Category: Uncategorized

• Mara Jade’s actions make no sense, and are clearly there solely for the sake of plot and stretching out the series. There is no world in which an experienced assassin would go after a secret Sith Lord alone, without telling anyone or even leaving a Dead Man’s Switch so that in the event of her (more than probable) death, someone other than her will know what happened. It’s ludicrous and almost inexcusable.
• Jaina’s character is handled poorly. In the last two books the series, she’s billed a Big Fuckin’ Deal, what with being the Sword of the Jedi, destined to take out Darth Caedus before he can wrap his hands around the galaxy, and being trained in combat by the Madalorians in a way no other Jedi has even attempted. The problem, though, is that she’s barely even present in the rest of the series. For the most part, she’s sent on pointless sidequests and given an awful romantic subplot that goes nowhere (which is just more of the same of her awful development from the New Jedi Order series). Even worse, her Mando training amounts to nothing. More on that below.
• The finale is just bad. Especially the climactic battle. As I said, Jaina’s Mando training means nothing. You’d think the final climactic battle would be influenced by it, somehow. Maybe a more intense version of the Jag vs. Alema fight where he takes her out using brains, brawn and some neat gadgets? Nope. Jaina happens on Jacen in a hallway, he’s surprised and she cuts him in half. There’s a tiny bit of sadness because he’s focused on saving his daughter at the time, though this is hardly a revelation. That’s it. The only thing Jaina learns from the Mandalorians is that when you fight, you should really go all-out and show no mercy. Wow. What an amazing insight. That absolutely required months of training and preparation, as well as two full novels of build up.
• Troy Denning’s point-of-view shifts are unforgivable. There’s no other way to say this. He arbitrarily shifts POV inside chapters, jumping into other characters heads without warning, without indication and irreparably muddling the narrative. He does it in battle scenes. He does it in dialogue scenes. I can’t believe this got past an editor. Even for licensed fiction, it’s just awful.
• The author’s pet characters can get pretty annoying. Alema Rar especially, but the sprawling, mostly unnecessary Boba Fett and Wedge Antilles subplots aren’t much better. 

It’s not too difficult to name the two video game developers that had the most influence on my childhood. The first is Square-Enix, formerly Squaresoft and Enix, creators of such games as Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, etc. There is no other developer that even comes close.

The second, though, has to be Nintendo. It probably doesn’t need to be said that games like Zelda and Metroid are some of the best in creation, but even more than that, Nintendo created much of the hardware that facilitated Squaresoft’s game development. So, you know, there’s that.

It’s sad but interesting that both companies have fallen on somewhat hard times. Huge losses, wayward philosophies and lots of Internet jokes at their expense. It’s also interesting that the cause of these problems are actually blamed on opposite factors. For Square-Enix, it’s said that they’ve ignored their old school fans and design ethos and focused too much on the mobile, social future of games. For Nintendo, they’re said to be stuck in the past, refusing to create a robust online system and creating hardware that’s at least a generation out of date.

I’m not sure what to say about that disparity other than to point of the humor in it. But this week did bring some new revelations for both companies. The first is good news: Square-Enix is revising its profit estimates upward because of strong sales, especially of its flagship MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. It’s impossible to see this as anything but proof of the power of focusing on your core games; notice that the story isn’t “Square-Enix Forecast Bolstered By Success Of Facebook Games.” I expect this is good news for fans of SE’s classic games. I expect continued support of the Final Fantasy brand because of this, and maybe even some revivals of some old favorites (I want more SaGa!)

Now for the bad news. Nintendo posted a half-billion dollar loss for their most recent fiscal year, mainly because of poor Wii U sales. Unlike the SE example, it’s hard to pinpoint this on an exact cause. I mean, yeah, the Wii U isn’t selling. But why isn’t it selling? And more to the point, why is Nintendo refusing to do anything about it? Thusfar, any changes have been minor to say the least. I like my Wii U, and I’m not one of those who think they need to release a brand new uber system ASAP. But they need to do something, and like many conservative Japanese companies, they’re resisting that.

Yes, more games would be nice. But more than that, we need some surprises. We’ve got Mario, and yeah, it was good, but Mario games are expected to be good at this point. Mario Kart 8 is on its way, and it looks … like Mario Kart. Fun, of course, but not something that will make Wii U’s fly off the shelf. E3 is coming up, and if Nintendo wants any chance of turning this ship around, they need a “wow” moment. Something wholly unexpected that gets people’s attention. I don’t know what it is, but I’m really hoping for it.

Just wanted to give some shout-outs to some recent reads, so without further ado!

First up, Vessel of Kali, the debut novel from Richard Milner! A story I’d describe as dark and ponderous, full of intrigue and strange cultish philosophies that might seem a little bit familiar to us Earthians (which is a good thing!)

Who would I recommend it to? Well, fans of competent, highly literary fantasy. If you like China Miéville, I suspect you’ll fall in love with Milner’s writing. Like Miéville, Milner has a fantastic ear for description (there’s nary a chapter without a few evocative lines that make me incredibly jealous). But unlike a few of Miéville’s more plodding moments, Milner’s descriptions never get in the way of the story. The words are there to reveal the story, not obscure it.

Next, I have to highlight the latest in Barbara Ann Wright’s Starbride and Katya series. What began in The Pyramid Waltz and continued in For Want of a Fiend reaches epic new heights in A Kingdom Lost. I had the privilege of reading this before release, and have no qualms about saying it’s the best yet in the series. Starbride and Katya are separated, the wicked Roland’s suddenly got all kinds of power, and for once our heroines are forced to navigate the world as underdogs. Highly enjoyable, and I recommend it highly to fans of the series, or romantic and adventure fantasy in general.

And what else? Well, I’ve got a huge backlog to catch up on because of the last Humble eBook Bundle. I started with John Scalzi’s novella “The God Engines,” and it didn’t quite grab me, so I’m putting it aside. I’ve also read the first few chapters of Yahtzee Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame). I’m not a fan of his highly cynical video game “reviews,” so I was totally prepared to hate this in the ultimate show of justice/irony/obstinacy. To my surprise, I’ve actually been enjoying it. It’s Discworld Meets HHG2G Meets Warcraft, and while so far it’s not gut-bustingly hilarious or brain-meltingly challenging, it’s enjoyable enough for me to keep reading.

I’m also reading some more Star Wars pulp fiction. Now that Disney has officially announced that the old EU (now called Legends) is finished, and it’s very unlikely we’ll see any more stories in that universe, I’m actually optimistic that I can catch up. So, silver linings?

Have a good week!

I don’t have much to say today, but I did want to share a trailer that proves that even after a lot of disappointments and cynicism, I can still get a bit misty-eyed. Have a good weekend!

So, my posts around here have been pretty sporadic as of late. And by sporadic, I mean nonexistent. Some of it is due to my novel projects (Chanter is being shopped, Daughters is being revised), but that’s not the only reason, and it’s no excuse anyway. So starting tomorrow(!), I’m going to be getting onto a strict twice a week schedule. What will that entail?

Tuesdays: Literature type posts. Musings about writing, book reviews, maybe even some fiction here or there. This is where my Women of A Feast For Crows series will continue (and I promise, it’s coming!)

Thursdays: Video gaming stuff. I know, I know, if you go back far in the archives, you’ll see me specifically saying that I didn’t want to cover video gaming here. But you know what? Games are one of my primary passions, so why not write about them? I’ll try to make these posts outside the normal gaming-blog stuff. No talk of why Titanfall is OMG TEH BEST or why Kinect is OMG TEH SUCK. Expect a lot of retro focus.

In between, it’s possible I’ll have smaller stuff. But Tuesdays and Thursdays are the guaranteed posting days, so be on the lookout. And if you read a post, consider sharing or leaving a comment, even if it’s just “lol” — it helps me know that this is at least reaching some eyeballs!

See you tomorrow!

There’s been quite a flurry of news on the Star Wars front, and since I’ve occasionally reviewed some Expanded Universe novels here on the blog, I thought I’d talk about it. Let’s start with some movie news.

The Younguns or the Olds?

A New Canon

The EU was coming to an end

The old EU isn’t disappearing

Reboots can be fun

Like many others, I’ve recently been accepted into the beta for Blizzard’s new game Hearthstone, a collectible card battling game based on their popular Warcraft series. For those not familiar, the game is similar (VERY similar) to Magic: The Gathering, with a few twists. While it can be played in single-player mode against a PC, there’s no story progression or anything, and the online ranked play is the primary draw, along with an Arena mode where you’re tasked with building a deck on the spot from random cards. It’s a lot of fun. But it could be a lot more fun. Instead of giving a huge runthrough or even a stream (there are literally thousands of those online already, if you’re interested), I thought I’d just give some quick impressions.

What I liked:

– The aesthetics. Hearthstone is a really pretty game. The art is great to look at, the music and voices are wonderful and the UI just works. I never found myself wondering how to play cards or check text. In fact, as a former Magic player, everything worked incredibly intuitively.

– It’s easy on the Pay 2 Play stuff. Card packs and entry tickets to Arena mode are available for real money, but they can also be purchased with Gold that you earn in-game. You earn gold simply by completing daily quests, and I’ve found that I can buy a pack about every two days, or enter the arena (which guarantees a pack as a reward, or more if you do well) every three. That’s not bad, as each quest can take anywhere from 3-6 battles to complete, and I don’t play any more than that anyway. The bottom line is that casual players will find no need to invest chunks of money to Keep Up With the Joneses.

– It’s very casual friendly. Aside from Blizzard’s classic ranking system that tries to ensure you win about half the games you play, the cards and decks are constructed in a way to make it very easy to construct a competitive deck even with basic cards. There are no monumentally unbeatable combinations, and while it is possible to make something that just doesn’t work, even a modicum of thought will get you a deck you can win with. This, of course, leads to the conclusion that wins are due more to player skill and luck than deck construction, and in my experience, it’s more of the latter. Depending on the type of person you are, that is a good thing or a bad thing.

– The computerized nature of the game takes a lot of headache out of playing. There’s no “Okay … does that affect apply before or after I take damage?” stuff. The game takes care of it.

I’m at the bottom, losing horribly.

What I Didn’t Like:

– It’s missing a lot of Magic — pun intended. In their efforts to make the game casual-friendly (which I support!) Blizzard has also robbed from Hearthstone a lot of what made MtG great. The primary culprit is the lack of cards, meaning that everyone’s deck is the same. Some people will point out that this is often true in competitive MtG as well, but that’s not the point. The point is that in casual MtG, there are a WIDE variety of decks to make. Heal deck, burn deck, equipment deck, goblin deck, suicide black deck, etc. The list goes on and on.

In Hearthstone, there are 8 character classes, and each class gets a set of unique cards the others can’t access. But that’s as far as customization goes. Yes, priest will have some healing cards, warlock will have some demons. But we all have the same 1-mana creatures. At turn 7, we’re all going to play the Stormwind Champion, a heavy-duty creature that increases the power and defense of all other creatures.

I have never once felt the feeling of “Oh! Wow!” when faced with a card I’ve never seen before. I’ve never been surprised by a combo or synergy or deck strategy I hadn’t thought of, because there are very few deck strategies to play around with.

Now, maybe I’m being unfair comparing a brand new card game to one that’s been around for 15 years, with all the card types that entails. And maybe a loss of diversity is worth being friendly to more casual players. But in Magic, I was constantly wanting to tinker my deck in response to things I saw played against me. I was constantly thinking up new strategies. In Hearthstone, the deck constructions for each class are pretty obvious, with only a few choices to be made. And even then, there’s a lot of luck involved. Simply put, Hearthstone is not as enthralling as MtG.

– To give you a specific point, I feel like Hearthstone’s lack of Instant cards takes a lot of strategy out of the game. In Magic, there were certain cards you could play during your opponents turn to mess with their strategy. It required complex thinking from both you (“Do I play a creature, or save my mana so I can use a counterspell?”) and your opponent (“Did he just have extra mana, or does he have a card up his sleeve?”) Hearthstone tries to compensate with Yugioh-esque trap cards, but there are so few, and they’re almost all a version of “If a creature attacks you, it dies,” they don’t seriously affect the metagame in any way.

Conclusions

Is Hearthstone ready for primetime? Well … yes, and no. As I said, it’s amazingly polished for a game in beta, and I suspect they could release it today and make a ton of money. The gameplay, however, is not currently something that I’d sink any real time or money into. A game or two a day for a little while, probably, but not something I’d seriously engage with. I suspect that won’t change. The sorts of gameplay improvements I outlined above are MAJOR changes. Even introducing Instant cards would require a complete rejiggering of deck balance, so what I’m seeing is probably what we’ll get.

If it ends up being free to play, though, it’s certainly worth trying out, especially for hardcore card game fans.

So there have been a couple of news stories in the past few days revolving DC’s movie universe, and it looks like we’re soon going to see Wonder Women herself on the big screen. Great news, right?

Nope.

Well, hold on a second. Turns out she’s not getting her own movie. Nope! She’s being thrown in as a cameo in the Superman vs. Batman film, leading to the inevitable Justice League movie. What do you think she is, the world’s most famous superheroine and one of DC’s iconic superhero trinity? Come on now!

I won’t rehash all the tired excuses over why a Wonder Woman movie won’t work. Okay, how about just one — “Her villains aren’t iconic!” Because moviegoers worldwide were OH SO FAMILIAR with Thor’s triumph over the Ice Giants of Jotunheim. Okay, I’m done.

It’s clear from this move that WB, and to some extent DC, has no faith in the Wonder Woman character. She’ll show up at the end of Bats vs Supes, shake her inevitable star-spangled panties (because you know it would betray canon to change her costume, not like we’ve ever worried about that with male superheroes!) and expect us to cheer.

And that won’t be the end. There will be no fucking Wonder Woman movie. There will be no Wonder Woman origin story. The followup to Supes vs. Bats is clearly Justice League, where Wonder Woman will be relegated to an also-ran along with Aquaman and Hawkman or who the fuck ever the put in to round out the cast, when Superman and Batman will be doing the brunt of the dramatic work.

Fuck everything about this. Fuck WB. Fuck DC. Fuck Zack Snyder. Fuck this shitty, cowardly move.

As if that wasn’t enough, look at their other announcement this week: DC has already decided to dip into their second-tier heroes to try to expand their cinematic roster. That’s right. Booster Gold and the Suicide Squad are getting movies before Wonder Woman.

Let me repeat that.

The Suicide Squad is getting a movie before Wonder Woman.

I’m probably being hyperbolic, but it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that DC simply has no respect for its female characters. It’s shown this time and time again. It’s sad, disappointing and infuriating that such a powerful feminist icon (really, one of the few powerful feminist icons that exists in pop culture) is held back by such myopic asshats.

As for the casting itself: I’m sure Gal Gadot will be fine. Whatever. I’m not familiar with her work, but she looks the part and by all accounts she’s a pretty tough woman. But the fact that she’s not a bankable star in the same way Christian Bale, Ben Affleck or even Henry Cavill (a main actor in a long-running, popular TV show) were makes me think it’s fairly unlikely that the producers have pegged her to headline her own movie franchise.

Is it possible that I’m exaggerating this, that Wonder Woman’s cameo will be tasteful and well-received and will lead the way for a superbly-written, power, feminist Wonder Woman solo film? Uh, sure. Is it less likely than a Texas snowstorm in July? Yeah, I think so. Especially, as Charlie Anders so deftly points out, with Zack Snyder at the helm (though I’ll point out I disagree with her about Wonder Woman being substantially harder to adapt than any other hero).

All the more reason for me to finish editing that Wonder Woman script that’s been lying here on my hard drive. Not to prove how awesome I am, but to prove how goddamn easy it is to make a compelling Wonder Woman film, if people would just pull their heads out of their asses.

You can find the first half of my FenCon X panel writeups here. Now, on with the rest!

Death as a Character

Worldbuilding

Politics in Genre Fiction

Here it is! For any of you that had to miss FenCon this year, I’ve got links to authors and writeups of the panels I attended. Enjoy!

Modern Good vs. Ancient Evil

* Barbara Ann Wright (@zendragandt)
* Vivian Caethe (@VivianCaethe)
* Julia S. Mandala 

First panel of the con! And of course, HUGE expectations. Well, not really. More like tired audience and tired panelists, especially on a Friday afternoon after driving 3 hours. But thankfully, these three women overcame that and facilitated a pretty interesting discussion.

– The panelists noted that a lot of the obsession with modern good vs. ancient evil comes from modern society being impressed with itself. In my own experience as a liberal bordering on communist … yeah. This is sometimes true.

– It’s fun to have a simple, easy-to-understand evil force to defeat, compared to a modern threat like terrorism whose root causes are difficult to understand and even more difficult to remove.

– However, there have been portrayals of ancient evil against which modern forces stood no chance. Lovecraft comes to mind. Also an interesting parallel in that Lovecraft’s views on race and sex are pretty abhorrent by modern standards.

– Cabin in the Woods is a fantastic representation of modern good vs. ancient evil. Without spoiling too much, it definitely tends toward the Lovecraftian side of things.

– A great idea developed by the panelists: crowdfunded evil. A Kickstarter for a Dark Empire? I would read that story.

– Heroes used to be protective of the status quo. Think Lord of the Rings. Sauron disrupts the normal flow of life, and Frodo and friends struggle to protect it. Many modern good vs. evil stories are the opposite, featuring rebels or usurpers overthrowing evil. What does this change represent in societal views?

– One of the women in the audience made a fantastic observation that the modern good vs. ancient evil trope is mirrored in industrial vs. nature stories. Nature in these stories (think The Andromeda Strain or Alien) is often set up as an ancient force getting revenge. This is a little complicated by the fact that it’s sometimes science that provokes nature’s revenge, but this is also sometimes present in good vs. evil stories (Wheel of Time comes to mind).

Reading suggestions: Larry Correia, H.P. Lovecraft

Beastly Fans

* Barbara Ann Wright (noticing a pattern?)
* Kathryn Sullivan
* Mary Turzillo
* Rosemary Clement-Moore (@rclementmoore)

This panel was nominally about the lasting power of certain common fantasy creatures. Dragons, griffins, that sort of thing. What it really was about was dinosaur porn. Yep. Beasts led to Beauty and the Beast, which led to bestiality which led to the phenomenon of dinosaur porn. Blame Rosemary for leading us down that particular road.

Regardless of everyone’s ability to stray offtopic, it was awfully enjoyable. Sort of a “had to be there” thing. Panelists were hilarious, and I especially enjoyed hearing about Mary Turzillo’s risque escapades.

When Action Gets in the Way of Story

* Barbara Ann Wright
* Kevin Hosey
* Rob Rogers (@robcrogers3)
* Steven Brust (@StevenBrust)
* J. Kathleen Cheney

This panel was pretty much as described. When is action too much? How do you balance an awesome chase scene with, you know, actual plot and character development? As the discussion progressed, the panel lumped sex in along with action, which make complete sense as they serve pretty similar functions in most stories.

– Every scene should be worthy. This sounds obvious, but it’s so important that it’s worth stating. Steven Brust had a fantastic line here that he applied to both action scenes and sex scenes (though it works for any scene, really): Action scenes should be transformative, meaning something changes about the character. To that, I add ‘revelatory.’ That is, the character doesn’t necessarily have to change if the purpose of the scene is to teach the audience something about a character we didn’t know before. Brust’s example was the ‘fight’ scene in Temple of Doom where Indiana Jones is confronted with a giant sword wielder and ends the battle with a single bullet. That’s not particularly transformative, but it is exceedingly revelatory.

– A good trick to making action/sex scene meaningful is to focus on the dialogue. Dialogue is where character is revealed — as long as you stay away from cheesy action one-liners.

– Another Brustism: “When a fish tells me about water, I’m bored.” Avoid overexplaining, especially in things that the character would already be familiar with. It doesn’t make sense for a character to stop and think about the mechanics of a hovercar or laser gun if they use one every day.

Copyright 101

* Patrick Nielsen Hayden (@pnh)
* Cory Doctorow (@doctorow)
* Paul Herman

FenCon is attended by a lot of writers, and as such, there’s a lot of shop talk about the actual craft of writing. The copyright panel took a slightly different path. It wasn’t related to writing specifically (though writing certainly overlaps here), but with the utterly broken copyright system in the US.

– The United States Patent and Trademark Office is funded directly by patent applications. This gives the USPTO a huge incentive to affirm patents.

– Non Producing Entities (a fancy word for patent trolls) don’t produce any products, and as such, they can’t be countersued. That makes them much harder to defend against than big companies, who pretty much know they’re all infringing on each other in some way.

– What’s the metric for judging the success of an intellectual protection system? We never got a good answer to this, which is unfortunate, but it’s clear that “number of patents” makes absolutely no sense as a measurement.

– Once established, it’s very hard to take away property rights. The interests involved are too powerful. Thus, gradual reforms are far more likely than a broad revamp of copyright.

– Copyright trolling falls under the corruption problem. Stated simply, it’s hard to punish someone who benefits by hurting society, since their benefit (and thus power) is concentrated, and the harm is diffuse. Requires all the people harmed to band together, which can be difficult to manage.

– The Magnificent 7 Solution: Every year we can pay the bandits, or we can get together and hire the mercenaries. Crowdfund patent troll defense. Now, this was just a brief discussion, and my notes are sparse, so *please* don’t nitpick Doctorow’s solution on the basis of my writeup. But the gist is that people in risk of being sued (or who have been sued before) would dedicate money to a Kickstarter-like fund. Then, whenever one of the participants is sued, that money would go to legal defense to beat back the troll, which any legal fees won going back into the system. According to Doctorow, it would be self-sustaining; the more lawsuits patent trolls opened (which they’d have to ramp up, since they’d be losing money), the more money the fund would gain.

Now, the main problem I had with this problem is that it seems to assume that most (or all!) of the cases would be won by the defendants. This is a problematic assumption in a couple of ways. First, not all of the defendants are actually going to be innocent of infringement. And second, even when they are, there’s no guarantee a court will actually see it that way. Courts are notoriously overprotective of IP.

When I raised this concern, Doctorow admitted that if it went wrong, it could create some very bad precedents, and you’d have to be careful. But he didn’t really have a solution for the problem of losing cases. To be fair, his discussion was more general, rather than a fully fleshed out plan ready for production.

– “…gaping buttsex…” -Cory Doctorow. He was talking about porn and copyright, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is I want to see that quote on next year’s FenCon program.

– The panelists cited a study which said that most artistic work has a 14-year life span. That is, after 14 years, it’s not really generating money for the IP holders any longer. Now, I haven’t seen that study. I’m curious if it’s still true in the age of digital publishing, where long tails can be loooooooong indeed.

– Doctorow floated the idea of a compulsory license for fiction. In the same way that you can cover a song on a CD or a bar for a flat fee without the permission of the artist, you’d be able to write fanfiction (for profit, even? maybe) for a flat fee. You’d probably have to make sure this only applied to individuals, and not, like, WB adapting your novel into a movie without paying. This probably isn’t a workable solution, though, since authors are notoriously hardheaded about “owning” their work.

– Cory Doctorow’s Utopian Copyright Solution: separate individual users from participants in the copyright industry. Adding on to the previous point, it is absurd to treat fanfiction and a movie adaptation with the same copyright rules. Absurd to treat someone downloading a copy of Harry Potter and someone opening a multimillion dollar Harry Potter theme park based on the same per-use measurement.