Tag Archives: Writing

Science Fiction, Double Feature

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At 6:30 this morning I said good-bye to my wife, who is going to camp on Gibson island with her school until Wednesday. Herding 150 kids onto a ferry may seem like a daunting task, but I’ve seen her handle a room full of kids. After 5 years of performing what they call “classroom management”, she carries herself with confidence and authority in situations where most of us would be hesitating and later cowering in a corner pleading the children to leave us alone. Nonetheless, I will at the ready Wednesday night with Sara’s favorite magazine and ice cream.

As the day drew on I realized that if I had to contend with an empty house much longer, I would be fashioning a life sized replacement Sara out of throw pillows and misplaced cashews. So I opted for a movie night out. Science fiction double feature, as the old song goes. The features in question being Indiana Jones and the Incredible Hulk.

If you haven’t seen the new Indy movie yet, for God’s sake go. It’ a fun ride and if you have problems digesting the paranormal stuff, it’s important to note that this is the movie franchise that chased for and found a fully functional Ark of the covenant, Holy Grail and Indian Sankara stones. After studying the Hollywood development process and being part of a few other development processes myself, I think I’m way less nit-picky about movies. And it feels great. I had a lot of fun tonight. I didn’t exactly leave my brain in the parking lot, but I forgave a lot of the missteps I would’ve called out at a different time in my life. In summary it’s Indiana Jones movie. Go and have fun.

In between the two movies I noticed a couple of things. Namely a couple with a newborn. Walking into the Incredible Hulk. It was like I was in the middle of some sophomore comedian’s joke routine in between the sticky floors and the guy yammering on his cell phone. However, that baby stayed silent throughout the entire picture. Perhaps the bass of the movie has a soothing effect, I don’t know. But if I didn’t see the kid myself at the end of the movie, I would’ve thought that the stroller and bassinet were merely an ingenious snack smuggling system.

Anyway, about the Incredible Hulk. You know, the original movie seems to get worse every time I hear about it. It won’t be long before there’s an article about how the original Hulk was so bad that people emerged from the theatre with their eyes bleeding and screaming in tongues. I enjoyed the original, and no amount of pompous hipster bitching is going to change that. So quit it already.

That being said, this is the better film. It starts off with Bruce Banner on the run, just like in the TV series and the better part of the comic series. This movie has a better grip on what it is to be Banner and the Hulk. Edward Norton is perfectly cast. His loneliness is portrayed as genuinely heartbreaking. When he turns into the Hulk, the smashing is fun and perfectly satisfying. And then there’s the integration with the Marvel Universe at large. Captain America! The Avengers! Tony Stark! Oh my God! I’m geeking out to eleven!!

Okay it seems I have issues, and I’m not talking about Amazing Spiderman #563. But the truth is, I wonder why the idea of cross-overs wasn’t brought up sooner in the process, like right after X-men and Spider-man were verifiable hits. We now know that such cross-overs would make money no matter what the quality of the actual movie is. Aliens vs. Predator is a good case in point. However, a quick imdb.com search reveals to us the tangled web (no pun intended) of movie rights attached to all of the major Marvel properties. Everything was held back by traditional corporate short-sightedness and the simple panicky nature of deals that are worth potential billions. Now, an Avengers movie would be a huge step forward, but I think a redefinition of the block-buster is in order, particularly for the digital age.

Imagine, if you will, a group of film school drop-outs who got sick of shooting dying flowers in time lapse and set out to re-engineer the summer blockbuster. Armed with the latest digital tools they are able to super-impose over reality with the skill of renaissance painters. Budgets are no problem when you can create whole cities within a computer the size of a large toaster. The scripts contain multi-layered story-lines that take trilogies to carry out, but the central conflicts are simple and read easy up on the screen. The actors are complete unknowns, but they have enough method training to meld completely into their blue-screen surroundings. The movies are distributed instantly over torrent networks at $10 a download. It’s played simultaneously in theaters in “road-show” style events, where the cast and crew can go on tour and meet their audience. Tickets to these shows are sold over social networking programs. With 200 of your closest friends, the premier suddenly becomes the event of the summer. Say, is anyone taking this down?

And so it begins…

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19209573 19209575 large And so it begins...
From my house I can see the dark cloud of political op-ed articles that was formed across the border when Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination. This turn of events was not unexpected. The political stunts that Hillary pulled in the final weeks of the primaries range from merely condescending to outright bone-headed. However, it turns out that Clinton’s fate was sealed many months ago as she organized her campaign.

An article in the March Rolling Stone told the story of the Obama Campaign. While Hillary Clinton favored paid organizers and top down management approaches, the Obama campaign relied on social networking websites and thousands of volunteer organizers. The Campaign’s own website, MyBo, served as an information clearing house. Organizers could get in contact with other supporters in their area for whatever they needed, be it rallies, letter-writing campaigns, or voting road trips. Working from a basic framework outlined at various three day training seminars, Obama’s front-line campaign workers were allowed to make crucial decisions on how to get this man into the whitehouse. That whiff of self-determination has given the Obama Campaign energy that Clinton could not hope to duplicate. She was content to let her supporters stand around and clap when she should have been offering them the tools to change the entire country.

The Clinton, McCain and the rest of the old guard politicians wasted their time either buying or stealing the kind of intellectual and political capital that Obama gets for free. I believe that the reason Obama is vague on certain issues is that he expects the electorate to do his thinking for him. In a democracy, this is a good thing. If people feel that they’ll be listened to, that an exchange is taking place, then they feel a gratifying sense of responsibility for what the other person is thinking. The actions of your Mayor, your Member of Parliament, your President are now dependent on what you have to say right now. That is the point when people stop thinking about what their country can do for them, and start thinking about what they can do for their country.

Adults Who Are Young

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I’ve been checking out the Young Adult genre for the past little while now. Harry Potter and his ilk have completely changed the publishing industry and apparently “saved reading”, so I wanted to find out what the fuss was all about. Harry Potter was okay, but not without certain nitpicking flaws. James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series was so inexcusably bad that I couldn’t make it through the first few chapters. Sara introduced me to another series by Rick Riordan called Percy Jackson and the Olympians and surprisingly, I couldn’t put it down.

It’s the story of Percy Jackson, a dyslexic, ADHD twelve-year-old boy who one day finds out that his long lost biological father is none other than Poseidon, Greek god of the sea and earthquakes. After a desperate escape to a demi-god summer camp in upstate New York, Percy is assigned a quest to retrieve the Thunderbolt of Zeus from the Underworld, which is now in LA (Mount Olympus is respectively now on the six hundredth floor of the Empire State building. It’s a long story, read the book already). It was heavy on action and self-referential humour, but it was complex enough to get me to read all three books in the space of a week.

Now, as I was going through all of these books for “young” adults, I realized I had gone sour on most adult books of the same genre. Truth be told, most of my friends had as well. The Author of Old Man’s War, Jon Scalzi wrote a really neat post on what is happening to the industry. Without mentioning titles, YA Science Fiction titles are outselling adult titles two to one. YA Fantasy outside of Harry Potter is outselling adult Fantasy by four to one.

So, Young Adult authors are moving books like gangbusters, and we can reasonably assume that an increasing portion of that readership is made up of adults (including yours truly). The question is why? It’s not because the books are shorter either. The Harry Potter series topped out at 900 pages. There hasn’t been a Percy Jackson book under 200 pages. The answer then, is hidden in the adult books.

I’ve also been doing a long, painful parallel study into adult science fiction novels, particularly David Brin’s Uplift War, Verner Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky and Greg Bear’s Forge of God. In all three books I found ideas that would blow your mind. A Galactic culture based on cultivating animals into sentient races, 1000-year-old computer programming traditions, and roving fleets of self-replicating killer robots. The problem is that the books are an utter pain in the ass to read.

In all three of these books, the authors seemed more concerned about getting the science and social concepts right rather than concentrating on writing an entertaining novel. The ideas in these books are great food for thought. You could debate for hours on how the societies and technologies in these books actually work. Unfortunately the characters are either unlikable or unremarkable, the language is obtuse and the conflicts are unsatisfying. In Uplift War, everyone except the sentient chimpanzees speak the same “alien” dialect that’s devoid of any slang or color. If you’ve heard Mr. Spock open his mouth at any time you know what I’m talking about. The Qeng Ho space traders in A Deepness in Sky were so insipid that by the time they had defeated the Fascist Emergents, I just didn’t care any more. I feel really bad about Forge of God, because I loved Greg Bear’s Blood Music. But in this book, so many of the characters are just stalwart experts and scientists. I can’t properly tell the astronomer advising the president from the geologist held in quarantine at the Airforce base. The President in this book decided to lay down arms in front of the impending alien invasion, but the description of his thought process was so mushy that I wasn’t aware of the decision for about two chapters.

It’s important to note that all three of these books are Hugo award winners, the top honor among literary science fiction. Some fans out there may scoff my claims, that these books are too advanced for my primitive brain to handle. However, all of these books are guilty of the sins described in George “1984″ Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

In the essay, Orwell writes that difficult prose with too many long words, jargon and adverbs is not only difficult to read, it might as well destroy western civilization. By making political speeches and decrees unclear and lacking of any strong imagery, you can justify any monstrous action you can imagine. Take George W. Bush’s definition of “freedom”, for instance. The same rules apply to fiction, only we don’t use it to pick leaders, we just don’t want to get bored at the bus stop. It’s impossible to enjoy yourself when you’re puzzling over what “circumlocution” means.

It wasn’t Harry Potter who saved reading. That series was only a conduit, a lightning rod for a public that was tired of bloated prose, threadbare imagery and indulging author’s neuroses. We should keep in mind that it’s enough just to keep it simple, stupid. The very best of the genre will walk the edge of pandering and indulgence. Most Adult SF and Fantasy are on the indulgence end of the equation. If the genre is to survive, then this time a little bit of pander is in order.

Screenwipe

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My brother has worked in the television business for over 15 years, and in that time my family was privy to all the bloopers and bureaucracy of the television business. Every time someone dropped a tape or forgot to flip a switch in broadcast TV, we were sure to know about it. For those of you out there who didn’t have the benefit of my brother’s running commentary, there’s Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. It’s a BBC documentary series on the business of television. It goes into the enormous cost and complexity of creating a television show

The show’s most interesting segments delve into the thinking behind what gets aired on television. As a business, television producers don’t sell content per se, they sell audiences for the consumption of advertisement. So television producers essentially have to guess at what kind of person would watch their program. Sure they have statistical sampling methods like the nielsen box, but that only tracks the people that want to be sampled. This seems as reliable as checking chicken entrails in the age of contextualized advertisement. With the advent of Google you can now tailor ads to specific content. Ads are paid for on a click through basis, and the advertisers website can track where the visitors of coming from. That means that the effectiveness of ads can be measured without any invasive samplings. With luck, the next 20 years could see the end of the insidious practices of “consumer surveys” and “focus groups”.

Clip found at Mayerson on Animation.

Revenge of the Year in Review: Writing

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What’s this you say? Wasn’t James done solemnly eulogizing last year? Aren’t all the Year In Reviews supposed to be done by now? What’s going on? Where am I?! You are in front of your computer reading my latest attempt at improving my writing. Yes, I know, I get a lot of compliments on my writing from those readers who are not search robots (unless ads for phentermine and online casinos are a form of compliment), but wouldn’t it be nice if my pithy observations were made more often? How do I know if I have any skills to improve if I don’t use them? Long story short, I tried to write novel last year. I started in May and gave myself until December 31st to finish the first draft. Unfortunately, since I am not mailing copies to myself and prospecting literary agents right now, something has to be done about my rate of output. We live in an ultra-industrialized society based on results, so if I’m not pumping out pages every day, I have no right to call myself a writer. Since I have more time now to write, I’ve decided that if I increase my overall writing output, a 10 page a day sort of regimen might not be so daunting. So in the interest of volume, I’d just like to talk about a couple of things I’ve learned last year about writing.

The Online Market:

There was a time when pulp and glossy magazines were so prolific that a semi-competent writer could make a living long enough to find his or her voice and build some semblance of a career. With all of these other media options out there it seems like those days are gone forever. I did a little research, and it appears that this isn’t the case. Writers today are now making money from the advertisements on weblogs. I had thought that this sort of business model had been quashed earlier in the decade, but with the advancements made in applications like Google adsense, the effectiveness of online advertisements is much better managed. Businesses can essentially pay by the eyeball for visitors to their websites. Professional blogger sites like problogger.net and copyblogger.com have extensive articles on how to make money in weblogs. The advice essentially boils down to a few choice steps

1. Choose a niche. This can be a specific interest that provides enough research for at least one article a week. The target audience for this niche interest must also be computer savvy in order to grace your site with traffic. You can also generate interest by aggregating information from many different sources with a common theme.

2. Generate enough posts consistently to generate traffic. Googlebots love it when your site updates regularly

3. Contact advertisers with a media kit describing your site. Sure, you could make some money using contextual ads, but if you actually have that personal rapport with your readers, you should be able to provide them with ads they can actually use. This will also provide your advertisers with consumers they can use.

And voila, you have your new revenue stream. Blogs like Gizmodo.com, consumerist.com and lifehacker.com are great examples of blogs that make money. As you may have noticed, james-strocel.com is not in the format of a money-making blog. The interests are too broad, and let’s face it, it doesn’t update enough. Hopefully within the next year I can come up with a blogging concept that’ll result in some groceries.

Novels: Screenplays are for suckers

Even before the writer’s strike, there was tons of literature by former television and movie writers that both media were becoming creatively bankrupt. The shows were being bankrolled to enhance the names of executives rather than to make any real profit. Works of art simply can’t be designed like cars or mp3 players. The ones that worked the best are very personal and specific in nature, so to make a movie all things to all people is an exercise in futility. So why not go it alone? Keeping ownership of your idea is not only good for future income, it preserves the idea’s potential income. When you buy a movie ticket or turn on the TV, you’re looking to experience a personal connection with whoever made the show. Film, television and print are after all only means of communication, they are not products in and of themselves. You only need to look as far as J.K. Rowling to see that we live in the era of the billionaire novelist. The potential gains of the novel far outweigh that of a screenplay that may never see the light of day anyway.

2007: A Year In Review

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2007 started off for me in Bellevue, where Sara and I enjoyed a rosing blow-out at our friend Sandy’s. Explosions of party-poppers and the drunk-dialing of loved ones abounded as the last incandescent new year ball dropped. I had no idea that I had passed all my courses at BCIT and Sara was wondering why I was waxing poetic because for her, the year had started back in September. I was still working my way through a GIS diploma, and even though I had a practicum all set and ready, the jury was still out as to whether I would have a job at the end of it all. The nuts and bolts section of the course had finished, so we were now studying more specific subjects like photogrammetry and object-oriented programming, and more holistic areas like presentations and proposal writing. No sooner did my final exams end did I move on to my practicum at Environmental Criminal Research Incorporated. I spent two months working out of a loft office on beautiful Granville island. Although it was unpaid, it was my first job where I was NOT an entry-level mook interchangeable with thousands of other random hipsters in the city. It was almost like I was being paid to think. I liked it.

I completed all of my development targets and pretty soon ECRI had a serial criminal detector that would automatically load up map files. I also gained the distinction of having worked on software that had military applications, which was unfortunate because I had no desire to use it to pick up chicks. When the District of Maple Ridge called me back saying I had won a 6-month contract with them, high fives were had by all. Not only was I now getting paid to think, but they also provided me with Bose noise-cancelling headphones! Can you believe that? Of course, their purpose was to drown out the rack of servers set up behind me, but Bose Headphones! The District has become my favorite place to work so far. I got to make maps, scripts and data models for departments all over the city. When I got out of school, I was afraid of getting into a specialized discipline and having to perform the same tasks over and over again. Luckily for me, GIS is a generalist’s discipline, and will remain so as long as the world keeps changing and evolving.

I could’ve spent the next 20 years working at DMR, but alas for now it is not the case. Last Friday my contract ended and once again I’m out there looking for a patron to fund my calling. It’s odd though, after 4 contracts with some very diverse companies, unemployment feels like coming home after a long vacation. Work has piled up on my desk and I’m ready to approach it with a new resolve. I don’t have any more doubts about if I’ll find work, it’s more a question of where and when. All told, this year is ending on an up note. I’ve got a host of new skills and I am better able to work on projects on my own. My family is also doing well across the board. My sister is moving in with her boyfriend in Dawson Creek, and is looking forward to a new job there. My brother Jon still has plenty of video work, his wife Amber is still making the world’s printers run, and Hannah, my niece is figuring out preschool. Sara’s sister Megan is on a part-time contract teaching kindergarten, and her boyfriend Ryan is starting a new program at BCIT. Jen is finishing her fourth year at UCFV, and her boyfriend which we call “Other Ryan” is an assistant manager at Milestones. Sara, my Fiancee, is balancing her grade 7′s at Clayburn Middle with our upcoming wedding in March, but thankfully I’m now at home with her to help. As for myself, we’ll just have to see. Happy New Year, and God bless.

A Case of Useless

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A couple of thoughts about the writer’s strike. The first is this Video that made me laugh.

Anyone who’s perused fanfiction.net can tell you that the comic embellishment here is at a minimum. These people do exist and that fact is both sad and hilarious. But after a bit of rumination, I felt that this video had some wider implications beyond brightening my coffee break.

This skit takes the producer’s optimum position to its hilarious conclusion. The ability to buy labor using non-monetary benefits. Workers who are just happy to be there! It’s manager heaven! I worked as games tester for about a year, and one thing I learned was that any passion you have for your job can be used to bend you over a barrel. My work was repetitive and there were thousands ready to take my place, so it’s no wonder I didn’t get re-hired after my second contract with the company. 10 dollars an hour and 60 hour work weeks seem like a fair price for the chance to work at a video game company. It’s same deal for the Writer’s Guild, the Director’s Guild and the Screen Actor’s guild. Without them, management could easily do whatever they wanted to workers because people would pay to do the work that they do.

The second item is this blog post by Ryan Sohmer. If there ever was a case for an internet-only entertainment universe, Sohmer would be it. His comic strip, Least I Could Do has run for over five years with four books out and an animated series deal on the way. However he may have trouble getting any help writing said animated series if he maintains his line of thinking. Sohmer believes that if the producers and guild just bucked up and compromised, everybody would get back to work. Everyone MUST get back to work, otherwise all the actors and studio janitors will go hungry, this great 70 year old infrastructure will crumble and America would no longer be the cultural epicenter it once was. Oh no! The actors will have to choose between their dignity and a little gold statue at the Oscars! If you ask me, this sounds like a good thing.

The producers are about to get hit with a terminal case of useless, a disease that few occupations recover from. Back in the days of a three channel, one newspaper, one movie screen universe, the producer’s job was much more important. Making sure that the most appealing if not best content got out there to attract the best viewers and the best advertisers was a task that required strategy and tough decision-making. When the internet came along and made sure joe nobody was as accessible as NBC, creators are now able to make money from a small audience without the interference of committee thinking. Networks and corporations simply are not able to maximize revenue from the personal, specific stories that make mass media what is today. Technology is going to replace the functions of producers until they are simply providers of production capital, and holding money is something the banks have covered pretty well. The Producers know this, and they are attempting every under-handed trick in the book to keep themselves relevant and swimming in cash, from anti-net neutrality bills to copyright extensions. Every trick that is, except serve the consumer and pay a decent price for labor.

Every day the writers remain on strike brings the entertainment industry to a more robust and equitable business model. Furthermore, it’s not like any of the workers on those shows haven’t been unemployed before. In the Vancouver where they film Battlestar Galactica, an unemployed tradesperson is pretty much an oxymoron with this job market. When you lose your job, you don’t dress up like G.I. joe and go shoot up a happy burger. You look for work, you retrain, and you adapt. It may take only a few hit shows on the internet to change the game completely. Besides, if enough actors and directors boycott the oscars, things will really start to get interesting.

Ryan Sohmer’s Strike Musings, Part Deux

Fanfic Video via Writer’s Life

‘Tudin’ up the place

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Right now the internet is awash with the controversy that is the firing of Jeff Gertsmann, better known as Gertsmann-gate. According to Gamespot, his employer, Jeff Gertsmann was let go as a game reviewer for reasons related to his “tone”. However, many in the gaming community suspect that this was due to Gertsmann’s less than glowing review of Io Interactive’s latest crime shooter, “Kane and Lynch: Dead Men”. Since the publisher of the game is a major sponsor of Gamespot, the fans were quick to construct a conspiracy involving Gamespot and the publisher. This comic from Penny-Arcade illustrates the situation brilliantly.

I thought I would read the review and see the video to figure out what the hubbub was all about. Curiously, I found myself siding with the editors at Gamespot. I felt a little uncomfortable for the developers of “Kane and Lynch”. Gertsmann described the game as “ugly”, starring characters that were “completely unlikable”. There are ways to pull of off a negative review with flare and personality, but Gertsmann’s generic gripes led me to believe that he was simply seen as a weak link on the writing staff. He immediately points out the game’s faults, where a more skilled reviewer would have built the game up a little before taking down Greek tragedy style. It may have just been bad timing that he was let go after reviewing the game of a major sponsor. Despite all this, I think he was on the verge something important. Something that the video gaming industry in America and Europe is just not ready to deal with.

If this game is “ugly”, then by what standard is it ugly? What are we comparing it to? Bioshock? Gears of War? Clive Barker’s Jericho? Any other M-rated shooter on the market? And who’s to say the characters are unlikeable? Surely we can identify with the faceless chap ripping slugs out of creepy little girls in Bioshock! And who wouldn’t want to have a beer with the over-muscled chainsaw-wielding hulks you play in Gears of War?

What I got from Gertsmann’s review is that we consumers are drowning a sea of games where every character is the most badass mofo in the universe, kicking the asses of badasses who are supposed be even more badass than the badass you are playing. Never mind that the government is trying to legislate these kind of games off the shelves. Companies are pouring resources into these Next-Gen titles, for which they may see little return profit. Developing new characters has to be THE weakness of Western game studios. JC Barnett over at the blog Japanmanship suggested we should just give up and outsource all of our character designing to Japan and Korea. And why shouldn’t we? Contra 4 and Metroid Prime are proof positive that Western Video Game companies can do wonders with foreign intellectual property.

“Kane and Lynch” is a logical game to produce. The developer, Io Interactive, previously produced the game “Hitman”, which was quite popular with its strategic approach to murder and mayhem. Making a heist game in the tradition of “Heat” or “The Italian Job” implemented with the strategy of “Hitman” should have been money in the bank for these guys. But it seems that in the haste to make the game more palatable for the Western market and on the shelves by Christmas, the fun and character development of those films was lost in the quest to make absolutely everyone in the game the hardest case on the planet.

Gertsmann seems like he would never be happy working to assess an industry that was so lacking in its self-awareness. The editors may have had the company’s best interests at heart when they let him go, but unless developers treat character and story-line as integral to their process as graphics and gameplay, we are going to see a lot more game reviewers with “tone” problems.

Japanmanship on the Art of Character

The Penny Arcade Comic


Gertsmann’s review of Kane and Lynch: Dead Men.