I can't believe this actually happened

(Trigger Warning:  Captain America: The Winter Soldier spoilers to follow)

This weekend, something remarkable happened: Hollywood grew a spine.

I don't know it happened. Perhaps it is a sign of things to come; perhaps it is just temporary cartilage that will buckle as soon as any real weight is placed upon it.  But still, for 2 hrs and 30 minutes, something glorious occurred.

In a big-budget blockbuster that is, incidentally, only one of two Marvel Studios movies this year, and the only one with any real "name-brand" recognition, I heard and saw the following:

• The bad guys, who have a direct moral and historical link to the Nazis, said that people were too stupid to be allowed to have freedom, but if you try to take that freedom away they will fight; therefore, the trick is to scare the people enough into giving up their freedom voluntarily. 

• The bad guys also said that to serve the "greater good", millions would have to be killed (troublemakers, free thinkers, and those who would oppose the new order) in order to save billions. Ah, the moral "justification" of genocide. 

• And finally, these bad guys, these Nazi inheritors, said that they needed to do this through Big Brother tactics and the surveillance state... which they acquired through step 1, "scare the people into giving up their liberty."

• And then -- AND THEN -- no less a symbol than Captain America* his own bad self stated that no, this is wrong, that it goes against everything he believes in, everything he stands for, and everything he and his generation fought for in World War 2. Then they try to murder him, of course. 

I'll say that again:  the proponents of the surveillance state try to murder the living symbol of liberty.

• And then this living symbol, allied with other trouble-making, free-thinking, liberty-loving "undesirables", goes and beats the snot out of the bad guys. They get the mobile death camps to destroy each other, they expose the spy network by leaking all their secrets onto the Internet**, and they dismantle the surveillance organization so that citizens are no longer spied upon by their own government -- all while the audience is going "Go Cap!  Kick their butts!"

I can't believe I just watched Hollywood make a movie where they

1. Equated the modern surveillance state with Nazi Germany;
2. Stated we were but one step away from genocide;
3. Had a figurehead for American Ideals say "No, that's wrong";
4. Endorsed the destruction of said surveillance state in the name of freedom. 

I feel like I dimension-shifted while I was sleeping and awoke in a glorious new world. 

Pray tell me, good sirs and ladies, what color is the Emperor Norton bridge in this reality?

* Fuck Yeah!
**  This was done by Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanova. Who is Russian. The Snowden parallel is obvious.

A general lack of pony-related activity lately

I've fallen behind on my "Sunday, Pony Sunday" series.  This is due partly to the fact that I can't see the episode until Sunday night at the very latest (and by then, the internet has already analyzed the episode to a fare-thee-well and turned it into memes), and partly because I'm very disappointed that the promised season-long arc of "We have to figure out how to unlock the McGuffin from the 2-part opener" hasn't been delivered on in even the slightest manner.

However, some fun pony-related April Foolery occurred last week, and I figured I'd share this.  I was going to write it up yesterday -- again, for Pony Sunday -- but I went to go see "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" instead.

So first of all, there's this gem:




While this is cute and all, I feel they missed a hilarious opportunity to make a Soul Coughing reference, what with the Biggest Pony being a super Bon Bon and all. ;)

Move aside, and let the mare go through... let the mare go through!

As a point of curiosity: Every time I look up this song, I am always surprised that it wasn't written by Cypress Hill.



The next video is another April Fool's joke, but it's less silly and more "Oh yeah, that would be cool!"




Did anyone else get a "Firefly" vibe from that?  I think it's the music more than anything else that makes me think that.


Speaking of both ponies and Firefly.... my job as "Patient Zero" in the continuing Brony-fication of the gunblogs has claimed another victim  (well, sorta-kinda, but he's wearing the shirt, so I count it as a win even if he hasn't watched the show):

Go read his post on the matter.  He says he's going to wear it to at least one carmeet, and I plant to hold him to that.

STHFriday: Pistols and Pistol-Caliber Carbines

Lo, and Erin did sayeth, "Behold, see that it is Friday; look upon my words, ye gunnies, and despair at the rustling of thy jimmies."

Doctor Wholmes Part the Third: The Alien

     You reach a certain point in your life where you find that you just can't relate to people anymore. At least, you do if your mind works like the subjects we've been taking a look at over the past weeks. This manifests in the most alien of incarnations that we've looked at so far: The Eleventh Doctor and Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock. On the surface, these two are nothing alike, but deep down, the similarities are striking.

     The Eleventh Doctor is a wild-man. From his manic first moments of crashing into the garden of a seven year old and demanding wide and varied foodstuff to standing down an array of assorted alien warships with a (questionably silly) shouty speech, he's non-stop movement. All gangly limbs running and jumping and licking things like a gazelle on meth marking its territory against things much bigger and meaner than him.

     Cumberlock, on the other hand, is quiet and reserved, unless he's giving a (sometimes deserved) withering tongue-lashing. He's dignified and poised (except when he's a homeless junkie). He's sane and rational (except when he's throwing a man out of a window four times for threatening a friend). He's calm and collected (except when she's concerned). Maybe those differences weren't so broad after all.

     But the main crux of my argument here is that despite all their differences, these two are the most similar of the comparisons we've looked at so far because they are so different from baseline normality. They come across as different and alien. Their minds work in a way that is utterly unfathomable to most, and they express themselves in such a way that they would stand out in nearly any crowd. They say inappropriate things not to get a rise out of people but because that seems like the logical thing to say at that particular point.

     And, while the Doctor has let people think he was dead before, Eleven is the first to fake his death on such a scale that the Universe forgot who he was (resulting in that incredibly cheesy Dalek chant of "DOCTOR WHO? DOCTOR WHO?"). Considering the Sherlocks we've looked at before, Cumberlock definitely has the more spectacular death scene, especially considering I barely remembered RDJ's at the tail end of A Game of Shadows. And finally, the Doctor gets a proper mystery in Clara Oswald. The type of mystery that Holmes would tear his hair out at.

Next time..?

WNW: Refusal

With Kapitan Von taking the Wednesday slot, I haven't done as many Wednesday Night Wackiness posts as I used to.  However, I saw this one today and I just HAD to post it, as it is both timely (note the date) and humorous.

[A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Game Store] - You Ruined It So You Could Keep Selling It

"...there will be no riches at the end of the rainbow for the creation of content in any medium. Deciding to self publish rpg material is no road to riches... In fact the very issue of work for money is in flux - with movies and music being available free online (leagally, hulu, pandora, anyone?) how will anyone support themselves with creative effort? It is very likely they will not be able to."
C- of Hack and Slash, 'On Fracture'

A former gaming acquaintance of mine - we'll call him Mike, for 'twas his name, although I believe he should also have answered to 'Fun Murderer' - argued, eloquently and at length, that the very concept of a 'games industry' leads to bad design in the cause of creating and maintaining a functional business in order for developers to support themselves.

A business has financial responsibilities; bills, wages, costs, overheads. To satisfy those responsibilities, it must continue to produce and sell product, either by creating new games, or adding either supplements or splatbooks to existing ones. Extension of existing games is easier, in terms of development, than creation of new ones, and so this is frequently the preferred option. On top of that, there's the oft-noted issue in selling an RPG, the proverbial elephant in the room: you don't actually need everyone at the table to own everything in the line. One or two copies of the essential rules and that's it. RPGs, as products, innately limit their own sales volume - turning them into a going concern involves creating the illusion that everyone at the table needs STUFF, or that the game itself needs more STUFF to function. So far, so business-sensible; but is it actually good for the games?

Supplements tend to be okay, in my book (arf arf). They're the ones which add new settings in which a system can be used, and/or provide a substantial increase in replayability through additional mechanics. Dark Ages: Vampire was one of my favourites; new morality mechanics, new (or rather old) clans, quite a few differences in Disciplines, and a new context for characters, as lords of the night rather than skulking predators hiding behind a Masquerade. Victorian Age: Vampire was a less well-done product; although it remains an enjoyable enough experience to read, and does a credible job of showing us what the World of Darkness was like in the 1880s, it's all style and no substance, all fluff and no crunch - there's no practical difference between it and the parent game.

Splatbooks, meanwhile, I have more of an issue with. People who've bought a splatbook will want to use it, and fie on anyone who's convinced that there is aeons of potential play in the core materials alone (which there is, in most halfway-decent RPGs). They introduce padding to both mechanics and backstory, stuff which is 'in the rules' and which people will frequently feel bad about ignoring. This can then be 'stripped out' by the bright, clean, new edition, which will promptly generate splatbooks of its own the second sales start to dip, creating the need for a new clean slate. All very salutary business practice, but deliberately poor design: you're cluttering your game so you can fix it so you can declutter it again...

If you want to make games for a living, though, this is the path which you will sooner or later end up going down. The problem with the RPG industry isn't that games are a product for which money is charged, it's that a lot of people are trying to make their living off them, and when you have a living to make you need to keep making the things that make you a living. At least, that's what Mike told me.

While I agree with his analysis of the nature of game development as a business, I'm not sure that it's impossible to make a game and make some money off it. C-'s answer to the question he posed was that development should be done for the love of the game, and while I agree in spirit, developing a good game takes time, time is money, and too much time spent not making money means I'm having the pay the rent with Bullshit Integrity Dollars, which no nation on the world accepts as viable currency. Putting it simply, if I'm going to sink my time into making a game, I want that time to provide a viable stream of income. This doesn't, however, have to mean that I make my living as a game developer.

I spend a lot of time thinking about (and relentlessly attacking) the idea that we need one job, one stream of income, one vocation by which we can tidily identify ourselves and go about the means of living, and relegate everything else to 'hobby', stream-of-outgoing status. Personally, I am capable of doing quite a few things; I teach, I research and write, and I play, think about and occasionally even design games and game materials. Each of these things can become a stream of income, and I can identify as myself, rather than being 'a teacher' by vocation whose 'hobbies' are literary criticism and gaming.

This piece is now about three years old. Despite that, it's getting a repost - I would like to use it as a foundation for some further discussion about roleplaying games and how they're made and sold in the age of Kickstarter. Take this as "the way things were" - we'll talk about "the way things could be" and "the way things should be" and possibly even "the way things are" in the coming weeks.

There's your ninepence

Let us all take a moment to remember Salem MacGourley, who died on this day six years ago. He would have approved of the way he died: in a drunken stupor, pantsless, t-boned by the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile and then hit head-on by a Wonder Bread truck.

[Looking back, I'm quietly amazed at 1) everyone took it at face value and, yet, 2) no one seemed to blink an eye at my declaration that I was a pre-op transsexual waiting for an experimental uterine transplant. Either no one found it funny (which I refuse to accept, because I am fucking hilarious), or it was too subtle.]