I have been trying to get some games design in all week. It didn’t really happen. This means I am looking forward to a whole day of it tomorrow.
My wireless network is now secured.
I am looking forward to regaining some sort of a routine, for however short a period of time.
I stuck up for Larry Wachowski.
My detractor told me that he deserved what he got because the Matrix sucked.
Fuckin’ humanity.
No… no… I’m not thinking of turning this into a Goth blog. But for some reason this afternoon the ghosts of creative projects long past have been haunting me. First of all I got 6 extremely beautiful Crossgen Comics publications for 6 quid from my local branch of The Works. These things are frickin’ awesome, over 200 pages of full colour heavy paper comic stuff. This stuff is gorgeous and totally worth 6 quid. In fact in materials terms these things are worth a hell of a lot more than six quid.
Curious I enquired of Wikipedia: O Mighty Wikipedia, what is the story of Crossgen Comics.
The story, apparently, is that Crossgen got caught up in a Sale or Return cycle after a bout of scandal and went bankrupt. *sigh* Not an uncommon story in this day and age, and a reminder of why places like lulu.com are so important.
While I was at the fount of knowledge that is Wikipedia I decided to try to resolve one of my long time mysteries and tragedies the expiration of Toxic Magazine in 1992. I loved and commited to this publication, also full colour, weekly, beautiful, cutting-edge in a sophomoric fashion. I have a copy of every edition and was extremely upset when it just stopped one week and I could never find any information about what happened to it…
Until today. Long story short apparently they didn’t pay their contributors in a timely fashion and many of them never worked in comics again following the fiasco.
This is the problem, publishing as a whole has ever been a flaky industry. Once like a kind of low rent Hollywood in the days of the pulps and now like a slowly dying but ever imperious relative who can’t quite seem to cope with their own infirmity. The number of seemingly insane business decisions and consequent situations I have heard about (being the son of an SF author who doesn’t get to go into bat with the big style authors of this world has done nothing but add to the fun) is large indeed. This kind of thing has got to the point where I just think the whole business is both unsound and unhelpful.
I’m not going to make any bones, I’m a huge fanboy for the lulu concept. I would love to be the next Clive Barker or whatever but I would be perfectly happy with a fanbase of 50 to a 100 people who love my stuff. I mean I’m the guy who tossed off 50k words in 6 days last November, I don’t need to devote my life to writing, and have no desire to do so anyway.
It still makes me sad that the ways we have been forced to do business in the past have shaped this hideously malformed industry into what it is, fed authors spurious quality control information and in many cases discouraged innovation. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of donkeys producing poorly written precious crapfests out there. But there are people with good ideas who seem to have been forced into thinking unless they’re the new Stephen King/JK Rowling/Whatever there’s no hope whatsoever.
I find publishing in its traditional form to be predatory in some ways and elitest in others, publishers a bunch of vultures who occasionally find a prime caracass to be made of sawdust and disregard good food on the grounds that it doesn’t look like what they’re used to.
I look forward to the day when the publishing industry as it has been for the last 60-70 years can join Toxic and Crossgen in the list of things which are dead.
Have spent most of this afternoon starting to assemble my all-new card-based BBV Role Playing system. The redoubtable Ian also turned me onto the idea of using tokens to represent various things like Wealth, Level and Health. The thing’s actually starting to look coherent, shapish and as if it might not run like a dog.
While discussing possible mechanics for this system we started to talk about the arbitrary die roll, the bane of all narrative gamers. I am happy to say I have never ever played a game where everyone thought that wandering around monster bashing and min maxing was the be-all and end-all, or one where the GM thought it was funny to give the players inordinate amounts of shit.
The BBV RPG will not cater to these styles of play. It’s all based around character temperament and transient life conditions. I have also come up with a number of “Occupation-Related” Skills which encourage teamwork by making skill cards transferrable or boostable with assistance from team colleagues. I was actually quite pleased with this innovation as group cohesion is a bugbear of many a GM. I hadn’t actually thought about systematising teamworking approaches before and the idea actually grew out of my use of Freemind an, er, free mind mapping tool (I wonder where they got the name).
In fact the whole thing kind of grows out of the idea that a character will have a defining temperament card and then skills come as either temperament based or non-temperament based. Not only that but the occupational skills of other players (which may be stacked and enhanced over time) actually help to void individual shortcomings. BBV is turning out to be a game about team balance and co-operative play. I like this a lot as it’s something I like in my games.
Even so it is only 6 weekends to go until the game weekend. One or two of those weekends are spoken for and I haven’t even started on Feng Shui or scenario writing yet.
Better pull my finger out I suppose. (Goes off to watch Ong Bak.)
You know what I really fucking hate about literate consumers who are appraising something they don’t like?
The use of the ‘Original Stick’. The Original Stick is the first weapon to come to hand when wishing to beat up on a cultural artefact. You apply it to said item by saying: “Oh and it’s so derivative of x and y and z”.
Well, fucking duh!
Some sensible person always pipes up that nothing’s really original any more, but our cliche detectors remove the comment and the artefact bashing continues. The fact that sensible person is right, that nothing is original and hasn’t been for many, many centuries is deemed irrelevant.
The thing is that saying something you don’t like is ‘unoriginal’ is a bit like saying something you do like is ‘entertaining’. It’s a safe term to apply to signify your distate for it because it could safely be said to apply to just about every cultural artefact ever.
This particular observation has been kicked off by this rumour:
Here expertly debunked by Snopes, in which it is claimed that Ms Stewart once wrote a story so similar to the plotlines of the Matrix Trilogy and Terminators One and Two that she won mega bucks and those hacks Wachowski (elder and younger) and Cameron should weep for shame at abusing some poor innocent struggling writer. Great story, all bullshit. Her only innovation was in pointing out that the first two Terminator movies and the Matrix Trilogy kind of dovetail into almost one narrative.
And all this was prompted by a discussion I engaged in which was supposedly about the prurient allegations of sexual perversion practiced by Wachowski the Elder (Larry) which is allegedly making him into a Hollywood pariah (in which case surely his sin would be more likely in not covering up his perversions not in having them in the first place). What this has to do with whether the Wachowskis will ever live up or down to the reputation garnered them as makers of the Matrix Trilogy, is anybody’s guess. It was disheartening as ever to see the conversation evolve thus:
1) Larry Wachowski is kinkier than a tangled hosepipe.
2) And the Wachowskis are going to screw V for Vendetta, they, and their stupid fucking Matrix trilogy suck.
3) The Matrix wasn’t even particularly original.
4) Yeah, I heard they ripped the whole thing off from some chick and she won huge damages off them.
5) The Matrix sucked!
6) The Matrix sucked!
7) The Matrix sucked!
Then if anyone defended or stood up for the Matrix Trilogy even in the mildest way they would be shouted down by points 5-7. And the major weapon used in this browbeating? The Original Stick.
Well, here’s the thing children, the Matrix may not have been amazingly original in its concept but it was a hell of a lot more original than a plague of sequels, adaptations and remakes. I have no problem with a well executed film of any sort, after all I accept that nothing is original. But if originality really is that important to you then you need to be on a quest a little harder than the one to find the Holy Grail.
Original Stick that up your smug, judgemental arses.
(P.S. Although I think The Matrix fails to deliver in several important respects it is, historically, one of the most important Motion Picture Trilogies ever produced and will be forever more. Give it up. And if Larry Wachowski wants to be a guy with a vagina owned by a celebrity dominatrix that’s his business not ours.)
After a nailbiting couple of hours with my ftp client, my database client, my image editor, support websites, coffee, and a bunch of good music here is the fruit of my labours!
Being a busy guy I have slightly modified a very beautiful theme called red is nice by Andre Deminiac for my journal’s look. It is curiously more or less exactly what I had in mind except my design was much more elaborate. I begin to see how flash designers get stuck in this idea that simulating an actual stained glass window and making all the magenta tiles lead to ‘about’ while all the red ones go to ‘contact me’ etc. can happen. Not that mine was anywhere near that hideous but it was a lot more complicated than this piece of elegant understatedness.
The novel-centric downloads remain intact, I’ve taken away the shorts and they *may* return, but possibly in some form like a collected short stories format or something. I’ll be back later today to talk about my agenda for the site and everything but right about now all I want to do is finish up getting the bugger active. 
Welcome to the new look leostableford.com everybody!
