RPG Articles

Up front here, I am no fan of Millar. Wanted was shit with a couple of warmed over ideas, some stuff for random shock value, random racism, and buried in all that was one or two interesting things that would be good in the hands of a competent author. The artwork was also bad, in that it was drawings of various actors for some reason.

Enough about Wanted, though, this is about Kick-Ass. I went back and read the comic just out of curiosity spurred by the upcoming movie.

Premise- nerd decides to be a superhero. Not groundbreaking, but not common and a good place to start.

One of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is that Millar feels that being bored is enough to make someone go through all this. There is nothing further, there is no development. There’s only some narcissism, gore, and dick jokes. Even that description sounds better than it really is.

This is like trying to describe why Shoot ‘Em Up is awful. The descriptions fail to convey how shitty it all hangs together.

Throughout the 8 issue run the characters are never engaging, the action is just sort of a boring smear of blood, and nothing seems to stick, despite the premise hinging on only mild hyperbole of reality. Spinal trauma and severe blood loss? Forget about it. Testicle torture? What consequences?

The story proper doesn’t exist. The main arc consists of perhaps two key scenes, with a number of clips filling the space between without adding much.

Oh, and of course there’s some not quite racism combined with a “It’s ok, his dad is fucking a black chick” moment.

On that note for a moment, I’m of the ilk that heroes should be flawed, sometimes significantly, but that needs to be anchored to some substance worth contrasting it against.

So yeah, this crap gets a movie, while The Black Pearl is nowhere to be found.

I checked this out from the library yesterday and finished it before bedtime. Not bad for a book from 1951.

The book starts out with our protagonist waking up in his hospital bed, eyes bandaged from an incident, not knowing if his sight will return, but knowing that something is terribly wrong. One of my few complaints about the book is we don’t spend very long with the character being blind, it would have been a neat trick. That said, everything is tense enough.

You see, everyone that watched these green flashes in the sky (which was most of the world) went blind. On top of this there’s predatory (as in walks around and stings you to death from ambush) plants, called triffids. Relatively harmless when managed, and providing high quality animal fodder, but the blind population is terribly exposed to the danger they present.

There’s other bits, but I won’t spoil them for you. The best part, for me, is that there is no external agency to this story. Aliens and wizards played no part, it was all the fault of our own hyper aggressive cultures.

I’m not sure how to feel about the despair and lack of functionality people in this story take on when blinded.

Oh, and I found the whole thing drew some strong parallels to 28 Days Later. I never saw the movie made from Day of the Triffids, and it’s certainly not unique enough to say for sure, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that either movie or book lent a strong hand to the formation of Boyle’s movie.

So yeah. Turns out Superman is totally lifted from this book. Looking around it seems like people try to say that this is just a maybe, but let me tell you, this dude is exactly how early Superman was.

Allow me to expand on that. Our protagonist, Hugo Danner, has blue black hair, superhuman strength on the order of lifting and carrying at least four or five tons, bulletproof flesh, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, and outruns a train. There’s even elements in there that you can see developed into the Superman character. At one point he goes on about how if he had even one weakness, an Achilles heel, it would humanize him, allow people to connect with him. He also builds a sort of fortress deep in the woods, and while he swiftly destroys it upon discovery, it reminds me so much of the fortress of solitude that it ain’t even funny.

Published in 1930, the language is a little distracting, but it’s nothing too troublesome. The actual character of Hugo is quite different from Supes. Imagine Superman, only a bit bipolar, and not naive.

I don’t want to spoil the arc of the book, so if the following analysis is too vague, just go check it out from the library and come back. I’ll wait.

Ok, back? Good.

There are, in my opinion, three main concepts explored here.
Science defeated by mysticism
Individual defeated by the group
Exclusion from the group due to an unusual level of prowess

The big thing tying this all together is, naturally, frustration. Science, of which Hugo is presented as a pinnacle achievement, is constantly presented as potent but horribly naive when it comes to the staying power of religion, politics, greed, and other petty matters. Every scientist in the book seems to believe that simply showing a truth to someone should be enough, that all it takes is more evidence, but as Hugo discovers this just isn’t true. He is an honest thing, a sort of living truth, and despite his power he is incapable of correcting or energizing anything.

I have to say that the hardest part is knowing that we still live in this world. Religion, mysticism, and plain old corruption continue to trump reason and, quite frankly, good will.

It’s a very depressing read, but I still recommend it.

So, uh, yeah. Know that bit about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice? Yeah, that’d lead to dead silence here.

This book was excruciatingly boring, pointless, and various kinds of not good. Very Neal Stephenson, and if you think that should be a compliment, then by all means pick this book up.

So, this is the book Soylent Green was based on. Based on in the same way that another Heston classic, The Omega Man, was based on I Am Legend.

Allow me to adjust your set for reading this book. There is Soylent, but no Soylent Green, and nothing is distressingly made out of people. Soylent is the closest thing to affordable protein available, and it’s still far too expensive for most people. It’s comprised of soybean product and lentils. The mainstay food are weedcrackers, which are made of seaweed. Also mentioned are ener-G, which are granules of plankton, and meat flakes, comprised of snail or slug bits, issued to the very ill.

No, the thrust of this book is the living hell we’ll create with unchecked population growth. In this New York City has about 35 million inhabitants, the vast majority of which are beyond impoverished.

I really have to point out how amusing, and interesting, it is that someone as pro-life as Heston was in that movie. Of course, it leads me to wonder at how much impact he, or someone else in production with similar morals, deflected the message of the movie from birth control to outrage at defiling the dead.

Anyway. The plot, characters, and setting, are all carried out so very well. Sometimes you feel the author himself shy away from the future he can envision with such clarity, but it really only serves to get your own wheels turning.

All that said, you really have to prepare yourself for a soul crushing ride. You are left feeling that happiness, in any form, is at best a setup to more cruelty, and that you have been pre-fucked by every generation before you, while failing to summon the strength or resources to unfuck the future even a little.

Like anything I’ve suggested by Peter Watts, read this one when you think your feeling too good about yourself and the world.

So yeah, this series of books is all wrapped up now. It was fun, had some neat ideas, and was thoroughly enjoyable, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t make it stand out in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite worth reading, unlike, say, certain books written with Brian Herbert. I think the biggest hindrance to the story hanging with me is it all felt a bit too much like television. I can’t really find the right way to describe it. I suppose one of the biggest similarities is that it really seemed like we could have wrapped some of these points up well before we did, know what I mean?

The Ildirans kept whining about how stagnant they were, then someone would throw out something at least a little innovative, but it would either go nowhere or they’d die, horribly. The Roamers were like MacGuyver clones, and never ever failed. It all just came off as a bit too static.

Anyway. Onward.

A very energetic story that manages to convey a sense of doom, humor, and hope; usually in the same breath.

It’s a tough one to explain without giving away everything. The best I can do is that it sums up all the feelings of heartbreak, whether it be of a lover or friend that has abandoned you, without getting maudlin, and always as part of the story.

Also aliens and doomsday cults. Just read the damned thing, ok?

You can check out the author’s website and even read a chapter of Spaceman Blues.

That is one long assed title.

Anyway, I checked this gem out of the library a couple of days ago and have since read it from cover to cover. That’s right. Cover to cover. A cookbook.

First off, there’s a lot of white space, and the pages are really thick, so it isn’t really as long as it looks, but also it’s boiled essence of these dishes sprinkled with Bourdain’s asshole charm.

If you like to cook it’s so very much worth reading. His passion and understanding of the fundamentals behind this food shines through. Also, you’ll learn what a “pope’s nose” is.

In one of my library forays I picked this book up fairly randomly. Mostly because I was in a foul mood and nothing about it irked me immediately. On to details.

This is an excellent bunch of short stories. Over here is the author’s blog.

All of the stories are fast reads, with great concepts. Almost all of them use a sort of pinhole camera approach to telling a tale. By this I mean you’ll have the main character in their own environment, but you get tiny glimpses of the vaster, often horrible, world, and these glimpses often leave brutal marks on the narrative character. It leaves you relating to the character, since you experience the blindside attack when they do.

Most of it’s very much the speculative sort of sci-fi, and he does a great job of bringing consequences into focus without preaching, or indeed even trying to lead you whether it’s all right or wrong. No, those are left to you, and that’s great.

I’m quite too tired to cover this thing story by story, but it was a fantastic read, and I hope to locate a copy of his long fiction sometime soon.

This little book is a tough one. I want to like it more than it deserves.

When he’s having fun, it rolls along very well, and is often rather amusing, but it’s just not enough. That good time is enmeshed within an almost droning story arc, and the characters, while solid and good, just aren’t really all that critical to the story, at least not directly.

You know how Good Omens rocked right along for the most part, but by the end it was complete shit? No, of course not, because you all read at a fifth grade level. Anyway, this book has that same feeling for me. By the time it was done I cared less about it than when I started.

The thing being satirized is how we’re steadily enclosing ourselves in a soceity that’s too insulated from freedom in the name of reducing exposure to danger. At least that’s the face of it. Aside from slogans it does little to demonstrate the good or bad of either, and instead takes the all to familiar approach of hammering fascism into all the peg holes.

Late in the book we’re introduced to the OtherSide, along with a really brief explanation based on the uncertainty principle which leads me to believe the author may not actually understand the principle. That aside, this component of the story is a complete bit of cocksucking nonsense. It has no bearing, and is the baldest example of deus ex machina I’ve encountered in some time. Let me remind you that I’ve recently read a mess of PK Dick stories, just so you can get that in perspective. If he’d had the stones to trim out this little bit of crap the story would have been better. You know, now that I think of it, the whole thing was lifted from Half Life 2. Where it was done better.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m calling the writing in a game where the central character never speaks, signs, gestures, emotes, or writes better than something in a book.

Anyway, what’s good is really good, and what’s bad is rancid. Read it, but do what I did and check it out from a library.