Storytelling Engines Available for Preorder!

Hi all! I just wanted to mention that the Storytelling Engines book is available for pre-order here, and will be released on May 16th! The book has several entries that were never available in the initial blog, including discussions of Shadowhawk and Amethyst, follow-up entries on Batman and Green Lantern's O'Neill/Adams era runs, and a discussion of the reasons we didn't get a Marvel Cinematic Universe until 2008. It's got an afterward by Irene Vartanoff, who was working at Marvel during the era where a lot of these comics were created, and frankly it's got a really damn snazzy cover if you don't mind me gushing about it. I'm really excited about it!

Storytelling Engines Announcement Continued

A little good news and bad news for folks who still check this blog out--the bad news is, I was asked by my publisher to take down the Storytelling Engines posts that will be collected in book form this year, so those are no longer accessible through this site. (I've also sent a request to have them taken down from CBR.com.)

The good news is, those Storytelling Engines posts will be collected in book form this year! They've been extensively revised and expanded, with my errors (hopefully) corrected and some additional analysis based on events that transpired in the last ten years since they were originally written. Plus there are some new, exclusive bonus pieces for the book that cover things like the O'Neil/Adams Green Arrow and Batman runs, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Rip Hunter of "Legends of Tomorrow" fame. (Although this talks more about his comic book incarnations.) It should hopefully be out within the next couple of months, touch wood, and I'm sure I'll have more information as we get closer to the publication date!

Review: The Hatching

I guess I know now what it takes to bring me back to blogging--scathing contempt for a book that I bought at half of half price and still feel like I overpaid for it. It's not exactly the most noble of sentiments, but I'll take it.

'The Hatching' is a book that brings to mind nothing so much as Sarah Hagi's quote, "Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man." The author, 'Ezekiel Boone', is actually Proper Literary Writer Alexi Zentner slumming it in the horror genre under a pen name, and it's blatanly obvious to all concerned--not because this is a Proper Literary Work that just happens to be in the horror genre, but because this is really obviously not the work of a young hungry author who's swinging for the fences in his debut novel. It's a flabby, underplotted little potboiler that does nothing to earn the already-greenlit sequel, hardcover status, and promotional push that it was given because of his proven track record under another name in another genre, and it's no stretch to say that I really want to make him go back and do another couple of drafts to see if he couldn't try a little harder.

As the cover gives away, the book is about a global invasion by a giant colony of murderous spiders (as opposed to a murderous colony of giant spiders) and the book starts off with a little atmosphere as said spiders flood out of the jungles like army ants devouring everything in their path. But then the book jumps to China, and Minneapolis, and India, and Washington, and California, and a different part of California, and Scotland, each time introducing a new set of characters whose reactions to events will no doubt be highly important to the next book 'Skitter' (coming in May, as the ending helpfully reminds you) but many of whom have literally no connection at all to actual events in this book.

Except for the characters in China and India, whose role in the story is to die messily in ways that the American characters can find out about and realize that Something Terrible Is Coming. The more I think about the way that a story that makes a point of having a sprawling cast of characters from around the globe has absolutely no point-of-view characters from two of the countries where the majority of the plot actually happens, the more annoyed with it I get. It's lazy, it's othering, it treats the lives of foreigners as disposable and only of importance to Americans as canaries in the mine when a global crisis hits, and it's utterly inexcusable in a book where so damn little actually happens.

And let's not bury that lede any further--the book is about 300 pages, and the author only decides to stop generating atmosphere and introducing characters on about page 220. The vast majority of the book is "People get increasingly nervous about impending spiders," with the actual spider invasion never getting any further than LA before the author goes, "Ooops! Out of room! Come check out my sequel, 'Skitter' to find out what actually happens in this story!" It is indefensibly slack plotting. It is insulting to one's audience to write a book this lazy, this slapdash, this reliant on regurgitating tropes done better by other writers (I guarantee you that the pitch for this series said, "World War Z, but with spiders") and then not finish it and demand that people pay twenty bucks for a second hardcover to get the story you couldn't be bothered to fit in the first time around. This is the Peter Jackson's Hobbit of killer spider books, basically.

About the nicest thing I can say about it is that the main characters are all written so shallowly that I genuinely couldn't tell for much of the novel who was written in just to be killed by spiders in the next scene.

(Okay, no. I can also say that he has a gay couple in there, at least one half of whom is not written as flaming and stereotypical, and he has a black female character in there who is a Marine from a wealthy family, and the President in the book is a woman as well. So we've got some nods to representation, which is nice. But none of them are given particular depth and the book would be better off narrowing its focus to one of them or expanding its focus out to show what the heck is actually happening in China and India while all the Americans dither and worry.)

I have no doubt that this author can do better. He's going to get the chance to show someone that he can do better in the sequel. But oddly, that's what frustrates me the most. Because a first effort like this should not be automatically rewarded with a second chance.

My Subconscious Has a Weird Sense of Humor

I dreamed last night that I was watching a revival of Cyrano, and they'd decided to go a completely different direction by making it a musical. It was a terrible mistake, though, because the director chose "Roxanne" as one of the songs, and it really made Cyrano's reputation as a great poet and lover misfire when he wrote an anonymous love note calling the woman of his dreams a prostitute.

I'm Suddenly Tempted to Make a Short Film

I saw the trailer for 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' recently, and while there was a lot of cool stuff to unpack, I find myself utterly fascinated by the four burglars at the beginning wearing the cheap Avengers Halloween masks. I mean, setting aside the head-twisting weirdness of kids dressing up like superheroes in a world where superheroes are real, I really want to know what made the bank robbers decide to pick these particular masks. I can actually see myself making a short film on the subject, a sort of Reservoir Dogs pastiche where these four hardened criminals, having obtained the advanced tech they need to carry out their crime, now argue over which Avenger they're going to dress up as.

I figure you'd have the one guy who really thinks it's a bad idea. He says that the one thing that will make the Avengers get up off their butts to chase down a bunch of bank robbers is finding out that those bank robbers all wore Avengers masks to commit their crimes. He finally, reluctantly agrees, but demands to be Captain America because that's the only one of the four who probably won't accidentally kill him just by punching him.

There's a huge argument over who gets to be the Hulk, with one of the guys insisting that he totally, like, gets the Hulk in a way that none of the others possibly can. But one of the other guys wants to be the Hulk, because it's either that or Thor (because the guy who organized the gang is like, "No, letting me be Tony Stark is one of the conditions of the job" and his mask is suspiciously better than everyone else's and it's kind of obvious to everyone that he came up with the whole 'Avengers masks' idea pretty much as an excuse to wear his Iron Man mask without looking weird for being the only one wearing a superhero disguise, but they don't say anything because it's a really good plan and they don't want to lose out on the loot)...

And the Hulk guy is like, "Why don't you want to be Thor? You're totally a Thor dude!" and the other guy explains that he saw all these creepy skinheads in prison with Norse tattoos and he doesn't want anyone to think he's, y'know, racist or anything, his girlfriend is black and his kid is biracial and he wants them to be proud of him. And the Hulk guy is like, "Naw, no way, man! The real Thor, he'd be totally cool with your kid! You know if he saw those skinhead dudes, he'd be smacking 'em with the hammer like he was playin' Whack a Mole!" and really selling Thor to this other criminal, until the guy finally relents and picks up the Thor mask and says, "Let's do this!"

And then the post-credits scene is just a reprise of the scene from the trailer.

I can see it working, I really can. I suppose it'll become a sickness if I ever write out an actual script.

A Seat at the Table, a Voice in the Corner

(Crossposted to Daily Kos.)

I’ve seen a lot of angry progressives over the last few days. While it is definitely time to look at why we lost, it is not and never will be a time to cast blame. Finding a problem and fixing it is important and necessary; finding a reason why it’s not your fault is just an exercise in ego-preservation and will only lead to a whole bunch of new mistakes next time as we fix every problem but the ones we’re responsible for making.

So, let’s talk...calmly and without rancor...about Hillary as a candidate, and the other choices we had...and the other choices we didn’t have.

Hillary, in retrospect, was everything we tried to convince ourselves she wasn’t. She was a wonderful woman, a great civil servant, a hero that the American people frankly don’t deserve...but she was also a polarizing figure that the vast majority of Americans had already made their mind up about, who was too reserved and guarded to be an effective campaigner. She did her best, but she was always going to be better as a Secretary of State where she could play to her strengths than as a speaker out on the stump. We told ourselves that we could overcome that and we almost did, but the flaws were what we thought they were.

Bernie Sanders...was pretty much the same. Not that he didn’t differ with Hillary, but his differences were not the kind of differences that would have swung the election. He would have come out with a more fiery, more progressive message...but his message would not have swayed the voters that came out for Obama and stayed home for Hillary. Because his message to minorities, and her message to minorities, was the same. “Trust me to represent you and I’ll be a voice in your corner.” And I think that from now on, the Democratic Party is going to accept that this simply isn’t good enough anymore.

Because we’ve had Barack Obama. I’m 41, and he is the best President we’ve had in my lifetime. I think I’d say the same thing if I was 51 or 61 or even possibly 71. He performed magnificently under conditions that were almost impossible. He was an inspiring leader and a forceful voice in polarized circumstances. And his coalition, the coalition that got him elected and re-elected despite the best efforts of obstructionists and racists, is a diverse coalition of minorities. They have seen that a black man can be President and can do a damn fine job. A promise is not good enough for them anymore. Nor should it be.

If the Democratic Party and the progressive movement is going to be a coalition of minority voters, the candidates we put forward should reflect that. If minority support is the difference between a D and an R in the White House, then they deserve a seat at the table, not just a voice in their corner. They deserve to look at a candidate that reflects them, not just another member of the white establishment making promises. Anyone can make promises. Trump made promises. Actions speak louder than words here, and the actions of the Democratic Party were to follow up the historic election of America’s first African-American President with Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Martin O’Malley, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and tell minorities, “It’s cool, they’re all woke!”

(And in hindsight, Tim Kaine was the most adorably terrible choice for VP Hillary could possibly have made, for those same reasons.)

In 2020, we have to do better. We have to show that the Democratic Party does not just pay lip service to our core constituencies, we respect their ability and their perspective and their patriotism. It is time for people like Hillary, Bernie...and yes, me too, white guy speaking...to sit down and let someone like Ilhan Omar be a voice in my corner for a change.

Saying Farewell to A Pastime

For those of you who haven't heard, tomorrow marks the last day of the Facebook game "Marvel: Avengers Alliance", which started out as a turn-based tie-in to the 2012 'Avengers' film and just sort of kept going for four years and 166 playable characters. It wasn't a perfect game--it was a Flash game and prone to bugs and balance issues just like many others, and it had its grindy elements just like pretty much any game that tries to get you to log in every day and play it as much as possible does.

But it had some amazing virtues. It had a character roster that hit just just the classic Marvel characters like Spider-Man and Thor and the Hulk, but quirky and offbeat cult favorites like Howard the Duck and Daimon Hellstrom. It introduced players to new heroes like the Blue Marvel and Faiza Hussain, spotlighted obscure heroes like Phyla-Vell and Cloak and Dagger, and even allowed you to redeem a variety of villains from Magneto to Ronan the Accuser and put them to work in the service of humanity. It allowed for a dizzying array of team-ups and crossovers, and was every Marvel fan's dream in a lot of ways.

And the gameplay, while simple, was not without its depths. The different characters each had their own mechanics and special abilities, and figuring out how to combine them could produce synergistic effects that made them amazingly powerful. (Drax, for example, was lethal but withered quickly under direct assault, while Groot was a walking shield wall that took the hits for his team mates. The two made a devastating pair.) Combine that with a variety of different game situations that mandated or prohibited specific characters and you had a recipe for constant reinvention and adaptation to the different enemies the game threw at you.

I've been playing the game in one form or another for about three years now, pretty much ever since 'City of Heroes' went the way of all things. It got me through my grieving period for that game, in a lot of ways. Now I have to grieve this one. I guess that's the problem with games that offer you an infinite number of possibilities and a sweeping array of things to do. In the end, it just means that your interest in the game outlives it instead of the other way around.

Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?

Of late, I think it's safe to say that there's been something of a fan backlash against Joss Whedon. His last work of note was 'Avengers 2: Age of Ultron', after which he more or less quit doing big studio movies in despair and hasn't had a major project since. Meaning that to some extent, he's been judged by 'Age of Ultron', which...

Okay, let's get this out of the way. I liked 'Age of Ultron'. I know the criticisms against it and they're not without merit, but I do think that they are sometimes overemphasized in relation to the film's virtues. Whedon had a murderously tricky balancing act to pull off--making a movie that was simultaneously the beginning of Tony Stark's big hubris arc while still making him relatable, advancing the metaplot of the Infinity Stones while still making a movie about Ultron, advancing the stories of Black Widow, Hulk and Hawkeye who aren't getting features of their own for internal studio-politics related-reasons that are pretty much why he quit in despair, introducing Vision, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, setting up Wakanda for future films, and oh by the way rebutting 'Man of Steel' and Zack Snyder's dystopian Objectivist vision of superheroism. The fact that he made a film that was watchable is, I think, something of an achievement even if I can also agree with the people who have specific and legitimate complaints about it.

There. Now as I was saying, he's been judged to some extent by 'Age of Ultron'...but I also think that we're beginning to see the first reappraisal of Whdeon's overall body of work as we get a bit of distance and perspective from it. And some of the things that people are seeing are things they're not happy about. For the first time, Joss Whedon is being viewed not as "the feminist writer guy", but as "the problematic writer guy". So what's changed?

I don't think that Whdeon himself has changed. I think he has always been a committed ally to feminism, but I think he's also, like a lot of guys who see themselves as committed allies to feminism, not really used to having to adjust to the fact that a committed male ally to feminism is playing a supporting role and not being a star. It's difficult, I think, for him to accept the fact that as a major Hollywood writer/director/producer, he is fundamentally sucking up some of the oxygen in the room away from feminism no matter how hard he tries to do otherwise simply because his voice is so much louder than that of the women he's ostensibly supporting. I think we've seen this overtly a few times when he's gotten into verbal dust-ups and been very upset that his "feminist cred" was being challenged by women--surely he'd done the work by now, right? Surely he would get the benefit of the doubt?

He doesn't and shouldn't. As much as I can say that I understand what he was getting at with the Black Widow scene in 'Age of Ultron', I can also say that I fully understand why a lot of people thought he failed at conveying what he was trying to say and failed in ways that reaffirmed some very sexist tropes in fiction. He does not get a "feminist pass" on those things, and he shouldn't behave as though he's earned one. And I can understand as well how that issue and his response to it has made him lose a lot of trust from feminists in the forefront of the discussion, even though he's said he'd like to try to write a story that would make amends for it. Because...

Well, honestly, because even if you ignore some of his recent tantrums over being called on his feminist credibility, it's still worth reappraising his work in the light of a good decade or so of distance. It's okay to say that while 'Buffy' and 'Angel' were very progressive for 1997 when they started, or even for 2004 when they left the air, that they're not that progressive for now and it's okay to examine them from the point of view of here and now and say that Tara getting killed off was a major example of a very unpleasant and homophobic trope that LGBTQ fans have gotten thoroughly sick of, or that killing off Charisma Carpenter's character because the actress got pregnant was shockingly petty and sexist, or that while we got some big moments of Buffy throwing off the shackles of the patriarchy over the years, we also got a whole season of her screwing up the basic functions of adult life so badly that her father figure had to come back and help her put her life in order.

And that Mal Reynolds is a misogynist jackass to Inara whose lack of respect for her is palpable in every scene between them, despite the chemistry the two actors had together, and that had the series gone another season we would have probably gotten the most profoundly horrible sexist episode of a Whedon series ever. (If you don't know about this one, be kind of glad. It doesn't get much better when you describe it in detail.)

Oh yes, and that in pretty much all his series he describes "physical strength" with agency and romanticizes abusive relationships. The point is, while Whdeon was progressive for the 90s, it's okay to say that it's not the 90s anymore (yes, I feel old too!) and we expect more from creators than just "look, there's a female protagonist here who's not the damsel in distress!" It's okay to say that looking back, these series seemed great to us because we were getting so little from our media in terms of representation that just having a lesbian couple who were openly in a relationship for a full two seasons was ground-breaking. It's okay to say that even though we respect Whedon's efforts to shift the conversation forward, he's not a flawless saint and he can be criticized without tearing down the entire edifice of feminism. It's okay to say that he's a feminist and that he's problematic. You can be both things at once. Lord knows that as a white dude myself, I've probably fallen into that trap more than a few times.

Joss Whedon has not become less feminist. He is still who he always was. But it's okay to want more than that now.

My One Concession to Donald Trump

Having now officially heard more out of Donald Trump's mouth than I think I ever want to in this lifetime, I'm willing to concede one important point that he's been hammering on for the past...oh dear god it's been almost a year will this endless stream of verbal diarrhea never CEASE?

(It's not the one about the Mexicans.)

Donald Trump has been saying, almost from the beginning, that he's fighting a "rigged system". And after watching him in action, I'm willing to say that yes, absolutely. The system is rigged in such a way as to make it harder for liars, fraudsters, crooks, cheats, con artists and swindlers to get into a position where they have the power to siphon off vast amounts of public money for their personal aggrandizement, and to use the bully pulpit of running for office to steal money from American citizens under the guise of "soliciting political donations." We make it hard for people to do that. Entirely on purpose.

(Clearly we haven't made it hard enough, because Trump, but that's another conversation.)

Basically, yes. The system is rigged against Donald Trump. The system was also rigged against Bernie Madoff. The only difference is that Donald Trump is better at getting around rigged systems than Madoff was.

Review: The Fog

This is not a review of the 1978 film 'The Fog', directed by John Carpenter and starring Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis. This also isn't a review of the 2005 remake starring Superboy and a bunch of other people who singularly failed to make an impression on my memory, probably because they weren't rocketed from the distant planet of Krypton. No, this is a review of Dennis Etchison's novelization of the '78 movie, which I picked up in a used bookstore because I saw Dennis Etchison's name on the cover and I wanted to see a bit of what he was about.

And look, there's no question that he gives it his all. He cranks up his descriptions of glowing fog to eleven with phrases like "the reptilian swishing of the cloud as it withdrew", and "It gathered in a cold boiling on the ground and grew amoebalike pseudopodia in glutinous chains" and "The fog contracted, strengthening its substance, and expanded again, solidifying an ectoplasmic net". This is a man who has realized that his brief is to make his reader buy into the idea of 'scary fog', and is determined to make the best of it.

The problem is that basically, this isn't a 'scary fog' story, despite the title being 'The Fog' and there being much made of 'scary fog' in pretty much every scene in the first three-quarters of the book. This is a zombie story. It's a zombie story that tries to make its zombies cooler by hiding them in scary fog, and cooler still by making them pirate zombies (well, technically they're independently wealthy leper sailor zombies, but the iconography is all piratical, so hell with it), but still, this is basically a movie where vengeful undead hunt and kill people. All the 'scary fog' stuff is just window dressing for boring old zombies that don't even really do any of the cool stuff that zombies do like eat brains or bring their victims back to life as more zombies.

(Which they could very easily have done! If they were actually pirate zombies instead of merely independently wealthy leper sailor zombies, then they could have a ship of the dead, and anyone they kill is damned to join their crew for all eternity. I mean, it would get a little crowded on board, but it's a spectral ship of the damned, so maybe it's got TARDIS-like insides that can hold a lot of people. Or maybe if you kill enough people to take your place, you're free, so there's constant crew rotation. The point is, the whole "actually really nice people in life who are just miffed about their totally unjustified murder a hundred years ago and are revenging themselves on the descendants of their murderers" thing is really only scary if you happen to be the descendant of a treacherous murderer who used stolen gold to make your family rich. And also that ghostly pirate ships are way cooler than scary fog.)

In the end, Etchison more or less manages to cover most of the weaknesses in the basic structure of the movie the same way that Carpenter did with the film version, through copious amounts of atmosphere both literal and figurative (see what I did there?) Honestly, that's probably the reason the 2005 remake made so little impression--without amazing people elevating the material, there's really not much there. Even with Etchison's prose, it's not great. But it's not terrible, it's short and there are worse ways to pass the time.

Review: I Drink For A Reason

Wow, was that bad. I mean, it was really astonishingly terrible. Hacky, smug, lazy, unfunny, frequently cruel, and the kind of thing any comedian should have been ashamed of, let alone someone like David Cross who's genuinely got a claim to being one of the most groundbreaking comedians of his generation. This is so bad that I spent a good portion of the book trying to determine whether this was actually some kind of fourth-dimensional meta-satire of the flaws of terrible pretentious faux-intellectual comedians, but after a while it became clear that no, David Cross just crapped out a book to fulfill a contractual obligation.

The big problem with it...well, the big problem with it is that it's actually woefully unfunny. Large stretches of the book are just Cross suggesting that someone innocuous is actually suffering in some way, as an aside or as part of a portion of a list. If the words, "A Retarded Baby Gets AIDS," free of context or purpose, is inherently funny to you, then you are Cross's target audience and may God have mercy upon your soul. (Only, of course, as Cross never tires of bringing up, God doesn't exist and people who believe in Him are stupid and/or crazy. He doesn't make jokes about that--apparently just saying that religious people are stupid and/or crazy is enough work for one day.)

But the other, bigger problem with it is that it proffers no point of view beyond simply "David Cross is much smarter than everyone else." Cross obviously makes fun of people he thinks are foolish or hypocritical or morally bankrupt, because that's kind of what comedians do and what satire is--you expose the foibles of the pompous. But Cross makes no differentiation between, say, Catholic priests who molested innocent children and the system that shielded them, and the people at Pitchfork.com who gave his latest comedy CD a bad review. His negation is mindless and thoughtless, which makes it worthless.

Because all he does is point to things and say "That's stupid," there's no value to his genuine social commentary. Does he examine why it is that the Catholic Church rallies around its members and uses its institutional power to protect them? Does he find something meaningful to say about the idea that any institution, no matter how noble, eventually comes to be about holding on to its power and authority rather than its initial ideals? Nope. It's because they're religions, and religions are stupid. He doesn't critique things, merely criticize them.

And like all emotional thirteen-year-olds, he's more interested in finding a weakness he can use to attack the people he disagrees with than in holding any kind of an intellectual or moral philosophy of his own. He's perfectly willing to go after Larry the Cable Guy as "homophobic", because he doesn't like Larry the Cable Guy and he knows that homophobia is a charge you can successfully level at someone. But he's also willing to do an extended multiple-page gag about Jim Belushi dressing up as a woman and giving blowjobs in a truckstop restroom, because homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of unless you're using it to humiliate a comedian you find annoying. The book is filled with these little hypocrisies and petty jabs...interspersed, of course, with Cross's insistence that he's not at all bitter about anything in his life, and that anyone who thinks he's bitter or angry about anything just doesn't understand how calmly he takes the endless frustrations of dealing with all the stupid people who aren't him.

Other than that, the book is mostly weak and unfunny nonsensical asides, a few of which land with less than a dull thud than others but none of which can struggle to life under the endless burden of having to co-exist with Cross's angry whinging. If you really like David Cross, do both him and yourself a favor and pretend this book never existed. All it can do is lower your opinion of him.

A Brief Word From the Ministry of Magic

Dear Wizards and Witches of the Ministry of Magic,

We are aware that security is always paramount in the minds of all those who work in these august halls--our duty is to work with those aspects of magic that are forbidden, after all, and the forbidden always has its own allure. So we appreciate that everyone is doing their best to secure unauthorized Dark Magic spells, magical items, and curiosities away from those who would abuse them.

Nonetheless, we wish to take a moment to discuss the topic of security. After a few recent high-profile breaches, we would like to offer a few helpful suggestions that might help make forbidden magical items that can...purely hypothetically speaking...alter the course of history or undo all our hard-fought struggles against the Dark Lord Voldemort...even more secure!

1) Information security is everyone's responsibility. Between the use of Invisibility Cloaks, Polyjuice Potions and other disguises, one must always be aware of the possibility of someone using "social engineering" to try to determine the location of forbidden magic. Avoid openly discussing the location of hidden items, and never share details on accessing these items with someone, no matter how well you know them, without first confirming their identity beyond a doubt. Remember, kisses are not personally identifying information!

2) A strong password is a safe password. We understand that items may need to be accessed for a higher purpose, and that magical barriers must therefore have a means of removing them in the event that it becomes necessary. When setting a password for your magical barrier, try not to use the names of family members or pets, as these can be easily guessed by intruders. Also try not to use phrases like "password", or your birthdate, as these are too common and can also be guessed. Also, if you do decide to use a cunning children's riddle answer as your password, do not put a "hint" in that is the riddle's question. This common mistake allows the item to be accessed by the clever thieves only, and frankly if unscrupulous people are going to have access to our magical items, we want them to at least be dumb enough to get caught.

Following these two guidelines will drastically reduce the number of times a certain wizard with a minor facial disfigurement has to save the world (please refer to our workplace sign, "It Has Been 9 Days Since Harry Potter Has Had To Bear the Great Burden of Heroism On Behalf Of Wizardkind"). And remember, if it wouldn't safeguard a computer, it won't safeguard the most dangerous magical item ever created. Thank you!

Review: Prophecy

I'm going to break my habit of curling up into a little ball and waiting for the Presidential election season to be over to review a book I read recently, David Seltzer's 'Prophecy'. It's an adaptation of the screenplay he wrote that was turned into a 1979 movie directed by John Frankenheimer, and it says a lot about both movie and book that the term "prophecy" doesn't refer to anything within the story--Seltzer is saying that the story, itself, is a prophecy of what will happen if we don't stop polluting.

Which is odd, because the primary consequence appears to be "angry deformed 15-foot tall bears will come and kill us all", and I'm reasonably certain he's kind of winging that one.

To be honest, if he'd simply skipped the "deformed bear" angle and come at it as a straight-up ecodrama, it probably would have been a lot more effective. It's about a doctor who works in the inner-city and is frustrated by his inability to make a difference due to the entrenched power structures keeping black people in poverty, and his wife who's dealing with a pregnancy that she knows he won't want but that she also knows she can't get rid of. The husband gets an offer to do an environmental study for the EPA, and decides that maybe he can do something for the environment that he couldn't do for the inhabitants of Washington's slums, and his wife goes along hoping to find a good time to tell him about the baby.

But what he walks into is a powder-keg, as the results of the environmental study will determine whether the local paper mill gets to keep operating in the face of entrenched (and increasingly militant) opposition from the local Native American population. The paper company is doing everything short of bribing him to give a good result, while the Native Americans are distrustful of yet another well-meaning white man who says he's there to help. Meanwhile, people and animals are sickening, dying, and being born horribly deformed due to contamination of the watershed with mercury. (Nothing involving mutant bears is quite as horrifying as seeing the pregnant woman tuck into some freshly-caught fish.)

This is all a bit preachy, and it's all filtered through an oh-so-70s level of racial and environmental consciousness (the Native Americans are referred to as "Indians" and given an overlay of noble savage mentality, the questions about abortion are treated with a lot of patriarchal condescension even though the wife's right to choose is ultimately upheld) but then there's this giant bear lumbering through things. It feels like Seltzer is dangling the bear like a bright shiny object whenever the story gets too boringly didactic, as if to say, "Hey, I know you don't have the attention span for all this boring political stuff, so here's a big deformed bear mauling some people for you!"

And that's fine as far as it goes--certainly, a lot of sci-fi stories use allegories to sharpen and intensify the emotions surrounding their central concepts. But the problem is that Seltzer uses "deformed bear attacks everyone" as his plot resolution, and you'd be amazed at how many problems a giant mutant bear doesn't solve in this world. The third act is really just a bunch of people running around getting attacked by a bear, and in the end I guess enough people are killed that things are better now but not really but maybe a little? It's all sort of dumped in the lap of the gods (and you'll be so totally surprised that one of the Native American characters thinks the bear is an "Indian legend" come to life to protect the wilderness), and I think that the ending becomes far less effective as a result.

It's weird to say that a monster story would have been more effective without the monster, but it's kind of true here. 'Prophecy' is, at heart, about people willing to leave the planet uninhabitable if it helps them make a few extra dollars. Next to that, even a very big bear isn't that scary.

My Current Punditry Pet Peeve

I keep seeing it in every single article about Trump that's been published in traditional media or online. This particular one is from a Salon article by Sean Illing, but they all say something similar:

"If any other candidate said what Trump said this week, his campaign would collapse immediately. But Trump has been saying and doing things that would disqualify anyone else for months, and yet he slithers on."

Look. I understand that Trump did defy the political odds during the primaries by thriving despite some glaring and horrible statements. But can we stop pretending that Trump is somehow "normalizing" horrible discourse, or that he's not paying a price for his commentary? His polling numbers are in freefall, he went from dead-even with Hillary to having (according to FiveThirtyEight) a 13% chance of winning, his brand is toxic, Republicans are openly fleeing him in droves, the RNC is being flat-out asked to stop spending money on the Presidential race, every single media outlet is raking him over the coals as an affront to democracy, and he's losing states that haven't gone to the Democrats in 24 years. The only way that he could be more ruined by his Presidential campaign is if he literally burst into flames in the middle of one of his rallies and was dragged down to hell by the fiery claws of the Beast.

(Which may yet happen at this rate.)

The point is, Trump will still be allowed to speak all the way through November, unless he drops out or the Republicans finally come to their senses and lock him in a small windowless room without access to Twitter until November 9th kick him off the ticket. But that's not the same thing as still having a political career.

The Brutal Truth About the "Two Party System"

A lot of people will, as part of the ongoing debate about how miserable and grinding the current election is, talk about how frustrating it is that in America we only have Trump and Clinton as viable options because "we live in a two-party system". (Usually, this is right before they talk about writing in Mickey Mouse, and right before I deliver a long and boring discussion of tactical voting that I'm going to skip this time out, which is kind of a shame because I have a great analogy but I'll save it for later.)

The problem is, this isn't untrue. We don't live in a two-party system. We live in a two-competent-party system. There's no reason encoded into our nation's laws that genuinely prevents a third party from forming, and in fact there are actually something like one hundred political parties currently operating in the United States. But most of them are content to run essentially as ego-stroking campaigns for their members, insisting that they would totally win if not for "bias" and "a rigged system" while ignoring their own clear issues that prevent them from gaining a foothold beyond the occasional Congressperson or state official. Here's why you don't see a national third party that competes with the Democrats and the Republicans, and why it has very little to do with media coverage or any rigging that might be going on.

1. Third parties don't put in the work. The Green Party runs a Presidential candidate every four years, and insists each time that their momentum is growing and that they're going to take back the mantle of "liberal" from the centrist Democrats. But a) nobody has ever explained how President Stein will get her agenda enacted when she has literally no Congressional support, and b) nobody has ever explained how a party with absolutely no track record in government will suddenly do a great job in that field.

The fact of the matter is, a third party needs to be built from the ground up, not the top down. A Presidential run is great press, but any third party that wants to have a hope in hell of enacting their agenda needs to have a full ticket--a Congressperson for every district at minimum, Senators for the 33-34 seats up each year, and probably local representation as well. But that kind of work is boring and low-profile, while running for President is exciting and fun and entails lots of interviews with people who really want to know your opinion! So the Green Party is Jill Stein every four years talking about how unfair it is that she never gets elected.

2. Third parties are fringe. Both the Libertarians and the Greens this year are presenting themselves as alternatives for those in the Republican and Democratic (respectively) Parties who want a candidate who's more true to their beliefs. Meaning more conservative for the Libertarians, and more liberal for the Greens.

The problem is, a candidate who trends toward the far end of the political spectrum is going to have less appeal to the middle, for obvious reasons. And if you have less appeal, you get fewer votes. A third party that gets fewer votes doesn't get elected. Once you start selecting for ideological purity and campaigning for the outliers, you're not going to win. Hell, that's the problem the Republicans have this year, which is why they nominated a sculpture of Mussolini made entirely out of pre-chewed Cheetos.

3. Third parties tend to be single issue parties. This isn't so much true of the Greens and the Libertarians, who are least are making a pretense of caring about actual governance, but something like the Alaskan Independence Party is basically running on the issue of, "Hey, seceding from the United States would solve all of Alaska's problems!" (I assume the "Rent Is Too Damn High Party" in New York state has a similar approach, but I'm not quite sure what their issue is. Probably legalization of marijuana or something.)

The problem is, this is a nonsensical approach to governance. There's no single fix that can be pushed through that will solve the problems the United States experiences on a yearly basis, and generally these candidates tend to be delusional people who have focused their emotional energy on demanding one unworkable fix because it's easier to believe that you can Solve All the Problems with one heroic swoop than it is to deal with the years of constant and unrewarding work needed to make the world a better place. Most people know this, which is why these parties tend to only attract a few true believers who are just as delusional as the candidate. Which brings us to...

4. Most third-party candidates tend to be delusional nutbags who build the party around their particular hobbyhorses, and they wind up more as cults of personality than viable attempts to do the work of governance. The obvious example that comes to mind is H. Ross Perot, whose stated goal was to create a pragmatic third party focused on practical solutions rather than ideology, but that wound up being held hostage to the narcissistic whims of its eccentric candidate. (Yes, I know, it does sound like the Republicans are rapidly descending into third-party status, doesn't it?) But really, I mean something like this guy:

 http://andy2016.com/

Take a look at those proposals. This is a man sincerely running on a platform of disclosing the Pentagon's secret time travel program and admitting that we're already on Mars. This is the kind of thing that third parties in America are doing right now. They're not out there trying to become a viable alternative to the current two dominant parties, they're out there trying to put Bigfoot on the Endangered Species List. This is why we live in a two-party system. It's not because the Republicans and Democrats suppress the competition, it's because third parties are more interested in being symbolic forms of protest against an unpleasant reality than any kind of actual group interested in promoting responsible governance. Until someone--a lot of someones, really, because a political party isn't just something you make with your buddies in the garage--is willing to change that, a third party won't gain traction in America.

In fact, at this rate, we could be down to a "one-party system" in a few years unless the Republicans get their act together. But that's probably a separate post.

My One Political Prediction

It, um...seems to have been an interesting few weeks, politically speaking. I believe that since I last blogged, Donald Trump has picked a fight with the parents of an American soldier who died stopping a suicide bomber on the grounds that they support Islamic terrorism, stabbed his two most prominent national political allies in the back, insinuated he would use nuclear weapons as a first resort, asked the Russians to illegally interfere in a national election on his behalf, discussed documents that he claimed were "top secret" (which may not actually exist), and oh yeah he kicked a baby out of one of his rallies.

And then said that he doesn't understand why he's behind in the polls.

With all that, the Republicans seem (unsurprisingly) to be hitting the panic button. There's just one problem--that button's not hooked up to anything. There is no provision for denominating a candidate who has been selected as the Republican standard-bearer once the convention happens. This means that no matter what Trump does--publicly setting fire to Reince Priebus' car, pissing in Paul Ryan's protein shake, playing the "I'm not touching youuuuu!" game with John McCain--all they can do is ask him to drop out. (And Trump knows it, which is why he's doing all this. Trump is only nice to people when he needs to be in order to get something out of them. Voters should remember that in November.)

Which brings me to my one political prediction. Because rumor has it that the Republicans are, in fact, privately trying to get Trump to drop out (a rumor that the Republicans are denying with the same approximate degree of believability that NFL team owners use when insisting that they have full confidence in their 1-11 head coach and don't plan on making any personnel moves until after the season). And those journalists who have looked into this have said that if Trump were to drop out, the Republicans would need it to happen before September 1st in order to be able to put the new candidate's name on the ballots in all 50 states (once they selected him or...oh who are we kidding, him...to become the nominee, which would also need to happen before September 1st).

So here's my one political prediction. I'm not saying that Donald Trump is going to drop out and fail to finish what he laughably calls a political campaign. (Although it's not an impossibility. If you quit, claiming that the game is rigged and people aren't giving you a fair chance to win, you can always claim you would have won.) But I will say that if Trump does drop out, it will not happen until at least September 2nd.

Because if there's one thing that the Ryan/McCain episode has made clear, it is that Donald Trump never does anything gracefully when he can achieve the same outcome while avenging imaginary slights against him. If Donald feels like the Republicans have insulted him (which, although entirely justified on their part, they have) he will exit the race in a way that makes it as clear as possible that the blame for his failure rests on them, and in a way that does as much damage to them as a party as he conceivably can. In this case, that means shifting his campaign message to suggest that he's being sabotaged by his own party, then dropping out after it's too late to find a replacement and watching their electoral strategy crash and burn.

I realize that "Donald Trump does something spiteful and petty to his allies in order to salvage his ego" is not exactly going out on a limb as far as predictions go, but I feel that it will at least help you during this uncertain period to know that we are stuck with Donald for another month at least. Beyond that, it will depend on which kind of humiliation he hates more--the humiliation of losing to Hillary, or the humiliation of not even trying.

Review: The United States of Arugula

It's strange--looking back on our nation's history, we can collectively remember a time when TV dinners were new and exciting and frozen food was a miracle and SPAM was something to be lauded and celebrated. But somehow, it's difficult to connect our modern day Instagramming of "food porn", 24-hour food-based TV networks, celebrity chefs and McDonald's arugula salads to the days when the most exciting thing about food was how well it kept and how easy it was to make. What happened to bring us from food as a grim necessity to food as an epicurean delight?

That's not just the question I ask myself every time I walk past a Hungry Man TV dinner and wonder who still eats those, it's the basic premise of David Kamp's book 'The United States of Arugula'. The book starts in the 1950s, the era when fast food and processed food was at its ascendance, and introduces the key characters responsible for transforming our cultural understanding of food. He covers fine dining, cookbooks and cooking shows, and the process of food sourcing and how it changed slowly but surely over the decades.

There's a lot of interesting stories in the book, many of which show how the counter-culture movement of the 60s intertwined with the push for ethically-sourced and healthy cuisine, and he highlights a number of important figures in the history of the culinary arts that might otherwise have gone forgotten. In addition to obvious stars like James Beard and Julia Child, he covers Craig Claiborne, Jeremiah Tower, and a host of other people known primarily to foodies who he feels influenced the development of modern cooking and taste-making.

In a way, this is also probably the book's weakness. Because he wants to cover the breadth of the transformation of food culture as well as the depth of it, there's a lot of jumping around to focus on figures within the industry who play only a minor role, or who are more remembered for their influence on other famous chefs. Towards the end, without the organizing principle of "how did this person's legacy contribute to food culture as we know it?" (because as the book ably shows, it's hard to tell a food fad from a cultural contribution to our national cuisine right away) the book loses focus rather badly. The last few chapters are a dizzying leap from chef to chef to celebrity chef, with no real explanation given as to why some merit consideration within the book's pages and others are a mere footnote.

Still, the overall theme comes out very well despite that--the last fifty years have seen a national conversation about what we eat and how to make it better tasting and healthier. And while that's occasionally descended into faddishness, snobbery, scolding and absurd levels of bacon worship, it's still a conversation worth having. Kamp makes that case very well indeed.

My Brief Take on the New Trek Fan Film Guidelines

There is exactly one thing you have to understand about the new Star Trek fan film guidelines. They are a promise, not a threat.

The promise is actually pretty impressive. Not quite unprecedented--Lucasfilm embraced the fan film community, albeit with a few reservations--but this is a pretty big deal. Paramount is saying that they will let anyone, for free, make their very own short film based on one of the four biggest entertainment properties in science-fiction (Marvel, Star Wars and Who being the other three), for free, gratis, so long as certain rules are adhered to. Are those rules pretty stringent? Sure. Do they let you make your very own Star Trek with absolutely no threat of legal action by the holders of the IP? Sure.

And if you don't want to adhere to those guidelines...you don't have to. Sure, you could be sued by Paramount, but what people are forgetting in their initial judgment of the new policy is that this was always the case. All Trek fan films prior to this point, every single one of them from the officially unofficial series that used Trek actors playing their copyrighted characters down to the guys wandering around in their heavily wooded backyards in pajamas yelling, "I AM KIROK!"...they all risked a lawsuit. Because they were infringing on someone's intellectual property. They had no legal defense against that, none of them. It wasn't fair use, it didn't matter that they weren't making a profit, it didn't matter how it was distributed. They all were potential targets.

So nothing has changed for these people. Officially, 'Star Trek: New Voyages' is operating outside the guidelines and is vulnerable to a lawsuit should Paramount decide to go after them. Officially, Paramount can't say to them, "Hey, we don't really care, you're not making any money and your show is good PR for us so knock yourself out." But that was the case yesterday too. All this is, when you boil it down, is a way for Paramount to cover their butts so that when someone like Alec Peters comes along and raises a million bucks to make a feature-length movie while selling bootleg merch, he can't say, "Well, I had no idea that I couldn't do it!"

Of course, that won't stop fans from freaking out about it, but hey. Fans gonna fan.

Review: The Tropic of Serpents

After gushing about Marie Brennan's first book about the intrepid Isabella, Lady Trent and her voyages to discover dragons, I felt like I would be remiss if I didn't spend at least a little bit of time talking about the second book in the series. This one focuses on her journeys into the swamps of Mouleen (an ahistorical continent with clear parallels to colonial Africa) to study swamp dragons, during which she gets unavoidably swept up in local politics.

It's the local politics that take up a lot of the book, which is a little disappointing if you come to the novel looking for dragons, dragons and more dragons. On the other hand, Brennan does a good job of conveying, through Isabella's slow realization that her country may not have the finest interests of Mouleen at heart, the contradictory and messy interests that lie at the heart of the colonial mentality. Being something of an outsider in her own homeland due to her decision to pursue a traditionally male career, she's positioned perfectly to notice that the Scirling (read: British) promises of aid and comfort tend to come with a lot of armed men, and not a few concessions to a superior military force. Her decisions regarding that ugly truth behind the "White Man's Burden" myth form the narrative's spine.

There are also further developments in the slightly ominous metaplot that was seeded in the first novel--having discovered that preserved dragonbone is as light as aluminum and durable as steel, Isabella spends no small amount of time in the book attempting to avert a resource war over the rare and endangered dragon species that we already know (since this is presented as her memoirs) has already happened. This book keeps that to the background, but it informs the entire story with the slow drumbeats of impending conflict. There's a lot of very clever metaphor going on here, with dragons standing in for any number of precious and irreplaceable natural resources...plus, they're freaking dragons, which is always cool.

I'd recommend the second book just as strongly as the first. It takes a bit longer to get to the dragons, but the time it develops other themes is time well spent.

Match-Making

Is it wrong that I really hope Tom Hiddleston turns out to be gay or bisexual so that he can be linked with Benedict Cumberbatch romantically (whom I also hope turns out to be gay or bisexual) simply so they can have the "power couple" nickname "Hiddlebatch"?

I would accept, as an alternative, a romantic liason between Tom Hiddleston and Mark Ruffalo, who would of course be "Hiddleuffalo". (I suppose technically they could be "Ruffleston", but I feel like that lacks the quiet dignity of "Hiddleuffalo".)

EDIT TO ADD: I would also be satisfied if Mark and Benedict caught each other on the rebound from that serial cad, Tom Hiddleston, and formed the power couple "Cumberbuffalo".