Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Great big good news

I like to think that this time I have a pretty good excuse for at least some of the delay in posting to this blog. You see, there was news, and it was big enough that it didn't feel right posting about anything else, but at the same time I couldn't post it here until certain people had been told in person.

So if you haven't heard already, I'm getting married.

Let me try that again.

I'm getting married!

Sorry. Exclamation marks don't come naturally to me, but some situations warrant them.

Shortly before Easter I gave Fiancée (née Girlfriend) a ring. Some people brag about how much their engagement rings cost; we're the sort to brag that I got this ring from my mother and only had to pay to get it resized. It looks like this:
Is it weird for a guy to show off an engagement ring? I'll stop.

As it happened, we were soon to see both our sets of parents over the Easter holiday, so we naturally held off on telling the internet at large until we had told our immediate families.

But since I mentioned Easter, I'm sure what you're really wondering is whether I colored any interesting eggs. In fact, Fiancée introduced me to the use of rubber bands in egg-coloring. This allowed some stripy experiments.
Here is Fiancée's, which I'm sure everyone recognizes as the flag of Scania. (That's not actually what she was going for.) I, on the other hand, didn't have the discipline for straight lines. I did this:
It's not the flag of anywhere.

Then I did this, though:
That's actually my attempt to reproduce a sunset that Fiancée and I saw through the tree branches when we went out for a walk to discuss how hard it is to get my whole family in one room at the same time. Because we had been staying with my parents for a full day at this point and an opportunity still hadn't presented itself to tell them that we were engaged. In fairness, this was because my sister was laid out from an adult tonsilectomy and spent most of the day unconscious, and my dad was at church the whole day on account of him running the church's music program. We toyed with the idea of writing "We're getting married" on the eggs and letting my family find out that way, but decided against it because that would be bad.

We finally got the news to them the next day after everyone was home from the Easter service. Everyone was suitably excited. And a few days later, after we had told Fiancée's parents (with much less logistical difficulty), everyone was suitably excited again.

Anyway, now you know, whoever you are.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Questionable predictions from after-dinner confections

I got Chinese food last week because I enjoy leftovers and fortune cookies. At least, I used to enjoy fortune cookies. I'm beginning to think fortune cookies don't like me very much, though.

I've already talked about a fortune cookie trying to bait me into a theological argument. The fortunes I've drawn this past week, on the other hand, have been somewhat bewildering.


Let's break this down. #1 isn't so bad, in my opinion, though Girlfriend thought it was the sort of fortune Genghis Khan might get.

#2 is more open to interpretation. Was that cookie trying to tell me I ought to be a test subject? That I was congenitally abnormal? And "could prosper"? Where's the world-bestriding confidence of fortune #1? Fortune cookies aren't a sound basis for major life decisions to begin with, but if the cookie itself is unsure of its prediction then the whole exercise's narrow foundation crumbles.

#3 doesn't make very much sense. I suspect it is a lyric from an upcoming song by one of those arch pop rock groups like the Arctic Monkeys or the Killers.

#4 is practically fighting words. Excuse me, cookie! Would you say that to someone at a party? To a friend, even? Where do you get off? Your overt contempt for my achievements (those yet unachieved and, by inference, those already behind me) is completely uncalled for. I worked for what I have, I'll have you know. But you know what, cookie? I crumbled you into pieces and ate you.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The next big thing

Sometimes I run into some fridge logic in my own life. For instance, I have the strong impression of having watched the following trailer in a theater, but for that to have happened it would have had to have been shown before The Lego Movie, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.


Anyway, the news that another Godzilla movie was coming down the pipe lit a fire under the vague desire I've had for a while to watch the original Godzilla/Gojira from 1954. Partly because the Godzilla franchise became so goofy over time, it was intriguing to me that the original movie was so deadly serious, and so relevant in the bizarre way that we've been getting more and more used to things being relevant.

I've spent plenty of time since college noticing how America's cultural anxieties play out in our media. In the aughts we watched Spider-Man, Batman, and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica deal with the ramifications of the War on Terror. Then, of course, there are the hordes of zombies manifesting our fears of societal collapse.

It's 2014. Are we ready to be afraid of Godzilla again? If this new movie catches on, I think we might be. People are getting tired of zombies (the degree to which I continue to be impressed with The Walking Dead notwithstanding), but our anxiety seems prepared to outlast the trend. Zombies and kaiju both play on the same fears that our civilization is inadequate to deal with a serious challenge... flimsy, even. Are those state-of-the-art tanks defending us, or plastic toys? Are our walls made of brick or cardboard? Push them and find out.

In 1954, 60 years ago and 9 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was a dark movie about a radioactive monster destroying Tokyo. Some reviewers thought it was too soon (especially because, earlier that year, a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in the fallout from a botched American H-bomb test).

If Godzilla were just about anger at America, I doubt it would have caught on here. And if it were just about nuclear weapons, I doubt it would have the same staying power. But Godzilla was, more generally, a disaster movie, and Japan's is a culture well acquainted with disaster: earthquakes, famines, fires, centuries of civil war... typhoon and tsunami are Japanese loan-words.

The civilians in this first Godzilla are already a bit jaded.

I came to Godzilla curious and finished it impressed. Not all of it ages well, of course, but most of it made good on its mighty ambitions. (It won the Japan Movie Association award for Best Special Effects, and lost Best Picture to Seven Samurai, possibly just my favorite movie ever.) It's at its best with the monster shrouded in smoke and darkness, which doesn't feel like cheating so much as a good use of the medium.





I take it as a good sign that the new movie's trailer, at least, is choosing to imitate that.

Of course this new movie could still turn out as poorly as the one in 1998 did. I think it's about time for it to be done right, though. Who knows? Maybe we can be as sick of city-flattening monsters in 2020 as we were of vampires in 2010.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Green stuff and ignorance

(Borrowed from Married to the Sea.)

Just sharing a comic today, which certainly hit on how I feel reading The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down, or other masterpieces by Englishmen who must have spent all their childhoods frolicking in a clearly-labeled countryside. I try not to skim passages that read to me like:
The sweet odour of the smendley mixed with that of new-mown grass, for it was Spring; the curmudgeons bloomed merrily in the hoary elbows of the Mother-Doing-Laundry, and the swips sang amongst the buds upon the branches.
I find myself in a similar position reading The Stand, Stephen King's American epic, except in this case it's cars rather than nature whose names are a dizzying blur. I could care less about cars, but not much less, and I could much more easily care more if I cared to, which I do not.

Not that I begrudge King his interest, any more than I begrudge Tolkien his Shire-y upbringing. It's just interesting to notice the things that a narrator knows by name. Of course a good narrator knows enough to explain what he's on about to ignorami like myself when it's important.* The rest of the time, we can look it up if we need to know.

* We as writers might remember to use the common name of anything that ends up in the foreground of a story. Don't think of it as lowering yourself to the level of your stupidest readers; think of it as expressing the hope that your work will still be read when our household names are but a distant memory.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Media roulette

I didn't watch the Oscars last night because, well, network television. Judging by my Netflix connection (why, yes, I'm still with Verizon right now) I wasn't the only person who decided to give the 86th Academy Awards a pass. These award shows are more or less like baseball anyway, in that although they take three hours to play out you can take in the essential action in five minutes, over the internet, afterwards. Although I might have enjoyed seeing John Travolta introduce Idel Dazeem live, if only to give my eyebrows a workout.

Girlfriend and I have a policy of not watching The Walking Dead immediately before bed because she has zombie dreams and if she hears me getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she is liable to murder me with the heaviest thing she can find. As it happens this year we've mostly developed a policy of watching each Sunday's episode of TWD during the snow day the following Monday.

We ended up watching Moon, which means we watched Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell Sam Rockwell for two hours. It was very good and very sad, and I had thought we had escaped watching an untrustworthy Kevin Spacey by ruling out House of Cards for the night but no.
How can you not trust that face?
There are two kinds of pain, Sam...
I don't want to give the impression that I'm spending all my time watching television instead of reading. I'm just still reading The Stand.

While I wasn't actually watching Netflix, I did spend some time on their site, rating movies. Because it's fun. Because it helps them help me. Because it's addictively distracting. Because it gave me ideas for what to watch (when it randomly threw out Moon, that's when I decided to watch it, though I watched it on Amazon). Because it's... interesting to see how it categorizes movies.

After you rate a movie, Netflix asks you how often you watch movies like the ones you just rated. As I went on, I got the distinct impression that Netflix was messing with me.

How often do you watch movies about marriage like American Beauty?

How often do you watch dysfunctional family movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

How often do you watch tortured genius movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

How often do you watch father-daughter movies like The Incredible Hulk?

How often do you watch movies about cool mustaches like O Brother, Where Art Thou?

How often do you watch holidays like Independence Day?

Monday, February 24, 2014

What do we want? Strong female characters! What do we mean? I'm glad you asked...

How the time goes by. One may justly ask me what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging. Well, I’ve been watching TV. I’ve been working. I’ve been reading my friend Elinor Diamond’s blog.

I had the neat opportunity to write a guest post for Ms Diamond, and that should be going up today. If you’re interested in some observations of mine on narrative voice and the reader’s place in a story, check it out there.

Meanwhile, Ms Diamond’s recent post opining on “strong female characters” has caused me to start opining in turn.

As she pointed out, the concept of the “strong female character” has drawn some fire lately. Once we started talking about SFCs as something that should exist—perhaps something that writers should be applauded for creating—writers naturally started trying to create SFCs in larger quantities. Yet as a general rule, more people want to be applauded than actually want to do something they find difficult. The result has been a glut of SFC-bait—characters who we’re supposed to appreciate as progressive but who don’t actually do the women of the world any favors.

Part of the problem is people misunderstanding the meaning of “strong.” Maybe it’s not entirely fair to blame them, because when we call for “strong female characters” I don’t think that’s precisely what we mean (I’ll get to that later). But those of us who call for SFCs in media are not (I hope) satisfied with female characters who are merely muscular, merely violent, merely invincible,* merely obnoxious, or who are active when surrounded by minor characters but become passive when they interact with the main (male) cast.

I don’t think we should publicly abandon the idea of the strong female character. It would be a shame if the idea fell out of style without achieving its purpose (or worse, because it had been terminally derailed). But we need to ask some clarifying questions.

People have already been asking what qualifies as a “strong female character.” Precisely, when we demand SFCs in our media, what exactly are we asking for?

I think, as a general rule, what we (I?) really want to see is female characters who shape the story according to their own motivations. That’s what I would call “narrative strength.”**

Some of the better examples from media I’ve recently ingested aren’t exactly egalitarian. Having finished the first season of the new House of Cards, I find Zoe Barnes an interesting liminal case. I actually argued with Girlfriend about whether or not she qualified, but I think if she isn’t an SFC, then the dividing line passes very close to her. I’m going to try to break down the case for her without significant spoilers.

Zoe’s ambition is a major force in the show. Only one other female character competes with her in terms of narrative influence, and in my opinion Zoe is the more influential. She certainly overwhelms the influence of the other characters in her own sphere. It’s only up against Frank, our main character/villain, that she’s clearly in over her head.

That may be the first objection raised against Zoe’s status as an SFC—that the strongest male character in the show exerts so much power over her—but I would argue a key distinction. She doesn’t fade into the woodwork when she shares the screen with Frank—instead, the struggle between Frank and Zoe is one of the main elements of the story. As for her being in over her head, if we respect the characters we write we must allow them to get into trouble. A protagonist certainly needs enough rope to hang themselves with, and Zoe takes her turns as protagonist.

A stronger objection may be the way she works for her goals. She trades on her gender, both offering sex and using gender politics as a bludgeon when one or the other will get her what she wants. It’s not exactly role-model behavior. It’s less of an issue in a show like House of Cards, where the morally uncompromised are a vanishing minority, and a character doesn’t need to be sympathetic to be narratively strong.

Maybe this highlights a shortcoming of the term “strong female character,” though. After all, a media universe filled with “strong” women who trade primarily on their sexuality would be a pretty regressive one, even if those women exerted disproportionate influence on their stories. But the problem of whether we should depict this sort of thing at all turns into two questions, and I’m a little afraid to chase them down because of how long this post is getting already. I’ll make a go of it, though.

The first question: What means can a strong female character use to get what she wants? Must she be a role model? I think girls deserve to see female characters in media who use a variety of empowering means to achieve their goals, but I don’t think media for adults*** can afford to completely ignore that women have certain disadvantages in our society, and a few “dirty tricks” that they can use to get ahead if their goals are bigger than the accepted means at their disposal.

The second question: Are strong female characters descriptive or aspirational? That is, are we showing the world as we see it, or are we showing the world as we want it to be in hopes that life will imitate art? I think the truth for creators is usually a little of both. But what are we asking creators to do when we ask for SFCs? To show us what women can do of in this world, or to show us what women should be able to do in a better one? (How strong a distinction this is is a function of your setting and your worldview.)

As a creator, I think at some point you need to be honest with your characters. They can’t come alive as long as they’re artificially constrained by a lesson we want them to teach. They need to pursue their own goals as they see fit, with the means available to them.

Of course all of this hair-splitting would be less necessary if there were more active female characters in media. We can’t really be honest with characters until we don’t feel the need to make them representative of anything other than themselves.

* Admittedly, we’ve been dealing for centuries with male characters with no personality outside of their proficiency with violence, but writers don’t expect a pat on the head for writing them.

** This isn’t to completely ignore egalitarian portrayals of women—that is, women in traditionally masculine roles: warriors, leaders, any job that usually ends with “-man.” But 1) that’s not exactly the cutting edge of 21st-Century progress, and 2) doing it lazily leads to tokenism. Independent goals and narrative agency are the antidote.

*** If your little girl is watching House of Cards then the portrayal of women in media probably isn’t her biggest obstacle to success.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

I know something you don't know

If you're like me (and you are) you've had this experience: you find out about something, and then you see it everywhere. This is basically how I ended up learning a lot about web writing this week. I kind of oscillate between thinking of it as having learned something about the craft of web writing, and having learned something about why the internet is awful.

There's a certain style of headline writing that's been taking over the internet. I won't hesitate to compare it to a virus or a fungal blight, because even if the underlying idea is solid, the majority of the execution is terrible. You probably already know what I'm talking about: a hyperbolic, emotion-based claim that doesn't so much indicate an article's content as dare you to prove the headline writer a liar by reading the article in it's entirety. "You Won't Believe..." "Inconceivably Awesome..." "...Will Blow Your Mind." If the internet were truly as rich with such content we would all be quivering husks by now, our every assumption about the world shattered and our relentlessly blown minds a thin paste around the interior edges of our skulls.

Someone has taken it on themselves to make a browser plugin, Downworthy (warning: some language in the link), that changes these stock hyperboles into something more believable. "Literally" thus becomes "Figuratively" and "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment." I don't think I want to install it myself, because if anyone starts writing headlines like that in earnest I want to give them credit, and not mistake them for the work of my cynical plugin. Besides, Downworthy would only externalize what I already do in my head as I read these things. The point is that stumbling on this plugin was among my first steps down the rabbit hole.

Soon after this (or before, I don't remember--reality is confusing) I found the same style lampooned again, on Cracked.com, of all places. The irony here is that for years I had been thinking of this as "Cracked style," and if they didn't pioneer it they were the first place I saw it. Not to be too judgmental--I could forgive this sort of thing from a humor site. It was only when it caught on elsewhere that it actually became objectionable.

The last piece of the puzzle--I didn't think of it as a puzzle until I saw this--fell into place shortly after I found, through wandering internet happenstance, the following tweet:
In reference to this tweet:
I took a moment to be suitable appalled about it all. But to the point of this post, I hadn't realized we (and by "we" I mean you, CNN) had sunk so low. And more to the point, I had finally given a name to my pain, and it is "curiosity gap."

A name enabled research. Whose bright idea was this? Well, I'm not being scientific about this, but some Googling indicates that the concept originated in behavioral economics courtesy of George Loewenstein in the mid 90s, and entered the marketing vocabulary (which is to say, metastasized) around 2006. The concept itself is innocent enough: people are curious about what you are going to say when you tell them you know something they don't know, and which they thought was unlikely.

Of course the difference between "informing" and "lying" rests mainly on externalities, what's good for telling the truth is good for lying, too. Conversely, the technique isn't evil in and of itself. Manipulative? Maybe, but not necessarily--surprising information exists. Tired, though? Hells yes. At least the way they're driving it right now.

I do believe that knowing the name of something is a sort of power. Now I (and you, too) can recognize this thing. I can conceptualize it. With the proper precautions I may even summon it someday and make it do my bidding. For good, of course.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

I can't think of a good title, but this post is about Yoshi's Island

I was playing Yoshi's Island recently* and Girlfriend walked into the living room, drawn by the bouncy music and the boings and ka-dings. "Jumping!" she exclaimed. "Coins! This game is triggering reward centers I forgot I even had!"

"You're telling me," I replied (or something to that effect). "At the end of every level, I get graded out of 100 points!" I proceeded to show her my (disappointing but in-progress) B average across the current world, and my string of perfect scores across World 1.

I think that Yoshi's Island may be the game I loved most out of the entire SNES oeuvre.** It's been my go-to game now ever since I reunited it with my SNES. I'm discovering the feeling of realizing that the 11-year-old version of yourself actually had good taste.

I didn't really have the vocabulary to explain why I was enjoying myself so much, but I definitely was. I pretty clearly remember gushing about the game in a journal assignment in school soon after I got the game. I was pushing the limits of my fledgling vocabulary and I specifically remember praising the games abundance of "simple complexities." I got that journal entry back with a red-ink chastisement about "simple complexities" being a contradiction. I knew what I meant! (But, little Cory, it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate it.)

What I realize now that I meant was that the game consistently found ways to surprise me by building on a consistent, if whimsical, internal logic. It was full of Aha! moments. Some of my favorite were the things they did with the eggs which Yoshi would lay and which would then follow him(?) around like ducklings until he(?) used them as projectiles.

About halfway through the game you run into a ducklike creature with a trail of little ones following behind it. Sure enough (by the game's logic) you can scoop up the little duckthings, who then follow you around like eggs--as if you were their mother. And yes, you can throw them at things--they act like cute little boomerangs.

Yoshi's Island is really all about childcare, if you think about it.

Somehow I loved this at the time and yet I don't think I understood the visual pun behind it.

It's been--oh wow--almost twenty years since Yoshi's Island came out. I've learned a lot of useful things in that time, but I've also learned a lot about video games and media and how we enjoy them. Playing this game again I get to see all the craft that went into all the fun I had.

So now I can see, and actually recognize, how the game teaches you how to play it. How the game controls how you encounter new elements and nudges you toward understanding how to interact with them. You would learn that you could stand on a rolling boulder because the game would show you the boulder and then show you goodies that you could grab if you stood on that boulder. The game would reward experimentation and mildly obsessive-compulsive behavior, which would drive you interact with the world and see what happens. I didn't notice the game teaching me back in 1995. But about a year ago I ran into a YouTube video where a man explained, with a surfeit of enthusiasm and NSFW language, how it was done in the Mega Man series, and I've been noticing it ever since.

Sometimes when you get older and discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were insipid. As a compensation, sometimes you discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were actually brilliant--sometimes better than we remember.

* My whole SNES game collection was reunited over Christmas, thanks to my sister, who delved into my parents' attic on my behalf in exchange for the N64.

** Possibly in a photo finish with Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."