I found this Kickstarter via io9, which found it via Superpunch, which listed it with little comments aside from "Pathetic kickstarter a from major artists."
It's a proposed illustrated novel by Bill Willingham & Frank Cho, of Fables & various comics featuring cavewomen, respectively. I'm not an active follower of either man's work, but I've got nothing against them either -- Cho draws a wonderfully glamorous She-Hulk, in my personal opinion -- but this is a dreadful Kickstarter.
The project itself makes me think of the Veronica Mars kickstarter from a few weeks back. It sounds perfectly interesting -- in this case, an illustrated novel about the last descendent of Norse gods, and the primate detective she's teamed up with -- but the rewards involved here are pretty paltry. Post cards and thank yous at the lower levels, and 5-minute phone calls as you get up to $100. If you kick in $10k, you can be served dinner by Cho & Willingham. There's no low-level option to donate and get the book, presumably because Willingham & Cho are going to sell this project to a big-name publisher (and get rightfully paid for doing so), but that no doubt introduces complications with regard to giving actual copies of the actual book away.
The specifics of the Veronica Mars project were different, but essentially it was a film being backed by a major studio who didn't want to pay for it. So they asked fans to pay for it, upfront. There's nothing immoral about that, but to me the spirit of Kickstarter is that it allows people to make something they otherwise couldn't, without crowdfunding. With Veronica Mars, the studio could foot the bill upfront -- they just don't want to.
But where they do deliver above and beyond Willingham & Cho is that backers who pledge $35 actually get a digital copy of the movie. With Bifrost, the proposed illustrated novel, the closest equivalent is for backers who pledge $125 -- they get a signed copy of the book. There's no unsigned or digital equivalent for someone who pledges a lower amount. Willingham & Cho are trying to get paid twice for the same book: once now, from fans who want to donate ahead of time in order to win the chance to buy the book on the shelves later, and again from whoever agrees to publish it.
Like the Veronica Mars project, there's nothing immoral or wrong about going about the process this way. This would be a several-years-long process, and as they say on their page, "this is a Kickstarter project for selecting out the inordinately patient from the rest." But it doesn't sound like it's a project they're especially passionate about, either. Aside from the dreadfully boring video of Willingham describing the project and the process it would involve, the underlying message of this Kickstarter is, here's a project we would do if no other paying gig came up in the meantime, and if fans were willing to throw $30k at us to inspire us give up our downtime to work on it.
There's nothing wrong with asking. But I prefer to back projects that are inspiring, from creators who are willing to put a finished project in their backers' hands.
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Thursday, March 01, 2012
SpringSpringSpring
Every other day in Baltimore has been a spring. Then the cold returns, and me and Kate sing Christmas songs to each other. Today it's spring again, and it makes me think of Chicago. I can't remember if that's always been true.
It makes me think of recommitment and starting new projects. I like it when I'm not the only one. I got an email from Adrian last week saying we should make a new movie before we're old men in rocking chairs. Just a few days before that I'd been thinking about the kung-fu movie we made in high school, and how if I wanted to watch it again I'd need to buy a VCR. Do they make VCRs that connect to computers? I would put that kung-fu movie onto the youtubes in a heartbeat.
Starting new projects makes me think of finishing old ones. I'd wanted to finish the next draft of my book by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas, and then I started to wonder (again) if I'd ever finish it. Adam finished his and had it Lulued and everything. Our writing group is meeting to talk about it next Friday, so I started to plan on finishing my book by then, too. I only have 8 chapters left to revise, so that's pretty doable. In theory, right?
Comic books I've read recently and liked:
Prophet, being a continuation/bold new direction of a 90s Image comic that I never read.
Conan the Barbarian, being a continuation/bold new direction of the Dark Horse Conan comics that I've barely read.
Daredevil, being a continuation/bold new direction of the Marvel superhero that I never really liked.
Book-books I've read recently and liked:
The Lost City of Z, being an examination of 20th Century Amazonian explorations, and the missing bones resulting thereof.
Movies I've seen recently and liked:
Gosh, I dunno. The Descendents was pretty good. I bought The New World on blu-ray this weekend, and I want to watch it real bad like. I watched part one of the American Experience Clinton two-parter this morning while I was working, and it seemed pretty good. The dream of the 90s is alive in my living room, y'all.
It makes me think of recommitment and starting new projects. I like it when I'm not the only one. I got an email from Adrian last week saying we should make a new movie before we're old men in rocking chairs. Just a few days before that I'd been thinking about the kung-fu movie we made in high school, and how if I wanted to watch it again I'd need to buy a VCR. Do they make VCRs that connect to computers? I would put that kung-fu movie onto the youtubes in a heartbeat.
Starting new projects makes me think of finishing old ones. I'd wanted to finish the next draft of my book by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas, and then I started to wonder (again) if I'd ever finish it. Adam finished his and had it Lulued and everything. Our writing group is meeting to talk about it next Friday, so I started to plan on finishing my book by then, too. I only have 8 chapters left to revise, so that's pretty doable. In theory, right?
Comic books I've read recently and liked:
Prophet, being a continuation/bold new direction of a 90s Image comic that I never read.
Conan the Barbarian, being a continuation/bold new direction of the Dark Horse Conan comics that I've barely read.
Daredevil, being a continuation/bold new direction of the Marvel superhero that I never really liked.
Book-books I've read recently and liked:
The Lost City of Z, being an examination of 20th Century Amazonian explorations, and the missing bones resulting thereof.
Movies I've seen recently and liked:
Gosh, I dunno. The Descendents was pretty good. I bought The New World on blu-ray this weekend, and I want to watch it real bad like. I watched part one of the American Experience Clinton two-parter this morning while I was working, and it seemed pretty good. The dream of the 90s is alive in my living room, y'all.
Friday, February 03, 2012
The Five Foundational Texts
My pal Adam has a novel in which the main character brings 5 books with him to college, the 5 tomes that have shaped his brain and his bones up to that point. It's an idea that has stuck with me since I first read it a few years ago, and since I've been rebuilding my library these days I've been thinking about what my Five Foundational Texts might have been...
1.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player's Handbook
by David "Zeb" Cook, 1989.
This was the rulebook for what still takes up a whole lot of my headspace, even when I'm not actively playing D&D. My brother played D&D, but I never did much more than watch him and his buddies play around the pool table from time to time. But when I was in high school I fell in with some of the kids in band who had a D&D group, and thereafter spent more weekends than not playing in my basement, or John Bennington's living room, or James Laird's dining room. It was partly the swords-and-sorcery, playing pretend part of D&D that made it attractive, but I think it was also the fact that it was a group activity. As a younger kid I mostly played one-on-one, but sitting around a table for Dungeons & Dragons brought about a kind of collaborative storytelling that I've never shaken the jones for. Reading over the handbook between games -- or during some stretches between gaming groups -- brought to mind all of the possibilities for Adventurers and Adventuring Parties, and I definitely imagined and rolled up more characters than I ever put into play. In reasons I still don't entirely understand, I think playing D&D is what encouraged me to move from Ohio to Chicago. Something about "let's see what's over that next rise..."
2.
Marvel Saga
by Peter Sanderson & the Marvel Bullpen, 1985-87.
I could just say "Marvel Comics from the 1980s, specifically whatever my brother Dave had in his footlocker from 1994-1988," but if I had to pare it down to a volume that can exist on a bookshelf it would be this. This one reminds me of play, too -- it was certainly the precursor to the imagined comic books I wrote scripts & summaries for in middle school and high school, and combined with Marvel Universe, it gave me an encyclopedic mythology I could explore, meditate on, interpret, and -- once the idea of the written by credit had sunk in -- contribute to. It was essentially a retelling of the events of the Marvel Universe, in order, beginning with the Celestials arrival on Earth "roughly one million years ago" and their creation of the Eternals and the Deviants, and ending with the Fantastic Four's battle with Galactus from Fantastic Four #s 48-50. The series used blocks of text mixed with original art from vintage Marvel Comics as well as new art used to fill in some of the gaps. Each issue would have some sort of focus -- "See today's X-Factor in their first battle, when they were the original X-Men!" -- but it generally covered the crannies and side stories of the Marvel Universe from Spider-Man to Daredevil to Alpha Flight, making connections that I'd glimpsed in editorial notes of the normal comics I read, but now explained in a way that revealed just how big and interconnected those stories were.
3.
The Greek Myths
Translated/Retold by Robert Graves, 1955.
Speaking of mythologies... there was a hardcover copy of Ancient Greek myths in the Clermont Northeastern Intermediate School Library that I used to check out and re-read over and over again. I don't know now if it was the Robert Graves version -- I kind of doubt it -- but I don't remember much about the specific edition except it was a hardcover, it was gray, it was lacking a dustjacket, and "Greek Myths" was printed in gold on the spine. I'm sure the subject matter fed something similar to the Marvel Comics I read over and over again, but I also think it was an important step toward, you know, reading actual words on paper, understanding and enjoying how they fit together, resonating in a way that comic book word balloons don't. I'm not talking smack about comics as much as I'm saying -- look, they ain't poetry. I remember the version of the Greek Myths I read was simple and sparse in a way that pushed me to fill in the details. The less they told, the more I saw. I checked that book out ever other week, I think. I think about those guys the same way I think about Pete Laub and Jimmy Daniel. My relationships with Zeus and Heracles and Apollo were just as formative as with the guys with whom I pretended to be Lost Boys (the vampires, not the boy runaways).
4.
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare, 1605-ish.
Spectral daggers, witches three, medieval battles -- if I've made anything clear to you in our time together, it is that these things are right up my alley. And if you wanna talk about expanding one's understanding of language's potential -- I mean, "By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes/Open, locks, whoever knocks!" is certainly enough to blow open the brain of a seventeen-year-old me.
And it will always have a place in my heart for being the play that Charlie Hartman, Josh Lawson and I reenacted with sock puppets and Castle Grayskull for our 12th grade English class.
5.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, 1975/1984.
Writing this post, I've been surprised at how hard it's been to put an honest-to-gosh novel on here. I remember that for a big chunk of junior high/high school, my answer to What's your favorite book? was The DragonLance Chronicles: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which was the first book I loved so much that I read it nonstop for three days over one summer break. But looking back, it doesn't stick with me much more than watching lots of GI Joe. It was a fun book, but it didn't change anything about how my brain worked.
Illuminatus!, on the other hand -- it was fun, dirty, weird, and by far the longest book I'd ever read at that point. It also dovetailed nicely with my musical obsession with the KLF/JAMs/Justified Ancients of Mu Mu by sharing some of the same conspiracy theory-fueled mythology. It was the book I carried in my backpack so much that it started to fall apart, and it was the book I most wanted other people to catch me reading. I thought about fnords forever after, I thought about authorial pranks and unreliable narrators, I thought about a plot that comments on itself as you're reading it and dares you to keep up. I didn't necessarily understand all of it then (or now), but I knew that I liked the feelings it made me feel.
I think it would be easier to pull together a list of Foundational Texts from my 20s, and maybe that's what I'll do next. I imagine that list speak more to how I write and what I write about now -- this list, as I look over it, speaks to how I think and what I think about now. Which is what foundational is supposed to mean, yeah?
1.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player's Handbook
by David "Zeb" Cook, 1989.
This was the rulebook for what still takes up a whole lot of my headspace, even when I'm not actively playing D&D. My brother played D&D, but I never did much more than watch him and his buddies play around the pool table from time to time. But when I was in high school I fell in with some of the kids in band who had a D&D group, and thereafter spent more weekends than not playing in my basement, or John Bennington's living room, or James Laird's dining room. It was partly the swords-and-sorcery, playing pretend part of D&D that made it attractive, but I think it was also the fact that it was a group activity. As a younger kid I mostly played one-on-one, but sitting around a table for Dungeons & Dragons brought about a kind of collaborative storytelling that I've never shaken the jones for. Reading over the handbook between games -- or during some stretches between gaming groups -- brought to mind all of the possibilities for Adventurers and Adventuring Parties, and I definitely imagined and rolled up more characters than I ever put into play. In reasons I still don't entirely understand, I think playing D&D is what encouraged me to move from Ohio to Chicago. Something about "let's see what's over that next rise..."
2.
Marvel Saga
by Peter Sanderson & the Marvel Bullpen, 1985-87.
I could just say "Marvel Comics from the 1980s, specifically whatever my brother Dave had in his footlocker from 1994-1988," but if I had to pare it down to a volume that can exist on a bookshelf it would be this. This one reminds me of play, too -- it was certainly the precursor to the imagined comic books I wrote scripts & summaries for in middle school and high school, and combined with Marvel Universe, it gave me an encyclopedic mythology I could explore, meditate on, interpret, and -- once the idea of the written by credit had sunk in -- contribute to. It was essentially a retelling of the events of the Marvel Universe, in order, beginning with the Celestials arrival on Earth "roughly one million years ago" and their creation of the Eternals and the Deviants, and ending with the Fantastic Four's battle with Galactus from Fantastic Four #s 48-50. The series used blocks of text mixed with original art from vintage Marvel Comics as well as new art used to fill in some of the gaps. Each issue would have some sort of focus -- "See today's X-Factor in their first battle, when they were the original X-Men!" -- but it generally covered the crannies and side stories of the Marvel Universe from Spider-Man to Daredevil to Alpha Flight, making connections that I'd glimpsed in editorial notes of the normal comics I read, but now explained in a way that revealed just how big and interconnected those stories were.
3.
The Greek Myths
Translated/Retold by Robert Graves, 1955.
Speaking of mythologies... there was a hardcover copy of Ancient Greek myths in the Clermont Northeastern Intermediate School Library that I used to check out and re-read over and over again. I don't know now if it was the Robert Graves version -- I kind of doubt it -- but I don't remember much about the specific edition except it was a hardcover, it was gray, it was lacking a dustjacket, and "Greek Myths" was printed in gold on the spine. I'm sure the subject matter fed something similar to the Marvel Comics I read over and over again, but I also think it was an important step toward, you know, reading actual words on paper, understanding and enjoying how they fit together, resonating in a way that comic book word balloons don't. I'm not talking smack about comics as much as I'm saying -- look, they ain't poetry. I remember the version of the Greek Myths I read was simple and sparse in a way that pushed me to fill in the details. The less they told, the more I saw. I checked that book out ever other week, I think. I think about those guys the same way I think about Pete Laub and Jimmy Daniel. My relationships with Zeus and Heracles and Apollo were just as formative as with the guys with whom I pretended to be Lost Boys (the vampires, not the boy runaways).
4.
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare, 1605-ish.
Spectral daggers, witches three, medieval battles -- if I've made anything clear to you in our time together, it is that these things are right up my alley. And if you wanna talk about expanding one's understanding of language's potential -- I mean, "By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes/Open, locks, whoever knocks!" is certainly enough to blow open the brain of a seventeen-year-old me.
And it will always have a place in my heart for being the play that Charlie Hartman, Josh Lawson and I reenacted with sock puppets and Castle Grayskull for our 12th grade English class.
5.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, 1975/1984.
Writing this post, I've been surprised at how hard it's been to put an honest-to-gosh novel on here. I remember that for a big chunk of junior high/high school, my answer to What's your favorite book? was The DragonLance Chronicles: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which was the first book I loved so much that I read it nonstop for three days over one summer break. But looking back, it doesn't stick with me much more than watching lots of GI Joe. It was a fun book, but it didn't change anything about how my brain worked.
Illuminatus!, on the other hand -- it was fun, dirty, weird, and by far the longest book I'd ever read at that point. It also dovetailed nicely with my musical obsession with the KLF/JAMs/Justified Ancients of Mu Mu by sharing some of the same conspiracy theory-fueled mythology. It was the book I carried in my backpack so much that it started to fall apart, and it was the book I most wanted other people to catch me reading. I thought about fnords forever after, I thought about authorial pranks and unreliable narrators, I thought about a plot that comments on itself as you're reading it and dares you to keep up. I didn't necessarily understand all of it then (or now), but I knew that I liked the feelings it made me feel.
I think it would be easier to pull together a list of Foundational Texts from my 20s, and maybe that's what I'll do next. I imagine that list speak more to how I write and what I write about now -- this list, as I look over it, speaks to how I think and what I think about now. Which is what foundational is supposed to mean, yeah?
Friday, January 13, 2012
Strength Is How Strong You Are
Hey guys. What's new?
I have a new Dungeons & Dragons group. My last regular group was during the LA Days, and we played 4th edition. That's the one where the core races & classes are split up over multiple players' handbooks, and everyone gets sweet special moves when they level up. If you get through 2 or 3 combat encounters in a single session, then you're moving at a pretty quick clip.
If it sounds like I'm being harsh toward 4E, then it's because I'm being kind of harsh toward 4E. In general it's true that your D&D game is as fun as you make it, but after running a 4E campaign for a good three months of weekly sessions, by the end it was just lots of searching through papers for the proper power and, to me, a lot of restrictions on what I could make happen on the fly. The encounters in 4E involve a lot of different types of the same monsters -- Kobold Minions, Kobold Skirmishers, Kobold Slingers, Kobold Dragonshields, Kobold Wyrmpriests and Kobold Slyblades -- and a reliance on miniatures that made game prep lots of work and not a lot of fun. In general I'm not a snobby kind of dude, you know? But I think I really decided that 4E isn't for me.
But! After the move to Baltimore I found myself with a cadre of new friends who were interested in some D&Ding. I don't remember now how the idea first came up, but I know that Kate and I invited more people than we thought would/could come, because I figured it was the kind of event where folks would try it, get bored with it, and then maybe half would become regular players. But this very eve we're going to launch our fourth (I think?) session, and so far everyone has come back for more. The players are mostly new to D&D, and I don't think anyone is an RPG aficionado, so I took the opportunity to foist my preferred edition unto their unsuspecting nerd-holes:
In the words of Pierce Hawthorne, "I won Dungeons & Dragons! And it was Advanced!"
I chose 2nd edition partly because I already have a lot of the books, but mostly because my memory of AD&D is that it fosters more role-playing. The rules are there, but kind of loosey-goosey. Even as they expanded into more campaigns and realms of greater PC-customization, there was a core make-it-up-as-you-go to the game that was surely rooted in playing it in high school when no one wanted to actually read the rulebooks cover to cover, but also, I think, inherent to the system. The jump to 3rd edition brought great satisfaction to the players and DMs who wanted every question answered somewhere in the rulebook -- take a look at the size of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, which is built on the bones of D&D 3.5.
It's probably more true that whatever version of D&D you come to first will be your D&D, regardless of the reasons. Wizards of the Coast have just announced "D&D Next", being the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and they did it in the New York Times of all places. 4E came out in 2008, 3E in 2000, and 2E in 1989. That's a slight acceleration of a few years with each new edition, and the reasons are pretty clear. D&D started with Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson at TSR, the product of a couple of guys playing games in their figurative basement. It grew and changed through licensing deals and cartoon shows and toy lines -- re-reading 80s New Mutants comics lately have led me to some rad ads for D&D the game and D&D the product line -- but in the 1990s TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast, who made their mark on the gaming world with Magic: The Gathering. A few years later, Wizards of the Coast was bought by Hasbro, toy and gaming overlords whose history is the same as most successful 20th century corporations/brands. They had success in the mid-century with things like Mr. Potato Head, and have grown since through mergers and acquisitions. This means that the people currently making Dungeons & Dragons have corporate bosses and conference calls and R&D meetings. I'm not saying Gary Gygax didn't have those over the course of his career, or that AD&D is pure and 4E is not because one was homegrown and the other was playtested at Hasbro-sponsored events. But I am saying that the development of a new set of rules is now more about selling a ton of new core rulebooks, rather than collecting new rules and revisions that have been developed organically by the gaming community.
Part of any given Dungeons & Dragons Edition lifespan is now a planned obsolescence. Maybe that was always true and I was too young or naive or disinterested in such things to observe it before. Maybe it's from having a professional life and seeing office politics play out in a number of environments, so that I can understand better the benefits a major rules overhaul would bring to Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro's year-end sales.
But what I feel in my bones is that I'm having friends over tonight to play AD&D, and the only things it's going to cost us is the price of snacks and beer. Kate & I are going to make a pasta bake and a pot of chili and we're going to sit in my office and pretend to be elves and dwarves and kobolds and owlbears. I'll leave the fighting and the pre-ordering to somebody else.
There's a big difference between playing D&D and being an active member of the D&D online community. As with most online communities, it's full of dark corners and bad attitudes -- but there are two blogs I've been reading since getting back into the game that I feel bring enthusiasm to the topic and show their love of the game. One is Grognardia, written by an RPG creator & enthusiast whose allegiance lies with 1st edition, and the other is The Id DM, written by a gamer who returned to D&D after several years away, and who currently plays 4E. Also, The Escapist did a great series of articles on D&D's Past, Present, and Future, the latest of which is a little outdated now after the "D&D Next" announcement. But still worth a read if you're interested in the game and its history and the people who are invested in either. It's especially illuminating with regard to the switch to 3rd Edition, the Open Gaming License, and the resulting "Edition Wars" that are bound to break out all over again when the new version premieres.
I have a new Dungeons & Dragons group. My last regular group was during the LA Days, and we played 4th edition. That's the one where the core races & classes are split up over multiple players' handbooks, and everyone gets sweet special moves when they level up. If you get through 2 or 3 combat encounters in a single session, then you're moving at a pretty quick clip.
If it sounds like I'm being harsh toward 4E, then it's because I'm being kind of harsh toward 4E. In general it's true that your D&D game is as fun as you make it, but after running a 4E campaign for a good three months of weekly sessions, by the end it was just lots of searching through papers for the proper power and, to me, a lot of restrictions on what I could make happen on the fly. The encounters in 4E involve a lot of different types of the same monsters -- Kobold Minions, Kobold Skirmishers, Kobold Slingers, Kobold Dragonshields, Kobold Wyrmpriests and Kobold Slyblades -- and a reliance on miniatures that made game prep lots of work and not a lot of fun. In general I'm not a snobby kind of dude, you know? But I think I really decided that 4E isn't for me.
But! After the move to Baltimore I found myself with a cadre of new friends who were interested in some D&Ding. I don't remember now how the idea first came up, but I know that Kate and I invited more people than we thought would/could come, because I figured it was the kind of event where folks would try it, get bored with it, and then maybe half would become regular players. But this very eve we're going to launch our fourth (I think?) session, and so far everyone has come back for more. The players are mostly new to D&D, and I don't think anyone is an RPG aficionado, so I took the opportunity to foist my preferred edition unto their unsuspecting nerd-holes:
In the words of Pierce Hawthorne, "I won Dungeons & Dragons! And it was Advanced!"
I chose 2nd edition partly because I already have a lot of the books, but mostly because my memory of AD&D is that it fosters more role-playing. The rules are there, but kind of loosey-goosey. Even as they expanded into more campaigns and realms of greater PC-customization, there was a core make-it-up-as-you-go to the game that was surely rooted in playing it in high school when no one wanted to actually read the rulebooks cover to cover, but also, I think, inherent to the system. The jump to 3rd edition brought great satisfaction to the players and DMs who wanted every question answered somewhere in the rulebook -- take a look at the size of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, which is built on the bones of D&D 3.5.
It's probably more true that whatever version of D&D you come to first will be your D&D, regardless of the reasons. Wizards of the Coast have just announced "D&D Next", being the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and they did it in the New York Times of all places. 4E came out in 2008, 3E in 2000, and 2E in 1989. That's a slight acceleration of a few years with each new edition, and the reasons are pretty clear. D&D started with Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson at TSR, the product of a couple of guys playing games in their figurative basement. It grew and changed through licensing deals and cartoon shows and toy lines -- re-reading 80s New Mutants comics lately have led me to some rad ads for D&D the game and D&D the product line -- but in the 1990s TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast, who made their mark on the gaming world with Magic: The Gathering. A few years later, Wizards of the Coast was bought by Hasbro, toy and gaming overlords whose history is the same as most successful 20th century corporations/brands. They had success in the mid-century with things like Mr. Potato Head, and have grown since through mergers and acquisitions. This means that the people currently making Dungeons & Dragons have corporate bosses and conference calls and R&D meetings. I'm not saying Gary Gygax didn't have those over the course of his career, or that AD&D is pure and 4E is not because one was homegrown and the other was playtested at Hasbro-sponsored events. But I am saying that the development of a new set of rules is now more about selling a ton of new core rulebooks, rather than collecting new rules and revisions that have been developed organically by the gaming community.
Part of any given Dungeons & Dragons Edition lifespan is now a planned obsolescence. Maybe that was always true and I was too young or naive or disinterested in such things to observe it before. Maybe it's from having a professional life and seeing office politics play out in a number of environments, so that I can understand better the benefits a major rules overhaul would bring to Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro's year-end sales.
But what I feel in my bones is that I'm having friends over tonight to play AD&D, and the only things it's going to cost us is the price of snacks and beer. Kate & I are going to make a pasta bake and a pot of chili and we're going to sit in my office and pretend to be elves and dwarves and kobolds and owlbears. I'll leave the fighting and the pre-ordering to somebody else.
There's a big difference between playing D&D and being an active member of the D&D online community. As with most online communities, it's full of dark corners and bad attitudes -- but there are two blogs I've been reading since getting back into the game that I feel bring enthusiasm to the topic and show their love of the game. One is Grognardia, written by an RPG creator & enthusiast whose allegiance lies with 1st edition, and the other is The Id DM, written by a gamer who returned to D&D after several years away, and who currently plays 4E. Also, The Escapist did a great series of articles on D&D's Past, Present, and Future, the latest of which is a little outdated now after the "D&D Next" announcement. But still worth a read if you're interested in the game and its history and the people who are invested in either. It's especially illuminating with regard to the switch to 3rd Edition, the Open Gaming License, and the resulting "Edition Wars" that are bound to break out all over again when the new version premieres.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Creative Life
Scott Pilgrim! It was the movie of the weekend. The only thing keeping it from movie of the year were two outrageously better movies, released earlier this year*. That's not the narrative playing out in the box office tallies this weekend, but, you know...
... whatcha gonna do? It'll find the kids on cable.
But what's been resonating with me most is something I read in an LA Times article running down the soundtrack song by song. Emily Haines of Metric talks about their song "Black Sheep," performed in the movie by Envy Adams's band The Clash at Demonhead, and says it was a song they'd recorded for a prior album, but had rejected for sounding ... well, too much like Metric, I guess:
Aspects of the song, the electro aspects of the band, and the abstract lyrical visualizations, are extreme examples of certain aspects of us ... These are late-night conversations the band has had. Everyone has commentary on what you’re doing, and everyone has interpretations. But we are also looking at it. It’s not like we’re blindly going, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ We’re aware of what we have been, and what we want to be.
Producer Nigel Godrich concurred: "It’s a very common criticism when you’re making records. You say, ‘Well, this sounds like somebody trying to be us."
But my introduction to Metric was through the Scott Pilgrim movie, and as of right now it's my favorite damn song on the record. I've listened to some other Metric songs in the days since seeing the picture, and "Black Sheep" remains my favorite -- pretty much because it sounds the most Metric-like of Metric's songs. It reminds me of what Paul McCartney has said about "Yesterday" -- that he had the melody in his head for quite some time, but initially wrote it off because it seemed too good. I'd go a bit further and say it's the most McCartney-ish of Paul McCartney songs -- and his first reaction was not to trust it.
A lot of people react that way to things they make that are good -- McCartney didn't trust "Yesterday" because he thought it was so good, someone else must have written it first, and he was simply remembering. Haines and Metric didn't trust "Black Sheep" because they thought it sounded so much like their band, that it must be bad. When I was very early in writing my (still-in-progress) novel Brand New Berto, I was having a lot of fun writing about Berto and Papa on a road trip. They leave in Papa's truck to go to a wake for a relative Berto's never met -- but Papa decides to blow it off, and instead they spend the day together in Houston. And I was in the shower one morning, and I was wondering what the hell I was writing about anyway, and I thought Well hey -- what if I kill off Papa? And Berto's alone in a strange city?
(Erm -- spoiler alert there. It's okay, it happens in chapter one.)
Berto didn't really get his chance to explore the city alone, because that idea spun the entire novel off into what it's actually about -- Berto loses a dad and encounters several different father figures/mentors over the course of the book. But my first reaction to that idea was, Naw, you can't kill Papa. Papa's great! But what was actually scary was the prospect of finding my story -- or, more directly, finding what it was I wanted to talk about, and write about, and explore, for the next several years of my life. That's daunting, when you put that kind of thing into specific terms. Somewhere in, what, 1965?, Paul McCartney writes "Yesterday" and realizes -- Oh shit, this is the kind of songwriter I am. This is what I'm going to be singing about for the rest of my life -- and, I dunno, maybe Metric had that moment when they heard themselves making "Black Sheep."
It's like hearing your voice on an answering machine**. You're suddenly face to face with yourself, from a step outside of yourself.
All of which is just to say -- Metric buried "Black Sheep" under a rock, until the Scott Pilgrim folks called around looking for a song to stand in for The Clash at Demonhead. Metric gave it to them, and Nigel Goodrich said it was perfect because, "It’s not Metric. It’s a shadow of Metric."
Only that's a lesson our man Pilgrim learned when he faced Nega-Scott -- the shadow's you. You can't turn away from it, you can only take it out to brunch.
(and I realize that Michael Cera is getting on everyone's nerves, but srsly d00dz -- the movie is unique and a hell of a lot of fun. The closest thing I've seen that compares is Kung Fu Hustle.)
*Winter's Bone and Inception, in that order.
**There used to be answering machines!
... whatcha gonna do? It'll find the kids on cable.
But what's been resonating with me most is something I read in an LA Times article running down the soundtrack song by song. Emily Haines of Metric talks about their song "Black Sheep," performed in the movie by Envy Adams's band The Clash at Demonhead, and says it was a song they'd recorded for a prior album, but had rejected for sounding ... well, too much like Metric, I guess:
Aspects of the song, the electro aspects of the band, and the abstract lyrical visualizations, are extreme examples of certain aspects of us ... These are late-night conversations the band has had. Everyone has commentary on what you’re doing, and everyone has interpretations. But we are also looking at it. It’s not like we’re blindly going, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ We’re aware of what we have been, and what we want to be.
Producer Nigel Godrich concurred: "It’s a very common criticism when you’re making records. You say, ‘Well, this sounds like somebody trying to be us."
But my introduction to Metric was through the Scott Pilgrim movie, and as of right now it's my favorite damn song on the record. I've listened to some other Metric songs in the days since seeing the picture, and "Black Sheep" remains my favorite -- pretty much because it sounds the most Metric-like of Metric's songs. It reminds me of what Paul McCartney has said about "Yesterday" -- that he had the melody in his head for quite some time, but initially wrote it off because it seemed too good. I'd go a bit further and say it's the most McCartney-ish of Paul McCartney songs -- and his first reaction was not to trust it.
A lot of people react that way to things they make that are good -- McCartney didn't trust "Yesterday" because he thought it was so good, someone else must have written it first, and he was simply remembering. Haines and Metric didn't trust "Black Sheep" because they thought it sounded so much like their band, that it must be bad. When I was very early in writing my (still-in-progress) novel Brand New Berto, I was having a lot of fun writing about Berto and Papa on a road trip. They leave in Papa's truck to go to a wake for a relative Berto's never met -- but Papa decides to blow it off, and instead they spend the day together in Houston. And I was in the shower one morning, and I was wondering what the hell I was writing about anyway, and I thought Well hey -- what if I kill off Papa? And Berto's alone in a strange city?
(Erm -- spoiler alert there. It's okay, it happens in chapter one.)
Berto didn't really get his chance to explore the city alone, because that idea spun the entire novel off into what it's actually about -- Berto loses a dad and encounters several different father figures/mentors over the course of the book. But my first reaction to that idea was, Naw, you can't kill Papa. Papa's great! But what was actually scary was the prospect of finding my story -- or, more directly, finding what it was I wanted to talk about, and write about, and explore, for the next several years of my life. That's daunting, when you put that kind of thing into specific terms. Somewhere in, what, 1965?, Paul McCartney writes "Yesterday" and realizes -- Oh shit, this is the kind of songwriter I am. This is what I'm going to be singing about for the rest of my life -- and, I dunno, maybe Metric had that moment when they heard themselves making "Black Sheep."
It's like hearing your voice on an answering machine**. You're suddenly face to face with yourself, from a step outside of yourself.
All of which is just to say -- Metric buried "Black Sheep" under a rock, until the Scott Pilgrim folks called around looking for a song to stand in for The Clash at Demonhead. Metric gave it to them, and Nigel Goodrich said it was perfect because, "It’s not Metric. It’s a shadow of Metric."
Only that's a lesson our man Pilgrim learned when he faced Nega-Scott -- the shadow's you. You can't turn away from it, you can only take it out to brunch.
(and I realize that Michael Cera is getting on everyone's nerves, but srsly d00dz -- the movie is unique and a hell of a lot of fun. The closest thing I've seen that compares is Kung Fu Hustle.)
*Winter's Bone and Inception, in that order.
**There used to be answering machines!
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