After Ragnarok (Spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok)

Hela awoke in pain.

The right side of her body was in agony, every nerve and muscle screaming in torment. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to sit up. That simple movement nearly caused her to lose consciousness, but she was Hela, and her will was strong.

She looked down, and a hiss escaped her teeth at what she saw. The half of her had been burned to the bone, and what was left of her flesh and muscle looked like cooked meat. She raised her right arm, forcing near-skeletal fingers to flex and form a closed fist. Satisfied, she called a sword and used it to prop herself up onto her feet.

She looked around for the first time, taking stock of her surroundings. The landscape was blasted and filled with a sulfurous reek. A poor showing for Asgard, she thought.

She remembered Surtur driving his blade down, the last attempt to dodge the enormous flaming sword as it bit home. Obviously less than successful, but that was of no consequence. She lived, and she was Hela, and she stood on Asgardian soil. That would be enough.

Hela closed her eyes and drew upon Asgard's power, willing herself whole again.

Her eyes flew open when nothing happened.

This was not Asgard!

She sought around herself, and now the landscape became clearer. A blasted wasteland, yes, and a very familiar one.

She was back. Back in the hell that Allfather Odin had banished her to, so many millennia ago.

She reached out instinctively, her senses questing for the weak point that she had found, that had granted her her freedom, her kingdom, her empire, everything that was rightfully hers... and found nothing.

Was she too weak? Or was that door simply gone, as if it had never been? Impossible to tell.

Hela raged. She screamed, cursing all the gods, her family most of all. She struck the ground, splintered sword after sword. And when she had nothing left she fell to her knees.

All of her rage was futile. Nothing she did had the slightest effect.

Of course not.

She was Hela, but she did not live.

And this was no Valhalla.

For the first time in her long existence, Hela suffered a single tear to fall from her eye.

Behind her, something chuffed.

Hela turned her head and felt a hot breath on her healthy skin as Fenris Wolf licked her face. She reached up and stroked the great wolf's muzzle, joy and astonishment lightening the weight of her despair. It looked at her with its old eyes, the glint of the Eternal Flame no longer present.

She rose to her feet again, and looked behind Fenris. Ranks of soldiers stood there, soldiers she recognized. The Einharjar of her youth, the warriors who had pledged to her above all others and followed her in defiance of the Allfather. They were dead, as she was dead, but their swords were sharp and their armor was strong.

As one, they put their fists to their breasts, and bowed to her.

Hela stood in the reeking waste and she smiled.

This was no Valhalla.

But perhaps it could be better.

Five Writing Lessons From Suicide Squad

The wife and I went and saw Suicide Squad over the weekend. We didn't expect it to be a good movie, but we laughed all the way through Batman vs. Superman, so why not? And coming out of the theater we agreed that Suicide Squad was probably better in the sense that we weren't immediately mocking everything about it, so that's something. And it's a good movie if you enjoy looking at Cara Delevingne. Because holy shit, there's a lot of Cara Delevingne to look at in this movie. I mean distracting amounts of Cara Delevingne. Did anyone tell her Enchantress wears a literal robe and wizard hat in the comics?

She wears WHAT?!

But never mind all that! Some things could have been done better, and my writer's mind has seized them in its rusty vice. And some things about the movie, actually did get done remarkable well. So let's have a look, shall we?

1. You Really Need To Watch Your Tone

Not swearing - go ahead and fucking swear if you want, you fuck. I'm talking about the overall feel of your work, or your voice if you like. It's important for a single book to have a consistent tone throughout, or to have a tone that evolves in a natural progression from beginning to end. What you don't want is to ping-pong between like four different tones.

Suicide Squad ping-pongs between like four different tones. It opens in Gauntanamo Bay, Louisiana, then jumps to a bunch of flashbacks that go tense-political/standard-supervillainics/politics-again/WTF-Harley/more-politics/horror-movie/back-to-politics, and that's just like the first ten minutes! The soundtrack doesn't help because none of the songs stay on for any length of time - I'm not sure there even was a score, it was so lost in the rest.

If the movie had maintained a consistent tone (preferably not the darkest one), it could have been a hell of a lot better. So take a look at what you're writing/creating and make sure you're not bouncing around like Harley on a surprise meth injection.

2. Don't Spare The Knife

Task Force X, the titular Suicide Squad, is a gang of criminals that get picked to do dirty jobs for the U.S. Government in return for reduced prison sentences. That's it. It's the Dirty Dozen with supervillains, something even the director acknowledges. And one of the traditions for that particular trope is that a fair portion of the people picked for the "Suicide Squad" are going to, um, die.

Unfortunately, probably because of sequel concerns, only one member of the Suicide Squad actually dies in the film. (Well, two if you count Enchantress, but she's the main villain and that's a whole different problem with superhero movies.)* It's a pretty decent death, done well, but it's kind of ridiculous how low the body count ends up being given the threat the Squad is facing. A few more Z-list villains getting offed might have made the threat more credible. (How do you get time for more villains? See point 3.)

*Yes, three if you count Slipknot. But who cares about Slipknot?

You have to be willing to kill your characters when the situation is so bad that nobody dying is absurd. Also...

3. Kill Your Grinning Evil Darlings

For all the hype Jared Leto's Joker got he doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in the film. His only real contribution is to abduct Harley Quinn from the Squad briefly, but she ends up right back with the damn team anyway after his chopper gets shot down! Basically the Joker moves Harley from roof level to ground level. That's it.

Joker could have been left as a flashback character to tease an appearance in a later Batman film. Hell, let him have the stinger too. The rest of the time he used up would have been much better used to flesh out the Squad, patch a few plot holes, or just introduce a couple more warm supervillain bodies to off in creative ways. Instead we got Jared Leto being vaguely creepy, and a few thousand horror stories about working with him that will dog his career for the next decade.

Don't leave a character or a scene in the story that isn't necessary. Cut cut cut!

4. Shoot The Damn Guard

You've heard that a gun placed on the mantel in Act One needs to go off by the end of Act Three, right? Well Suicide Squad loves putting guns on mantels, but it doesn't actually fire too many of them off by the end of the movie. The excepion is the neck bomb implants, which get fired off almost immediately. (Because nobody cares about Slipknot.)

A prime example is the abusive asshole Guantanamo guard early in the movie. Deadshot tells him flat out he's going to kill him. The rest of the Squad has reason to hate him. And then the Joker turns up and makes this guard his new best friend to try and spring Harley Quinn. (After killing the last guy who was his new best friend.) Yet somehow the movie forgets about this guard for the second and third act, and he remains alive by film's end. What the actual hell? Did Mindy Kaling pull some strings? (I did not recognize Ike Barinholtz from the Mindy Project but the guard is totally him.)

Do not set up a character to be obviously killed off and then fail to do it. Pick your guns off the mantel and pull the trigger.

5. Don't Let Your Heroes Let Your Villains Win

In a lot of ways Suicide Squad is a disjointed mess of a plot, but I will give the movie credit in how it treats Enchantress, the main villainess. She's being forced to work for Amanda Waller under threat of death, but manages to escape briefly by playing on her minder Rick Flagg's emotions. She can't reclaim her captive heart, but she frees her brother, who immediately begins a killing spree. Waller sends Flagg and Enchantress in to deal with it, but Enchantress bails and gets her brother to protect her from Waller. She then immediately starts working a plan to end the entire planet.

At no point in all this do the villains, er "heroes", get an obvious chance to stop her that they screw up. Even Rick Flagg only knows she's done something, not what, and it goes bad so fast that there's no time to figure it out. Enchantress pretty much executes her plan perfectly from start to finish, and it's only because she doesn't know what the Squad's capable of that she loses in the end.

I've seen a lot of plots where the heroes screw up to advance the bad guy's plot. It's refreshing when the villain actually is just competent enough to be a major threat.

Anyway. Hope some of that was helpful, and now I'm going to tuck in. Sweet dreams...

Five Writing Lessons From Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman! Superman! Wonder Woman who gets the shit-tier billing even though she steals the big fight of the movie!

I went, I saw, I took some lessons from it. Thoroughly entertaining, but note none of these lessons qualify as "positives". Spoilers lie ahead, all ye of faint heart.

1. Show, Don't Tell

Batman vs Superman starts 18 months after Man of Steel, and early on in the movie there's a lot of beats that feel like a laundry list of Zack Snyder addressing complaints about the first movie. Superman and Clark Kent are established in Metropolis, Superman is a beloved hero, he and Lois Lane are in a solid relationship.

And that's all great, but we never got to see any of it happen. It's easy to overlook that with the Lois/Clark relationship - that trend was established in the first movie - but we've never actually seen Superman do anything heroic at this point! The stuff he did in Man of Steel is explicitly treated as reasons not to trust Superman, and all we ever get is a montage of "saves" where Superman looks miserable as he rescues people we have no investment in.

The first Superman scene in the movie would have been a great place for Superman to actually save people we care about. I was completely expecting it, but it didn't happen because, for plot reasons, everyone there had to die to frame Superman for murder. (With guns.) It wouldn't have been hard to fix this scene to let Superman save everyone, and then have the evil mercenaries come in and wipe the camp out after he was gone. That way we could see Superman being super and gotten on board with him a whole lot faster. Alas.

Point being: don't just tell your reader things about a character and expect them to care. They need to see it!

2. Suggest, Don't Show

Two examples of this, the first being Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot does an excellent job and Wonder Woman is a highlight of the movie, for the record. But part of her arc is that she's trying to get back a blackmail photo Lex Luthor has on her. Batman ends up finding a photo of her standing next to Chris Pine's cheekbones in 1918, looking just as young as she is in 2016 (or whenever).

All that's fine. The problem is that Diana is in full Wonder Woman garb in the photo, and it completely ruins her big entrance in the final fight scene! It would have been fantastic if that had been the first time we saw her in costume. And that would have been so easy, because there's no reason for her to be in costume in the photo - the scene works just fine if it's just Diana in a period dress, or a uniform.

You don't have to spell everything out for the audience immediately. Let them put some thought into things. They'll feel smart and the story will be better for it.

(Oh, right, second example. *ahem* MARRR-THAAAAAAA)

3. OOC Needs To Be OOC

I'm referencing a trope known as Out of Context (OOC) is Serious Business, which means a character starts acting... differently when things get serious. The pacifist starts kicking ass, the jokester gets deadly serious, the klutz becomes scary competent. It's a fine trope, I recommend it.

In Batman vs Superman, there's a flash-forward/dream sequence/vision of Batman in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, apparently ruled by a crazy evil Superman. (Actually ruled by another guy who's blindingly obvious if you read DC comics. Foreshadowing!) In this sequence Batman, who famously abhors guns, pulls a machine gun and just shoots the hell out of enemy soldiers.

The point, I think, is to demonstrate how bad things are by showing Batman shooting people. But he's also shooting people in the present! Hell, he runs over people, stabs people, he burns a guy alive in front of a middle-aged kidnapping victim... Who cares if he's shooting people in the Bad Future if he's already shooting people?

If you want to shock people by having a character go off his usual script, he actually has to be acting out of character. If there isn't a significant change in behavior, it won't work.

4. Talking Is A Valid Action

Now, there are some circumstances where two people will get into a fight immediately without trying to talk things out first. Maybe it's a protagonist and a gang of disposable mooks. Maybe it's two soldiers on opposite sides of a battlefield. Maybe one guy is drunk. Stuff happens.

But, if you have two protagonists getting into a fight. And both are known for having codes against killing. And one of them is being blackmailed by the villain under threat of his mother being killed within thirty minutes. And the other one just had a good friend murdered by the same villain, and has spent years saving innocent people's lives. In that circumstance, you need to have a really good reason for the two protagonists not to at least try to talk things over for a minute before they try to murder each other.

There's a tradition in comic books for heroes to fight at the drop of a hat, but make sure they've got a good reason, and try to make sure that reason can't be resolved by four words, i.e. "Luthor has my mother".

5. Make Your Villain's Schemes Internally Consistent

Crazy villains are great. Joker? A blast. Green Goblin? Superb. But even the most lunatic villains tend to at least make sense to themselves.

In Batman vs Superman, Lex Luthor hates Superman because he's a superpowered alien threat to the planet. And for the most part his solution (Batman + kryptonite) is appropriate to his mindset. But then for some reason, he decides he needs a backup plan and creates Doomsday: a superpowered alien  threat to the planet.

Now, there's a fine tradition of villains hypocritically creating bigger threats in order to deal with the hero's perceived threat. J. Jonah Jameson sponsored the Scorpion to get rid of Spider-man, Movie General Ross helped create the Abomination to take out the Hulk.  But in most of these cases, the bigger threat was intended to be something controllable that ends up getting completely out of hand and requires the hero to stop. In Batman vs Superman, Lex just flat out creates Doomsday without any restraints or controls, apparently believing a sample of his blood would be enough for him to control the creature. Nope! And even when Superman has to save him from getting splattered into meaty chunks, we never get a reaction from Lex to show that he realizes he screwed up. Yes he's crazy, but he's not stupid.

Make sure your villain has a reason for everything he does, even if that reason is only sane to him.

On Female Superheroes and Wonder Woman

I went on a lengthy stream of consciousness rant last night on female superheroes and Wonder Woman. I'm not sure what the hell I was thinking. I'm not solving anything. But there is some stuff I'd like to see in there, a few insights that might be worth something if they were developed, and what I think is a valid point about the way Diana Prince has been handled for the past few decades.

So, enjoy! Or not. As you will.

Image courtesy of paintmarvels.deviantart.com

Pacific Rim

This is not "Five Writing Lessons From Pacific Rim". There's a certain point in movies where spectacle overwhelms any ability to critique the plot and I certainly wasn't trying. This is just my impressions from seeing the movie this weekend.

Be warned there will be some spoilers, so can I recommend you go see the movie? Seriously, it is quite awesome.

So, yes. Wow.

Five Writing Lessons from Oz the Great and Powerful

So Oz the Great and Powerful is out on Blu-ray, or coming out on Blu-ray, or... something, I wasn't really paying attention to the commercials. The point is they got me thinking about the movie again. I saw it in theaters and thought it was okay. Not great, and not quite "good", as in I'd recommend people go see it. More like good enough that I wasn't pissed I'd seen it, but not quite good enough that I was satisfied.

I thought it should have been better! It absolutely should have been better. And it wasn't that the actors were bad (they all did a fine job) or that the CGI was awful (with the exception of the Wicked Witch - seriously, she looks a thousand times better in shadowy silhouette). So it had to be something about the story, right?

I think it was. And with my help, you might just avoid making the same mistakes.

1. Either have a twist or don't.

I'm going to spoil the movie right here just to get it out of the way, so either go watch the movie first or decide you don't care before you keep reading. Either way. Okay? Good.

Last warning.

Theodora the Good, a.k.a. Mila Kunis, is transformed into the Wicked Witch of the West halfway through the movie. Now there are two ways you can handle that. One is to treat it as a fait accompli: make it clear what's going to happen to Theodora, give you some hope it won't, then stab the audience in the heart when it happens anyway. The other is to keep it very secret that that's where Theodora is headed, and shock the audience when it happens.

Both methods have merits, but Oz botched it. They tried to take the second option, and played Theodora as a straight good witch right up until her transformation. At the same time Evanora, her sister, was played up as evil and had a bunch of flying monkeys and it was totally obvious she'd be the Wicked Witch. So it should have been a surprise how things turned out, right?

The problem was every freaking promotional image and trailer made it flipping obvious that Theodora was the Wicked Witch! I mean there are three trailers where Evanora and the WWotW are standing next to each other - guess it's not Evanora! And there were magazines that identified Theodora as the Wicked Witch in their freaking captions! And even if you avoided all that crap, Theodora's shadow turns into the WWotW right in the opening credits! Fuck!

Look, twists are great, but they don't work if you spoil them in the trailer. The movie would have worked a lot better if they'd just been up front about Theodora's identity and left us to wonder how she went bad. If you know you can't pull off a surprise, you can still create a lot of tension in a story by making us guess how the characters get to the ending.

Speaking of Theodora:

2. Let characters develop their own damn selves.

Ultimately Theodora becomes the Wicked Witch because she's tricked into becoming evil. Like Hayden Christensen.

Killing babies will totally save my hot wife, right?

When we meet Theodora she's almost painfully innocent, something the womanizing "wizard" Oz is quick to take advantage of. Then Theodora starts talking marriage and queening it up with him and Oz runs away on his quest, leaving her alone with Evanora, who plays on Theodora's vulnerability to convince her that Oz betrayed her. Then she talks Theodora into eating a magic apple (ho ho) to take the pain away, and WHAM!! Wicked Witch.

(I should note for clarity's sake that in Oz, being "wicked' is exactly the same as being on the Dark Side. Not a stronger witch, but the magic comes easier and looks cooler.)

Now, can you point out the thing that Theodora did wrong? No, you can't, because there isn't anything. Sometimes I think Sam Raimi has a thing for disproportionate retribution: Did you read the words wrong? WHAM, undead army! Refuse an old woman a fourth extension on her mortgage? WHAM, death by gypsy curse! Is your name Peter Parker? WHAM, misery misery supervillain dead girlfriend misery! (Okay that one isn't Raimi's fault.)

Theodora is innocent and naive and trusts her sister and that's why she gets turned evil. It's... I'm going to say it, it's lazy writing! And it wouldn't have taken much to correct. Just have her confront Oz, fly off the handle, try to cast a spell that goes wrong, disfigures her, and drives her insane, and you're all set. It could have been done in maybe five minutes of screen time.

A character should not become irredeemably evil because they were tricked into it. Allow characters their own agency.

3. Give villains a believable motivation.

That's Theodora's problem. Evanora's got a different one. See, she's wicked from the get go, because... I don't know. Nobody knows. She's just bad.

Now, yes, there are people who are just bad for no reason in real life, but in fiction everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason is for no reason except to fuck with the reader/viewer, but the author at least have a reason. In Oz there's never any reason given for Evanora to be bad.

And there are plenty of reasons for her not to be bad, starting with the fact that being wicked instantly turns you into a hideous hag! And it's pretty clear at the end of the movie that you don't get any significant power boost from becoming a Sith, er ah Wicked Witch. So what the hell was Evanora thinking? We don't know. And that's a problem.

Remember that everyone is the hero of their own story - even complete monsters.

4. Heroes are allowed to hurt people.

Back on Theodora again, sort of. I mentioned that Oz seduces her, right? Well that's because he's a womanizer, a flim-flam man, a con artist... a humbug.

Unfortunately Oz is also the protagonist of this movie. Now in The Wizard of Oz, Oz isn't all that good. He's a big flaming head that demands near-impossible tasks and tries to welch when they're completed. At his best he manages to B.S. the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion into accepting gifts of nothing and thinking they're awesome.

But because he's the protagonist this time, we need to root for Oz, which is why I think the relationship between him and Theodora never got resolved. See, there should have been a point where Oz had to admit to Theodora that he didn't love her, that he'd taken advantage of a naive girl because really, he's not that good a person. It would have helped justify Theodora's turn to wickedness, and it would have been honest.

Instead, Evanora tricks Theodora into thinking Oz doesn't love her. And that's true, yes! But because they never have that confrontation we never got proper closure on the issue. Oz gets to convince himself, if he wants, that he's not responsible for what happened to Theodora, because he's not responsible for what happened to Theodora. He could have been truly and honestly in love with her and the same damn thing would have happened.

Heroes are not perfect. Heroes can hurt people, sometimes badly. What they can't do is fail to confront that fact when it happens.

5. Good is not dumb.

Now for something Oz did right. For most of the movie the good people of Oz treat Oz like he's the second coming - or, properly, the Wizard they've been waiting for to save all their asses. Now it's pretty damn obvious that Oz isn't a proper wizard, but for the most part the... Ozians? Ozlings? Pass it off as jitters or misunderstandings and continue with the hero worship.

The good people of Oz are simple. Glinda is not.

She's unquestionably good. She cares for the people of the Oz sincerely and wholeheartedly, and does everything she can to help them. She also sees through Oz in approximately a millisecond and refuses to buy into any of his bullshit. She'll use it, though - she needs to get Theodora and Evanora separated, and Oz is the man with the skill at trickery to make it happen. But even her methods of manipulating Oz mostly rely on convincing him (or shaming him) into becoming a better person. It's really not a surprise at the end when Glinda puts aside any pretense of pacifism and goes toe-to-toe with Evanora.

Glinda's practically the defining Goody Two Shoes, but that doesn't make her dumb or weak. The same holds for your characters.

I hope all that made sense. If you've seen the movie (or even if you haven't) and want to chime in, feel free.

Final Report 2012

Still not dead!

So, okay. I did succeed at NaNoWriMo this year. I haven't mentioned anything about it since n'yeah because I'm still not done with the book yet, which is how it should be. I'm currently at 70,000 words, give or take, and steaming on to the big final battle.

I'm going to keep writing through 2013, of course. I want to finish and then revise the NaNoNovel, and then I think I'm going to work on my short story game. I would like to submit a few complete stories this year, whether or not they get published.

I had a very lovely Christmas holiday which consisted of visiting family and talking and generally being happy. I go back to work tomorrow, then I'm off again for New Year's Day, then I'm back to work for real. My resolution for the year at the office is to manage my timekeeping properly and to avoid any psychotic episodes.

What else did I do this year? Oh that's right, I bought a house and moved into it, which still leaves me feeling bewildered every once in a while. I am proud to report that my home feels like home, and now that I'm settled in I don't think I'd trade it for any other house in the world, rickety fence and all. Next year will  bring more surprises, and if they're as nice as this one has been I'll look forward to them.

I paid attention to politics more than ever this year, and now my heart is full of hate. 'Nuff said. But I'm glad Obama won.

And now because I wasn't really planning a recap of my year when I sat down I'll do some easy product shilling.

I read some great books, I read some good books, I read some okay books. I don't think I've read any truly bad books this year, which is not a terrible thing. No Know Fear was a spectacular highlight for the generally fantastic Horus Heresy series, while Betrayer left me feeling completely frazzled (in a good way). Let's Pretend This Never Happened made me laugh, and I got some warm fuzzies rereading classics like Heir to the Empire and The Hobbit.

I'm planning to read through The Silmarillion this year. All of it. I might write more about that later, but I suspect there's nothing more terrifying a man can do when he's trying to write his own epic (or any) fantasy book. I also might write more about Ravenwing, which was a very well-written book that still had me loathing most of the cast well before the halfway point.

I have fallen in love with Two Best Friends Play!, and maintained my adoration for The Mike O'Meara Show and The Big O and Dukes. The one upside to an hour-long commute is that I can keep up with my favorite podcasts without too much trouble. I would also recommend Nerd Poker to anyone who wants to listen to a filthy Dungeons & Dragons podcast from professional comedian Brian Posehn.

I've kept up with big changes in the comic book industry, but I'm sad to say that next year will probably see me cut back on my comics reading considerably, if I don't drop it entirely. I can't afford the price and the storage space to keep up with every Earth Shattering Event (tm) that comes down the pipe. With that said, I'm going to try to keep up with Saga and Transformers: Regeneration One, at the very least; and I'm very curious to see what Dan Slott has planned for the Superior Spider-Man.

I still play video games when I can, though I rarely have enough time to get serious with them. I got my first Call of Duty game for Christmas, and I'm curious to see if my Battlefield skillz transfer over. And I'm bound and determined to get Sarah on board for a Lego Lord of the Rings playthrough.

I'm not deeply committed to a lot of television shows. I'll be watching Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones, and the finale of Breaking Bad. I'll also try to keep up with The Walking Dead, which is more difficult than I'd like. For movies, I'm looking forward to the Evil Dead remake and trying to stay optimistic about World War Z. I'll take the rest as they come. There were a lot of good movies out this year, so suffice to say The Avengers was my favorite.

Have I shilled enough yet? Do I get a check from Google or Amazon now? God this was disjointed...

I'm Going To Say This Once

I've been almost silent online about the Sandy Hook shootings. I haven't felt it's my place to comment. It was a horrific tragedy and I'm unlikely to say anything that would reach or provide comfort to anyone affected by it. (If by some chance this post does reach anyone affected by a school shooting, you have my deepest condolences.)

But as time has passed and people have started debating how we can prevent this sort of tragedy from happening again, I've been tempted more than once to get into an argument over opinions I disagree with. And, again, I've refrained, because frankly I'm not interested in getting in a meaningless fight that'll piss me off, piss somebody I like off, and end with acrimony and nothing useful coming out of it.

Then I read the NRA statement that came out yesterday, and decided that yes, I need to write something about this.

For the record, I support the Second Amendment and I'm in favor of responsible gun ownership. I have a lot of hunters in my family, who've owned guns for years (hell, generations) without incident. I was, in high school, a member of the Annapolis High School NJROTC's Rifle Team for four years, headed* the damn thing for two, and earned an Expert marksmanship medal. (And my dad likely still wouldn't trust me with a rifle in the woods. I'm not going to argue with him.) I like guns and I think they're a fine thing for sportsmen and hunters to become familiar with.

With that said… I part company with the NRA in a lot of ways. I'm not sold on the idea of owning a gun for home defense: making said gun accessible enough to be useful means that it's not locked up well enough for me to feel secure having it in the house. I don't have anything against gun control in the practical aspects: I'm fine with more background checks, I don't care what size my ammunition clip is, and I can imagine a few semi-automatic weapons** that nobody really needs to own, at least without providing significant proof that they're competent enough to handle the weapon.

Now, I didn't expect the NRA to come out in favor of gun control. But I thought they might at least acknowledge that there is a debate to be had on the issue. I was, of course, thinking of the NRA of the actor Charlton Heston, and not the somewhat more batshit one of Wayne LaPierre.

Here is the full NRA statement for your reading convenience. It starts off on a strong note, acknowledging the tragedy and the NRA's silence up until now out of respect for the victims. But then it veers over a fucking cliff and demonizes the media, the mentally ill, the media, video games, Hollywood, the media, the President, and the media amid calls to put an armed guard in every school in the country.

Um… what?

Let's start with the main point, which is the armed guard thing. A lot of schools in America already have armed guards on the property, and I'm sad to say that they don't always prevent mass shootings. Columbine is one example. Fort Hood, a military base, could be considered another. There's also the fact that it would cost billions of dollars to keep enough guards employed to do a job that, thankfully, doesn't actually need to be done all that often.

And maybe it's just me, but I'm miserable about the state of schools in this country as it is. I don't like the idea that we need to put guards and metal detectors in schools to keep them from exploding with violence. School, particularly middle school, already felt like a damn prison half the time when I was attending. I don't want to send my future children to some place with the look and feel of Blackgate.

So I'm not in favor of more guards. There was also an implication in the statement that we should start a national registry for people with mental illnesses. It's a vague idea to start with, and I'd tend to oppose it on the grounds that it would be open to abuse by employers, neighborhood communities, and anyone else who got access to it. It also doesn't actually do anything to treat mental illness.

I think that improving mental illness treatment across the country ought to be a priority now, in addition to taking a serious look at gun control. None of the gun control measures I noted above, for example, would have done a damn thing to stop Adam Lanza, who stole a gun from his mother and shot her with it before he went on his rampage. Getting Lanza into treatment earlier might have stopped him before he started. Then again, a gun safe might have done the same thing.

What we don't need to do is get another Inquisition started against the "callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry" that makes video games. Nor do I give one shit about "Splatterdays" or the race to the bottom of "media conglomerates". (Well, I do give a small shit about that last one, but Jersey Shore has been canceled.)

The entertainment industries get trotted out as whipping boys at least once a decade to answer for the crimes of mentally ill people who might have had a passing familiarity with some violent game or show. The evidence of any actual influence is always spotty at best. (There's also the First Amendment issue, which Penny Arcade covered much more eloquently than I could, per the image above.)

And it's fairly obvious that Wayne is bringing up the evils of media to deflect attention from the NRA. Why else would he keep talking about how the media is "rewarding" killers, concealing "dirty little truths", and working to "demonize legitimate gun owners"? He's trying to make it as clear as possible that the media ought to be concentrating on MTV and >snerk< Bulletstorm, and that anyone talking about the NRA is flagrantly biased against it.

Which is, to be fair, his job. But it's not in the country's best interests to pretend that we don't even need to have a debate about gun control. And it's a farce to paint the NRA as an embattled organization being assaulted on all sides.

Gun control needs to be on the table. So does providing better treatment for mental illness. I don't agree with putting more armed guards in schools, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it. Wayne said it himself: "there is no national, one-size-fits-all solution to protecting our children." We have a very clear problem that our leaders need to address: I encourage them to do so quickly and thoughtfully.

What we should not do is let the NRA or any other lobby put their interests before the interests of the citizens of our country. We should not let pundits and lobbyists spread disinformation, anger and bullshit to cripple even the most common-sense regulation. We should not let a desire for austerity prevent us from funding programs that have can prevent future tragedies and improve the lives of American citizens. Above all else, we shouldn't let this become yet another partisan exercise to score points for the next election.

We have an opportunity, in the face of this shooting, to take real actions to prevent future tragedies. Those actions won't be perfect; they can't be. But we can't afford to let the NRA keep us from taking any action at all.

I'm going to ask you, if you haven't already, to contact your Senators and your Representative, and urge them to act. I'm not going to be particular on what you urge them to do; as I've said, no one solution is perfect. But an imperfect solution is still better than failing to address the problem.

* In reality I was a figurehead. The program was run by Mrs. Miller, a parent volunteer who brooked no trespass of the range safety rules, i.e using a student's head as a gun rest. I salute her both for keeping us competitive and for ensuring that we suffered no injuries.

** Ignore anyone who talks about an "assault weapons ban" without qualifying what they mean. The term is ill-defined bullshit that can cover automatic weapons (which are already heavily restricted) and semi-automatic weapons (which covers any gun that doesn't require you to chamber each round by hand - that is to say, the vast majority of them).

The Mythbusters vs James Cameron and Plot-Induced Stupidity

I love the Mythbusters, okay? I don't watch the show as often as I'd like, mostly because my wife isn't a fan and I have to compromise on our TV time.

But a Titanic episode? On whether Jack could have survived at the end of the movie? That compromise is going my way.

Be warned, spoilers for the episode follow. I guess spoilers for Titanic have already happened, but we're a decade out, people, go see the movie already!

The Important Lessons of Prometheus

Warning: You can infer spoilers about the movie Prometheus from this post.

So I just saw Prometheus this afternoon. It was a very good movie - not excellent, mind, but enjoyable to watch, and if you're a fan of science fiction/horror I recommend it. But a lot of the plot seemed to be... well, idiot-driven. Basically, if somebody needs to do something to advance the plot in this movie, and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to do it... They'll do it! Because they're morons.

Clearly nobody on the Prometheus was trained in proper archeology, biology, or sociology techniques. But I am here to help! The following is a list of rules to follow when working on a xeno (alien) archaeology dig. Follow them, and you might live. Key word might.

Power Outage

Some people would use that as a metaphor for missing a blog post. Not me, I really had one tonight. It's sleeting outside, which is a great way to screw up power lines and morning commutes; something to look forward to in the morning as I skid my way down a 30 degree incline onto the road out of our neighborhood...

But I digress. The lights went out about half an hour before Sarah went to bed. In that period we hunted for light sources (successfully; Yankee Candle is Sarah's new best friend, and my Kindle reading light is surprisingly useful as a deployable turret), listened to the neighbors chop firewood and yell a bit, and comforted the dog, who took to stuffing herself into corners and trembling like a very scared thing.

I haz The Fear.

Luckily our power company managed to restore service in about an hour and a half, so I'm able to pry Lina off my leg and blog a bit before going to bed at my usual time: Too Damn Late.

I did end up seeing Black Swan this Saturday, and I'll say right now that Natalie Portman earned the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and as far as I'm concerned she's earned herself an Oscar as well. Her performance was inspired and terrifying, in a movie that was also inspired and terrifying. If you're at all engaged in a creative endeavor, go see Black Swan.

Review: Tron: Legacy

Gah! Too many colons. And almost a week late now. Oh well.

Let's get this out of the way: the new Tron movie is not hard science fiction. If you have a background in computer science, you will smile at an open source software debate early on, and you might nod knowingly when you see that the Grid runs on some flavor of *nix. Beyond that, forget about TCP/IP, binary, or even the laws of physics. Tron: Legacy might look like science fiction, but in reality it's pure glow-in-the-dark fantasy.

The movie takes place well after the first Tron. Flynn, the star of the original, has been missing for twenty years. A mysterious page (it's like a primitive text message) draws his son, Sam, to his father's old arcade, where he gets sucked into the computer-generated world of the Grid where his father is trapped. Now Sam will have to rescue Flynn from his own out-of-control program.

Tron: Legacy is a gorgeous movie. The CGI isn't groundbreaking, but it's excellently done. Jeff Bridges is de-aged for a large part of the movie: his eyes aren't quite right, but for the most part you barely notice that it's a special effect. The action scenes are a treat to look at, as is most of the scenery; the costumes vary, but most of them look great.

The story is good. Not excellent, but good. There are plot holes in the movie that you could drive a lightcycle through: nothing that comes about through stupidity, really, but just things that never get explained that ought to be.

All of the characters are fun to watch - there's nobody in the movie you'd really want to punch in the face, except Castor, and he's supposed to be like that. Unfortunately there are two characters who represent horribly wasted opportunities in the film: without spoiling anything, one is played by Cillian Murphy (which means Disney is wasting a great actor as well), and the other is a program named Rinzler. I expect the movie ran afoul of time constraints, and I'm hoping an extended DVD release will do a better job of using these guys.

Overall I'd recommend Tron: Legacy as a good family-friendly popcorn flick. If you're a hardcore geek with standards, you'll probably want to pass it up. Otherwise, enjoy.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 28 - R.I.P Leslie Nielsen

I'm going to keep writing a little longer tonight, but I want to get this post out of the way. I should easily hit 4,000 words written today before I get to sleep.

Leslie Nielsen passed away today. Reportedly he passed away peacefully, falling asleep in the company of his family. He will be missed by his fans, and almost certainly by the parody movie market. When you get the chance, I wholeheartedly recommend you pick up one of his movies and take the time to enjoy it. Airplane! and The Naked Gun movies are obvious choices, but I would also recommend Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and Repossessed (an Exorcist parody).

Whatever your choice, pick it up, sit for two hours, laugh, and salute the passing of a great comedian.

42059 / 50000 words. 84% done!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 27, And a Review of Splice

38495 / 50000 words. 77% done!

Today was definitely a very strong day, writing-wise. I am starting to catch myself cheating, mostly in little ways: adding extraneous words where they aren't needed (bad), or too much detail to a scene or an action (good - I'll at least have a best of breed when I'm done cutting).

During the writing grind I ended up watching Splice, since my wife was upstairs playing The Sims 3 and wouldn't have to sit through it. I predict that this movie is going to ruin the hobby of biohacking for everyone for years to come.

Here's what I learned from watching Splice (vague spoilers ahoy):

• While those two bright-eyed young biohackers might be brilliant, they will fuck up your company's bottom line and may very well get you killed. If they won't wear a damn lab coat, fire them immediately.
• Ask about your girlfriend/wife's childhood after a few years. Her childhood traumas will eventually bite you in the ass.
• Don't let your girlfriend/wife talk you into a child you don't want.
• Don't let your girlfriend/wife talk you into a blasphemy of science you don't want.
• Never do a live show with animals.
• Genetically-altered animals will change their gender, not because of environmental pressures, but just because they damn well feel like it.
• The proper way to discipline your blasphemy of science is to tie it down, strip it naked, and mutilate it while speaking into a tape recorder. Because that will teach it to behave.
• You can get yourself covered in all sorts of genetically-altered bodily fluids without any ill-effects whatsoever.
• Do not fuck your science experiments.
• Do not allow your science experiments to fuck you.

And that's all I have to say about that. I give the movie 3 out of 5 stars, mostly because I suspect something very similar is going to happen in somebody's garage in my lifetime and I think an educated populace is a safer populace.

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

25765 / 50000 words. 52% done!

No progress today, I'm afraid. To be fair, if I'd kept writing what I was writing I would have ended up with even more things I'll need to rewrite, as I've ended up deciding that I need to go in a different direction with my story, setting, conflict, etc. than I had in mind when I started. Frankly I don't have much hope of finishing well this year - I have too much reworking to do and not enough time to do it in, and even counting what I've written so far (which I fully intend to do), I'm still way behind where I need to be to net 50,000 words this month.

So let's forget about all that and talk about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

I love J.K. Rowling's books, and many of the movies have been a great deal of fun. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had me worried though. I've long been used to directors skipping over minor plot points from the books, but Half-Blood Prince went out of its way to throw things into the story that didn't need to be there and didn't fit in with the original plot.

Luckily, Deathly Hallows goes back to the original formula for the films, sticking as close to the original book as it can within the limits of film. Some subplots again fall by the wayside (apparently because Mad Eye Moody says so), and one character's demise seems to have been jettisoned for reasons unknown, but the main thrust of the book is captured by the filmmakers.

The set pieces are beautiful, expansive, and really get across that Harry and his friends are no longer confined to Hogwarts; it's a big damn world out there, and a great one to look at. The cast is in full form as well. Aside from a few groaners in the script, everyone turns in a top-notch performance. Ralph Fiennes has come into his own as Lord Voldemort, and Helena Bonham Carter finally seems to have nailed Bellatrix Lestrange.

The tale of the Deathly Hallows was a real treat. It's done as a narrated animation, in a style that evokes the movie Coraline and Terry Gilliam's work. It's a fine piece that stands alone in its own right, and I'd love to see it posted on the web somewhere as a free-to-watch clip by the film company. (Not pirates. The people with actual rights to post it.)

The action and fight sequences are very well done. They don't follow the books, as per usual, but they're exciting to watch. I'm still annoyed by the Death Eater Smoke Monsters the series director(s) have fallen in love with, but there's enough villainy afoot from the actual actors to keep me from getting too mad.

Oh yeah, and scares too! There are a few points that are going to give young kids nightmares, and all of them come straight out of the book. You have been warned.

Overall I'd recommend the movie to anyone who's invested in the films up to now. The cast seems ready to finish out the series with a big finale, and if you've watched the rest of the movies there's no reason at all to stop now.

Inglourious Basterds

There have been a number of things delaying this post. Guilt, as you'll see below... also paperwork that needed doing, yard work, visits with family, and the new Batman game, which I recommend to anyone who likes Metroid or Castlevania style games, or the Batman comic books and/or cartoons. Also Mark Hamill fans, because his Joker is probably the only one that can equal or exceed Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight.

The other time eater recently was today's trip to see Inglourious Basterds, the latest Quentin Tarantino film. Anybody who follows Tarantino's work knows that it's going to be an excellent study in good-to-great dialogue. But where the movie really shines is in building up tension over the course of an entire story.

The movie is divided into five chapters. Each chapter starts out mildly, but over the course of twenty to thirty minutes, raises the tension between all the characters involved, usually through nothing more than creative dialogue. The last few minutes are devoted to Tarantino's customary ultra-violence, and then we're in a new chapter, a new situation, and a new low that builds to an inevitable high.

That would be enough to make a good film, but every chapter after the first two (which are, when you come right down to it, extremely well-played back story) also builds on unresolved situations from the previous chapters, until you hit chapter five and everything comes together in an inspired, apocalyptic finale that changes the very course of history.

The acting is excellent. Brad Pitt is a natural scene-stealer, but even he loses out occasional to Colonel Landa, SS officer and the movie's main villain. I can't think of anybody who does a bad job in the movie, and I think there's only two seconds of the film that should have been left on the cutting room floor. If you see the movie, you'll spot it instantly, but it won't do a damn thing to sour your experience.

If you're not squeamish about blood, and you feel like having a true edge-of-your-seat experience, go check out Inglourious Basterds. You could do a lot worse this weekend.

-Dave

Author's Log

These past few days I've written zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. I am a failure as a writer and deserve to be damned to the deepest pits of procrastination hell.

Current Reading

I've finished reading Living Dead in Dallas, which differs from True Blood so much that I'm no longer worried about spoiling anything. The writing in this second book has improved a lot from the first, and I'm hoping this upward trend continues. Unfortunately I won't find out for a few weeks, at which point my wife gets the rest of the books back from a friend.

In the meantime, I'm going to be rereading All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. These two graphic novels are simply the best Superman story that's been written... possibly ever, if I'm honest, and there are enough subtle Easter eggs contained therein to make another reading more than worthwhile. Highly recommended.