Everybody’s a critic

Posted by natechen on September 12, 2014

So criticism is good for you, whether it’s criticism of your work or someone else’s. The next logical question is, what critics provide useful feedback? There’s a lot of critics out there, ranging from Michiko Kakutani, literarian extrodinair, to Noah Antweiler, the Spoony One. What are their relative values and weaknesses?

Well, in short, it really depends on what kind of aspect of a work you want to examine.

In general, highly literary critics are going to grapple with issues like theme and symbolism. Many works are crammed full of tiny subtleties that are all designed to point the audience to a single conclusion about a work, many of them so subtle or so vague that the audience either misses them or isn’t sure what to make of them. When you add in creators who add symbolism without bothering to consult with an expert on what it’s supposed to mean (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek) or who add symbolism for the express purpose of muddying the waters, it’s easy to wonder how much value there is to reading that kind of highly literary criticism.

The answer is, a lot. As I’ve said before, many creators are building their stories with all the care of a master jewel thief planning one final heist. Careful examination of that kind of work is definitely beneficial. But all but the most patient and painstaking minds will find that it grows dull after a while (and not a long while at that). I try to read one or two works of serious literary criticism a year – currently I’m working through “Reading Joss Whedon,”edited by Wilcox, Cochran, Masson and Lavery. Also, this is the kind of criticism you only tend to get from books and journals, the kinds of things it’s better to get from a library (cheap) or dedicated research database (expensive) than try and dredge up online, so access to it is not as easy as the next kind.

You see, below literary criticism but above the layman’s criticism is the criticism you get from people who spend a lot of time exploring stories and have become experts on narrative structure and examining the craft of writing. We’ll call this semi-literary criticism. There’s a lot of people out there these days that dabble in this kind of criticism. Already mentioned are reviewers like Kakutani (who I believe has done some true literary criticism as well) and Noah Antweiler (who has done no literary criticism and has the motto “Because bad movies and games deserve to be hurt back!”)

While Spoony can be both excitable and crass he does put a lot of thought into his critiques and takes the time to thoroughly, sometimes too thoroughly, explore his points. It might be tempting to write him off, since he doesn’t have any background education in writing or film, but the fact is you don’t really need much beyond reading comprehension and a nose for lazy writing to be a good semi-literary critic and Spoony has both in spades. Spoony has examined the plots of a number of video games as well. While that’s still kind of useful for a hardcore writer many of his critiques are not going to translate to other mediums directly.

Doug Walker, The Nostalgia Critic, is a movie critic and leading member of the League of Super Critics and his work is very good. While he is a movie critic first, and thus addresses issues such as the strengths of an actors performance or the technical level of a film’s cinematography, there’s still more than enough said in his typical review about plot and characterization to inform attentive writers watching his work.

There’s very few to no video reviews or podcasts for written fiction that I know of – Linkara’s Atop the Fourth Wall for comic books on Channel Awesome, liked with the Nostalgia Critic above, coming the closest that I can think of – but a good way to find in-depth analysis of a book is to hit up Goodreads. I don’t recommend doing this with a book you love as the Internet has absolutely no regard for the things you love and that will probably hurt. But if you had a title you thought was mediocre, chances are the people on Goodreads have analyzed why it’s lousy or not lousy six ways from Sunday and there’s a lot you can learn from reading that kind of thing.

And, of course, I have also dabbled in semi-literary criticism right here, and hope to continue doing so for a long time.

So we come full circle back to you. Yes, you too should indulge in criticism. The more criticism you read the sharper you mind should become and the sharper and more insightful your abilities to pick apart writing and analyze it should become. Practice it as much as possible on your own so when you disagree with other critics you’ll be equipped to talk about why. Who knows, you might eventually be able to make your living as a literary critic yourself! Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you if you do.

Cool Things: Prince of Foxes

Posted by natechen on September 10, 2014

Prince of Foxes is a work of historical fiction by Samuel Shellabarger set in the long ago days of Italy during the era of the free cities, specifically during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the power of Cesare Borgia was at it’s zenith. As the name implies, the book centers on a character who prizes himself on cunning and subtlety – although the relative value of those things is left more for the reader to decide on his own.

The plot revolves around Andrea Orsini, a young noble and chevalier (or knight) in the service of Cesare Borgia, who’s working his way up the ranks of Borgia’s court and has just been assigned his first political mission (as opposed to a combat mission.) Andre faces a lot of problems along the way – he’s lying about who he is, he’s fallen in love with a married woman and he winds up dueling one of the most proficient chevaliers of his era on something of a fool’s errand. And then there might be the little part where he adds to his problems by deciding to betray one of the most powerful men in the land for the sake of outdated notions of love and honor…

At the very heart of the conflict is the growing and competing notions of honor and self interest Andre holds. On the one hand, Andre prides himself on being very modern and quietly sneers at the values of honor and chivalry that so many of the foreign knights espouse. That’s not without cause – Northern Italy was one of the richest parts of Europe at the time and wouldn’t be eclipsed until it’s poor avenues of trade to the American continents gave the advantage to England and the Dutch, and they got there in part by shedding feudal ways of living often upheld by notions of honor and duty. But they were also ways that Borgia would take them back to.

On the other hand, the Lord Varano, an old soldier who has lived by the code of honesty and respect for all people, is the embodiment of the Italian free city. He serves his people as much as they serve him and he lives chivalry rather than preaching it. He has married Camilla, Andrea’s love interest, for her protection and not out of romance or a desire for heirs. Varano respects his people’s rights because that is the honorable thing to do in his mind, providing a picture of honor and chivalry that upholds something worthwhile rather than something cynical and self-serving, like Borgia and the serfdom he’s seeking to go back towards. Neither honor or cynicism are ideals, it turns out, but rather tools to uphold either freedom or slavery – and it’s these Andre has to choose between.

Although Andrea has been promised Varano’s city and wife by Borgia, if only Andrea will help take them by treachery and murder, ultimately Borgia doesn’t view Andre as his equal as the old man and his wife do. In no long period of time Andre will have to decide where his loyalties lie and each choice comes with unpleasant consequences.

This story has pretty much everything you might like from a good piece of historical fiction. A wealth of real, historical figures, a backdrop of events of great consequence – although little discussed now, Italy of this time period was a testing ground for democratic principles like citizen’s rights – and most important of all, fictional characters that blend seamlessly into the historical narrative. It also grapples with questions of what it means to be a man, to lead people and where the place of God and honor (or societal pressures if you want to be technical) fit in it all.

While the plot moves pretty slowly by modern standards that is fairly reasonable for a book over seventy years old and not all tales of intrigue hinge on how fast events move. Prince of Foxes is one that prefers to entrap readers by how much pressure it puts on. The story is chock full of characters, real and imagined, noteworthy for their cunning. There’s at least three different agendas at work most of the time and gambits pile up pretty high by the end. At the same time, at least one protagonist gets through most of the book totally ignorant of all the machinations and if you can’t follow them all either you won’t be any worse off.

If what you want is a good story with memorable characters who do a little scheming and a little standing on principle, this is one of the best books I can recommend. On the other hand if all you want is a good yarn well told this is… still one of the better options out there.

And if you want a hero without fear and above reproach, it’s got that too.

So go read it! It’s worth your time.

Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Posted by natechen on September 8, 2014

Izzy

I really should stop listening when people tell me something is worth a shot. And by people, I mean Jane. She has this idea that just because I’ve never used my ability to smash anything for kicks I’m repressed. I don’t understand why she seems to think smashing things is going to be such a productive route to solving so many problems.

But let me back up here. We went to visit Al’s friend, Lincoln He, who is the nephew of Al’s wushu instructor, as a part of our patrol. That meant going into the outskirts of Chinatown.

Now I have nothing against Chinatown or the He family but I swear it has the highest concentration of shops per city block anywhere in the U.S. They come in individual stores, strip malls and quaint little plazas with fancy Oriental gates, and in every other possible arrangement you can think of short of actual shopping malls. A surprising number of these storekeepers live on top of or behind their shops but most of the newer shopping centers have done away with that old time convention.

Lincoln He doesn’t live in one of those newer shopping centers.

He lives on a little plaza with oriental looking storefronts facing in on a nice courtyard with waist high red pots and planters holding live plants and bushes, a worn wooden railing marking a walkway around the outside and, at least at the time we arrived, a half a dozen people poking through the stores with crowbars. That last part was not a typical feature of the shopping center, which I guessed from the way Al reacted when he saw them.

We had six people with weapons, mostly crowbars or baseball bats with one tire iron mixed in to switch things up a bit. They were all male, which wasn’t really surprising, and they were in the process of trying to pry through one of those folding metal security doors at the front of a shop when we walked into the courtyard. Other than a little vandalism that ruined perfectly good trees I didn’t see an signs of long term harm done yet.

“Hey!” Al called, reaching into his back pocket for his ID, “Put down you weapons and step away from the door.”

“Who’s that?” I heard one of the thugs ask his friends. The general consensus was that they didn’t know and they didn’t care. In their defense, the three of us were all dressed in T-shirts and jeans or, in Jane’s case, cargo pants so we didn’t exactly look intimidating.

At least, until thug number one stepped up to give Al a shove and wound up coming to an almost comical dead stop as Al diverted the force of the push into the ground at his feet. Thug one started to back off a step, maybe to bring his baseball bat into play, but Al turned the move into a takedown, rolling his opponent back while tripping him with one foot and letting him slam flat on his back with an added shove’s worth of momentum.

Things turned hectic after that.

For the first few seconds of the fight my contributions consisted of taking one of the other would-be looters and turning his crowbar into a set of impromptu handcuffs. That took the fight out of him and gave me enough time to get my bearings – a lot happens in a fight in just a few seconds but, at the same time, if I’d accidentally broken the man’s wrists while tying him up because I wasn’t paying attention I’d have been in all kinds of trouble with Al. Not to mention Helix.

Stunned boy was back on his feet but leaning on his bat for the moment. Al was going three on one with most of the remaining thugs while Jane was holding the tire iron and gleefully stomping on her opponent’s toes to keep him off balance. Since none of the thugs were using bladed weapons, which could actually hurt Al since cutting and whacking apparently aren’t the same thing from a physics standpoint, I grabbed Jane’s dance partner by the belt and dropped low, using leverage to swing him around into an underhanded toss into thug one, who was still disoriented and went back down flailing and shouting under his partner in crime.

At that point it should have just been mopping up except it turned out our friends had friends. Friends with guns.

Another three guys, each with some kind of handgun, chose that moment to come running into the plaza, shouting in an attempt to figure out what was wrong and clearly demonstrating why one of the first things you learn to do in just about any kind of tactical training program is communicate clearly. I had no idea what they were actually saying but guns are a problem for just about everyone. Even Al couldn’t move around freely under steady gunfire.

Jane saw them too and came up with a solution first. She pointed to one of the large planters, about eight feet long and two wide, and said, “Stack and shove!”

“Can you tank the recoil?” I asked.

“It’s worth a shot!”

——–

Okay it’s time for a quick explanation of how my talent works. Papa and I are taxmen, a name that was coined because we supposedly levy a tax on entropy. In a nutshell everything you do takes energy and most of that energy is wasted as entropy. When a taxman like me is around we take a small portion of that energy and store it for later use. The name is genderally pejorative because it was coined in the late 1920s.

Now that idea sounds really simple in principle because it is. Dr. Higgins, one of the guys Project Sumter has been been working with to build a better picture of how talents work, has this huge mathematic equation that lets you figure out exactly how much energy we steal in a given situation but we never use it. You see, we can sense that waste.

Don’t ask how I can sense an abstract law of physics at work. I spent an hour trying to explain it to Dr. Higgins and we both wound up confused. That’s how it usually works when somebody tries to explain their talent to someone who doesn’t share it.

What’s important here is that we know when entropy is happening, we feel it as it makes us stronger and we know how much power we have from it to use. What we don’t do is project it like it’s some kind of mystical energy or a forcefield or something. We exploit loopholes in physics, we don’t break them. I can punch a car and fling it across a parking lot but only if I can somehow brace myself against that equal and opposite reaction people like to talk about in Einstein voices. Otherwise the car just rocks on its suspension and I fly back into whatever’s behind me.

This is a big part of the reason why Massif is my combat instructor. Wushu is a martial art that’s largely about positioning the self to best direct force and he has taught me more ways to effectively use my talent in the last year than papa learned in nearly ten years working for the Project. What he hadn’t let me do is apply any of that knowledge. I don’t have a feel for my strength yet, as he puts it. and so he’d been leery about my trying anything he’d taught me on someone who was less than moderately indestructible.

But Jane is part of a moderately indestructible group of people and working together as much as we had in the past year we’d discovered that her ability to trap incoming force let her brace me when I really needed to move something.

——–

The planter was way to heavy for me to do anything but maybe pick it up and throw it. Problem was that would keep me stuck in one place long enough I was likely to get shot in the process. So instead Jane and I lined up one side of the planter, Jane bracing me as I gave the planter a hard shove. Since she’s a vector trap, Jane was able to take all that equal and opposite reaction and store it for later use. I got a really solid shove on the planter and it went towards the guys with guns like I wanted.

Unfortunately, as Al says, I don’t know my own strength. I’d never done something like that before.

I way overshot the mark. Instead of sliding the planter along the ground and clipping the newcomers with it; the thing rolled over once and flipped up a good fifteen feet in the air, scattering dirt and plants across the courtyard in a bizarre reversal of rain. The three new guys threw their hands over their heads as the cloud of dirt and plants fell on them, one was taken out by a small bush landing on his head the other two dropped their guns as they wiped furiously at their eyes and spat dirt from their mouths. The planter crashed to the ground behind them and rolled straight over the decorative gate, sending it careening into the street beyond in splinters.

Behind me, Jane stumbled and fell back on the ground, the pavement beneath her shattering as she lost her grip on the forces she’d just absorbed and it went careening through the ground as she landed. Clearly she hadn’t been as ready to handle the recoil as she’d thought.

The two thugs left fighting with Al saw all that and decided that dropping their weapons like they’d been told was the better part of valor. As for our unarmed combat instructor, he let the thug he’d been grappling with out of the hold he’d been in and shoved him away with a sigh. Then he folded his arm behind his back and surveyed the scene, trying to look harsh but a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

That was when we heard Lincoln yelling from across the courtyard, “What are you kids doing on my lawn?”

——–

Helix

We’d just about reached the halfway point of our look around town when we spotted the bodies.

I confess to having the stupid thought, about two minutes before we stumbled on them, that we were going to have a really simple time of it. Everything had been going so well.

Gearshift looked like a natural for field work – he paid attention, he pointed out anything he thought looked odd right down to the unmarked white van we passed a few blocks from the concert venue – which Teresa photographed with her phone in case we needed to run the plates – and he kept his mouth shut the rest of the time. I remembered him as a headstrong, stubborn kind of a guy from our first meeting a couple of years back but I guess field training had steadied him some.

Of course a fog bank like him could easily kill himself if he did something stupid like trying to walk through the load bearing wall of a building and causing it to fall on himself. It was a sobering revelation and news to most of the living ones we found.

There weren’t even that many people out on the streets. Most of the city seemed to have settled in to wait out the power outage. It wasn’t that we didn’t see people, there were a fair number out on the porches or decks of the houses we passed, but they didn’t seem interested in going anywhere.

But several blocks on the houses gave way to an apartment building and beyond that a small strip mall. There was a drug store, a grocery, a hole in the wall restaurant and an electronics store advertising cheap smartphones. There were nine people lined up under the big window of the electronics shop, all seated with their back to the building, heads propped up on their knees and with hands seemingly at their sides. The store window behind them was broken.

One of the best parts of weird experiences is that, even when your job is dealing with them, they’re still new and exciting every time.

This is also one of the worst parts about them.

A glance at Teresa confirmed she was thinking along the same lines as I was. Gearshift just waited for me to give him a signal. After a moment’s thought I didn’t see anything for it but to wave them forward.

We spread out a bit so we’d have room to move if we needed to and Teresa produced a sidearm from a holster at the small of her back, hidden under her loose fitting shirt. Gearshift looked a bit surprised to see it but he shouldn’t have. I’d come to realize that her battered, thrift store purchased T-shirt and cargo shorts, both of which looked like they came out of the men’s section, were just another expression of a deep seated pragmatism that came from a childhood spent living at or near the poverty line. That pragmatism didn’t let her spend more than a few dollars on clothes unless she had to and it didn’t let her walk around the city with herself or her friends unprotected.

In this case, though, we didn’t really need much protecting. There was some stray glass on the ground but the eight men and one woman we found weren’t really that much of a threat. They were all unconscious with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. A couple of crowbars and a baseball bat lying on the ground or leaning against the broken windowsill gave a pretty clear picture of why those people had come there.

I gave one of the sleeping men a poke with my toe, just to see what would happen. He didn’t even groan. I had to lean in close enough to hear him breathing before I was sure he was alive. A glance through what was left of the window confirmed that there wasn’t anyone on that side of it and it didn’t look like anything had been taken. Teresa stood on the other end of the line of people, giving her a better view of the interior of the shop through the window. “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” she reported after a moment. “What do you think happened?”

“Looks like vigilantes,” Gearshift said with contempt I found ironic, given that’s what he’d been when we first met. He trotted up to the wall, his feet sending tiny ripples through the sidewalk as his density increased to the point where matter around him was nearly a liquid in comparison. He gave me a look and jerked his head at the wall. Did I want him to go through it and get a better look inside?

I was about to make my answer when the TV in the store window switched on and said, “I’m very flattered to hear that you think so, Agent Gearshift.”

Teresa snapped her gun up and trained it on the TV while Gearshift just jerked back from the wall like it had burned him. I held still. There was no way the man on the screen was anywhere near close enough for my moving to matter, one way or another. Either we were already in a trap or we weren’t.

The TV showed a slightly grainy view of a man sitting in a leather desk chair in front of a row of floor to ceiling windows that gave a stunning view of the city. Most of the visible skyline was dark but I could make out the lights of civilization out in the suburbs and the more remote patches of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The man in the chair concealed his face with a fedora pulled low over a long scarf, wound around his face like a mask. He was dressed in a pinstripe vest and pants, a plain white dress shirt and a mess of wires and reinforced electronic gear that spilled off his belt and vambraces onto the chair he was seated in and most of the visible floor around him.

A closer look at the TV let me spot a small camera attached to one of the corners and pointed at us. I narrowed my eyes and addressed it, not the screen. “Hello, Circuit.”

“Double Helix.” The man leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “It has been far to long. Welcome to my city.”

Fiction Index

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Criticism

Posted by natechen on September 5, 2014

No, not the kind where some rude jerk on the Internet comes along and tells you that you’re worthless. We’re talking about the kind of criticism where some rude jerk in a highly respected literary publication comes along and tells you you’re worthless.

When I was in college, earning that Journalism degree, there was a lot of criticism to be read and I learned something very interesting from it – critics can take any word from any part of speech and turn it into a noun describing a literary phenomenon, thus proving that Whedonspeak is a real literary concept. Literary criticism is also a real thing and a useful tool for the aspiring writer. Why? Well, there’s a lot of reasons. The simplest and most straightforward is that literary criticism, for all that it is sometimes pretentious and frequently boring, is one of the densest, most insightful and useful breakdowns of what stories are and why they work an author will find.

Yes, it can be very uncomfortable to have a total stranger submit your own works to that level of scrutiny. Eventually, that level of criticism will be useful to you (assuming anyone ever decides to try it) but in the mean time there’s no reason not to read criticism of other authors. You see, even if the things you read about don’t apply directly to your story you can still get tips that give great insight into how you might improve your own writing process.

Here are a few things that literary criticism is good for:

Criticism lets you get another’s perspective. And not just any other person’s a literary expert’s opinion (well, maybe an expert maybe just a shmoe on the Internet). While literary experts are like all other people, armed with subjective opinions and fallible intellects (but don’t tell them I said that), there’s one thing they have that most other people don’t – a vast amount of experience with literature. Simply by reading huge amounts of fiction one can start to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. While some experts will approach any work of fiction looking to plaster their own agenda all over it most are simply trying to break a story down and see if it stands on its own merits. Which brings us to…
Criticism shows you the shortcomings of a piece. Every writer makes mistakes, even Stephen King. Criticism carefully examines every aspect of those mistakes and paints them in neon colors so they will be easier for you to recognize. Really understand the mistake, whatever it was and regardless of whether you think it applies to you, and you’ll quickly come to grasp how to avoid it. Even if you’re already aware that the aspect of the work under discussion was a mistake you may still learn new things about what went wrong or how to correct it.
Criticism shows you the strengths of a piece. Writers are very good at writing great stuff but they don’t always stop to explain how they did it. Sometimes they can’t always articulate how they did it clearly and understandably. Sometimes the critics can’t either. But when they do they highlight every part of those successes as clearly as they do with mistakes. While plagiarism is bad, understanding what works in what is good is the first step to making something good yourself.
Criticism shows you the context of a piece. This is especially true of works that are more then ten or fifteen years old. Even if you were alive and reading at that time there may have been aspects of culture, the author’s life or the publishing industry they worked in that you were not aware of. This provides better understanding for what did not work, what did work and what only worked because of the piece’s context. There are often layers of nuance that even a very perceptive lay reader will not catch simply because they have not done the legwork that the professional critic does. Rather than do all that legwork yourself, let the critic do it. That’s why they get paid, after all.
Criticism provides a language for discussion. Critics do a lot of Whedonspeak for a reason. They need to reduce their concepts to a useful shorthand and do so without hesitation. Like in many industries there’s a lot of jargon to be learned (and it’s not always picked up quickly) but if you read enough criticism then you to can begin to work through these concepts in a much more convenient shorthand. So long as you do this to smooth discussion along and not to be a snob this is a great bonus!

Yes, as the name implies literary criticism has a tendency to be a little negative. But that’s only because that’s the only way to get all the positives! Criticism is the heart and soul of discussing writing – you don’t have to have a degree in literature to provide useful commentary on themes, character or plot. You just have to sit down at the table and remember that not everyone will agree with you. So find three or four critics to keep track of and read up (or watch or listen in) on what they’ve said and start gleaning those tips and considering those opinions. It’s not as good as having a dedicated editor looking over your shoulder – but in some ways it’s the next best thing and frequently it provides benefits an editor can’t.

Cool Things: The Lego Movie

Posted by natechen on September 3, 2014

Confession time: I was fully prepared to hate this movie.

This is mainly due to my viewing the trailer and assuming that, as is so often the case, I’d seen the best parts of the movie. It turns out that not only is this not the case, it’s so far from the truth as to be kind of laughable. The biggest misconception the trailer gives is that this is a movie about Legos. It is not.

The Lego Movie is a film about people playing with Legos. This makes all the difference.

I have fond memories of playing with Legos when I was young (and when I was not so young and I anticipate doing it some more when my niece gets older) so I remember the fun of mashing all the pieces together and making something cool. Essentially, that’s what The Lego Movie is all about.

Yes, it’s true that the movie leans on a lot (too many, in my opinion) of stupid pop-culture references that won’t make sense to much of anyone in five years. But even if you took all those away you would have a solid and meaningful movie that works on two levels.

The first level is the story of Emmett. Emmett is a Lego construction worker who lives in a world of Legos. Every day he gets up, pulls out his instruction book and does exactly what’s expected of him. He goes through the same routine, builds the buildings, listens to the proscribed music and works for the totalitarian government of Lord Business – we’ve been here before, right? There’s really no need to rehash the plot, you’ve seen it at least a dozen times.

What sets Emmett’s half of the story apart are a couple of things. First, Emmett is (mostly) humble. He’s told he’s “the special” but has a hard time seeing it, since most of the people he’s working with are so much more experienced and skillful than he is (and let’s face it, one of those people is Batman.) But more than that, what’s impressive is Emmett’s ability to work with the Master Builders.

These are the heroes of the Lego world, people who can take the parts around them and build new and amazing things out of them. Emmer’s told he must be one but he can’t figure out how to do what they do. Ironically it will turn out to be Emmett’s ability to get the other Master Builders to work together in spite of their quirks and follow the directions no matter how much they dislike the limits on their creativity that is his greatest strength.

Ultimately we find that it’s not creativity or a lack thereof that’s making things difficult for people in Lego Land. You see there’s more to it than just a case of an overbearing would-be dictator. There’s also the Man Upstairs – which is to say, the people who are playing with the Legos. The Lego Movie is also about a man and his son, both of whom love Legos.

Unfortunately, the grown man has come to see Legos as his way to control his life – if things aren’t exactly as he wants them he flips out (we never see this behavior directly but that’s how Lord Business reacts and the two are obviously meant to reflect one another.) His son, on the other hand, clearly admires everything his father is capable of and just wants to join him in the fun, in his own way.

The two stories parallel one another to a conclusion that is both satisfying and, better yet, reflective of real life. Emmett and his human friend don’t triumph over their antagonists, they convince them to have a change of heart. And that is a true victory.

So, much to my surprise the story was awesome. So was seeing all the Lego guys running around doing their Lego things. A brilliant bit of humor comes from the addition of non-Lego things to the Lego world, like Lord Business’ ultimate weapon, the Kraggle (a tube of Krazy Glue that has gunk over a few of the letters) or the sword of Exact Zero (the blade tip of an X-acto knife.)

The various cameos by other franchises like Star Wars or the DC Superheroes don’t really add a whole lot to the movie (other than the Millennium Falcon’s conveniently providing a MacGuffin) but neither do they really harm the story, either. They’re just sort of there and most people will probably be able to live with that. The pop culture throwaway lines are dead weight but they don’t harm the story much.

The biggest strike against the movie is it’s pace – it’s aimed primarily at kids with short attention spans so it jumps from one thing to another at a rate that’s going to be too fast for some people to be fully comfortable with.

The Lego Movie is a CG film that’s aiming to duplicate Legos, so it’s not breaking any ground in the cinematography department, but I will say both the zany action sequences and the building sequences, both of which play out in the same kind of rapid fire real time that you used to see in Lego commercials, are a huge joy to watch. And the movie has a very catchy soundtrack with one song in particular that you, like the Lego people, will probably have to live with all day for at least one day. Whether you enjoy it or not is up to you.

In all, The Lego Movie is a great film for all ages, so long as you won’t have a seizure from the frequently breathless pacing. So go check it out and relive – or discover, or just plunge deeper into – the joy of Legos.

Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Posted by natechen on September 1, 2014

Helix

The room was total blackness but the one bright spot, so to speak, was that Sumter had an agent on the scene who didn’t need the electricity on to make herself heard. Almost as soon as the lights went out Amp was saying, “Sorry about that, people. Some kind of glitch, probably. Give us a few seconds and I’m sure the backup generator will kick in.”

The last word was barely out of her mouth when sure enough dim emergency lights flicked on around the hall and you could see your hand in front of your face again. I’m sure there were exit signs and the like on the same loop that had been on the whole time but when you’re only five foot three and in a crowd it can be hard to tell these things.

People in the crowd were milling and muttering – really, talking pretty loudly since it was a rock concert and eardrums were probably numb by now – but I’d spotted something during the two or three seconds of blackout that bothered me. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to prickle with that weird kind of sixth sense that I never believed in until I started doing law enforcement work. The feeling that there was something out in the world that was very, very wrong and was about to drop in my lap. “Samson!”

I looked around but there was a lot of noise and no sign of the strong man at the moment so I doubted he’d heard me. Teresa gave me a curious look and tried to say something over the crowd noise, gave up, then pointed off to my right. I glanced over and saw Isabella Rodriguez about ten feet over, watching the crowd around her a little nervously. Massif and Cheryl were there, too. Between the dark, the noise and the general confusion I figured it was faster to push our way over to them and set out to do so. In the end it still took almost two minutes of shoving and grunting to make it over to them.

“Crazy night, Helix,” Massif said, adjusting his position slightly. He was keeping his back to the stage at the moment, blocking the ladies from most of the press of the crowd. We were pretty far back so there wasn’t that much of a crowd, not like the front, and there was only one of him so I had might doubts about how effective he was being, but I didn’t see any reason to say anything about it.

So instead I said, “Crazy’s a good word for it. Izzy, I need to know if you can handle something for me.”

“Me?” Izzy’s voice came out as a squeak, which was funny since she was the second biggest person there. Not that she’s overweight or anything but, just like her dad, she’s got a broad build and really looks like she could be an Olympic athlete of some sort, provided the Olympics didn’t pass the ban on talents they had been discussing when I last heard. In terms of weight she’s probably just a little over average for her nearly six foot height, and that just because taxmen like her pack on a lot of muscle mass, even if it has nothing to do with how their ability works.

“You. I just need to know if you think you’re capable of something. See that catwalk?” I pointed up about two stories over our head where the lighting rig for the venue was. “I want to know if you think you can jump up there and run to the windows, take a look outside.”

Cheryl waved her had to get my attention over the crowd noise. “Sorry if I’m just the out of the loop office assistant here,” she said once I nodded at her. “But couldn’t we just go outside?”

“Not doing that is the point of the exercise,” I confirmed, turning my attention back to Izzy. “Can you make the jump? More importantly, can you stick the landing if you go up there? You might survive landing on someone if you fell but I don’t think they would.”

“No, that would probably be bad,” she agreed. “But I think I could make it. Want to give me some idea what I’m looking for out there?”

“I want to know if the whole block is out of power or if it’s just us. And keep your head down, we may be under surveillance. Amp?”

There was a moment of silence as I waited for our wave maker to answer and our little group spent most of it staring at me like I’d grown a new head. Finally, Teresa said, “Which are you expecting to find?”

“Either one’s bad,” I said, “but looking out the windows when the power was out I didn’t see any ambient light. That’s not good. This is one of the biggest cities in America. The streets never get that dark. Amp?”

“Just a second Helix.” Amp’s voice was being thrown, via another useful application of her talent, from where she stood on the side of the stage, standing with the rest of her band and some of the stage crew. “Staff might want me to make an announcement.”

“Wait.” I held up a hand to stall Massif and Izzy, who were starting to look over the scaffolding for a good landing point. After all that time working covertly, and with virtual superpowers to boot, I tended to overlook obvious solutions. “Amp, does the staff know what caused the power outage?”

“Checking.” I rocked back and forth on my feet as I impatiently waited for the answer. “Okay, the stage manager says they looked out the loading dock and at least this street is down, from the looks of things possibly the entire block.”

I nodded even though there was no way Amp could pick me out of the crowd. “Tell him we’d like to keep the people in here for a while, if that’s okay with them, then find Samson and have him meet us back stage. Bring Movsessian and Gearshift with you.”

Massif shot me a look and motioned toward the stage entrance, asking if he should start towards it. I nodded and the big man started half walking, half swimming through the crowd with slow and deliberate steps and gentle sweeping motions of his arms. The rest of us fell in behind him, taking advantage of the trail he’d broken as best we could.

As we made our way slowly through the crowd Teresa leaned down distractingly close and asked, “So why was that important to know? And why did you want the people kept here?”

“Just… precautions.”

“Right.” She was quiet for a second but didn’t back away. “You know, these concerts are not exactly unpublicized. If someone wanted to cause Project Sumter trouble this would be a really easy way to do it. I’m kind of surprised they don’t have more security.”

“We didn’t want to paint a target on it.” I started to shrug, then stopped when I nearly clipped her in the jaw. “Besides, so far no one’s broken any of the old rules from before we were outed. Why start now?”

“Because criminals are always breaking rules, so what’s one more? Because maybe they just hadn’t found the right time to?” She hesitated a moment, as if afraid to give voice to what we both knew we were thinking. “Because no one’s heard from Open Circuit in two years and as far as anyone knows he still hates our guts.”

“Hate is probably the wrong word for it. I’m not sure what it is Circuit feels about us. Contempt, maybe. But otherwise, yes, all those reasons had occurred to me.” The old rules were all common sense stuff, at least for anyone who actually knew how the game was played. The glass cannon rule, for example, basically meant that since almost all talents are just as easy to kill as most people, but many of our abilities can be used to kill someone fairly easily so if we set our minds to it we could kill ourselves off pretty quickly. So by unspoken agreement talents had avoided killing each other, or anyone else, with our abilities directly.

Another rule was, much like agents in the Cold War, we didn’t attack each other when we were “off the job” at home or just out on the town. In part that was to help maintain secrecy but also it was just another way to try and avoid a bloodbath. But, for someone like Circuit who ultimately aimed for governmental overthrow, that particular motivation might not have as much force.

When he had set out to make the world at large aware of our existence by going on a spree of increasingly violent robberies across the Midwest, ending in a secretly constructed bunker hidden in a state park where he’d been doing something we’d never quite figured out. Where before he’d scrupulously followed all the unwritten rules during those couple of months he and the surprisingly well equipped criminal organization following him had pulled no punches and left more than a few people maimed or dead. Why should the other rules have any more hold on him?

We’d smashed his center of operations for his last gambit but he’d escaped and evaded all attempts at detection. It was more than time for him to show up again and the fact that he’d been gone so long had me more than a little spooked.

And I was not only the agent who had spent the most time working to apprehend Circuit. I was also the leader of the taskforce that was technically supposed to be working at bringing him in, making me a natural target for him for a number of reasons personal and professional. But we’d had no leads on that front in almost six months and no useful leads in over a year. A part of me had thought he might be gone for good.

One could dream, anyways.

“Do you think this could be him?” Teresa asked.

“Honestly don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence and we are right here in the middle of the problem.” I glanced back at her. “What do you think?”

“I was hoping you had a clear idea,” she admitted. “He’s been almost half your career.”

There really wasn’t anything more to say after that.

Amplifier started making another announcement just as we got to the stage door. By the time we’d wrestled our way the last few feet and gotten backstage she was almost done and had rejoined the band and what I presumed to be the stage manager off in the wings by the loading dock. Everyone but Samson was backstage by that point, giving me a roster of myself, Teresa, Massif, Amplifier, Movsessian and eventually Samson to work with in terms of trained field agents plus Gearshift, Izzy and Cheryl as people who knew a fair bit about the job but didn’t have certification. And then there was Jane Hammer, technically a criminal on probation and something of a wild card.

“Okay, here’s the way I see things,” I said, gathering my little circle of agents around me like a football coach. “The power’s out in at least part of the city and it’s not because of weather. Temperature outside is even so we’re not going to have much wind or rain. That leaves some kind of glitch at the level of regional knocking out power to the grid or a deliberate attack on the power system. The first is kind of bad, the second is terrible. Anyone have anything to add?”

Movsessian, the good little junior field analyst that he is, immediately jumped in. “The first thing I thought of when the power failed is bad weather so I tried to pull up my weather app but my phone has no signal. Neither does any other phone we could scare up back stage.”

I frowned and pulled my own cellphone out. It wasn’t a smart phone but it worked fine under most circumstances. But this wasn’t one of them. Just like everyone else’s, my phone was searching for service. I pushed the phone back into my pocket, that sinking feeling I’d had for the last ten minutes suddenly getting much worse. “Useful information. Of course that could just mean the outage is a lot more widespread than I’d thought, and the towers have lost power too…”

“Isn’t there usually a backup power supply for things like that?” Cheryl asked.

“As a rule of thumb, yes,” Movsessian replied. “And cell networks are very decentralized, so it would be a lot harder to knock out a whole chunk of it than for the power grid.”

“Or this could just be a local outage cause by secondary complications from the power outage,” Teresa said. “But I think we’re straying from the point.”

“Right. Well and good.” I held up my hands and tried to get them to refocus. “What’s our biggest problem right now?”

“Looters,” Samson said, joining our circle. “Somebody, somewhere is going to see this as a chance to get free stuff off of stores with no power and bad security.”

I nodded. “My concern exactly. So we’re going to go out, we’re going to stomp on some ruffians right proper and scout out around here for a couple of city blocks, learn what we can about the situation and head back here. Any of you know this neighborhood well?”

“I grew up a few blocks from here,” Massif said immediately. “Also, Lincoln He lives six blocks away. He knows every building on ever street within a mile of his family place. Could be useful.”

“Okay. Samson, Massif and I will each head up a team. We go out, we look around, we deal with any looting we find in the most controlled way possible.” Teresa made a sound a halfway between laugh and choke. I ignored it. “Massif goes and gets Lincoln so we have another person who knows the territory well on hand. We come back here and compare notes. Amp, with no phones-”

“I can’t play relay across more than a city block, Helix,” she said, shaking her head. “The buildings and the concrete ruin the acoustics. It’s just not going to work. Sorry.”

“Then we go without, I guess.” I didn’t like being out of touch but there was only so much we could do with the situation and I really needed a better feel for the situation than we could get by staying at the venue, especially with no cellphones to work with. “Our teams are Samson with Amplifier and Movsessian, Massif with Jane and Izzy and I’ll go with Teresa and Gearshift. Cheryl, hold the fort and, in the off chance any kind of cops or Project agents show up identify yourself and try to keep them here. If you can’t at least tell them we’re coming back here and try to get all the information you can out of them, what’s going on, what the scale of the problem is, what the responders are doing about it. Questions?”

There were none. “Then let’s get to it. Be back here in no more than ninety minutes, preferably an hour.”

——-

There weren’t any questions but that’s not the same thing as there being no objections. I knew there was at least one of those and I also knew that Samson was enough of a pro not to protest my team assignments in front of the others. He came and found me as we broke up after a cramped, uncomfortable few minutes around Movsessian’s phone, which apparently still had access to maps even if it didn’t have service, plotting out what ground each of our small teams would cover.

“I know what you want to say,” I said, ignoring the instinct to cower in front of the much, much larger man. Not for the first time I wondered how our old regional manager, known at the time as the Senior Special Liaison, had dealt with Samson all those years considering he was an even shorter man than I was. With a good eight inches and at least ninety pounds on me, Samson could loom like a hurricane over Florida. But grandpa had been just as unusually strong and a touch taller to boot. Besides, Samson was far more level headed than most lawmen you worked with in my line of work, myself included. He was only physically intimidating and I’d gotten over that long ago. “You don’t like the way the teams are set up and you want to go with your daughter.”

“That’s right,” Samson said. It looked like there was more trying to force it’s way out but he managed to wait and hear what I had to say, which I appreciated.

“No.” He was starting to loose the war against whatever he wanted to say so I hurried on. “First, I need an experienced field agent to lead each of these teams. Al is the Training Agent for both Jane and Izzy. He knows their capabilities best, they’ve worked with him most. And besides it’s bad form for me to assign them to someone else when he’s right there. I don’t have enough people to work with here to cut anyone else loose for his team. Not to say anything about how having your daughter on your team could impair your judgement and endanger you, her, whoever else would be on your team and the civilians around you.”

Samson worked his jaw around slowly and then rubbed his hand across his mouth, unconsciously mussing up then smoothing out his neatly trimmed moustache. “I just want my daughter to be safe.”

“I understand.” Actually, I didn’t but we at the Project have worked very hard to develop better people skills since we became a publicly acknowledged arm of the government and sometimes that means faking empathy. “But if I could ask, why did you let her sign up for field work when her actually doing it makes you so nervous?”

“I didn’t want her to but when they work together she and her mother can be quite persuasive.”

I put a hand on his arm. His shoulder might have been more comforting but I’m sure the image of me on my tiptoes would have been counter productive. “Look, Al Massif is the best there is when it comes to keeping people safe. You just look after yourself, okay? There’s always a chance this is just a colossal screw-up by the utilities people.”

Samson gave me a biting look. “Helix, men of faith believe because of their faith bears fruit in their lives, not because someone spins them fairy tales.”

“Well, it was worth a shot…”

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Adaptations: Values Dissonance

Posted by natechen on August 29, 2014

What is values dissonance? This article from TV Tropes does a great job explaining it in long form (really long form if you wind up wiki walking) but the short version is, values dissonance is what happens when the structure and/or aesthetic choices of a work are presenting themes that fight against each other. It doesn’t always mean that values are directly opposed, but there’s only so much space in a given work (and the mind of the audience) for each story. When the themes of a story are too many or just don’t work well together it creates values dissonance.

The phenomena of values dissonance occurs most often when a story is a collaboration or an adaptation and the various parties involved don’t agree on what the major theme or purpose of the work should be. This doesn’t always have to be an open disagreement, they may just be trying to fit all their shared ideas into a package that isn’t equipped to deal with them or, as is often the case in adaptations, they may just have too much respect for the original work to want to change “sacred writ” and just try and shoehorn their own ideas into a story. And, of course, it can be any possible combination of those things plus any other number of circumstances such as studio/publisher interference or just not having enough time to work everything out.

What I want to talk about today is not values dissonance per se as it is adaptations and what makes them so difficult. It just so happens that the number one killer of adaptations in my personal opinion is values dissonance.

But wait! You say that I recently did another post on adaptations where I explicitly said thematic material was changed resulting in an adapted work that was just as good as the original, if not better? You’re right, I did. Edge of Tomorrow made huge thematic shifts to the story of All You Need is Kill. But more importantly, it then carefully extrapolated those thematic shifts to every aspect of the film, transforming characters, dialog, situations and plot to fit while, at the same time, producing a visually arresting film with a solid plot that would be more comprehensible than the original to it’s target audience.

Reread that sentence a few times. It boils down what the scriptwriting and production team did over the course of a year or so to it’s bare basics, the execution was much more complex – and that was not a simple sentence to begin with. Edge of Tomorrow was a phenomenal success in adapting a book to screen in part because it was so conscious of the changes it was making and their impact on the work as a whole.

Let’s look at two adaptations of the same famous work that strive to be faithful to the original work. My original urge here was to go with Shakespeare, since he’s pretty well known and his stuff has been translated to screen more than once. Problem is, I’ve only read a few of his plays and I’ve only ever seen them on the stage. Plus, theater translates more readily to film than books, so it might not be the best choice for this purpose. And I didn’t want to bring modern day reinterpretations into the mix, as good as I’m sure West Side Story is.

The solution? Do a work by a different author that has been reinterpreted for the screen more than once which I’m already familiar with in all forms! So today we’re going to be talking about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The two most well known adaptations of Pride and Prejudice are probably the 1995 A&E TV miniseries staring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the 2005 film version staring Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfayden. For purposes of clarity, since both share the same title, we’ll use their years of release to differentiate them.

This is not a review of Pride and Prejudice so I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the work – and I’ll wait if you need to go out and read/watch it before we continue. It really is worth your time, as all Austen’s work is, although I think my favorite adaptation of her work will always be Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility. (Yes, even though there’s no Colin Firth. Though Mr. Darcy is still my favorite male character of hers, largely due to Firth’s superior performance.)

Most of the caveats of my last post apply here as well – this isn’t about actors or costuming or any of that other stuff, just the way the story is presented.

So let’s get down to brass tacks! There’s three categories where I feel the 2005 version suffers from values dissonance which results in the film being slightly weaker than the 1995 miniseries. And they are:

Elizabeth Bennet

Our main character. In both versions and the book Lizzie is a woman of solid upbringing, good character and strange family. With four sisters and eccentric parents Lizzie is bound to be something of a character herself but fortunately it manifests in nothing more damaging than strong opinions and the guts to stick by them, generally admirable character traits. But Lizzie’s strengths are often her weaknesses and her tendency in the story to make snap judgments about a person and then carry them forward causes her to misjudge the characters of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham in spite of mounting evidence that contradicts her opinions.

Elizabeth is the perfect flawed protagonist for a morality play. She’s a great person, much better than many people we know, in just bout every respect but one – her tendency towards prejudice. This, much like Mr. Darcy’s high regard for his own station in life, leads her to bad behavior that causes her grief, first in failing to recognize Mr. Darcy’s good qualities beneath his antisocial behavior and second in failing to recognize Mr. Wickham’s caddishness under his guise of geniality.

Austen very carefully shows Lizzie’s brilliance in a number of ways. She spars with the dour and acerbic Catherine de Bourgh in a way that is both meticulously formal and correct but still slyly irreverent and witty. We can tell she isn’t intimidated by this so-called personage before her but rather confident in her own position and more than capable to use the mores of the times as both shield from Lady Catherine’s attacks and sword to prod the lady back into place.

While the 1995 version largely keeps this dynamic (something of a theme for this version) the 2005 version chooses to have Lizzie react in a more defiant fashion, more directly putting Lady Catherine in her place. While this is a very modern and fully understandable reaction it’s very modernity puts Lizzie at odds with the rest of the story. It creates values dissonance between her and the rest of the characters, including her own romantic interest and, at times, her own character.

Worse, the 2005 version chooses to focus on the reaction Elizabeth and her family have towards Mr. Darcy’s handling of Lydia’s elopement as the catalyst for their changing opinions of him when, in truth, it was Lizzie’s realization that she had misjudged Wickham that caused her to reevaluate all her other snap judgments in Austen’s book. Only when confronted with her own character flaw could she begin adjusting her understanding to take it into account. (In Lizzie’s own words, “Until that moment I never knew myself.”) Where the 2005 Lizzie is carried away by an emotion of gratitude the 1995 Lizzie can say that she has come to know and appreciate Darcy’s character better. One of these is engaging character growth the other is pure sentiment.

(That’s not a contrast, by the way. Engaging character growth creates sentiment, the reverse is only true at times – and those times are pretty rare. When sentiment from character growth and plain old sentiment compete, the former always wins out because it’s founded on something solid.)

Themes of Class Warfare

This is one of modern Hollyweird’s favorite themes and at first glance it seems a natural fit. After all, there is a sort of class difference between Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, isn’t there? Well, sort of.

As Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine, “He is a gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter.” Or, in other words, the difference is one of degree rather than one of kind. Darcy’s own feelings of superiority to the Bennets come from his feeling that he is better behaved than they are when Lizzie serves to show that he is just as offputting in his own way. The problem is not that there is a difference in wealth but rather in how people react to one another, difference in wealth being just one aspect of that (embodied not by the main protagonists but by the relatively minor character Catherine de Bourgh.)

This isn’t to say that class conflict never occurs or that it has no place at the storyteller’s table. Neither is true. But it wasn’t the story Austen was trying to tell nor is it something that seems to have even been on her radar. Pride and Prejudice was a story of self discovery amidst social mores with romance as the result of the journey. Romance was not the cause of self discovery nor did the process cut across the standards of the time (much). This was in part because that was the time and in part because Austen was writing about the life she knew, a strong trait in an author. The introduction of class warfare as a theme creates values dissonance between Austen’s original work and the 2005 version that is sidestepped in the 1995 version by, again, hewing to the original story. Granted it’s not much, but both works were of good quality and so ever little shortcoming shows.

Treatment of the Bennet Family

Let’s be honest – this is not a fully functional family in any version of the story. However Austen’s version and the 1995 version portray this largely as a result of the parents being less than ideal. While funny and intellectual, Mr. Bennet is also condescending and a little mean to his younger three daughters. He feels they lack sense but never seems to try and teach it to them, even though it is clearly his opinion (and that of most everyone else who knows her) that they will not learn sense from their mother.

And Mrs. Bennet… lacks sense. Sense of people, sense of propriety, sense of the moment, just about every kind of sense it’s possible for a person to have, Mrs. Bennet is without.

Never the less, the Bennets are a whole unit, supporting one another as best they can in all eventualities and forming a tightly knit family that stands in stark contrast to the nearly-solitary Mr. Darcy who, although born to excellent parents, now has no family to speak of save a much younger sister who he is in no position to confide in. It is in part the contrast between this family with its grudging solidarity and Mr. Darcy’s aloofness that leads to his own process of self discovery.

In praise of the 2005 version almost all of these family dynamics are left in place… except one. As Lizzie’s relationships with Wickham and Darcy become more twisted she lets the secrets pile up as well, rather than confiding in her sister Jane and thus giving herself an impartial mirror to view herself, in as well as cutting herself off from the support that so mystifies Mr. Darcy. In short, she behaves like a teenager of the modern day, once again creating values dissonance between the supportive Elizabeth, who fights for Jane’s happiness as well as her own, and the much more self absorbed character portrayed by Keira Knightly. On top of that, it runs counter to the original them of self discovery that permeates Austen’s original work, as Lizzie has fewer ways to see herself clearly since she has no one she can trust to give her an outside view of herself.

Now it’s not my intention to sit here and bash on the work of Deborah Moggach and Joe Wright in creating the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice. What they did was very impressive from beginning to end. The things I’ve pointed out aren’t the most important details of the story. But at the same time the difference between good and great, a strong impression and just vaguely memorable, is frequently in those details. Adapting a work, particularly a well known and popular work, only adds to the difficulty of getting all those details right because there’s an added layer of complexity, namely audiences already expecting certain things from your adaptation.

Where Edge of Tomorrow prospered was in completely reimagining the original premise, whereas the 2005 Pride and Prejudice (and so many other similar movies) stumbled when it tried to shoehorn in viewpoints that didn’t mesh with the story they originally set out to tell without that level of reimagining to make the new material work.

Cool Things: Dominion

Posted by natechen on August 27, 2014

I’ll admit it – I’m a card game fanatic.

Board games are fun but card games have this special appeal. It comes from the mix of available and hidden information, the randomness of the shuffle and the feel of the cardboard. Card games can run the gamut from something that you can play with your typical 52-card, four suited deck to an absurdly complicated, 12,000 plus card monstrosity that’s been growing for the last 20 years. Finding a card game among all those with depth and replayablity that won’t break your brain or your budget can be a real chore.

One game that I’ve found scratches the itch well is Dominion (specifically the Intrigue card set, but either version of the game is good.) The basic purpose of the game is easy – score the most points and you win!

Of course the real trick is in scoring those points. Dominion is what is known as a “deck building” game, a kind of game where everyone starts with the same basic cards but picks new cards to add to their deck every turn. Some cards are used to buy cards, some cards score points, some cards do other special actions. Easy, right?

Well, the real challenge of the game is long term planning. See, the vast majority of cards that score points don’t do anything else – you can’t use them to buy cards (and point cards have to be bought), you can’t do special actions with them, in short they’re dead weight until the end of the game. This means you have to spend time amassing resources to buy points with, and find ways to do it faster than everyone else. Each game is a race to find something that works well, rack up resources with it and then score points fastest.

Adding another layer of complexity is the fact that Dominion offers more cards than you can possibly use in a single game. The basic resource and point cards stay the same but you can change the special action cards every time you play, making the game fresh and different for a long time. And if you finally use every possible combination of special cards in your games you can always pick up additional card sets to keep things changing. While it’s not exactly a collectible card game the basic format makes expanding your game very easy to do.

Dominion is a game with a lot going on. There’s time management, resource management, opportunity management. It can be used to teach critical thinking, long term planning and the significance of opportunity cost. Like the best games, it can teach valuable life skills in a simple and engaging way. Or you can just play to show your friends who’s boss. Either way, win or lose, you’re probably going to have a good time.

Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Posted by natechen on August 25, 2014

Helix

This is how a typical disaster starts at the Project Sumter offices. First, I get back in town from another trip to DC. While checking my e-mail it becomes clear that it’s been a slow week and it might be a good time to try and catch up on some of that business that’s been on the back burner as I run around the Midwest region supervising stuff and consulting with the Senate Committee on new regulations for talented people in the workplace. So I decide I’m going to try and ask Teresa out. Again.

Cue disaster.

My pal Jack Howell, once my tactical team leader and good natured butt of a lot of rhyming jokes, leaned into my office doorway and rapped on the doorframe. “The Senior Talent in today?”

“I hate that title and can’t believe they made it official,” I said, reminding Jack that I would continue to ignore him until he called me something sensible.

“It could be worse,” Jack said, ignoring my hint. “You could be the Talent Agent. Or the Senior Talent Agent.”

I kept reading my e-mail. It’s amazing how much builds up in just three or four days.

Finally Jack sighed and said, “Sanders has something he wants you to handle, Helix.”

“Is it a good something or a bad something?” I asked, selecting a batch of files and hitting delete. “With Sanders I never know what to expect.”

“Amp’s band is doing one of those PR concerts again tonight, Sanders wants you to go and put a face on it.”

“Amp’s got a face already and most people think it’s better than mine.” Ever since we’d officially gone public a couple of years ago the Project had been scrambling to put what the relations experts called a “positive face” on us. Being a secretive government branch with minimal accountability to the public at large usually being considered a strike against you. Amplifier’s garage band, a group we had initially wanted her to pull out of, had proven really useful in that regard and she was starting to grow a really enthusiastic fanbase. I wasn’t really sure why they kept sending other agents to her events when there were already two talents in the group and everyone there was more interested in them than us. “Still, if that’s what he wants maybe Al Massif would-”

“He’s already going,” Jack said with a grin. “Taking Cheryl, from what I understand, but it sounds like that’s a lot closer to being a date than official business.”

I drummed my fingers on my desk for a moment, trying to think up a new dodge. To buy time I said, “Are those two officially dating now? Or is he still holding out for a yes from Amp?”

“I keep my mind off that kind of thing, Helix. Nothing good comes of meddling.” He waved a pair of tickets at me. “All I know is Sanders wants somebody with more than three years experience at that concert as the public face and that means you, Massif or Broadband. Further meaning either you have to talk a near-septuagenarian into going to a rock concert, make Massif change his plans or go yourself.”

I massaged my temples. “Jack, remind me again why I hated never being promoted beyond Special Agent?”

“You hated the low pay, lack of benefits and being ignored whenever you had a good idea.”

“What exactly have I got now that I didn’t then?”

“Good benefits.”

“Right.” I sat back in my chair and held out my hand for the tickets. “Does that make you my sidekick for the evening?”

“Not me, boss,” Jack said, holding his hands up in a ‘no way’ gesture. “I got plans with the better half. But you know…”

He trailed of and I waited for him to finish. Except he was clearly waiting for me to prompt him and enjoying every minute. So I did. “No, I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

“Well, I hear Herrera doesn’t have any plans for the evening.”

“Oh?” I stared at the tickets for a moment, then back and Jack. “Exactly ow many people were involved in this little conspiracy of yours, Agent Howell?”

Jack did his best innocent look, which is surprisingly good for someone who spends a lot of his time looking like a blonde grizzly bear. “Not sure what you mean, Helix. Concert’s in two hours so if you want a hot date rather than the alternative you better get moving!”

He ducked out the door and hurried away before I could say anything else. With little else to do I picked up my phone and started dialing.

——–

Izzy

One of the weirdest things about having most of your social circle be people you work with is, when someone who technically outranks you invites you to go somewhere, you’re never sure if it’s a suggestion or an order. While Teresa Herrera is more like the older sister I don’t have – by virtue of being the oldest – the fact that she’s worked with my father and might also kinda sorta be dating my boss makes the chain of command less than entirely clear.

Of course, papa seemed to think it was a good idea and he’s the expert on that part of the business, so Jane and I agreed to go along.

Another weird part of my social circle is the superpowers. My papa is half strongman, half preacher, so it’s no wonder Project Sumter called him Samson back in the day when real names were something that happened to other people. My friend Jane is some kind of ex-supervillain, or as dad would insist we call her, a reformed talent. Personally, I think she’s just filled out a little bit since dad took her on as part of Project Sumter’s new parole system last year. She may be a year older than me but she sure doesn’t have sense, if you know what I mean.

Case in point. Ever since papa introduced them, Jane and Amp have been best buddies. Sure, Amplifier has a cool job and a nice apartment but she’s always seemed kind of aimless to me. Still, that’s probably part of the appeal, Jane doesn’t like people getting too close and Amp’s certainly not the clingy type. So what I’m trying to say is, Jane’s a good person for hanging out with but I’m not sure I would’ve relied on her in a pinch.

Amplifier and Jane Hammer are a funny picture and I’m surprised the tabloids haven’t spent more time chasing them when they go out to parties. One’s tall, lanky and thin, the other is short, blonde and cute. They make quite the pair. That night they agreed to meet up early at the concert venue and spent half their time back stage tormenting the roadies and the other half checking on the equipment. I don’t know anything about sound stuff so I couldn’t tell which was which but I’m pretty sure they only had the speakers rearranged because they like watching the guys on the stage crew move them around. Like the name implies Amplifier has the ability to boost sound and make herself heard under just about any kind of circumstances and part of her gimmick is that she sings without a mic. As far as I know she didn’t usually take an interest in the stage setup. And Jane was definitely flirting with one of the crew in-between whispering with Amp.

For my part, I was hanging out with papa by the stage door. “I’m still not clear on how this all is good publicity for Project Sumter.”

“Basically, we show we’re here and doing things the community likes.” Papa shrugged. “I know it doesn’t sound exciting but it’s the foundation of any outreach.”

“I guess. Why did you want to be here?”

He gave me a knowing smile. “Because I knew Jane would want to go and it was better to invite myself along than leave you to running around on your own. Did you not want to come?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Amp’s brand of music isn’t my thing. Jane was going and I thought maybe I’d tag along – just didn’t think it was your reason, too.”

“Don’t all kids your age listen to punk?”

I laughed. “Sure, because you have to on the bus at the very least. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. I mean sure, it’s got a beat but you can’t really dance to it.

“That’s basically my problem with it, too.”

I jumped and spun around. “Sifu! Hi.”

This brings the weirdness of my life full circle. My hand to hand combat instructor – and how many college freshman can say they have one of those – had just popped up beside me. Built like GI Joe, born in the Polish part of town, trained in Chinese martial arts since the age of six and semi indestructible, Aluchinskii Massif is quite possibly the quintessential American superhero. On top of all that he’s polite, considerate, thoughtful and tonight he was accompanied by a busty redhead. Most of my time around him has involved getting swept off my feet in a very literal sense.

He is apologetic about it, though.

“Hello, Isabella,” he said with a smile. Then he nodded to papa and said, “Samson.”

And there’s the problem in a nutshell. To me, Al Massif may be very nearly perfect but to him, I’m just part of the job. If papa’s ever noticed that byplay he’s never said anything; then again he’s not dense either. But just like he usually did he held out his hand for a quick shake and said, “Hello, Massif. You look well. What brings you out here tonight?”

“To be honest, I’m really not sure.” He glanced at the woman with him. “Cheryl and Jack have some kind of bet going with Sanders and I’m apparently helping them win it.”

“Technically Jack made the bet,” Cheryl said. “I’m just conspiring with him.”

“That’s a lot of work for a bet,” papa said, waggling his eyebrows. “What are the stakes?”

“He didn’t say what they were, actually.” Cheryl shrugged. “Or what they were betting about. I’m not sure I want to know what those two are up to, to be honest.”

“Um.” The other three turned to look at me.

Al shifted a hand behind his back, as if he was using it to push his already upright posture even straighter. Jane calls this “the sifu pose” and says he does it whenever he’s trying to decide whether to be professional or not. Like when he’s putting us through a drill and is doing his best not to bawl us out for bad form. Except this time he just asked, “Um what?”

The correct answer was that Jack and Sanders had a standing bet over whether Helix would ask Teresa out before the end of the year but, once again, this is not exactly the kind of thing you can just up and say about somebody who is kind-of sort-of your boss.

And if you’re wondering how I can be unclear who my boss is, exactly, then you’ve obviously never worked in a government office that’s undergone a recent structural overhaul. I think, technically, Helix is the supervisor for all fifty or so field trained talents in the Midwest and the other dozen that are going through training, myself included, and that’s enough for me to want to stay as far away from poking my nose in his personal life as possible. The man’s scary when he’s mad.

So I played Obvious Excuse Number One and said, “I think I’d better check on Jane before she gets herself kicked out for hassling the staff.”

“If you see Helix tell him I want a quick word with him sometime tonight,” papa said. “No hurry, though.”

“Right.” So the real reason he came with us was work, probably something related to the parolees he’s in charge of. Not surprising, that kind of job doesn’t exactly keep regular hours. I headed off to try and find Jane and hoped I hadn’t made myself look like too much of a dork.

Amp and Jane weren’t back stage anymore so I figured they’d probably headed around to the bar out on the floor. Jane’s two years older than me, Amp’s three, and both can drink legally, so I wasn’t really worried about that. Neither one tends to get drunk and being at the bar put distance between them and the stage crew, so that was a plus. I never actually got to the bar, though, because as I went out into the hall I caught sight of Teresa and Helix coming in the main entrance.

Since I didn’t want to forget to pass on papa’s message before I forgot I cut through the growing crowd and met the two of them about two thirds of the way.

Teresa looked glad to see me there and, after a brief scowl, so did Helix. I had a hunch I knew what that was about but again, not about to pry. Then Teresa pinned me down with questions about life – school, testing for my field qualifications, family, stuff like that – and before I knew it the show was starting.

A Broken Sword show isn’t a whole lot different than any other, so if you’ve been to see a band in your life you know what happened. There were warm up acts, words from management, breaks to hit the restrooms and the occasional grabby drunk that event security dealt with quickly and quietly. It’s hard to keep track of everyone in crowds like that and I found and lost track of my papa, Jane, Teresa and Helix and Al and Cheryl a couple of times each. And that was all before Amp and crew took the stage.

The thing about Broken Sword, what I think is why Sumter likes to use them to generate good press, is that they’ve been together since before talents came out and they’ve functioned as a group the whole time. On top of Amp one of the guitarists, codename Gearshift, is a talent and has worked with the Project on and off. There’s apparently some kind of special certifications he needs to finish with before he can get full field licensing – something to do with his talent and architecture – and he’s taking his time getting through college while he works on them. Beyond those two out of the five being talents, Clark Movsessian on the drums moonlights as an analyst for the Project.

All in all, it’s a great PR to show that we’ve had groups working together both in and out of the field to make art, or at least something like it, and protecting the citizenry from evil. Or something. At least I’m sure it’s a nice contrast to the way most people usually see shadowy government organizations and helps play down the fact that, until two years ago, what half the band did was not only unheralded but was actually illegal to talk about.

So Amp was doing her Hello Midwest bit, introducing the band and doing trick with the crowd noise like making it swell to stadium levels or pushing it down to whispers, stuff that’s pretty cool to experience and, I’m told, very hard to actually do. Whether or not that’s true, the audience usually loves it and tonight was no exception. Amp was leading into the band’s first song of the night when the lights and most of the sound suddenly died and the hall disappeared in total darkness. I didn’t know it but it was the start of a very, very long day.

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Genrely Speaking: Aesthetics and Characteristics

Posted by natechen on August 22, 2014

So I promised to talk about Aesthetic and Characteristic genres today. For starters, so far as I know, this is not any official literary distinction; it’s just something I’ve noticed as I spent the last year or so working on this segment and started organizing the genres I’ve covered into something like a comprehensive list. So what exactly prompted me to start breaking genres into two groups?

Well, basically it was the fact that genres get mixed and matched a lot. “Scifi thriller” or “paranormal romance” just to name a few. Look at either of those and you can break them into component parts. The scifi in the first is usually some kind of space opera or maybe just twenty minutes in the future hard scifi. The thriller is something else (that is not related to Michael Jackson.) Paranormal probably means urban fantasy while romance is well… romance. Each of these “genres” is actually two genres – one governing the aesthetics and themes of the story, the other governing the kinds of characters we see and the pacing and focus of the actual plot.

While on the one hand you can mix and match aesthetic and characteristic genres you can’t really combine two aesthetic or characteristic genres. Take the detective story and the police procedural, for example. Each of those genres demands totally different focuses for character development and plot structure. Likewise you can’t combine steampunk, with it’s heavy emphasis on progress and examining the standards of society, with the high fantasy themes of upholding law, rightful rulers and the destruction of the depraved – or you could, but your story would be jumbled, confused and lacking in impact.

Unlike the genres themselves, these protogroupings (ur-groupings?) have no real pros or cons. It’s just another way to take the expectations of your audience and your literary form and analyze them. I’ve been wondering if I should even bother making the distinction here on the blog since it adds so little to how I look at them – but then, there’s no telling what the Internet will make of things so there is that.

One of the most interesting things about aesthetic and characteristic genres is that they can stand on their own just fine. Thriller is a perfectly serviceable genre without adding scifi or paranormal overtones to it. So are hard scifi, space opera, detective stories, you name it. The whole point of fiction is to give us a reflection of real life with which we can form a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world. If there’s one particular part you want to focus on without wasting time building up added layers of complexity, go for it. That’s a real strength for a writer and you should not shy away from it. Genres are tools for understanding, not requirements of it.

So write whatever you want. But if you’re having trouble getting your themes focused or your characters to flow the way you want them don’t hesitate to use genres to help you find focus. That’s a big part of what they’re there for.

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Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Author Archives: natechen

Everybody’s a critic

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Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Criticism

Cool Things: The Lego Movie

Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Adaptations: Values Dissonance

Cool Things: Dominion

Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Genrely Speaking: Aesthetics and Characteristics

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