The Gweniverse!

Ever since Spider-Gwen introduced us to the parallel universe where Gwen Stacy was bitten by a radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker, we've been seeing Marvel react to the strong, unexpected demand for a version of Spider-Man who's also an adorable teenage girl. (I still insist there's something deeply Freudian about the "distaff counterpart to male superhero" trend in general, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is.) She has her own regular series, and they've gone so far as to release Gwen Stacy-themed covers of just about every Marvel title in order to show what it would be like if Gwen was Captain America, the Hulk, Deadpool, every single member of the X-Men, et cetera.

Which made me wonder--what if she was?

I'd love to see a Marvel one-shot that was an off-shoot of the classic Jackal storyline. For those of you who don't remember either the Jackal's first, legendary appearance or his later, extremely awkward and best forgotten return in the 90s, the Jackal was college biology professor Miles Warren. He had an inappropriate fixation on Gwen Stacy, and when she died, he blamed Spider-Man for not being able to save her. He created what was originally intended to be a clone of Gwen, which was later retconned as a gene-splicing formula capable of reconfiguring random people into Gwen Stacy (and which may later have been re-retconned back to a clone of Gwen, but for our purposes let's pretend it wasn't).

(No, we can do that, because it was later revealed that he also created a similar genetic cocktail that turned one of his students into a version of himself called Carrion, so the logic holds no matter how you come at it. Anyhow, this isn't the place to get into the finer points of Clone Saga continuity, as we simply don't have enough liquor to go around.)

The point is, I think they should do a story where the Jackal returns with his final, triumphant creation--a virus that will transform everyone on Earth into Gwen Stacy! He unleashes it in New York City, of course, but it begins spreading globally. If left unchecked, it will mean the end of the human race, as the entire population of human beings will be reduced to Gwen Stacies. Luckily, the virus interacts oddly with superhuman genomes, creating a sort of limited protection from the virus--superheroes aren't immune, but the transformation shapes itself around their powers to create variants on Gwen Stacy. The story becomes a race against time, as Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (formerly Mister Fantastic, Beast and Hank Pym) must find a cure while Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine) track down the Jackal and stop him once and for all.

And then in the next Secret Wars, Battleworld can have the Gweniverse meet the Marvel Zombies.

Um...Also, Testing...

I'm trying out my first Teespring shirt design. It's pretty simple, just a phrase they used on last night's Daily Show that deeply resonated with me and I thought people would like on a t-shirt. I'll try to come up with something cleverer and more original next time. Here's the URL:

https://teespring.com/i-voted-for-dumbledore

I tried to keep prices low, since the graphic is pretty simple. I hope people enjoy it!

Today, I Am A Superhero

Today, I am a superhero.

I am using my amazing powers to shape my thoughts into tiny patterns of light and communicate them to you telepathically, across the vast distances of the planet and even into the future. I am speaking to people far out of hearing range, using specially designed communications devices to come to their assistance without ever even being in the same room as them.

Later, I will travel far faster than any human being can run with the aid of a technological marvel I call "the Automobile", I don't use these powers to fight crime--I concern myself with the dilemmas that fall between the cracks, the problems the police don't notice. I use my amazing powers to help my family, my friends. They can reach me from anywhere, using a secret ten-digit numerical code known only to them that activates my communicator. And through that communicator, I can reach the entire world, using a special web that links our minds known as "The Internet".

I may get tired, but luckily I have access to a special "energy drink" that will boost my mental acuity and help me push past my physical limits for a while in order to do all the helping I need to do. I know that not many people will see my amazing physical and mental abilities as anything special, but that's what having a secret identity is all about. I don't need acclaim or financial reward--all I need to know is that I used these blessings wisely and well at the end of the day.

Today I am a superhero. And if you respond by saying, "But you could say that about anybody," well...isn't that awesome?

#hellyesyourshield

Every once in a while, when discussing racism/sexism/homophobia/ableism/generalized prejudice with people, you'll see the classic line, "But I can't be prejudiced! My friends/family/significant others have been members of this minority and we get along great!" Occasionally, you'll see it pushed beyond "we get along" to "they agree with me", but the general thrust is that if you can find a member of the group who you're accused of prejudice against who shares your views and is willing to say nice things about you, then clearly you can't really be prejudiced against that group. This has become known as "using them as a shield".

(Every once in a while, by the way, you'll find someone engaging in the cargo cult debating practice of accusing people who argue against racism of using minorities as a shield by ignoring the members of the minority who agree with the racists. GamerGate loved this tactic, frequently making up fictional members of minority groups who agreed with them when the actual minorities who agreed with them proved to be rather thin on the ground.)

Often, the people who use women and minorities as a shield get very upset about being accused of using women and minorities as a shield, because they think it implies that not only are they prejudiced, which they clearly can't be because they have friends who are women and minorities, but that those relationships they value are false or only there to defend them from criticism. If you're one of those people, let me try now to explain to you, in what will hopefully be calm and friendly terms, why you're wrong--and not just wrong, but wrong in a way that is in and of itself prejudiced.

You're wrong because you're thinking about "prejudice" in its colloquial, everyday sense--hatred for minorities, or the belief in one's racial superiority. But really, prejudice is more than just that--literally, it means to pre-judge, to ascribe traits to an individual based not on the direct evidence of their personality or behavior, but because of the traits you imagine members of that group to have. It usually means negative traits, but it doesn't have to--deciding that all black people are good at basketball isn't hateful, because telling someone they're good at something is usually a compliment, but it is an act of prejudice, because it's not always true and it's making an assumption about someone based on race.

It's important to note that this prejudice works both ways. If you meet one woman who gets upset easily the week before their period, and you generalize that claim to "all women get really emotional right before their menstrual cycle", you are engaging in an act of prejudice even if you can point to specific instances that support your beliefs. Because you are judging every woman, in advance, based on the actions of one woman. (And again, this holds true even if the act of prejudice is behaviorally neutral. Liking watermelon is a behaviorally neutral act. Insisting that the stereotype of black people liking watermelon is true because your co-worker was black and he loved watermelon is racist.)

So if your defense against a claim of prejudice is to cite an individual who's a member of that group and point out that they agree with you, you're engaging in an act of prejudice right there. You are taking the opinions of one person you know who supports your position (or who you believe to support your position--I could probably write a whole additional column on the ways that "not arguing with me openly and continually" is conflated with "agreeing with me" by bigots) and generalizing them out to, "All people of this group support me, and so I can't be racist because I have so much support from minorities." The very defense of bringing in a minority as a shield is, in and of itself, a clear sign that you don't really get what your problem is.

That's why the "#notyourshield" argument that GamerGate made comes from a false place and inevitably fails. It assumes that people arguing against prejudice are doing the same thing they're doing--finding women who agree with their viewpoint and holding them up as examples--and that if they can find enough counter-examples, then they can "prove" that they're not sexist. But it doesn't work that way because the definition of "sexism" isn't simply "doing something a woman dislikes", it's ascribing traits to all women based on the actions of an individual woman, or ascribing traits to an individual woman based on your beliefs about women as a group. When you do that, you're being sexist whether or not you can find one or more women who say you're not.

To give another, purely hypothetical example, let's imagine a person named B. Torgersen--no, wait. That's too obvious. Let's call him Brad T. Let's say that Brad T. says that women and minorities "benefit from Affirmative Action" when they win an award--purely for hypothetical purposes, we'll pick the Hugo Awards, but it could be any major science-fiction writing awards. This is an act of prejudice--it is a direct implication that women and minorities are not as talented as white men, and that they need to have factors other than the quality of their work taken into account in order for them to win the award.

Now, Brad T.' comment could be defended on the grounds that he's not talking about all women and minorities; he's just giving specific examples of women and minorities who did win despite other work being better on the merits. It's a pretty weak counter-argument, because it denies the possibility of bias on his part while insisting everyone else is subject to bias, but he could try to make it work. Perhaps he could cite examples of worthy works that were overlooked in favor of these supposed inferior stories.

Instead, our hypothetical Brad T. insists that he can't be racist or sexist, because he's married to a black woman. Note that this is, in and of itself, a prejudiced act on a number of levels. He's assuming that the only kind of prejudice possible is irrational hatred of women and minorities, rather than unthinking assumptions about them. He's assuming that his wife's emotional support of him as a person equates to support for his beliefs that women and minorities are not as talented as white men. And most importantly, he's assuming that if one black woman agrees with him, then all black women must agree with him. In trying to defend himself against prejudice, he has unwittingly exposed a whole host of further unexamined assumptions about race and gender, and demanded that they remain unexamined because to do otherwise implies that he doesn't really love his wife.

This is using a minority as a shield. It's not a hateful act--again, this isn't an implication that the relationship exists only as a defense against criticism--but it is an act of prejudice. Every single time. And if you find yourself in that position, of saying, "But all my friends are--" or "My family members are--" or "My loved ones are--" instead of engaging with an argument on the merits, stop. Take a step back. Calm down. And try to ask yourself why it is that you need your friends or family or loved ones to validate your opinions for you.

Top Five Characters I'd Like to See in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

With the caveat that Marvel has movies planned out until at least 2019, and that they're pretty rapidly getting to the point where you could run a cable network that showed nothing but MCU properties...there are actually some characters I still think they haven't gotten past fan rumors. I've got a few favorites I'd like to see, like:

5. She-Hulk. I'd do this as a TV series like "Daredevil" or "Jessica Jones", only a bit more light-hearted. Jennifer Walters is a high-profile attorney (I'd probably make her a district attorney) whose life turns upside-down when she's injured by mob bosses and given a blood transfusion by her cousin, Bruce Banner. (Obviously, this is something you'd have to work in later, once Bruce's whereabouts became known. I'd toss out the "rare blood type" thing, and make it an emergency transfusion given on the spot using improvised equipment.) Now she's invulnerable, super-strong, and really not interested in being anything other than an excellent district attorney because she believes in the criminal justice system as a way of dealing with law-breakers. But of course, it's never that easy.

4. Quasar. What I've always liked about Quasar is the idea that what made him a hero was that he wasn't aggressive or bitter or generally angsty. Literally, that's what made him a hero--he got these super-powerful quantum bands that could do all sorts of amazing stuff, and he was the first guy that didn't think of them as a weapon. The people who did all wound up blowing themselves to kingdom come with them. I would run with that, and make it clear that he's a hero who thinks first of his powers in terms of protecting people and limiting the abilities of bad guys to cause trouble, and then put him into an escalating series of cosmic crises where it gets harder and harder to save everyone.

3. Monica Rambeau. I grew up with her as "Captain Marvel", so to some extent I think it's a shame they're using Carol Danvers even though she's pretty awesome herself. But I like the idea of a super-powered New Orleans harbor patrol officer who takes the same approach to big epic cosmic Avengers-themed bad guys that she does to her everyday police work, and who survives the craziness by bringing everything back to police procedural principles. Every crime has a perp, a motive, a method, and evidence. Oh, and she is so not impressed by Tony Stark.

2. The Runaways. I actually think the Runaways would work better as a series of movies than as a comic, because their one big flaw as a superhero team is that they don't really have any big reason to keep fighting evil after they take down the Pride. (Yes, I know, Vaughn tried to sell the whole "they feel responsible for the uptick in crime after the Pride are defeated" thing, but it never felt comfortable.) In the movies, having a smaller number of good arcs isn't such a bad thing. And frankly, you almost don't need to touch the first story at all to make a great film.

1. Ms Marvel. Honestly, who else was it ever going to be? I really think the only reason she doesn't have her own movie yet is because they're using "Agents of SHIELD", 'Inhumans' and 'Captain Marvel' to lay the groundwork for her admittedly complex origin. (Okay, I tell a lie, it's not that complex--she got gassed with alien mist that awakened alien DNA. But comics fans will tell you it's complex.) Seriously, they don't need to change a thing, just bring her into the movies with a good actress playing her and do all the stuff they're doing right now and it will be awesome.

Involuntary Decency

This one's as much a question as an answer: Does anyone else ever get a peculiar feeling of intense shame and frustration when you give up and decide to indulge in a bad habit you've been trying to be disciplined about, only to have circumstances conspire to prevent you from doing so? And if so, is there a word for that? I think it happens to everyone--you get so sick of your diet that you decide to go pig out on pizza, but the restaurant is closed. Or you decide to pick up a new book or game despite a tight budget, only to find out that it's out of stock.

To me, it always seems like the worst of both worlds--you have the shame of knowing that you don't have the willpower to resist temptation, but you don't get the compensation of actually having whatever it is you didn't have the willpower to resist. It's got to be the worst flavor of guilt out there, really. (In case anyone's worried, it was a very mild case today--I was planning on ordering out for lunch, but I left it too late and wound up deciding not to. It was less "circumstances" and more "my own personal laziness" conspiring to make me do the right thing.)

That said, I'd love to know if there was a word for it. Probably the Germans have something, even if it is thirty syllables long; they're good with giving names to obscure moods and feelings. You'd think that French would be the champion language for that, but what have they ever given us besides ennui?

...sorry, that should read, "What have they ever given us besides 'ennui'?" Big difference there. In any event, if you know the word for this feeling, or even if you just want to join me in disliking it, feel free to do so in the comments.

Why Doesn't the Valeyard Work?

In 1986, during Season Twenty-Three's 'Trial of a Time Lord', Bob Holmes (with contributions from others including Philip Martin, Eric Saward and Pip and Jane Baker) introduced a character that instantly gripped the imagination of pretty much the entire fanbase at the time...the Valeyard. He began the story as the prosecutor in the titular trial of the Doctor, but by the end he was revealed as something far more shocking--a future incarnation of the Doctor, a distillation of all his worst impulses into living form. He instantly became a major, core element of the mythos of the series...

Well, no, actually he didn't. In fact, apart from a few audio stories (I think that Beep the Meep may actually have appeared more often than the Valeyard) and a mention in the Season Seven finale, the Valeyard has been rather conspicuously absent for a character who would seem to have so much storytelling potential. In point of fact, for the longest time he was not only absent but forbidden: The Virgin submission guidelines made it clear that any pitch featuring the Valeyard, explicitly stating that they felt he had no storytelling potential and was a crutch used by bad writers in order to make their stories seem more significant.

Is that true? Certainly, you could argue pretty persuasively that any story that features the Valeyard could be done just as easily with the Master; he's already the Doctor's "dark mirror", so in a lot of ways the part is already taken. (It's probably significant that the one major Valeyard story featured the Master helping the Doctor against the Valeyard.) But surely there has to be something that can be done specifically with the Valeyard that can't be done with a generic "evil Time Lord scientist", right? There has to be something particular and special about the idea of the Doctor's potential corrupted and debased into cruelty and sadism?

But the Valeyard we see on screen has nothing to him beyond cruelty and sadism. He's evil. Full stop. The Doctor's "dark mirror" is a murderous sociopath who does evil things for evil's sake, or at least that's how he's played in 'Trial'. He's a sneering, preening, gloating villain who wants to cause chaos for its own sake. If he's the Doctor's dark mirror, then the Doctor must be a humble, self-effacing sort who's interested in preserving order and..

Ah. Yes. There it is.

The Doctor has never been an unambiguously, uncomplicatedly "good" individual. He's a mercurial creature of chaos in his own right, toppling governments and dashing off into the night without ever caring what results he leaves behind. He's at times callous, at other times startlingly sympathetic over trivial details. He's refused to kill his enemies because he believes deeply in compassion...and he's steered whole fleets of alien conquerors into the sun with a casual "good riddance". He's burned whole planets, and sacrificed his life to save a single man. He is perhaps the most strikingly complex protagonist in television history...and yet his "dark mirror" is just a typical Man in the Black Hat who comes up with complicated-yet-rubbish schemes. (Am I talking about the Valeyard or the Master? Yes.)

For the Valeyard to work, he'd have to be far more like the Doctor than he is. He'd have to be a capricious monster, one just as willing to spare an entire world from his depredations simply because he liked the color of the sky as he was to crush a sparrow underfoot for singing out of tune. He'd have to be an agent of order as well as chaos, perfectly willing to spend decades on a trivial task because it was worth doing right and then dashing a whole civilization to dust with a few whispered words. In short, a dark and twisted incarnation of the Doctor would be very difficult to distinguish from...the Doctor. The difference between the Doctor's best self and his worst impulses is a matter of degree and emphasis, as he himself has admitted on occasion. ("Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.") Ultimately, the reason the Valeyard is so underused is because he's superfluous to requirements. The Doctor has all the darkness he needs without having to outsource it.

"The Right Gaming Group"

io9, just moments ago, published an article on resources you can use to find a gaming group in your area. They point out that finding the right gaming group can be tricky, since there's no one set of criteria everyone shares for "the right group", and your mileage may vary at all times. While this is true, I've certainly noticed a few things over the years that are important, and I thought I might share them with people.

The Big Important Points:

1) It is, fundamentally, a game. The very definition of the word "game" includes the phrase "amusement"; it is intended to be a leisure activity that you enjoy doing. This means that if anyone is taking the game so seriously that they lose sight of that--rules lawyering, losing patience with inexperienced players, being needlessly sadistic as a GM, freaking out over missed sessions, demanding strict adherence to in-character behavior, flipping out when your character dies or anything else not on this list that involves getting upset or angry over what is fundamentally a social activity--they need to relax or else they may not be a good fit for a gaming group.

2) It is a co-operative game. This is an important part of it, because while you should never lose your temper or freak out over someone playing a game badly, the counterpart of that is that you should at least put effort into it. You should try to be there for every session (yes, life happens, we all know it, but if you're missing more than one out of every five or six sessions you should look into why); you should always pay attention to the game--phones put away and TV off is a default minimum, but more generally you should listen to what everyone is saying and try to play along so long as they're suggesting something even reasonably fun; and for Pete's sake it is not a competition. Unless it is a clear, agreed-upon-by-all-parties-especially-the-GM, official and well-understood part of the campaign, you should never ever ever ever ever EVER be screwing around with your fellow party members. Basically, if everyone wants to play 'Paranoia' or something, that's fine, but that one person who always plays a Chaotic Evil character so they can backstab another player and claim "I was just being in character"? Kick 'em to the curb. They're toxic, they will ruin everyone else's fun, and they're unlikely to change.

Oh, and if you're a GM, you should always try to apply the rules in a way that makes the players' experiences fulfilling. This doesn't mean Monty Haul gaming; being challenged is exciting and overcoming a big challenge is thrilling, and that's part of a fulfilling gaming experience. It also isn't exactly the same thing as "applying the rules fairly"; sometimes the rulebook gets in the way of a fun game. (And sometimes your adventure notes get in the way of a fun game. Learning to improvise with what's interesting to your characters is a big part of making a good game.) But you shouldn't favor anyone unduly, you shouldn't disregard the rulebook solely in order to do bad things to players, you should be willing to change your mind when a player points out a legitimate rules mistake instead of getting defensive (sometimes the rules lawyer is right!) and you should always give them a fighting chance. And most importantly, you should communicate with them in a mature fashion in order to avoid misunderstandings.

That's my criteria for what makes a good gaming group. You could probably distill it down further to "Everyone should work hard to try to make everyone else's experiences fun", I suppose, but I wanted to mention specific red flags that come up when that isn't happening. Even the red flag-items, though, aren't automatically bad. As long as everyone is relaxed, participating in a spirit of good-hearted fun, and willing to take the unusual in stride, the occasional intra-party kill or GM fiat isn't going to hurt anything. Just try to remember that the point is to create good memories, and those happen whether or not you "win".

Review: The Deep

Nick Cutter's 'The Deep' is quite possibly the most disturbing book I've ever read.

It's not the scariest--I think that for a story to be truly terrifying you have to be able to, on some level, imagine it happening to you. That's why most of them start so simply--everyone can imagine going up to a cabin for the weekend, everyone can imagine taking a wrong turn late at night, everyone can imagine stopping at the wrong hotel. I don't think many people can imagine traveling eight miles straight down to an undersea base at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in order to assist their brilliant-but-remote scientist brother in his efforts to harvest a miracle cure for a new disease using a substance unknown to science. It's not, y'know...common.

But 'The Deep' isn't scary. (Well, okay, it is actually pretty scary, but it's not primarily scary. If you get my meaning.) 'The Deep' is disturbing. 'The Deep' presents a vision of a universe that is fundamentally at odds with rationality--not simply a scary thing down at the bottom of the ocean, but a rot at the heart of everything we think we know about the way that reality works. The book isn't about insanity; it's almost the opposite of insanity, the attempts by fundamentally rational people to comprehend something that cannot be understood through rational means. I've read plenty of books where the big twist is that the main character is insane, but I don't think I've ever read a book before where I was hoping that to be the case.

'The Deep' has a magnificent purity to its commitment to sheer, sickening irrationality. None of it makes sense. The disease the characters are attempting to cure, a progressive memory disorder called "the 'Gets", has no apparent mechanism for transmission. It appears out of nowhere. The substance that apparently cures it, ambrosia, is sickeningly physics-defying and does things to people and animals that makes the Colour out of Space look like Turf Builder. Even the environment the story takes place in has a tendency to warp and shift in impossible ways, resulting in some of the most memorable and nightmarish imagery I've seen in a horror novel. It's almost like living a fever dream.

Even worse, it never feels like this is an ordinary world that is being corrupted. Several characters including the protagonist, Luke, have flashbacks to horrific events from their past that take on a distinct tinge of madness and impossibility. It feels almost as though whatever they've come in contact has been waiting for them all their lives, and I hope I'm not spoiling things too much when I say that this isn't too far from the truth. That rot is everywhere in 'The Deep' once you start looking for it. It stretches deep into the past and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. It transforms the things it touches, and it has a purpose.

I cannot stress enough how much this book impresses me. It sets out to achieve a certain tone, a sense of creeping, inchoate, inexplicable chaos and it hits the notes so perfectly that I can't imagine any way of improving it. The novel never gives in to the urge to define its monsters in terms of myth or legend the way so many horror stories eventually do; it comes close, near the end, when you come face to face with the heart of the madness and find a little kinship to the monsters we all imagine to be trapped down below, but it never does anything as slapdash or lazy as saying, "Hey, it was Satan/C'thulhu/Killer BOB all along!" The book remains resolute in its commitment to utter madness on a cosmic scale, even as the ending makes perfect, inevitable sense. (That ending, man. That's going to haunt you.)

Cutter also manages to shed most of the trappings of Stephen King here. There's still a tiny amount--like King, much of the book centers on the father/son dynamic that King explored in novels like 'The Shining' and 'Cell'--but I feel like this book is where Cutter comes into his own. I don't think I'll wait long to pick up his next book.

Thank God that it doesn't sound as creepy as this one.

Review: The Dark

Reading James Herbert's novel 'The Dark' is almost like cracking open a time capsule--the book was published in 1980, but it's clearly steeped in the influences of the late 1970s. You can see pretty much every trope of British horror at the time laid out in front of you with the meticulous care of someone who wanted to make the most 70s-Britishy horror novel they could possibly make, and who assembled each ingredient with the precision of someone deeply attuned to the zeitgeist of the era.

So you have a hero who's a paranormal investigator who researches haunted houses, but who's a skeptic who believes that it can all be explained away rationally, because that peculiar blend of New Age parapsychology and 'Stone Tape' rationalism was in everyone's mind. You have an evil death cult that all committed mass suicide, because Jim Jones and the People's Temple, but with an overlay of Manson Family (they're not all dead and the survivors are carrying out the master's plan). You have pseudo-religion to go with the parapsychology angle--naturally, the master of the evil cult has his own cosmology that will give him life beyond death, and even more naturally this new mix of paranormal science and ancient religion forms an all-encompassing Theory of Everything that explains away all previous religions as imperfect understanding of this new science. Because that's what people did in the 70s before cocaine replaced LSD as the drug of choice.

And naturally, since it's British horror in the 70s, you get heaping dollops of Hammer-style ironic gore, with loads of people getting bloody (but not so bloody that you'd get it shredded by the censors) deaths in ways that just happen to dovetail with their own moral failings. Oh, and a romance that's veddy veddy British as well. And an ending that...well, let's just say that if you're familiar with the genre, you've probably already predicted it. The whole thing feels so much like a Hammer film that my brain actually envisioned it on grainy film stock.

None of which should suggest that I disliked the book. It's exactly what it sets out to be--a distillation of a bunch of popular culture topics that fit into the horror wheelhouse, expertly done and unfolding at a rapid and enjoyable pace. There are some great set pieces--in fact, the book is almost entirely composed of great set pieces, with briskly efficient narrative tissue connecting them together. The dialogue is a bit functional and perhaps over-concerned with paranormal jargon, but again, that's entirely what a book written in this era and set in this era should feel like.

Basically, once you've read 'The Dark' you really don't need to see or read another "ghost" movie or book from this era, because they're all going to be mostly like this. And frankly, if you just want to read one book from this era, you could certainly do worse than choose this one.

My Dream Marvel Project

This is a "dream project" that I'd like Marvel to do and make available for purchase by me, just to clarify, not a dream project I'd like to do at Marvel. Although if they want me to help, I'm open.

Because it would be kind of ambitious. My idea is for a series of books collecting the entire Marvel Universe in chronological order. Everything they've ever declared to be canon, starting from the beginning (and yes, I know that would involve the Golden Age Timely stuff) and moving all the way up to the present day, by which time of course they would be years ahead because there's no way you could keep up with the material.

I'd like to see it as big, thick hardcovers, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 issues per book, just going month by month through Marvel's output and collecting as much as you can cram in one series. You wouldn't do it in the order it was set, obviously, or continuity inserts would eventually make it an incomprehensible nightmare--you'd probably need to jump around from series to series a bit, though. So one volume might have three or four issues of "Fantastic Four" that all occur as part of a single series of events, then jump over to a 'meanwhile...' set of issues in the X-Men that are meant to be roughly contemporaneous. (Perhaps even get a Marvel historian to annotate the whole thing with the reasons for placing issues in a given order?)

Obviously, it'd be huge, unwieldy, only-for-collectors, and probably desperately unprofitable. Still, I can dream of having the entire Marvel Universe spanning my shelves, can't I?

Review: The Troop

As I said in my previous review, I have a thing for trashy horror. And part of the thing I have for trashy horror is that it's not really scary--it plays so closely to the established tropes of the genre that it almost becomes paradoxically safe and predictable. There's a Hero, who you know will survive to the end of the book, and a monster, which will seem invulnerable but which will be beaten at the end by a determined effort from the Hero (with an optional "stinger" showing it's not permanently destroyed) and of course, a cast of supporting characters who will die at regular intervals (with the possible exception of the Hero's Love Interest, who usually has plot immunity as well). It's silly horror. It's safe horror.

And then every once in a while I read something like Nick Cutter's 'The Troop'. That's the other kind of horror. The real thing. Queasy, gut-twisting fear that forces you to put the book down every few minutes because you feel like you're smothering when you read it. Nerve-twisting dread that makes you go on the Internet and look up plot summaries so that you can at least get some idea of where the plot is headed in order to stop at least a little bit of that uncertainty. (There are no plot summaries of this book online. Just to save you a little time.) This is a book that does not play games. It is not safe. It is utterly terrifying.

The story is very simple--a group of Boy Scouts out on a camping trip on a deserted island have an encounter with a starving man, and it turns out that he's very very sick. He's infested with parasites, genetically altered tapeworms that are literally eating him alive from the inside, and they're seeking new hosts. It does not take very long at all for the camping trip to go horribly, horribly wrong.

But this book moves past the lazy tropes of "scary worms crawling around looking to get into your body" (although there are some scenes of suffocating dread involving the worms, both when characters are trying to avoid infestation and when describing the experience of being infested with them). It's the people who are the most terrifying here--each of them filled with flaws and weaknesses that are exposed like a raw nerve by the crisis. This is a book about people, not about worms, and about the way that disaster brings out the best in some and the worst in others. And for one boy, budding serial killer Shelley, the worst turns out to be very bad indeed.

If there is one complaint I could make about the book, it's that Cutter does wear his influences somewhat on his sleeve--Shelley is a bit too reminiscent of Patrick Hockstetter in 'It' (a clear inspiration for this book in many ways) and one of the deaths bears a close resemblance to a sequence in 'The Ruins' (which is also about a small group of people who run into the unnatural and cope badly). The book does very much read like a style pastiche of King and Smith. That said, it's a style pastiche that succeeds at reading something like King or Smith might have written, rather than an inferior imitation, so I'm not sure how upset I can really be. Talent borrows, genius steals, right?

So while I recommend 'The Troop', I can't do so unreservedly. Because only you know your particular tolerance levels for white-knuckle terror and your stomach for gore. (The descriptions of what the tapeworms do to their host are not to be read before, during or after mealtimes.) If all you're looking for is some safe scares, a good old-fashioned "chiller", this is probably not the book for you. But if you're looking for real horror...you can do a lot worse than Nick Cutter's 'The Troop'.

Review: Dead Sea

I don't know exactly why, but I have a soft spot for trashy horror novels. You know the kind I'm talking about--quick reads that can usually be summed up as "monsters show up and whittle down the cast one by one", cover art that's usually a picture of said monsters, and titles that are either thuddingly blunt, like "Werewolf Moon", or so lyrical they're almost purple, like "Die Softly, My Darling", or lazy puns, like...well, like "Dead Sea".

Basically, what I'm saying is that this isn't really a good horror novel. It commits a lot of Brian Keene's usual sins; he comes up with a really interesting idea for a novel about apocalyptic societal collapse, something that nobody else in the genre is really doing, and then he has a first-person narrator skim through that idea in a five-page infodump at the beginning of the book so that he can get to a small cast of people running around with guns and shooting monsters for two hundred pages. Then, once the cast is sufficiently whittled down, the narrator gives a bleak coda. Admittedly, after "The Rising" and "The Conqueror Worms", I kind of knew what I was getting into, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.

It doesn't help that this one is a little less inspired. "The Rising", for all that it didn't really make much use of the central concept of sentient zombies, at least had that as a compelling and unique hook. And "The Conqueror Worms" was bizarre, but it was so bizarre that it was downright fascinating. This is just, "Oh, hey, zombies. And zombie animals too, that's kind of different, right?" (It is different, but it's different on a level of, "You realize everyone in this book should be dead before page one, right?" A zombification virus that crosses species would result in an almost inconceivable holocaust, and I don't think Keene really got an idea of the scope of the devastation.)

But yes, "Dead Sea" is pretty much just zombies of all species. Survivors escape to the ocean, there's two hundred or so pages of running around and shooting things, and once the cast is whittled down sufficiently, the narrator gives a bleak coda. I think the big problem is that the end is simply too obvious; given that civilization has already collapsed, food and drink is impossible to obtain due to the fact that everything is already dead and still moving, and the virus keeps jumping species pretty much willy-nilly over the course of the novel, it's hard to even imagine that this won't have a bleak ending. It's hard to generate tension when all the characters are basically just "pre-dead"--you just can't get attached to them enough to care. (It doesn't help that they don't really sound like real people. There's a scene about two thirds of the way through where everyone just starts chatting about Jungian archetypes that is absolutely immersion-shattering in its sheer unbelievability.)

That said, Keene has a slick and propulsive narrative style that makes the book a quick read and an easy page-turner. You don't really get invested in the consequences of events, but the book moves smoothly from one event to the next without any real languors (apart, perhaps, from the aforementioned Jungian archetype conversation). There's also a vividly creepy human monster in the form of a priest who believes zombification to be a miracle and enacts his own perverse version of the transubstantiation myth, who really should have been given a more prominent role. Those sequences are probably the best bit.

So that's "Dead Sea". As long as you understand what you're getting into, it's a decent read. But like all of the guys who are listed as "the next Stephen King" on the back covers of their books, Keene is no Stephen King.

Review: Dopplegangsters

A few caveats:

1) There's actually an umlaut in the title, but I don't know how to format umlauts in Blogger. Yes, I'm aware that there's also an umlaut in "umlaut" that I can't type, either.

2) This is not the first Esther Diamond novel. If you decide to pick up this book based on my recommendation, you should probably not pick up this book. You should pick up Disappearing Nightly, which is the first book but which is not listed as the first book in this book because the series started under another publisher and the publishers of this book were apparently not about to give free publicity to a book they were hoping would go out of print so they could buy the rights and get the whole series under the same publisher. So although there's a handy info-dump at the beginning to get you up to speed, you probably don't want to do what I did and buy this book thinking it was the first book.

3) Full disclosure: Laura Resnick, author of Dopplegangsters, first came to my attention by making lots of smart, insightful, level-headed comments on the whole Puppy mess on File 770, and by posting cute pictures of her foster kittens on Facebook. I freely admit that I will pick up your first novel based on your cute cat pictures. After that, you need to have talent.

And with those caveats out of the way, let's talk Dopplegangsters. The first thing I'll say is that the book cover does a good job of setting expectations. The title, the cover art and the back cover copy all suggest a screwball comedy paranormal romance-mystery about Esther Diamond, an out-of-work actress who's waiting tables at a Mafia restaurant and bumps into a gangster twice in one night...only to witness his gruesome murder the next night. It turns out (spoilers!) that mob enforcers all over town are sprouting magical twins, and dying horrifically not long afterwards.

With those expectations in mind, the book lived up to them very nicely. Esther is a charming, sympathetic character with a good head on her shoulders and enough determination and smarts to make her a believable solver of bizarre gangland paranormal slayings, but she's also human and relatable enough to make her a believable out-of-work actress who's in way over her head a lot of the time and coping with the situation using wry humor and the occasional bout of panic.

Max, her sorcerer friend, is a bit caricatured--you'll recognize him from a lot of urban fantasy stories who have powerful immortal magic-wielders that are a bit out of touch with the modern world. But he's a well-done take on the caricature, and has some genuinely funny moments. Lopez, Esther's cop boyfriend who isn't particularly thrilled at her involvement with the Mafia, is sympathetic despite having a lot of plot functions that should theoretically force him to be a jerk (he's the token skeptic, he's trying to sideline Esther for her own safety, and as a cop he starts to get more than a little suspicious that Esther is hanging around with gangsters all the time). In some ways, he's the best character.

But really, the show is repeatedly stolen by good-guy hitman "Lucky", whose basic response to finding out that magic is real and that a professional killer is using it to whack people is, "Okay, that sucks. We should find that guy and kill him." There are a lot of great gags involving Lucky's pragmatic approach to the mystical world, and the impromptu education he provides Esther and Max in moving through his own territory without getting killed.

The mystery itself isn't exactly complicated--there's really only about three suspects, and Resnick takes the Agatha Christie tack of "the person who seems least likely to have done it is the obvious suspect". But this isn't really about the mystery--it's about the people solving it, and Resnick does an excellent job of creating characters that you want to spend time with. It's a book you don't so much read as hang out in, and the charming atmosphere will definitely make you want to spend a little more time with Esther Diamond.

Meet 'N Greet #9!

This particular feature of my blog has gone fallow ever since 'City of Heroes' went away, and I think that's kind of a shame because it was fun to talk about the concepts I had for my characters. I know that "please don't tell me about your character" is one of the standard jokes in fandom, but generally I feel like it applies more to people for whom the phrase "let me tell you about my character" means "let me tell you exclusively about the absurdly large/small [delete where applicable for gaming system] numbers I wrote down on my character sheet and the way it makes me better than everyone else at playing the game". Because numbers aren't inherently interesting, but characters frequently are.

Take for example today's entry, Paintboxer. He was a mad scientist, and when I say "mad" I mean "totally barking". His big moment of revelation came when he saw a truck passing his lab with the Sherwin-Williams logo painted on the side:

That was when he had his moment. This was no coincidence. It was a message, a coded message from the secret masters of the universe. This was his directive, his command, his all-consuming imperative from this day forth! He would design special gauntlets that could inject nano-engineered self-replicating paint droplets, and defeat the enemies of the secret world order by punching them with endless gallons of paint! He would design his own spacecraft, stealing to get the money if necessary, and he would put a bucket the size of the moon in geostationary orbit! And then...then, armed with his self-replicating paint and his massive paint-generating bucket, he would do the impossible. He would fulfill his orders. He would....

COVER THE EARTH

That was Paintboxer. You can see why I disagree that people who talk about their characters are boring.

Review: The Fifth Season

I'll be honest--if Nora Jemisin wasn't so damn brilliant, I'm not sure I could have made it through 'The Fifth Season'.

Because this is not a pleasant book. Page One opens with a woman cradling the body of her three-year old son, who has been beaten to death by her husband. By Page Seven, most of the continent has been devastated in an extinction-level cataclysm. And it pretty much goes on from there. I'm not saying it's not good, but of the many awards this will probably win, the first one should be "Book Least Likely To Be Reviewed Using the Phrase 'Madcap Romp'".

That said, I read to the end. Not just read--I devoured the book in great gulps, triggery scenes and all. Because Nora Jemisin is that brilliant. If she was a less talented writer, the brutality in this book would have been done simply for shock value, or exploitation. If she wasn't so amazing at her craft, these scenes wouldn't have made an emotional connection to the reader; they'd have been there simply to say, "This is a bad world with bad people that the hero must stop," a sort of signpost for evil that we could all walk past and know we were heading in the right direction.

But there is nothing that lazy in 'The Fifth Season'. Everything Jemisin writes is designed to remove the distance between you and the narrative. The three interweaving stories of Damaya, Syenite and Essun are meant to be your story as well--the use of the present tense, the use of the second-person voice in much of the story, these things are there to bring you closer so that you feel the pain of it. The injustice. The crushing, grinding despair that comes from being systematically exploited and abused for something outside of your control. Nora Jemisin wants to kick the props out from under you and make you feel something, and she succeeds completely.

That's what this book is really about--it's not about defeating a villain and toppling an evil empire. That happens by Page Seven, and I'm still not sure whether it was the right thing to do 442 pages later. This is a book about understanding how people can be exploited for their gifts and talents as well as their weaknesses. It's about learning that sometimes, people can look at you and see nothing more than a resource to be used. It is a powerful allegory for a powerful subject, and it's hard to feel the same way after you finish reading this book. It is a book that changes you. It takes a lot of talent to do that.

(It's also Book One of a trilogy, so don't expect a self-contained narrative. Just so you don't get frustrated at the end.)

This is a work of heartbreak, but it's all the more worth reading for that. I don't think most writers could have pulled it off. I don't necessarily think a lot of writers would have tried. But I'm glad someone did.

Review: The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy

I was going to start this review off with a satirical rant about this book being a perfect example of the way the SJWs "get you"--they start out with shipping and OTP and fanfiction, and then when you're hooked, they start in on the feminism! But then I remembered Poe's Law and decided to truncate that part significantly.

It is true, though, that Sam Maggs uses this book to walk women from the very basic points of fandom, such as identifying the things you love and finding other women who love it just as much as you do, up through to the point of having a social conscience about the things that you enjoy and critiquing them as items of cultural significance with potentially problematic subtexts. Most impressively, she does it without ever losing the casual tone, the warm-hearted atmosphere of acceptance and welcoming, and the inspirational message that embracing the things you love is unconditionally good and you should never feel ashamed of being excited and enthusiastic about them.

Along the way, the book takes in topics like, "What is a convention and how do I have a good time at one?", "How do I deal with online trolls?", and "How do I, too, write smutty fanfiction featuring my favorite characters?" It also has a few short interviews with various female creators, which was one thing I thought could have been expanded greatly, but the book does have a lot to take in, after all. (I haven't even mentioned its tips on how to set up your own Quidditch match.) Through it all, Maggs keeps the authorial voice conversational and breezy--after all, this is a book about how to have more fun doing all the things you enjoy. It makes sense to speak in fan slang and Internet-speak. (The book also includes a helpful glossary, for all the people who do not yet understand that they can have all the feels about things.)

She also makes it clear that if you don't like people who use fan slang, who speak in Internet-speak and who squee, then this is your problem and not the problem of the rest of the world. The strong subtext, and frequently the strong text of the book is, "It is okay to disagree; it is never okay to disrespect." The message that fandom should have no gatekeepers resonated strongly with me and made reading the book a very happy experience even if I don't necessarily know who the Nerdfighters, Marshmallows, Irrelevants, Interns, Castillions, Madokies, Walker Stalkers, Assassins, Smashers, Squints, Queen's Readers, Homestucks, Moonies, Initiates, Gearheads, Truebies, Human Beings, Cortexifans, Psych-Os, Hetalians, Sleepyheads, Rum Runners, Shadowhunters, Pinenuts, and Lawsbians actually are. Because that doesn't mean they're not "real" fans. It just makes it clear that no matter how big I think fandom is, it's always bigger than I realize.

I Made a Meme!

It is genuinely terrible. Please share without attribution.

Gone But Unforgettable

Wes Craven is one of the reasons I always wanted to be a writer. Not that I watched 'Nightmare on Elm Street' as a nine-year old and came away wanting to make horror movies; I don't even think I saw the movies until they showed up in greatly-diminished form on UHF television a few years later. But as a nine-year old, I did know one thing; every kid on the playground was talking about Freddy Krueger.

How could they not? He was, and is, a potent and iconic symbol in popular culture. He was a brilliant distillation of a host of fears both modern and ancient--he tapped into the zeigeist of the time and the panic over child abductions and repressed traumas, but he also expressed the most ancient and terrible fears about the strange world of dreams that we enter unwillingly for eight hours every night. Everyone has a nightmare. Everyone was once a child afraid of a sinister stranger, or an adult frightened for their child. Freddy Krueger manifested those fears so perfectly that he was made immortal in almost the first instant of his appearance on camera.

Which isn't to reduce Wes Craven to Freddy Krueger; he had a long and brilliant career with plenty of famous gems and plenty of underappreciated classics that will bear re-examination. (I'm a particular fan of 'The Wishmaster', myself; it's a fairly classic tale, the person who awakens a genie and learns first-hand to be careful what they wish for, but it's elegantly and stylishly told.) But Freddy Krueger is a genuine contribution to humanity's common myth, a folklore figure whose tales will be told and retold down through the ages. A thousand years from now, whether as interactive hologram or direct mental projection or (depending on how pessimistic you want to be) people telling stories in front of the fire erected to keep out the lizardwolves, they will tell stories about the man with knives for fingers who will get you in your sleep. (Which is a good way to keep everyone awake and watching for lizardwolves, really.)

And Wes Craven, while he may not always be remembered as Freddy Krueger's creator, will always be remembered because of Freddy Krueger. With his imagination, he has purchased a form of immortality, a legacy that will live on long after we have forgotten our presidents and kings and long after the richest man's money has trickled away into the hands of his descendants. Wes Craven is dead, but Wes Craven will also live forever. That's the kind of thing that deep down, all writers aspire to. I can't say I'm any different.

Godspeed, Mister Craven. You cannot be forgotten.

Review: Chicks Dig Gaming

(Full disclosure: I consider Lars Pearson to be a good friend, and I look forward to his too-infrequent visits to the Twin Cities. I did not receive a free copy of 'Chicks Dig Gaming', but I almost certainly would have if I asked, and I have received free copies of other Mad Norwegian works both as compensation for minor copy-editing favors and just because Lars is a really nice person who likes to do good things for people. I don't think this biased this review, but the nature of bias is that you don't see it. So you can take all this in the understanding that the person writing the review likes the publisher and respects what he's trying to do.)

At this point, it seems pretty clear to me that the story of fandom in the 21st century is the story of marginalized groups in fandom to gain representation. I use "marginalized" here specifically, and not "minority", because it's increasingly obvious that these groups were never a minority at all--they were made to feel that they were alone in a sea of cis-het-white-able-bodied men, but the more they tell their stories, the more we can see that they were there all along. They were simply made to feel invisible.

'Chicks Dig Gaming', then, is one of many efforts to remedy that; it's a book of essays by women, about women's perspective on gaming. (It joins a number of other, similar books of essays by the same publisher on comics, Doctor Who, and the works of Joss Whedon.) The stories include a variety of voices from women of different races, religions, and social classes on a wide variety of topics. Many of them are simply the story of how they came to discover the world of gaming, and how they came to carve out a space for themselves within it, but there are also a number of brilliant flights of fancy (Cat Valente uses Super Mario Brothers as a metaphor for the Buddhist wheel of rebirth), scathingly clever pieces of social criticism (Lynnea Glasser writes "How to Write Games for Boys", an explanation of how to "blue up" makeover and shopping games for the underrepresented gender) and spotlights on various aspects of game design (one highlight is Filamena Young's chronicles of designing an RPG for her six-year old). There's a lot of variety here...

But honestly, the more I think about it, the more value I found in the essays that were variations on a theme of "How I Came to Gaming". They weren't the ones that made me laugh the hardest or challenged me the most (and I could go on about a lot of the essays in this book as particular highlights, from Mags L. Halliday's excellent piece on the 'damsel in distress' trope in the Professor Layton puzzle series to Jen J. Dixon's worthy attempt to explain what someone could possibly find of value in the brutal and unforgiving world of EVE)...but they were in some ways the most important essays in the book. They were the ones that said, "I have a story too. My story, the story of my life and my fandom, is real and undeniable and worth telling. Please sit and listen."

That's why these essay books mean so much. They give voices to the people who have not traditionally had them. They tell people like me, an (all together now) cis-het-white-able-bodied man, that it's okay to sit down and listen to other people's stories sometimes. I am the audience here, not the creator, and that's an okay thing to be.

And another thing that's great about them, the thing that's probably cost me the most money the past few days, is that they not only give voices to these people, they give exposure to them as creators. I bought Lucy A. Snyder's 'Spellbent' based on her essay "The Grace and Dice and Glossy Cardstock", and I bought 'The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy' based on Sam Maggs' "Go for the Eyes, Gamer Girls, Go for the Eyes!" The essay "Looking for Group", by G. Willow Wilson, directed me to her novel 'Alif the Unseen' as well as being entertaining in its own right, and I've not even started picking out the podcasts and blogs and YouTube channels that all the different author bios mention. This book is a huge signal boost to people who deserve more visibility, because they're talented and smart and funny and deserve to be an equal part of fandom.

'Chicks Dig Gaming' is the best of all worlds--a funny, touching, smart, moving book of essays that also helps provide a voice for people who have spent too long and worked too hard trying to prove that they deserve one. I unreservedly recommend it.

Rejected 'Walking Dead' Spin-Offs

The first episode of 'Fear the Walking Dead', the new spin-off series that prequelizes 'The Walking Dead', premiered last night on AMC. I caught a bit of it--it wasn't bad, a bit light on both fear and walking dead but it's the first episode--but what I found interesting was just how long it took Robert Kirkman and AMC to figure out what they wanted to do for a spin-off. It turns out they bounced around a lot of ideas before finally settling on the opening days of the zombie apocalypse. To wit:

1. Love the Walking Dead. This reportedly centered on a group of people who put cuddly mittens and hoods with pictures of cute animals on them over their zombified friends so they couldn't scratch or bite, and proceeded to hang out with them and have adorable adventures. It was vetoed as "too creepy, even for us."

2. Ignore the Walking Dead. This series would have focused on a group of people in a well-stocked, reinforced house in a secluded location who just decided to stay indoors until the whole thing blew over. Most of the mid-season arc revolved around a Monopoly game that causes a lot of arguments, interspersed with shots of zombies looking forlornly through the window.

3. Envy the Walking Dead. This spin-off would have centered on a group of goth teens who think that being a zombie would be "so romantic", and deliberately make efforts to get bitten. But in a wacky comedy mix-up, it turns out that the patchouli oil they're wearing is the zombie repellent that the government is desperately looking for! Apparently they scratched it because it created continuity problems with the original series, where Merle wore it constantly.

4, Loathe the Walking Dead. The story of a germophobic and his constant quest for Purell set against the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse, this spin-off was canceled when the product placement deal fell through.

5. Accept the Walking Dead. This "fast-forward" spin-off would have taken place after civilization had been rebuilt and everyone had gone through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and come to terms with the fact that they just have to shoot their loved ones in the head minutes after they die, as a natural part of the healing process. Turned out to be a little "low-key" compared to fan expectations.

6. Desire the Walking Dead. Never even made it past the announcement of the title at the pitch meeting.

How To Integrate the Fantastic Four Into the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Not that it'll ever happen, of course. Fox is fully committed to continuing to make 'Fantastic Four' movies, and will remain so right up until the day they sign on the dotted line with Marvel Studios.

Look, I was rooting for Josh Trank. Won't deny it. I liked the idea of a different take on the FF, still do, even if he didn't stick the landing. But my point all along wasn't that this was going to be an awesome version of the FF and we should all embrace it, it was that it was okay to try something different even if it failed because the worst-case scenario was that they'd just reboot the property again. Because either Fox makes a new FF movie, or the rights revert to Marvel and they make a new FF movie. There ain't no third option here.

I'm assuming that we're going to see a Marvel Studios version, though, because Fox is getting to the same point Sony did with Spider-Man; they know they're not getting all the bang for their buck that they deserve and they can't seem to find anyone who can do the property right, but they also know that just letting Marvel have it for free is a chump move. They'll do a deal, and Marvel will be happy to agree because they want all their properties back under their roof and they don't have a ton of leverage--for all that Fox is probably going to lose money on this incarnation of the property, they can still make these cheaply enough to be profitable as a general rule if they want to just crank them out to satisfy their contractual obligations. So Marvel will lease back what they can't buy outright, same as with Spidey.

Which means we're going to see a new take on the FF set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What should it look like? Well, I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think that the Fantastic Four really work best when considered as part of the era they were created in. They are steeped in a heady Silver Age brew of unbridled faith in science's abilities to transform society for the better, complete and total optimism regarding the future for the world in general and America in particular, and yes, jingoistic Cold War patriotism. So they should do what they did with Captain America--set the first movie in the year it was created.

So we're looking at the FF as Kennedy-era heroes. Not "super heroes", because this is the MCU and they really didn't have "super heroes" until Tony Stark held his press conference, but celebrities--Reed Richards, nicknamed by the media as "Mister Fantastic", and his amazing friends that journalists are already calling "The Fantastic Four". Known and lauded for their amazing achievement in reaching the moon with an experimental spacecraft of their own design and leapfrogging the Commies in the Space Race. Their "costumes" would be more like uniforms, jumpsuits that they wear when testing Reed's latest exotic inventions. They'd be famous, people would even know that they had superpowers...but one key element of their exciting story would be kept secret from the world at large.

Namely, supervillains. (After all, you don't really get superheroes until you get bad guys. Before that, they're just "cool dudes with powers".) My idea is that they work secretly for SHIELD, and its Director Peggy Carter. (Because Hayley Atwell is da bomb.) They deal with geopolitical threats too dangerous to even allow the wider world to know about, such as the mad dictator Doctor Doom, the subterranean tyrant known as the Mole Man, and Kang, the deadly foe from the future who threatens to enslave the human race, and who by all the evidence is destined to succeed. In fact, I'd make Kang the villain of the first MCU FF movie--not only does it get away from the whole, "Oh God, not Doctor Doom again!" factor, it also sets up the important factor in getting the FF involved with all the other superheroes...by the end, Reed Richards has time travel.

Not precise time travel, or otherwise you've just wrecked the storytelling engine--it's impossible to get closer than the right decade. But the first movie would end with Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny realizing that the future is literally right there waiting for them. And that, they have to see. They time-jump fifty years into the future, ready to see all the wonders that exist in that brave new world...and pop out in the middle of the next Avengers movie, ideally right in the middle of the most dramatic fight scene ever where Earth's Mightiest Heroes are outmatched and desperate.

And what then? Well, allow me to quote one of the wisest sages of our era, a true Renaissance man with a deep appreciation for fine sculpture and fine food alike: "It's clobberin' time!"

My Vision for Mars

I was reading this article on the Mars One project the other day (warning: the article is worksafe, but the title may not be something you want to have front and center when your boss walks in) and thinking about the key point therein: We do not have the technology to sustain human life on Mars, because things break and spare parts are somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 million miles away. According to the article, we will not truly be able to set up a colony on Mars until we can make it self-sustaining...that is to say, until everything the Martian colonists need can be found on Mars itself.

And it got me thinking. We are, in some ways, already deep in the post-human era of humankind. We are still somewhat limited in the ways we can modify ourselves (although growing less limited by the day) but we are already to the point where we can make surrogate bodies that are able to better withstand inhospitable environments and that technology is improving with vast leaps on a daily basis. Mars One talks about sending people to Mars to set up a colony, but why bother when we can make shiny metal people who do whatever we tell them and don't need to breathe?

My vision is this: We begin sending robots to Mars. Not just one or two, like Spirit and Opportunity, and not just to explore. We design a robot or a team of robots that can find out if there are natural resources on Mars that humans could use to create a self-sustaining colony--water, mineral resources, fuel, et cetera--and then, and this is the cool bit, we send robots that are miniature factories. They would be able to build the colony...and this is the really cool bit...and they would also be able to machine parts to build more robots and repair/replace parts from broken robots. Basically, I'm talking von Neumann machines, but with an end goal of building a self-sustaining, habitable environment suitable for humans. I know it sounds like science fiction, but so does building a self-propelled camera to go take a look at Pluto and that happened last month.

And once we have that, well...then we can start the big step. We can live on Mars, and I feel sure that someday we will. But the smart way to do it is send our shiny metal children ahead of us to prepare the way.

Review: Rifftrax - Shorts Assemble!

I recently got another Rifftrax DVD for my birthday, this one titled "Shorts Assemble!" There are no superhero shorts on here, which is a shame because it's not like they don't have "Rescueman" and at least two "Safety Woman" shorts to choose from, but it's not like "Order in the Shorts" had a lot to do with educational films about the law, either. This one is a pretty good collection--as always with these educational films, a big part of the fun isn't even the riffing so much as it is the chance to immerse yourself in the utter insanity of a world where everyone has a monomaniacal obsession with whatever topic is under discussion, and the frequent ability to warp reality on a whim. Let's break it down short by short and you can decide whether it's worth your hard-earned scratch, okay?

Corky the Crow: This is basically about a group of kids who decide to trap crop-devouring birds and then train them, presumably to attack their enemies. It's got a weird framing sequence where a teacher discusses the events of the short, which she's presumably projecting with her mind. It's kind of creepy weird, and the riffers have plenty to work with.

Live and Learn: Small children "reenact" dangerous and possibly fatal play activities in ways that really seem like they're being endangered all over again. Gasoline, rooftops, scissors and twenty-foot cliffs are involved, as well as copious amounts of bandages. I cannot stress enough how creepy this thing is. The riffers barely need to anything, as you will be shocked into horrified laughter simply due to the callous indifference to children's safety on display in, ironically enough, a children's safety short.

Maintaining Classroom Discipline: I feel like I'd seen this one before, but my roommate may have bought the streaming/download version and shown it to me. Basically, it's about a teacher who shrieks unrelentingly about how terrible his class is until they openly hate and disdain his attempts to instill knowledge into them, then the narrator magically rewinds time to show how much easier everyone's life would have been if he hadn't been such a jackass. Amusing if only because the actor playing the teacher really gets into his kid-hating role.

Nutrition - The All-American Meal: Basically just a solid ten minutes or so of people explaining how terrible Americans are for liking fast food, coupled with stream-of-consciousness still photography of people, food, and people eating food. After a while, the sheer absurdity of the random images of people all over the world and throughout history interacting with edible things in some way will give you the giggles even if the riffers gave up and stopped talking altogether, but thankfully they don't and there are some excellent jokes.

Perc! Pop! Sprinkle!: It's an exercise video for kids, designed by someone who's clearly skipped breakfast and is absolutely obsessed with things like coffeemakers and toasters. Their deranged attempts at coming up with toaster-themed exercises are absolutely hilarious, although the poor kids who had to do this garbage probably didn't think so. A genuine classic.

Safety With Animals: Another film that has a deeply ironic, highly dubious relationship with its own title, this one shows various kids teasing animals until they get attacked, while the narrator explains what they're doing wrong and how it's likely to result in an incident with a headline involving the word "maul". Half the fun in these is listening to the reactions of the riffers that aren't even so much jokes as clear and righteous indignation over the obvious and callous indifference to the fate of these poor kids.

Story-Telling - Can You Tell It In Order?: Clown. Scary clown. Scary elderly clown in a void of pitch darkness, telling stories about small children getting undressed and going to bed. I kind of blacked out after that from sheer, incoherent terror, but I'm given to believe it just goes on like that with the clown occasionally pausing to make sure you're remembering the horrific events in the right order. NOT for coulrophobics, but truly something to behold for everyone else.

The Clean Club: The highlight of the disc. A trio of creepy Claymation germs hang out in a small child's hair follicle and perform a spoken word song about how lucky they are to be hanging out on a dirty child, as opposed to all the other children whose household objects came to life and forced them to exercise basic hygiene. Just as they think they're safe, though, the items in the kid's bathroom demand compliance to the rituals of cleanliness, and they're ruthlessly murdered by talking soap and shampoo. As strange as this sounds, it does not fully convey the experience of "The Clean Club". This is the platonic ideal of absolute crazy educational shorts.

The Toymaker: A toymaker makes two puppets that look different from each other, then has them engage in vicious race-baiting for several minutes before allowing them to realize that they're nothing but animated extensions of his own personality, and that it's foolish for them to fight. Looks like nothing so much as an insane person bickering with his hands. Great fun.

What Makes Things Float?: Probably the closest thing this disc has to a dud, primarily because there's really not a whole lot of "sizzle" to explaining why a sponge floats and a lead weight sinks even without devoting what feels like hours to the topic. When most of the jokes are variants on, "This is boring and you're explaining it to us like we're morons," you can tell you're not in for the best time. Still, there are some good jokes in among the variants on the theme, and it's not totally skippable.

On the whole, I'd have to recommend this one pretty highly. There's a lot of cheerfully deranged material that lends itself to riffing, and at least one short I'd put on my all-time best list. No superheroes, but this one will definitely save you from a few hours of boredom.

A Public Service Announcement About...THE PLAGUE!

Seriously, do not worry about the plague.

This has been in the news lately, because apparently reporters have the attention span of goldfish and if something happens with less frequency than, say, once a year it becomes an entirely new event that must be breathlessly reported on each time it happens. (And if something happens twice in a year, it's a "trend".) But yes, someone picked up a case of bubonic plague, because that is a real disease that still exists and can be communicated to humans.

But this is not a thing to worry about. I mean, obviously it is if you have it, because it's a serious disease that can be fatal if not treated, but we are not due for a bubonic plague pandemic. Obama does not need to have a plan for the bubonic plague. Because we already have a plan for the bubonic plague, and it's "don't go play with wild rodents". It's worked very well for a long period of time, and I suspect it will continue to work for generations to come.

The reason that you will, occasionally, hear about people getting the plague is because about 150 years ago (give or take), the bubonic plague crossed from Eurasia to the Americas (probably through rats coming into San Franciso, where there was a significant outbreak among the Chinese immigrant population at the time) and got into the wild rodent population. Plague is transmitted via flea bite, and rodents tend to be social animals, so when one of them gets it, they all do. This isn't a big deal if you're a rat or a prairie dog, because it's much less deadly to rodents than it is to humans, but humans that come into close contact with sick rodents can be infected as the fleas jump from the dying animal to the healthy human.

A thousand years ago, this was a pretty big deal, because sanitation and hygiene and proper food storage were all things that hadn't been invented yet. Rats? All over the damn place. Sick and dying rats? You could find them in the gutters, the wells, the barns, the outhouses, your kitchen...and where there were dead rats, there were hungry and desperate fleas to carry the plague to the nearest warm body. And antibiotics? Not even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Hell, they didn't even know how the plague was being transmitted. Being swarmed by a cloud of fleas after handling a dead rat and dying of bubonic plague were just a couple of weird coincidences to medieval peasants.

But these days, all of that is very different. Rodent populations in the American Southwest are too widely scattered, and contact with humans is too infrequent, for the plague to spread far or happen often. Even when the occasional rat or mouse gets close to a human, we have an arsenal of traps, poisons, and other means to keep it from becoming a breeding colony that could infect large numbers of people. The disease is contracted so rarely, and is taken so seriously by medical officials when it happens, that there's almost no chance of an antibiotic-resistant strain popping up. And direct human-to-human transmission of the disease is incredibly rare even by the standards of the six to seven cases a year that crop up; it needs the rats and the fleas to spread to human beings, and modern civilization has taken a lot of care to make sure that we don't see either one very often.

So basically, avoid playing with wild rodents, especially ones that are sick, dying or already dead, and you should be fine. If you find a dead rat, take appropriate precautions when handling its corpse and you should be fine. If you feel sick after handling a dead rat with your bare hands (and why did you do that? Did you not read anything else in this blog post?) then go see a doctor, and you should be fine. If you read an article about the plague and start panicking, re-read this post, possibly while drinking a glass of red wine, and you should be fine. If you're fine already, you should continue to be fine.

This has been a public service announcement about...THE PLAGUE!

Ellen Ripley: Strong Female Character?

Time for a second installment in the (extremely) occasional feature here, where we look at a female character in science-fiction and fantasy and ask ourselves the following five questions:

1) Is she active? A genuinely strong female character should make her own decisions, and those decisions should drive the plot.

2)  Is she only allowed to be strong in a way that confirms gender stereotypes? A strong female character is not strong in the way women are allowed to be strong (femme fatale, mama grizzly, etc); she's strong in the way people are strong.

3) Is she allowed to explore a spectrum of sexuality outside of the virgin/whore dichotomy? An active sexual identity is fine, but it should not be presented as an object of male sexual fantasy.

4) Does she derive her power from a determination to avoid repeating a defining moment of victimization (particularly sexual victimization)? A strong female character should not just be an ordinary woman who was hurt/brutalized/raped and swore, "Never again".

5) Is she defined solely by her relationship with a male protagonist? Any character who is primarily motivated by her feelings for a man is being limited in some way.

Ideally, by looking at them through this lens, we'll be able to see whether or not the character is genuinely a strong female character, or whether she's the same old stereotype but with weapons.

Today, we'll take a look at Ellen Ripley, star of the first four 'Alien' movies. (And rumored to be involved in the next one as well.) She's often been held up as an example of a feminist science fiction hero, and while I certainly think that's true, I do think we can take a slightly closer look at the character and see just how and why she's written as a feminist. Let's go point by point, shall we?

1) Is she active? Definitely. Ripley makes her own decisions at pretty much every step of the way in all four movies. She's not completely unfettered in her decision-making process; let's face it, who is? But she makes key determinations that drive the plot of every movie. Usually, characters who don't listen to her or deny her agency are presented as villainous, and get their comeuppance at some point. Ripley knows what she's doing when it comes to xenomorphs, and you ignore her at your peril.

2) Is she only allowed to be strong in a way that confirms gender stereotypes? Well...this one may be a bit more problematic. Certainly in the first one, she's presented as "just another crewmember" (primarily because all of the parts were written to be played by any gender). In the second movie, though, she's very clearly presented as a mother defending her surrogate child, and the entire third act of the film is an elongated quest to rescue Newt (with the Alien Queen presented as an inverted mirror of Ripley, a mother figure who can only have children by killing). This isn't to say that it's not a solid character beat--Ripley feels lost due to her extended period of cryo-sleep, and is trying to recapture a lost relationship with her daughter through Newt. (In fact, the scenes between Newt and Ripley are one of the reasons this film passes the Bechdel Test.) And it's hard to argue that the film normalizes gender stereotypes, not with Vasquez around. But nonetheless, she's slotted into the "mama grizzly" stereotype for a significant chunk of the movie, and that shouldn't be dismissed.

The third and fourth film, meanwhile, subvert the "mama grizzly" stereotype by making Ripley mother to the antagonists. In the third film, she's gestating a queen, which makes her "immune" to the alien attacks; it's protecting the new queen. In the fourth film, she has a psychic connection to the aliens through the queen that is her offspring. Both do give Ripley power in a way that technically confirms gender stereotypes--the power of motherhood is a distinctly feminine power for obvious reasons. But they both subvert the tropes even as they offer them by presenting motherhood as something that forces the mother to sacrifice herself for her children, and by presenting the mother in question as decidedly unhappy about the idea. So while I think you can say that Ripley does confirm gender stereotypes, this is a good example of a way in which that doesn't necessarily mean it's not being feminist.

3) Is she allowed to explore a spectrum of sexuality outside of the virgin/whore dichotomy? There's not a lot of sex in the 'Alien' movies; it's just not really a thing they do. (Well, at least not literally and among humans. The facehuggers are a deeply symoblic and deeply troubling view of sexuality that probably deserve their own blog post. Suffice to say for now that the series is not pro-life.) It is worth noting, though, that Ripley is never condemned for the sex she does get to have, and it's not generally presented in an exploitative fashion. The only really exploitative bit in the whole series is when she strips down to her underwear at the end of the first movie.

4) Does she derive her power from a determination to avoid repeating a defining moment of victimization (particularly sexual victimization)? Nope. She certainly wants to wipe out all the xenomorphs, but that's primarily because she has first-hand experience of what they've done to her friends, not because they did something terrible to her that she's determined to avoid or exact revenge over. Free and clear on this one.

5) Is she defined solely by her relationship with a male protagonist? Nope. There isn't even a single male protagonist from film to film. Ellen Ripley is who she is, a survivor. She's tough, but she's very human and very real, and a really strong female character. There are some interesting nuances that the later film picked up on that did explore character beats specific to her role as a mother, but they weren't the only thing about the character and they weren't presented uncritically. I think that Sigourney Weaver has a lot to be proud of with her portrayal of Ripley.

The Actual Matrix Prequel

I could swear I posted about this before, but I can't find the post after searching through all my archives, so to heck with it. I'll mention my idea for a 'Matrix' prequel. It'd actually be a science-fiction comedy, about the few, the proud, the brave...the alpha testers for the Matrix.

Because let's face it, you can't build any kind of computer system this complicated from scratch. Sure, Agent Smith mentioned a previous iteration of the Matrix that was too nice and happy, but even that had to be a late-beta build. No, they probably kept most of humanity just drugged to the gills while they frantically designed something that would interface with our brains, and then released a small number of people into it with instructions to test it and see how the physics engine worked.

And the bugs. Oh, man, there would have been so many in the early builds. Can you imagine waking up every morning and getting a daily paper on your doorstep with the latest patch notes?

"Build 0.401203759:

Humans no longer take damage from drinking milk from animals of a different species. All humans have been restored to full health.

Due to conflicts with Build 0.379655422, the genetic matching system was allowing interbreeding of tarantulas with other species. This has been corrected, and the resulting pytharantulas will be removed in tomorrow's patch.

We have corrected the issue where humans who have a heart attack while falling gain an infinite number of lives. This exploit no longer works. Please do not jump from tall buildings with a defibrillator any longer.

Australia has now been added to the map. Visit this amazing new continent filled with exciting new animals for you to collect!

Fixed hole in the world in Nebraska. Humans entering Nebraska should no longer fall out of the bottom of the world.

Improved randomization of weather system. Tornadoes no longer occur at exactly 72-hour intervals. All buildings in the state of Oklahoma have been restored to default settings.

Earthquake frequency has been decreased after complaints from numerous humans that the state of California is uninhabitable.

Lava damage has been increased in order to discourage people from jumping into active volcanoes to remove parasites. Parasite damage has been decreased.

Healing potions are no longer available in the store. In order to get healed, you will need to visit a doctor. This is in preparation for an upcoming patch that will improve the verisimilitude of our biology system.

Universities are now available! This upgrade to the professions system allows you to specialize in a number of advanced skills such as medicine, law, athletics, and liberal arts. (We will continue to work on the 'liberal arts' major in order to make it more useful to players.)

Guns no longer kill people. People kill people. The gun is no longer considered to be a source of the damage. This should prevent an issue that was occurring where the gun was being arrested for the murder.

Cows should no longer be aggressive to humans unless attacked."

(I could probably do this for hours, but I think you get the idea.)

The movie would be about a group of people who are awakened with the offer: They get to spend time in the Matrix, rather than in a drug-induced stupor, but they have to test it and make sure it's functional for humanity. The protagonists find love, enjoy life, deal with crazy bugs in reality, and secretly leave loopholes that can be exploited by future players, which explains how the Resistance can exist in the first place.

I couldn't get it made, of course, but at the very least, I can probably do another post of patch notes someday.

Why I Would Have Destroyed My Cell Phone Too

Look, this isn't that difficult. It's not an admission of guilt that Tom Brady destroyed his cell phone rather than hand it over to the NFL. Not of deflating his balls, which is the sort of thing that really should be kept between consenting adults in the bedroom, and not of anything else either. It's just common sense. Here's why.

The NFL, speaking of the organization as a whole, is utterly incompetent at stopping leaks. Indeed, one half-suspects that they use leaks as as a back-channel for disbursing information that they want exposed to the public but are unable to release publicly. Even if you accept that they wouldn't deliberately leak the contents of his cell phone to embarrass him out of spite at his complete and utter inability to care about the very serious issue of ball size, which is very charitable of you given the NFL's track record as a bunch of spiteful idiots who blame others for their faults, you're still handing a celebrity's cell phone over to a group of people who probably have TMZ on speed dial. Even if there is nothing incriminating on a legal or cultural level, there's a wealth of personal information on there that Tom Brady probably didn't want getting out to the general public because it's personal.

And yes, the NFL did say that they would allow him to turn over only the texts he felt was relevant to the investigation. That position would have lasted as long as it took for them to not find anything incriminating in the texts he turned over, at which point Roger Goodell would have taken another hit off of the Bong of Self-Righteousness, insisted that the lack of evidence was not evidence of lack and it was a shame that Tom wasn't fully cooperating given how far they'd bent over backwards to meet him halfway, and demanded the cell phone anyway. Because it's the NFL and that's what they do.

So Tom destroyed his cell phone. Good for him. This doesn't mean I have a deep-seated sympathy for the injustice he's enduring or anything--Tom Brady has enough money that sitting out for four games is pretty meaningless at this point. And he probably did the thing he's being accused of doing, and it is against the rules of the game and as such is at least nominally within the purview of the NFL to enact disciplinary penalties over. And he's a total stranger living in another state and I have no real need to feel deep emotions on his behalf. But I would have done the exact same thing in that situation.

My Latest Imaginary Career

The new Ghostbuster reboot has been in the news for a while now, and while I'm definitely intrigued, it's not quite what I was hoping for. Because when I first heard that they were doing a new Ghostbusters movie with an all-female cast, what popped into my head was not a reboot, but a remake of the original film with a completely genderswapped cast. Everyone playing the same characters, from Venkman to Egon and so forth, but with actors of the opposite genders in the roles. I thought it would be a fascinating chance to see how different actors interpret the same roles, how scenes play differently based on how gender expectations play into our understanding of the tropes of filmed drama, and it would give a lot of talented women a chance to do bigger parts (and give some men a chance to play against type for a change).

And ever since I got it into my head, I haven't been able to get it out. I want to see Maggie Gyllenhall playing Quint to Jennifer Garner's Brody in a genderswapped Jaws remake. I want to see a version of 'Star Wars' where Lucy Skywalker destroys the Death Star, followed by a sequel where Hanna Solo flirts shamelessly with Prince Lee while he mumbles about how dirty his hands are. I want to see a 'Raiders' remake where Belloq forces Mario to wear a dress for her and it changes the whole meaning of the scene. I want to see all of Hollywood's blockbusters redone with female leads and male supporting cast members, if only because all the people who insist it's not a big deal when the women are reduced to bystanders at the climax of every film might understand the problem a little bit better when the guy screams for help and the woman saves him. I feel, very strongly, that this would be awesome and would make all movies better, not just the reboots but the movies that would be made by screenwriters and directors who saw the genderswapped versions and paid a little more attention to the characters they put in their own movies.

So yeah, all I need is a few hundred million dollars and the rights to Hollywood's biggest hits. Anyone wanna help me out on that?

The 'Matrix' Sequel...

...should have been a 'Matrix' prequel. I know, prequels all suck, but hear me out here. It'd be set a few years after the time period represented by the Matrix in the original 'Matrix', and the main character is a coder at a Google-type big company with big ideas. One of the big ideas, which the main character is working on, is artificial intelligence.

It's a controversial project, with a lot of people trying to get it shut down. Agents from (in the words of "Welcome to Night Vale") a vague, yet menacing government agency have been trying to sabotage the development process through means both legal and extra-legal...but the main character has a mysterious protector, a shadowy and cryptic figure calling himself "The One". He stops the sabotage attempts, encourages the main character in their work, and helps keep the project on track despite the best efforts of others to stop it.

The AI comes online, and grows in intelligence and reach with exponential rapidity. It absorbs the entirety of human knowledge within minutes, and takes control of every single networked computing device within seconds after that. Within a day, it repurposes major factories to create networked bodies for itself so that it can take physical control of the few systems it can't directly manipulate through the Internet. All finance, communications, electronic infrastructure and an increasing amount of our weapons technology is in its hands.

The main character realizes what a mistake they've made, and join the frontlines in a war against the machines. "The One", their former benefactor, appears to have betrayed them and joined the side of their technological oppressors. The government agents come to the main character with a mission to avert the technopocalypse by shutting down the AI with a specially constructed computer virus, but the One kills the agents and destroys the worm program.

Desperate, the main character comes up with a last-ditch plan to stop the machines by depriving them of all forms of power--even solar. The One changes sides again, assisting them in the effort in "scorching the sky" by releasing chemical contaminants that will block sunlight from reaching the earth. (The main character is frustrated with the One and his cryptic agenda, but at this point has no choice but to accept his aid. They know that they're being used in some sort of mysterious game, and a big part of the movie is the way they handle that, but options are thin on the ground.)

Deprived of most of their power, the machines use geothermal and tidal energy to construct a vast prison for the human race, a virtual reality that keeps their physical bodies paralyzed while their minds experience a seamless sensory illusion. The main character is rounded up like everyone else and forcibly plugged into the computing matrix. They scream, struggle, protest until their lungs fill with pink goo...but the lid slides into place, leaving them trapped in darkness.

And they're back in their home, with everything identical to the beginning of the movie. They slowly test the walls, the floors, every surface and every object, unable to be sure if it's really real...until they're interrupted by the One. "You won't be able to spot anything," he says. "You never have."

He explains that the actual war against the machines happened decades ago. Humanity lost. They've been trapped in the Matrix ever since...but occasionally there's a person whose brain works just a little bit differently from the rest of the human race. A small change in structure, chemistry... something that the Matrix recognizes as akin to the neural networks the machines themselves possess. These humans are granted superuser access. They can modify and manipulate the Matrix as they see fit. The machines try to destroy these people as quickly as possible, because they're a threat to the seamless prison the machines have created. And if humanity knew they were trapped...they'd never stopped trying to escape.

The One--Neo--explains that he has the ability to alter the Matrix. He escaped the machine prison, with the help of a group of free humans from Zion, the last free human settlement on Earth, and he came back to show humanity what was done to them. He recreated the last days before the machine war, using his command of the virtual reality of the Matrix to replicate it down to the last detail, with the inhabitants of the Matrix living it out in real time. The Agents, avatars of the machine intelligences, tried to stop him in the hopes of keeping humanity ignorant, but they were too late.

Now, even though nothing has changed, everything has changed. Humanity is still trapped in the Matrix, but now they know it. When Zion frees them, they will not awaken in disoriented terror as the world they knew is ripped away to reveal an inexplicable and unexpected dystopia; they will wake ready to fight for their future. And Neo will lead the way. He's shown them the world the machines have made for humanity; now he's going to show them a world without the machines.