whose shadow he lives in constant threat of. Natasha is suffering from old guilt that she believes she’s repaying and new guilt and worry over the turning of Hawkeye (who we learn is responsible for her going “good”). Steve Rogers is burdened by loyalty and duty, two things that would normally be good if it wasn’t for the blindness which her pursues them at first. Later, when he’s freed from the grasp of Loki, Hawkeye is similarly filled with guilt for the actions he took while under Loki’s control and the lives he ended as a result. Even Thor, while not human, has his flaws; his sole devotion to Asgard gets in the way, initially, of his working with the team, even as he admires them and his love for his adopted brother is no help either, especially as it screws him over again and again and again. Finally, Fury is shackled by duty.

All of these are very real and very human issues that each of them deal with. Tony needles Steve, at one point telling him “Everything that’s special about you came out of a bottle” while Steve constantly remarks about Tony’s suit, implying that Tony would be nothing without it unlike Steve who is always special. Bruce is consistently down and dour, which is understandable considering that his condition will always, eventually, get away from him and that doesn’t leave him in the best of spirits. Fury, because his duty, cannot tell the rest of the team what is really going on. The only one who tries to be a team player is Natasha.

Well, and Coulson. Especially Coulson.

Coulson, you see, is the most human of them all. He’s not a super spy, a genius, a god, or anything. He’s just a guy who gets the job done, apparently a socially nervous guy with an interest in a cellist that moved to Portland. We’ve seen him in a number of movies and he just seems like a nice, likeable person, one who has a total fanboy crush on Captain America, who loves to poke back at Tony whenever he can (although I definitely got the feeling that the two of them had become friends of a sort in this movie). He’s the one who believes in the team, a fact that Fury remarks on later. And, because it’s a Joss movie, you just know he’s going to die.

Yep. Coulson is killed by Loki while trying to stop Loki from escaping. It’s Coulson who reads Loki perfectly, telling him that he’s going to lose because it’s his nature, that he lacks conviction. And then, to grind Loki’s face in it, Coulson blasts him with a laser, right in the face, as if to say “Yeah, you killed me, but you’re still nothing but a twerp.”

It’s Coulson’s death, and the emotional manipulation by Fury, that causes the team to finally click. It’s Coulson, normal, human Coulson, who reminds the rest of the team what it is they’re there for. As Coulson said to Fury before he died, “They need something to…” I’m going to agree with another reviewer and say that he probably would’ve said “avenge”. And that’s what they sought out to do, because, as Tony said, Loki made it personal.

And wow did Loki screw up.

The team clicks and clicks hard with Captain America taking the lead and directing the show, organizing the team in a way that they lacked earlier. He directs each of them to a task that is perfect to their skills, giving the simplest to the Hulk (“And Hulk? Smash.” *Big, green, shit-eating Hulk grin*). Before this there’s a scene with Loki and Tony in Stark Tower where Loki is being smug and Tony is being unimpressed. He then proceeds to tell Loki exactly why he screwed up. He explains the group of people whom Loki has pissed off and when Loki answers “I have an army” Tony immediately fires back “Yeah, well, we have a Hulk.” And considering the damage the Hulk does, Loki probably wished he had a Hulk too.

And then the Avengers proceed to wreck shop. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details, I want to save something for you, but the things Hulk does to Loki…Michelle and I giggled, GIGGLED, and were not ashamed.

And through all of the destruction, each member of the team is working to their utmost. Thor smites, Hulk smashes, Hawkeye snipes people, Black Widow and the Cap are bad asses and Iron Man mostly flies around solo demolishing bad guys. They fight with all the passion that Tony described to Loki and, to drive the point home of why they’re able to do this, just before all the fighting really kicks off, Tony says to Loki, “There’s one last person you pissed off too. Phil.” And then Tony blasts Loki, just like Phil did.

To cap it all off, the final scene of the movie after the credits. That scene alone underscores that these, despite Thor, are Earth’s mightiest heroes.

Go see The Avengers if you haven’t. I’d pay full movie price to see this flick again and happily so.