Pacific Rim is Coming...

Have you seen those trailers?



Pacific Rim is gong to be the first IMAX film I see, and the first 3d film I see. Yeah, I'm that technologically backwards.

I love monster films. Have for a long time. Godzilla is, among other things, my personal trainer. I own more films with Godzilla in them than any other character. One of the most expensive book I have ever purchased was the second edition of David Kalat's Critical History of Toho's Godzilla Series, 2nd edition. (In case you're wondering, the most expensive was the slipcased God of the Razor from Subterranian Press.) Because Godzilla films are fun to watch, and they also present an interesting history of Japan. As Kalat says, Godzilla is commonly understood to be a metaphor for nuclear bombing, it is also uniquely indicative of the Japanese experience. It almost always comes from the sea, like a tsunami. Under its weight, tall skycrapers crumble, as if from an earthquake. There is a power, and at their best a majesty, to these films.

I also enjoy Godzilla pastiches and homages. I've recently acquired Gorgo, the British version in which the titular monster stomps London. Yonggary is a South Korean remake. Each of these puts a unique national stamp on the story of the creature that destroys cities by stomping on them. The lost Bollywood version is Gogola, and I would love to find a copy of it. So would a lot of other people.

In the next year, two major American kaiju films are coming. Pacific Rim this year, and Godzilla next, which is the 60^th anniversary of the release of the original Godzilla. I'm hoping that these movies will revive the viability of the kaiju franchises. I also hope they don't suck, like the last American version of Godzilla. If these two films are good and succesasful, we might have another wave of influenced films, especially in this climate of imitation over innovation.

Certainly the prices on certain Godzilla DVDs are astronomically stupid. Destroy All Monsters, released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2011, just two years ago, is a hundred bucks on Amazon. And while Sony is doing a magnificent job releasing the earlier Godzilla films in both American and original Japanese formats (I'm a sub, rather than a dub sort of guy), their release has been spotty. Hopefully, the 60^th Anniversary will prompt the release of the more obscure DVDs, such as Smog Monster, and finally an American release of Godzilla 1984 on DVD. We got Godzilla vs Biollante last year. Weird-o film Zaat just got a Blu-ray release, is it really that difficult to finagle a couple more Godzilla releases?

For the next year, I'll be intermittently (how can a blog that gets updated once a month carry on an intermittant series? Hell if I know). discussing Godzilla and adding a few thoughts I have on the Big Guy.

"Strong Leaders"

I have come to realize that I have a distrust of people who are described as 'strong leaders'. We consider the democracy the most civilized of governments, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel lays out why democracies with social mobility are some of the most successful governments in history. But humans are social creatures, and we have a social hierarchy. We instinctvely like strong leaders, our alphas.

The problem, of course is that we have ALWAYS had strong leaders. And being a strong leader does not qualify one to be a good democratic, or republican leader. Idi Amin Dada and Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Franco, and Slobodan Milošević were certainly charismatic. They were leaders because they were strong, posessed of 'strong' personalities, and kept the underlings in line. But fanaticism has a charisma all it's own, and democracy does not need people who rule by strength. Further, the implied dichotomy is that anyone who is not strong is weak, a backhanded slap at anyone who does not crush their opposition.

Is this about Margaret Thatcher? Damn skippy.

David Weigel, the Thatcher apologist who got his article on Slate.com is typical when it comes to strong-leader apologism. I stopped reading when he wrote "Crass basically transformed into an all-Thatcher-bashing band, commemorating the war with "How Does It Feel to Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead" (British casualties were 255)." Because this contains the sort of irritating and self-serving parochialism that I find so distasteful in followers and excusers of strong leaders. British casualties were only 255, but Argentinian ones (according to Wikipedia were 650, leading us to, wait for it, 900 casualties. Which is not exactly the thousand from the song, but I'm allowing for artistic licence. Weigel chooses to ignore all the Argentine deaths, because they're not on his favored side of the war. But there can be little doubt, if we accept that Thatcher provoked the war (as Crass says) then she is responsible for all the deaths resulting from it. But Weigel doesn't see fit to acknowledge the humanity of the Argentine soldiers.

Which is about right for anyone who supported Margaret Thatcher. I'm not going to celebrate her death, the way many Scottish writers have. But I am going to say that we need a clear-sighted retrospect. She destroyed manufacturing in the UK. She enriched herself and her cronies by selling off the public utilities. She was a friend of aparthied, and considered mass murderer, torturer, and embezzler Augusto Pinochet a personal friend. Possibly because she considered him a 'strong leader.'

We no longer need these strong leaders. We have had charismatic dictators for thousands of years, and most people would not want to live under their rule. What we need now are leaders with ideas. Leaders who welcome all rational points of view to the table, and don't get their own way all the time. Because democracy is not many people following a strong leader. It's the people making the decision for themselves, of their own free will, without coersion or expectation of reward, and making compromises because they respect their neighbors.

Gone...

Sometimes I think that we don't die of old age, we die of the accumulated sorrow of missing our friends.

Yesterday, one of the most generous and unfailingly pleasant people I have ever met died.  Rick Hautala was a pro, but at NECON or Anthocon, he always had time to listen to little people and talk with us.  He was great person to talk with, a straight shooter, and a magnificent storyteller.    

Rick was unfailingly critical of himself, and spoke frankly about his depression, and his struggles to be motivated.  In that, we had a lot in common.  Only I'm still too insecure to talk about it.  It was incredibly reassuring to hear that someone so successful and talented as Rick struggled.  That he was able to talk about it told me about his strength of character, and that let me know that I was not alone.  I didn't know him well enough to call him 'brother' and I never had the privelige of working with him.  But I did appear between covers with him in Epitaphs.  His story, "Perfect Witness" was typical of him, brilliant. 

In an unpublished book, someone I invented representing a fictional religion once said "We are like stars.  And even if we aren't there, our light still reaches out to those around us.  We are not gone, we are not forgotten, so long as that light is seen."

Rick may be gone.  But his light will be felt for a long the in the hearts and writing of many for years to come. 

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Media Properties

Yesterday, I picked up Hellblazer #300.   The final issue. 

I'm sad.  John Constantine, the archetypal Sweary British Mage, has been a fixture for more than half of my life.  I've got more comics featuring the character than I can comfortably lift.  The most popular section of my website is dedicated to John Constantine. And now he's gone, subsumed into a younger, blander version of himself without any sort of ties to the culture that he grew up in.

That's the John Constantine in the DCUniverse, the new 52.  He's younger and nobs around with Zatanna, the Phantom Stranger, Frankenstein's creature.  But he's not much of a character.  Original John Constantine was rooted in the punk of the 70's and 80's.  He was a member of a spectacularly failed band (Mucous Membrane).  This gave him a center, a starting point.  His disrespect for authority, his iconoclasm and cynicism made perfect sense, because I understood the movement he came from, the zeitgeist from which he was born.  The desperate 70's were his formative years.  

This depth came from the minds of Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben.  They looked around and created a character that was from their time.  And people responded to John Constantine.  He was something new--a working-class mage.  Until Constantine, comics magic weilders have been remote mages, men with towers, women with witches terrible powers.  John was different.  He was a magical mechanic, not getting involved in the ritual of magic, but doing the necessary things in order to get the desired result.  If the words are the thing, then why not just say them, rather than intoning them?  Was a copper-inlaid pentacle really necessary, or would a quick chalk one on a linoleum floor be just as useful?  This practical approach was unique, stripping away the mysticism and obfuscation, as well as the overblown speeches.  Dr. Strange has all sorts of charms and talismans, the Specter is the Veneance of God, Dr. Fate channels the power of whichever Egyptian god through his helmet, the Phantom Stanger has some strange origin story.  John as none of these.  He wasn't a doctor, a mystic, or Judas.  He was a self-made sorcerer who got into magic as a way to impress the girls.  He came from a poor family, ran away when he was 16.  Never went to college. 

As such, he was always an iconoclast, and a smart one.  He has never been a hero, because heroes do the right thing.  John was a ruthless bastard who looked at the big picture and kept his eye on it, often at a personal cost, or to the cost of a friend.  That said, what he did always needed doing.  And after the price was paid, he usually got drunk.  We've even seem him cry a time or two.  Constantine was that small person who moved the wheels of the world because they had to.  Not because they were getting fame or glory.  He was easy to relate to, because he wore his faults and vices on his sleeve.  He smoked, he drank, he cursed. All of these motions and emotions made him human, someone I could relate to. 

He changed as different writers wrote him differently.  Jamie Delano's Constantine was very different from Garth Ennis's Irish Rebel, Mike Carey's masterful manipulator.  All these were different and yet recognizeable as the same person.  But there were some authors who didn't get it, who didn't understand the point of planting your feet, and flipping off God, the Devil, and the police simply because it needed to be done.  And ultimately, this was Constantine's downfall. 

Because Constantine was a media property.  The media he appeared in was produced on a deadline, and that had to be hit, whether the writer had a good idea or not.  And since the creators weren't willing to write him for more than a decade, the chore had to be passed on to someone else.  And so there were John stories that were from individuals who didn't really understand what he was about.  Certainly the film that used the Constantine name was pretty clueless.  As, sadly, was the last man to write the comic.  But that's what happens when a character is a media property.   

And so one of my favorite favoirte media properties flicks his ciggie into the bushes and heads out for Pubs Unknown.  There's going to be a hole in my life for a while.  But I'll always have those brilliant issues, and when I want, I can open up a box of comics and visit the good old days. 

My Pyramid Texts

My Pathfinder game is coming along nicely.  The PCs are living and working in Osirion, the Ancient Egypt analog of the Inner Sea.  They're doing a lot of tomb raiding, and I'm getting working my font wonkery out by fancying up the messages they find on the walls and in the messages they get sent.

RPGs are more a performance art than anything else.  A session is dull unless you're involved, and it happens in the moment.  And because I want a larger audience for my work, I'm sharing these pieces of ephemera with my readers.  And because my blog posts seem to get more hits when I post a lot of images. 

I won't say they're beautiful props.  But I am enjoying the creation process. 

First, a sad note from someone trapped in a tomb, from Goodman Games' quite wonderful Malice of the Medusa.  I used GIMPshop's oilify tool to make the ink spread a little.  It looks older, and is difficult to read.  My players were able to puzzle it out, and I think the difficulty made them a) irritated but b) more invested in the narrative, because they had to work on it.
  

The 1^st edition adventure Pharaoh is one of the most entertaining I have yet run.  For some background, check out the wikipedia entry.


 Pharaoh is a long-cherished treasure in my collection, one of the reasons that I decided to run a campaign based primarily in Osirion.  After some twenty years, I finally got to run the adventure, and it was delightful.  There's also a lot of text to be 'read aloud' to the players, which easily converted into documents to be fonted up.
 
Instead of just placing the words onto a sandstone background, I also copied the text into a hieroglyphic format, faded it so it wouldn't overwhelm the English text (I love layers).  This allows me to have my cake, readable text, and still have Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  I did this for the majority of the Pharaoh documents.  
  


  
  
Of course, anyone who read this knew it wasn't true.  

  
The unrobbable tomf of Amun-Ra was no ordinary trapped tomb, let me tell you.  There was a lot of backstory, which is part of the reason there was so much text.  Lucky for the adventurers, the individuals involved were obsessive chroniclers.
  
The players never did get the High Priests's name "Munafik" right.  But that didn't bother me, and  they never managed to ask him. 

And in case you didn't think the builders of Amun-Ra's tomb were jerks.  Here they reach out to the party members from 4,000 years ago and thumb their noses at them.  I love those guys.



Here we start a series of documents that are the Pharaoh Amun-Ra's personal chronicle.  I really liked this; it gave the villain of the piece a motivation, and made the guy who built the trap-proof tomb a heart.  He's not a particularly good person, but he's understandable, rather than just eeeevil.  I've altered it a bit here and there to fit into my campaign.  I would have liked to put this on one, long scroll, but I didn't have the printing technology available.  Still, these were a load of fun to make.      









Later, I again turned to Goodman Games, this time plundering their In Search Of Adventure for an adventure of an avatar of the Scorpion Queen.  The adventure doesn't contain a lot of flavor, so I made it up myself.  Dire warnings and all that.  The top is a little muddled because of the darkness of the sandstone and the hieroglyphic text.  But the reading wasn't essential, so I let them struggle a bit. 

 
The picture is a Sandwalker from Kobold Quarterly #7 (which is quite worth picking up).  Great picture, which I mucked with to make it look more like a carving with a hint of color.  The real illustration is much more detailed and pants-shittingly terrifying.  

Why Monster Movies Are Not All The Same

I'm a Godzilla fan.  I make no apologies.  I enjoyed David Kalat's Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series because I think just about any sort of entertainment that stands up to being taken apart has worth. 

I've just watched Godzilla vs King Ghidorah for, I think, the third time.  It's not one of the great Godzilla films, and that's partially because there's so much of the human plot going on.  The fights are dissappointingly short. 

When the monster is the draw of the film, that monster should be front and center.  When I buy a Godzilla film, I'm buying it for the Godzilla action.  I want to see Godzilla blasting away at giant monsters in the middle of a city that's getting massively trashed.  Some monster films, and I'll pick zombie films as an example, aren't really about the monsters.  Night of the Living Dead was not so much about zombies, as it was people under pressure.  And that's how a zombie film should be.  As a monster, zombies aren't that interesting, unless they're given a twist.  They're just dead people.  They're interesting in the fear they produce in living people, and how people react in difficult circumstances, similar to the now little-seen disaster film.     

Big monster films, in which the monster is usually in the title, are about the monster.  Godzilla, for example. The actions of the humans should revolve around the monsters.  This was, in part, a major failing of the American Godzilla.  The audience came to see a monster film.  Instead, they got a number of small personal dramas that had nothing to do with the monster.  Which could have been fascinating (but wasn't), but I wanted to see the monster.  And while the monster sequences, whether suit animated or CG, are expensive, they're what bring the audience in.  Why was GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack the highest grossing film of the Millennium series?  Because the last half hour of the film is devoted to the monster battle.  Godzilla is shown kicking the shit out of monsters, buildings, and the military.  In few other films is he portrayed as so relentless, monstrous, or invulnerable. 

The only film to succesfully straddle these two approaches, to balance the monster with the human drama is The Host.  This was hugely successful due in part to director Bong Joon-ho's decision to make his film more a drama with monster than a film about a monster. 

How I Make My Own Fun

I live in a medium-sized town, and as a a result, I have to make my own fun.  Sure, there's other fun to be had that other people do, but if I really want to have some good-quality fun, I pretty much have to provide it myself. 

In October, I started a Pathfinder game.  For those of you who write and haven't played one of these, a good RPG session is like four hours of brainstorming with freinds.  There's laughter, creativity, the wildness of bouncing ideas off each other, and the satisfaction of getting problems solved.  It's partially an excuse to get people into the house, because most of my social time has been at at my retail job, and thus poor-quality.  I'd been playing minis games (Warmachine, Warhammer) for the past couple of years, and the competitive nature of the games makes them less enjoyable to me than the collaborative process that is RPG playing.  And there's the opportunity to not only buy a bunch of books, but the expectation to pore through them for hours on end.  And that tickles the bibliophile in me. 

I've mastered a fair number of games over the years, and there's a couple of ideas I'd like to share.

1)  Fun.  Everyone is there to have fun.  As the Game Master, its important than the players understand and buy into the premise of the campaign.  In my Call of Cthulhu games, it was the opportunity to face overwhelming odds and have stories to tell about how the characters got killed.  In a later Over the Edge campaign, it was the chance to enter into strange conspiracies and experience massive weirdness.  If the players aren't interested in the premise, then the game master and the players will be at odds as to what the game is about.

That said, different people have different ideas of fun.  I once devoted about half of the run of an entire game to screwing a player's character as hard as possible, in game.  He loved it.  Because he was getting attention, and his character was obviously special.  He could see the light at the top of the very long drain I had dumped him down, and looked forward to climbing through the slime towards the light.  Interestingly, we both had fun doing this.  Me by dumping on him, and him by keeping his eyes on the prize. 

My current game is based in Fantasy Egypt, combining Hamunaptra with the Paizo's own Osirion.  I pitched it to the players as mummies and tombs, and some social campaigning in between.  This gives me the freedom to hand them dungeon crawls and time to prepare and do other stuff in between as they establish a base of operations.  This allows them to not be murderhobos, but gives them a sense of place and belonging.  This also helps the players care about their characters as people, rather than wargame miniatures.  This leads to more fun.   

2) Collaboration.  No one person should be responsibly for everyone's fun.  That would be very difficult.  I work best as a Game Master when I am more of a coach than a dictator.  Give the players some freedom, as well as a structure that involves them in the overall campaign.  Give them a reason to be involved in the plot, rather than just assuming they'll want to go along.  The Pathfinder RPG provides a good one, the Pathfinder Society, which serves as a warehouse of information and opportunities.  I took a slightly different approach, because I didn't want a reliably good-natured sponsor for the players to rely on as a moral center. They were all prisoners comdemned to die... and I thought of this before Skyrim!  In a strange land, the characters must provide their own moral guidance, especially as they gain in power and prestige, becoming more enmeshed in the local politics. 

3) Perparation.  This was a giant bugaboo for me.  I've got work, my current book, and other things I want to do.  Pathfinder, unfortunately, requires a lot of work if you want to customize an enemy.  The advantage to the Pathfinder rule set is that you have a tremendous amount of freedom to build exactly the sort of enemy/individual you want.  Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and work.  This was beginning to worry me before I found the Dingles Games Pathfinder NPC Generator and Perram's Spell book which allow me to create an NPC and equip them with a quickly-referenced spells.  These applications are tremendous time-savers, allowing me to concentrate on plot and story ideas, rather then mechanics problems.    

And it's working.  I'm definitely more consistently cheery, and I look forward to every Tuesday night.  The players are having a good time and don't mind telling me.  While this takes a little away from my writing, I think that in the long term, it will keep my mood up and stimulate my creativity.  

And hey, fun!

About Fear...

Last month, I wrote about fear.  Fear of embarrassing oneself is often a hitch factor in creativity.  "What if this idea is no good?"  "What if people laugh at this idea?" are pretty common ones, and that sort of fear can be paralyzing. 


But it's also exceedingly common.  It takes a long time to overcome that fear of failure, that fear of not being good enough.  Many people, and I'll add that many successful people retain that crippling fear that what they make is not fit for public consumption, and that makes them hesitate. 


Which is not to say that creation is easy, or that everything that we make is fit for public consumption.  Nickolaus Pacione has taught me that, if nothing else.  But I'll never get anywhere if I don't start.  I'll never develop good ideas if I don't work through the bad ones, and have enough of each to recognize a bad one when it presents itself.  More importantly, if I hadn't cycled through a bunch of ideas, I'll never get comfortable with the concept that ideas are easy to come by.  Ideas are cheap.  Good ideas are plentiful.  Being willing to discard mediocre ideas means that I spend less time wrangling them. Because experience has shown me that if I wait five minutes, a better idea will come up. 


Is also seems that, after five years, I'm going to hit 20,000 views of this blog.  I'm aware that the majority are Google search hits, and that I have yet to break a thousand hits in a single month.  But thank you to everyone who has read this strange personal/writing blog.  

Song of the Vikings

For a good time?  Go to an author's reading.  The Northshire Bookstore recently had an author signing for Nancy Marie Brown who has just released Song of the Vikings a book about the very interesting historian/skald of Iceland, Snorri Sturluson. 
I learned a lot, just in an hour.  I knew, for example, that my 'escapist' reading eas looked down on when I was in college, that Tolkien had only a grudging respect in academia in the early 90's because he had written part of the Oxford English Dictionary, and because his books had sold so well.  How much more frustrating it must have been earlier, when he didn't have the cache of being so popular.  He was only an Oxford Dean, back then.  


I love my Tolkien.  I love my Icelandic saga.  While they are not the same, they go hand-in-hand with a certain number of sensibilities.  And those have been passed onto a few generations of writers.  And I consier that a good thing. But it's always interesting to understand the origins of something I enjoy, as well as it's influences.  It's why I'm totally hooked on movie commentaries and extras.  What was the process that lead to the creation of something like the Lord of the Rings or Pan's Labyrinth?   

Snorri Sturluson was a poet and powerful landowner in 13^th Century Iceland.  He wrote many of the stories we clasically associate with Norse mythology, and laid the foundations for the early modern view of heroism. But Snorri's story also has unexpected moments of connection to the work of Tolkien.  For example, the day of his death.  September the 22^nd.  Which is, for the non-Tolkein fanatics out there, Bilbo and Frodo's shared birthday.  Hm. 

Nancy Marie Brown is a good speaker, interesting and informative.  She really knew how to hook me as a listener in.  She was pleasant to speak with and clealy knew her stuff.  Who wouldn't want a book or two signed by her?

 


According to her blog, what prompted her to start writing this book was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods.  Neil Gaiman, if you aren't a long-time reader, is, in my opinion, the second-most dropped name in English.  I can't wait to dive into Song of the Vikings. 

Not as Other Men

A strange experience today.  The Boss was talking about the need to come up with an idea for a store Christmas tree.  He didn't want one that was loaded with merchandise; he's done that on previous occasions.  And there's been a problem with the stuff under the tree getting wet.  So he asked me if I could help, since I'm 'artistic.'

Which I don't really consider myself.  I can paint miniatures in a way that's not terribly embarassing, but I'm massively the suck when it comes to putting anything in two dimensions.  Nevertheless, within fifteen minutes, we had a concept that he was pleased with.

What I don't understand is how I'm different from him.  He could have easily come up with  the Donkey-Kong Christmas Tree.  Princess Peach at the top, Kong 'throwing' barrel decorations down the tree, perhaps with a garland to indicate the platforms, and Mario at the bottom.  It's a simple idea, which I got from looking at the Donkey-Kong themed energy drinks in the cooler.  And my quesion is, why didn't the Boss have this idea?  Is it because I spend time coming up with stuff?  Because I pay more attention to my surroundings (ie am more easily distracted)?  Is this sort of thing innate?  Something I've developed where the Boss never did?  Am I less afraid of failure so I start and am confident that if one idea fails another will be useful because that's the way I work? 

But it was all so easy.  Just chunk up one idea and then another (my first was to have a Pac-Man tree.  Inspired by the Pac-Man energy drink sitting right next to the Donkey-Kong drink.  The next pitch was likely to be a Red Bull treee).

It's just strange to me. What do people do if they can't come up with ideas?