Category: Writer’s Blog

Is the term “killer app” still in parlance in the tech community? If not, quick rundown: hardware by itself doesn’t sell, or at least doesn’t sell for long. This is particularly true with game consoles and is why they tend to jealously guard their library of IPs. I remember the original release of the Xbox, and my local group and I had next to no interest in shelling out for that thing until we played HALO at a friend’s house, and within a few months all of us had an Xbox. Because HALO. That one game was arguable what made the Xbox a contender in the console marketplace. It was the “killer app.” A couple of decades earlier, the consensus was that as far as emerging videocassette technology was concerned, Betamax was the clearly superior format to VHS. And yet VHS won out, because the porn industry chose to make their tapes compatible with it. In the world of entertainment, the tail wags the dog.

Why do I bring this up? Well, mostly because I love to be oblique and bury the lede. The lede is that during the writer’s strike we canceled our Netflix subscription. The days where Netflix was the only real game in town for streaming were long gone and the prices kept going up while the management was making some very questionable decisions with their “software,” i.e. their library both of existing titles and newly minted exclusives. Some of it wasn’t their fault or under their control as major players were getting their own channels into circulation and circling the wagons, calling their IPs home so that you weren’t going to see Disney and such available anymore. Other decisions like canceling the Dark Crystal prequel series made me feel like one of those anime protagonists who has to clench their fists with tears streaming from their eyes and declare “I cannot forgive you!”

But if I’m totally honest it was probably the costs. Some people can afford to buy all the consoles and some can’t, right? And there was nothing particularly compelling keeping me there. After cancelling of course I found out no one else did even though we’d all talked about it, and Netflix apparently got its act back together and was putting out some good apps again, but… I held out. Even with Dawn poking at me hopefully every so often and pointing to things our friends were raving over like Blue Eyed Samurai, I held out.

So Netflix called in the nuclear option and hit me with their ads for Season 2 of Arcane: League of Legends.

There was no defense. They knew of my love for Season 1 and my figuring they would just cancel it like they canceled all other good and right things in the world, and no, they renewed it and waved it before me and my dumb bull ass ran right into the anvil of resubscription.

But here’s the kicker. It’s good. It may even be better than the first Season, and that’s particularly surprising in a world where sequels and prequels so often don’t measure up to what we loved in the first go ’round.

No, good doesn’t quite capture it. Six episodes in and everything shows the hallmarks of not only a generous budget but the work of a creative team firing on all cylinders with the storytelling, voice acting, and especially the animation. It’s gorgeous. It’s moving. It was worth the wait, and worth my pride in crawling on back to the entertainment ex.

I still have a lot of worry for Season 2 of Andor, although for better or worse my Disney+ subscription just renewed for the year. Now that we can pick and choose there’s a lot more need to keep an eye on what we’re picking and choosing. But for now, I have found a new killer app, and I am content.

Schrödinger aside, this title is referencing us. Dawn and I don’t have kids, we have a cat. Our agreement was that if we ever divorced, the person who asked for it would have to take custody of the cat.

We kid, of course. We loved the little furball for all of her 21(!) years with us, even if her kidneys had been slowly failing her over the past few. Up until fairly recently she was still running and jumping and meowing, if not with the spryness of her prime years. Hey I’d like to see a human over a hundred years old (relatively) free climb or clear their own height in a standing jump, even if she’d started to sometimes miss her mark.

She had always been skinny in a world of chonk, but more and more we felt her bones through her skin. She couldn’t seem to lift her tail anymore, or even sit down comfortably. Epileptic seizures had started, about once a month, and cat epilepsy is a scary thing because their brains short-circuit but they’ll still try to run.

Still, it wasn’t until her latest episode that she finally seemed to go away, mentally speaking, and not really ever come back. So with great sorrow, we made the long delayed decision to have her euthanized. Even knowing she’d had a long, good life, even with the long forewarning that she was on her way out, onions were being cut.

We had already decided that another cat would be adopted when the current one went, but not the timing or circumstance beyond that we wanted a rescue pet. After coming back from the vet, Dawn figured she’d want to wait awhile.

She didn’t last a day before changing her mind. Despite all the interruptions and the fur in her oil paints and innumerable other consequences of being both artist and pet owner in a small dwelling space, she woke up the next day to a catless house and it was, in her words, “too quiet.” And then a mutual friend of a friend sent us pictures of a new kitten just out of fostering at our local humane society. We went over that very day, and long story short, came home with a new mew. He is a handful (literally and figuratively) and also absolutely adorable and probably the best possible medicine for the loss we felt, we’re just in the process of figuring out some things like, right at the moment while I type this, “no trying to go to sleep on Dawn while she’s drawing.” It was the saddest of times but also it is the best of times.The cat is dead. Long live the cat.

Easy there, cowpokes — if you didn’t know, “homogeny” just refers to things that are the same. It’s great for some things, like gears or screws of a certain size. In creative fiction, though, maybe not so much.

Take for example the lament of some critics and fans about the “Marvelization” of cinema. While I have my problems with blanket terms like this, I can see how people might come to the conclusion that the so-called Marvel formula, or at least characterization, has become a tedious mass of indistinguishable quippyness. It’s probably a bad example since I disagree and think the problem dates back at least as far as Joss Whedon, who definitely left his mark on Marvel but his style of every character being something of a one-liner machine can be seen on display as far back as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series in the ’90s.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but there is a danger of character losing their individual voice and that’s when homogeny becomes a problem, whether it’s flippant snark or Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness sounding out from a dozen different mouths. If one of the holy grails of writing (in my opinion) is being able to distinguish a specific talker without any prompts whatsoever beyond what they say, homogeny in dialogue is the opposite of that. Maybe it’s why George Bernard Shaw would constantly indulge in phonetic accents in his scripts, jes so yew would naow a cockney wuz tawkin’. On account of his characters otherwise tending towards being mouthpieces for his various philosophical musings of the moment.

Homogeny in dialogue is more than just potentially confusing or flattening, it threatens to be the absolute death knell of any entertainment: boring. Maybe not in the short run, but sooner or later people are going to become aware of a certain sameyness. It’s true that in certain friend groups and subcultures in real life people can end up sounding very much alike, but I think that’s where it behooves a writer to pick out the differences and figure out what makes Sorority Pledge A someone distinct from Sorority Pledge B. Unless of course, your intent is to paint them as a blob of a mob, which is arguably the case for me back when I was writing the “background” McCartys. But I knew most of them were going to have a (literal) expiration date, so I don’t think anyone got to know them long enough to tire of their schtick.

I guess the point is, as usual, to be mindful, and if you make a first draft and feel like your characters are just sounding like you, you might want to consider finding some variation. Hopefully not enough to sound forced in the other direction, but variety is supposed to be the spice and spice can do a lot to liven up the same ol’ and bland which doesn’t seem to have that kick you wanted.

It’s been about 15 years since I started being “in the business” — if you can say so about someone whose business consists of two people doing their best with self publishing a work of fiction. Still, I’ve learned enough to know what might be considered some best practices, and with that comes a recognition of what the joke (troll?) is with the sticker image below.

As a layperson comics reader, would you see anything wrong with this? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s intentionally designed to trip the twitch switches of pro or semi-pro letterers. A sampling:

1) Left-justified text, meaning the paragraph is straight up and down on the left side but varies on the right. It’s standard in writing novels and such but tends to look very odd within the word balloons that are the standard method of delivery for comics dialogue. That’s why the convention is to center the text and ideally go for a “diamond” shape where possible to complement the balloon that contains it.

2) Speaking of which, the word balloon (while nice-looking on its own) is way too big for the text inside. It’s something I still wrassle with occasionally but you try to keep it from being too tight or too loose with regards to whitespace. This paragraph is not only left-justified but not even centered within the balloon itself.

3) Lack of all caps for your dialogue isn’t a big deal these days, but having three capital letters in the same sentence is… oof. As a bonus one of the caps is a crossbar capital “I” which editors would often consider a no-no to use in comics at all unless it’s on its own or part of an apostrophe situation.

4) Comic Sans is the font choice. This might be the least sinful overall to me, in fact when we first started the comic we were using it and you can still see it in the first issue or so. But there are a lot of people who really, really don’t like it and consider it a sign of ignorance and amateurism. What’s been explained to me is that it’s not very well set up as a font design, which might be why there’s also the problem of the “g” in “Lettering” brushing up against the “a” in the next line. That could also be a line spacing problem though, everything just looks cramped.

Anyhow, lack of these lettering stylings is hardly a criminal act, and most are honestly there for the purpose of making comics easier to read, so if your audience can read it then so be it (barring of course an editor you need to get things past). I’ve seen all sorts of webcomics do all sorts of things and the above at least is still legible, even if it makes my brain itch. But if you truly do have a passion for comic book lettering, it’s worth figuring out some of the basics even if you plan to break them later on.

So a friend of ours is a cartoon storyboard artist and a fan of the animated series My Adventures with Superman, to where he made his own (unofficial) animatic of an opening sequence for the recently(?) debuted character of Supergirl. I haven’t really watched at all but got curious and googled up the show, and my first reaction was “That’s Rosa hair!”

Whether you agree or disagree, this is likely one of the only places I could say that and have anyone know what I’m talking about. I’m not sure about the popularity of MAWS but being that it’s streamed by a major network it would be far more likely for someone nowadays to find Zombie Ranch and go “That’s Supergirl’s hair!”

There’s this concept of something or someone being “iconic” that gets arguably overused in our modern age. J.S. Sterling did a rant about it and they have a point.

The point being that something isn’t iconic just because it’s declared so. In fact if you have to declare something iconic, or explain why it’s iconic, it might not be as iconic as you think.

It doesn’t have to be global but there should be some critical level of recognition among the culture or subculture of the populace involved, the bigger the better. I would be brave (and bold) enough to state that a significant portion of humanity knows Superman. Less so Supergirl, but still a significant enough chunk that a Supergirl cosplayer will be recognized at your average comics convention. On the other hand Dawn was a Captain Marvel fan and until that movie came out most people misidentified her symbol for Wonder Woman.

It has to really stick in the mind, and be distributed widely enough for instant recognition and association before I would consider something iconic. Indiana Jones’s fedora and whip? Iconic. But prior to 1981 almost no one even knew of Indiana Jones, much less his preferred gear. And then there’s the question of if it’s going to last. Superman has been around for nearly a century and keeps returning to his classic look, but even though it’ll probably be one of the more popular Halloween costumes this year, I’m not going to lay money on Aussie breakdance “star” Raygun being considered iconic (you know, the one from the Olympics? No? Well, proving my point…)

So is Rosa iconic? I’ll come right out and say no. Suzie has probably one of the more potentially iconic looks of our cast but even she’s just going to look like some generic cowgirl to 99% of people at a comic-con, much less the genpop. We’d need a lot more inroad into the zeitgeist for that. Even with Supergirl above, how many people would recognize her just from that picture in her civvies? That hairstyle is not iconic to Supergirl (not yet, anyhow). Almost without exception when I see a Clark Kent cosplay they have their shirt open enough to show at least part of the blue top with the big “S” symbol that’s recognized the world over. Clark Kent is a just a guy in a suit, otherwise.

One game we used to play while sitting at our exhibitor booth watching people go by was the Three C’s game. You spot a cosplayer at a general pop culture convention in a suit and trenchcoat with a more or less rumpled air: are they Castiel, Constantine, or Columbo? All three are iconic, but have so much crossover in their look that Constantines would be well-advised to lean into blond hair or risk mistaken identification, which from my experience is a bummer for all parties involved.

But don’t mind me, I still remember dressing up as a sea turtle for one Hallowe’en, flippers, shell and all, and even in broad daylight everyone thought I was a parrot because their eyes went to the beak. So be ready for disappointment no matter how universally iconic you think something is. Or just stick to Superman.

When I was a kid, I had no patience for “old stuff.” What that meant could vary but one example would be the (now defunct) concept of Saturday morning when all the cartoon blocks would play on the television. Somewhere around 11am the cartoons stopped and gave over to live-action syndicated ’70s dramas like Emergency! or Adam 12 and that was a hard stop for me. TV went off, sometimes grudgingly, and I had to find something else to do. If someone had pointed out the flaw in my logic that I would fiendishly devour episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? despite it predating both of those shows I would have stared at them blankly. Cartoon is not for old. Cartoon is young.

Here I am at the half-century mark and still watching cartoons, and still not really motivated to give Emergency! and Adam 12 a go. For one thing it’s not like there’s ever been a lapse in medical dramas and police procedurals in the decades since so I might as well watch something in the genre that’s floated to the top, right? The 10% of “not crap?”

Opinions can vary of course, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to take a broader view of things and not outright dismiss entire genres or time-periods of entertainment. Not everything old is bad, and not everything old is good. What’s often true is that the merely mediocre fades away to leave only the memorable, and if you’re not careful about parsing that phenomenon you’ll end up in that all-too-common refrain of “music nowadays sucks” and similar blanket statements. Or the opposite end where “the youth” dismiss anything older than their own lifetimes as worthless and outdated and think every show tune originated with Family Guy. Then the older folk smugly assert “um, actually…” and the generational divide gets another fracture.

In terms of comics, there’s stuff from over 100 years ago that deserves study just as much as there’s stuff being produced now that’s worth a look, even if your jaded eye detects the influences of the past upon the present. 90% of everything is still crap, but just don’t make the mistake of cutting that last 10% out of your life.

I kept hearing good things about this one but we had never gotten around to actually watching it. Train to Busan was Korean cinema’s 2016 submission to the zombie apocalypse genre, and eight years later Dawn and I gave it a whirl after finding it available on one of our streaming channels. I don’t remember which one, although I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Disney Plus.

I’ve said before that there are no new stories under the sun, only riffs and recombinations of ones that have come before — and the closer you hew to recognizable tropes the more skilled you have to be at the contents. Busan has some definite moments but overall I may have just seen one too many zombie flicks to have really gotten into it despite the novelty of the non-American locale and managing to keep the confines of a passenger train suspenseful when there’s literally (and figuratively) very little room to maneuver. You can tick off the check boxes of characters and plot points and even in 2016 the “turn you in seconds” fast zombies on display here had already been seen in the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later, World War Z, etc.

It’s not bad. I wouldn’t even say it’s mediocre, it’s just I think because of the above it didn’t grab me and sink its teeth into my neck the way I was led to believe it might. What is it with zombies and necks, anyhow? Shouldn’t that be more of a vampire thing? Perhaps a topic for a future blog.

There’s a guy who picks up a zombie and uses it as a battering ram to hold other zombies back, though. He’s cool. And like I said there are some other memorable and creative moments even if it doesn’t stay far from the well-trodden path. Or um, well… it’s on rails?

Yeah, I’ll see myself out.

As a young tabletop RPG nerd, I recall poring over the 4th edition Champions game book. Actually I suppose almost more of a tome, since at the time it was the thickest RPG manual I’d ever owned.

Future me would laugh at that after seeing the 5th edition, but I digress. Champions used a point-buy system for character creation, from attributes all the way to defining your important interpersonal relationships. Anyhow, languages were bought on a one to five point scale. One point was being able to do basic things like ask where the bathroom is, two would give you fluency, three was “completely fluent with accent,” four was a native speaker, or at least being able to pass as one. But as I recall there was a five point level and it said something about having a command of idiomatic expression.

At the time that puzzled me, not the least because teenage me had no idea what “idiomatic” meant. Now I do. The easiest way to explain it is as the little bits of slang people rattle off without thinking twice that only someone sharing their particular culture would understand. Could be an ethnic group, a nation, a region, or heck even a friend or family group. Some of them you might be able to figure out with enough fluency, like the English expression “you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” But if you’re not familiar at all with theater and someone tells you to “break a leg!” would you understand that they’re not inciting violence?

In the recent Shang Chi Marvel movie there’s a moment where the nigh immortal Mandarin tells a village elder something which hits people familiar with Chinese culture hard. Closest English translation is, “I’ve eaten more salt in my life than you have rice.” This was not the translation subtitle given to English-speaking audiences who have no idea of the context and history behind that, but it basically is an expression meaning “I’m a lot older than you are, chump.” Hits like a truck if you get it, otherwise you can kind of understand the gist but not in the same visceral way. It’s like having to explain a joke.

Playing the video game Control, there is a character you encounter who is an elderly Finnish janitor that speaks fluent English but sometimes sprinkles in idioms like “throw the spoon in the corner” or “you don’t have to run with your head as your third leg” and I had no frigging clue if those were actual sayings or he was just making shit up. Even then, when he says “the pensioner inside is starting to feel the band around his head” — is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, he’s not making it up, turns out: https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/d5f0ki/ahtis_idiomsfinnish_words_explainedtranslated/

Grasp of idiom is that highest point level because it depends on being so immersed in a culture you understand these things without even having to parse them out or look them up. But on the other hand, the Champions model still falls short because there are so many different subcultures. Context remains everything

I put a flippant title on this, in full knowledge that hey, that’s a decent pun and I’m depriving myself of a comic page title down the road. Although I’m pretty sure if I scoured through the now over 500 pages of Zombie Ranch I’d find at least some repeats by this point, since in my arrogant youth (well, 30-something youth) I presumed I would have endless reserves of wit to keep the hits coming.

But it’s what, 2009 then and 2024 now, and that’s… 15 years? Yowza. This comic isn’t old enough to register to vote yet but it’s getting there. When we talk of “generations” the definition can get fuzzy but I personally think of it as about that amount of time, the time it would take for a baby born to become an adult, give or take a few cycles. It’s the time when babies start becoming moms and dads of babies of their own, and their moms and dads therefore become grandparents, and maybe the now great-grandparents are still kicking around at the upper end.

Although Dawn and I have no children, I am certainly of the age now where I could have been a grandparent (without any statutory laws being broken), which in turn puts the generation I grew up with as my immediate adults to that “great-grand” status.

The big problem being, of course, that’s around when the dying starts. The past ten years have seen my mom and her two sisters pass away, basically that whole maternal side of the family. Their respective husbands live on and although I share only blood relation with my father, I am quite fond of my two uncles. All of them have had some scares recently but recovered… well, except…

Look, y’all know I don’t bother you about the personal life much, but I’ll just say this month about why we’ve been delaying. One of my uncles was found collapsed in his home, and was diagnosed with a stroke, and although it’s a kind of stroke where he still knows who we are and such, he’s probably never going to walk again. And since he is also childless I’ve been taking point as the relative who lives closest because everyone agreed he was no longer going to be safe living on his own and needed to get into assisted living.

What has unfolded in these past several weeks has been such a spoon-bending tragicomedy of bureaucracy as to make me feel at times like I was experiencing my own bouts of dementia, and I extend thanks to Dawn and also all of you for your patience. It wasn’t a funeral thankfully, but a little voice does whisper “not yet” and remind me that this is a time when the people I grew up with as such vibrant adults are going away and will continue to be going away, in many cases with more whimper than bang, and I will continue to be on the frontlines of that whereas in the past I insulated, separated by a generation from the generational trauma and drama alike.

It’s a sobering thought. One to make you reach for Chuck’s stash and have a nice stiff drink.

As a rule, I don’t binge watch shows. Maybe three episodes in one sitting would be my record before I feel the urge to take a break. Most of the time it’s a single dose.

I binged the Fallout tv show.

Oh not completely start to finish, I did take a break after Episode 1. But Episode 2-9 ended up as a seven hour or so marathon as I got sucked in. Wham, bam, allakazam. I wasn’t even particularly hyped for it, it looked pretty good in the trailers but then so did The Phantom Menace. You can’t trust trailers. And video game adaptations? The Last of Us was good and by accounts pretty faithful to the source, ditto for Arcane with League of Legends, but in the overall scheme of things they still seem like exceptions to the rule. And neither of those were dear to my heart the way the Fallout franchise is.

So I skipped the Amazon Prime premiere on April 11th, and only later as word of mouth started to build did I begin to allow myself some measure of excitement. Did they do it? Did the showrunners manage to bring the violent, darkly humorous world of Fallout to live-action life?

Well, I’m keeping this entry spoiler-free but I’ll just spoiler that bit and say: they did. Immaculately (if that word can be applied to post-apocalyptic grime).

Sometimes I’ve reviewed a series in this blog after watching a few episodes and gushed about it only to then see it go off the rails, but here I’ve now watched the whole thing not once, but twice. I even showed my 80 year old dad and my sister and they know nothing of the setting but were hooked into the story and that lovely balance of ridiculous and sublime that the series managed to faithfully recreate.

“They stole your plot!” my sister half-jokingly mused at one scene that certainly had a bit of Zombie-Ranch-ish flavor.

“Nah,” I replied. “This setting has been around since 1997. If anything it’s Fallout that inspired *me*.”

And then there’s the properties that inspired both, which you’ll definitely catch if you’re a fan of Spaghetti Westerns.

Anyhow, it’s not only fun and full of giddiness-inducing easter eggs, it’s got dramatic heft to go with the humor and is a real masterclass in “show, don’t tell” exposition even where some really weird things have to be introduced to an audience that might not necessarily take them for granted.

Fan of the Fallout franchise or not, watch it if you can. Though maybe try not to binge like I did, as the worst part is that there’s a long ways off until Season 2.

WonderCon 2024 has come and gone and we’re left to wonder about the results of our experiment with packing up and moving to a smaller but potentially more lucrative space. For many years we’d exhibited in the Small Press area of the convention as various floor plans came and went, but sometime prior to COVID the show solidified into a layout that — well, not to sugarcoat it, really sucked for Small Press.

The way things are set up, the attendees all get their badges and enter the convention floor from the far Southwest side (Hall D). WonderCon isn’t quite as large as San Diego but still spans several of the center’s Halls, which can be opened up to be contiguous but there are still solid blocks that give a feeling of partitioning. Small Press ended up in Hall A, past about three of those partitioning walls, and despite feedback from us and other exhibitors there to this day is no signage for Small Press or even a “MORE THIS WAY —>” prompt that I’ve seen other shows do.

We wanted to believe it wouldn’t hurt, but it does. Sure, on the program map “Small Press” shows up but what does that mean to the average convention visitor? To go by commentary from the people who made it there, not much, with a common refrain being “Oh wow, I didn’t know this was here!” often coupled with “I love your stuff but I already spent all my money.”

Conversely, Artist’s Alley for WonderCon is positioned right smack at the main entrance where everyone tends to come in, and while not everyone does great there and the space is more cramped, it doesn’t feel like as much of a ghost town as the far boonies. This is what we did this year, abandoning our usual Lab Reject Studios space in Small Press in favor of a more Dawn-centric setup in AA, to see if the reports we’d been getting and our own gut feelings matched the reality. And while I won’t say our sales were astronomical, they were certainly improved and there were at least a lot more eyeballs checking out what we had on offer.

This is why exhibitors throw fits when being stuck behind pillars or exiled to a basement. Positioning really matters. Sometimes people come find you using your social media posts and the maps and such, but the vast majority still are just wandering by and something catches their eye, and you can gussy up your space as much as you’re able but it still isn’t going to make much difference if there aren’t eyes to catch.

Small Press in SDCC feels a lot different because there’s at least one main thoroughfare in and out of the exhibit hall right next to it, as well as a big SMALL PRESS sign hanging overhead. But it seems like Comic-Con International only has one of those and WonderCon can’t borrow it.

It’s hard to make a floor plan that pleases everyone, but WonderCon definitely has a traffic flow issue with their current setup that for whatever reason has been going on for years and shows no signs of being addressed. So for us it was either pull up stakes and try the more crowded “neighborhood” or just give up the Con entirely as our yearly revenue kept dropping at the same time all the other costs are going up.

Anyhow, the change of position was promising, and it was nice to still have at least one local, comparatively low cost show to meet and greet at. We’ll see how the perspective changes in 2025.

I’ve mentioned Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven many times over the course of these blogs. Not every movie in his oeuvre is a classic, but his big three (IMO) are all but ingrained into my DNA and, by process of creative osmosis, infused into the inspirations of Zombie Ranch as well.

I’m speaking of the science fiction triple threat of Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997). They don’t share source material, they don’t comprise any sort of shared cinematic universe — and yet their visions of media-saturated dystopian futures are certainly connected in theme and presentation. There’s a critique of the excesses of American culture, sometimes light and sometimes harsh, almost never subtle but almost invariably — well, fun. It makes them very rewatchable. It writes catchphrases into your psyche: “I’d buy that for a dollar!” — “Get your ass to Mars!” — “Would you like to know more?”

Are they shallow? Are they deep? Are they somehow both? Verhoeven never seemed to lose sight of these being popcorn-munching action movies even as he took the piss (as the British would say) with his subject. And with all the adventure and explosions involved it would seem natural that they would be further adaptable into video games, right?

Well, results there have varied. But oh sweet liberty did the makers of the game Helldivers 2 get it right. Look, I’m just going to take a minute to link the opening cutscene here. See if you can sense a certain familiar vibe:

Okay but blah, blah, we’re all jaded gamers here, we know better than to trust a fancy cutscene. Well, I’m happy to report the game very much preserves the whole feeling of the above in its actual play, right down to the propaganda videos that will play between missions as you and your fellow Helldivers kick back momentarily on your Super Destroyer before another suicide mission in the name of Democracy.

It is patently ridiculous, over-the-top, and it’s probably the first “war shooter” I’ve ever honestly enjoyed, probably because in addition to nailing the satirical aspects the game didn’t lose sight of that other Verhoeven factor of being fun. Since it’s multiplayer this can, naturally, depend on your fellow Helldivers of the moment, but if you ever felt like stepping into the boots of Verhoeven’s vision of the Roughnecks, of Johnny Rico or “Dizzy” Flores, this is as good as it gets, ironically even though there are actual official Starship Troopers games out there.

If you’re looking for Heinlein’s original vision you’ll probably need to keep moving along, but hey, at least there are tacnukes. Just no real powered armor to compensate. Let faith in Freedom be your shield… or at least the shield of your next diver in line after that one vaporized.

So it’s been a few weeks since my last post, but I haven’t forgotten that I promised to go into some of my half-baked theories on writing. I rambled around the topic enough in the past entry that I’m not sure I even got to that point, which I suppose in of itself bespeaks poor writing, at least on a technical level. All these blogs tend to be first drafters anyhow, I’m not going for Dickens or Shakespeare.

Oh but speaking of those two gents, they both indulged in a bit of poetry didn’t they? In Shakespeare’s case so much so that he is often referred to as “The Bard” — which if you’re a D&D player will usually conjure up two immediate impressions: one of them NSFW and one of them a dude or gal who habitually carries and uses a musical instrument and sings a lot.

Well, let’s roll with this. What if I proposed to you that a gateway into writing could be found in music? Even music without official lyrics? Vidi this video proposing that the most memorable theme music for movies and television is stuff that lends itself to unofficial lyrics incorporating the title, and how many composers have completely admitted to getting their start from that text.

Star Wars… nothing but STAAAR WAAAARS…

But seriously, if text can lead the way to music, why not the reverse? We make up lyrics all the time. We sing stupid improvised songs to our baffled pets. Is that writing? Well if you took it and committed it in the fixed form of copyright fame, I would say so. Is that good writing? Okay, save that for the advanced class. After all, this memed parody of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was wildly popular and will get stuck in your head despite what seems like a serious lack of effort in its lyrics:

@mattstorerhere

Art of the deal #comedy #music #fyp #parody #strangerthings

♬ original sound – Matt Storer

Ad jingles are kind of like that, too. I can’t remember where I left my keys earlier in the day but I can recite the lyrics to a Juicyfruit gum advertisement from the 1980’s nearly verbatim.

So maybe fledgling writers should stop worrying too much about being “good” and instead focus on, for lack of a better term, their “flow.” It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. To be, or not to be. Imagine someone reading the audiobook of what you’re laying down, do the words keep a kind of rhythm even though they don’t rhyme? This is especially true of writing dialogue. Speak it out loud, in the voice of the character as you imagine them, and see how it sounds. That way you hopefully don’t run afoul of Harrison Ford’s apocryphal quip to George Lucas of “you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!”

At very least I believe this could get you atarted, much the same as the music composers coming at the process from the other direction. It doesn’t have to be a full-on musical number, but a little bit of rhythm could go a long way.

If you own a copy of our first trade paperback, or you’ve browsed or been around for some of the extra content we’ve posted in the past, or been by our table at SDCC back when I was doing free “writer’s sketches” you will know this: I cannot draw.

Oh I know all the refrains; that anyone can learn to be an artist. That it’s not a matter of talent so much as practice and dedication. Maybe so, but at this point it’s like learning a foreign language to me. I might be able to fake it enough to get my point across but the natural fluency of the native is well beyond my reach.

What I never considered until fairly recently is that the same can apply to writing. Creative writing, especially writing dialog, seems to just come naturally to me. I enjoy it. I riff, I embellish, I play a tune and bring people dancing along. Enough of that metaphor though, since the only musical instruments I ever learned to play were piano and my own vocal chords and I am sorely out of practice with both. Which can definitely make vocal chords sore.

Look, the point is that for the past few years Dawn has been trying her hand at writing and has been very frustrated with it. What’s the number one bit of sage advice she’s gotten from me and my writerly friends?

“Just write.”

Well, from her perspective that might as well be her telling me to “just draw.” Sure I can tell her to just barf out words onto her medium of choice and then go back and massage them into something meaningful, but she gets tripped up at step one much less step two. How do I make it look so easy?

Well, maybe I do, but what’s not easy is trying to explain the process. Maybe that’s why “just write” was the popular answer. Maybe we writers are just a bitter and insecure lot who want to believe what we do is special but the general populace often doesn’t seem to think so. Think of the stereotype of every Tom, Dick and Harry (and distaff or enby versions thereof) saying that when they retire they will write The Great American Novel. It doesn’t really work out in practice, but the fact that that cliche is not retiring and composing The Great American Painting speaks to what I’m saying. So hearing someone actually admit they’re having trouble and coming to us in humble solicitude engenders a heady mixture of smug but also imposter syndrome and mistrust and we’re not quite sure how to answer, especially when put on the spot.

You could tell them to take creative writing classes, but will those help? Hell, my own experience with creative writing instruction was that no one knew how to actually teach it, so they just found some narrow definition of “thing I enjoy” and graded you based on how closely you matched that.

Sure, I can do edits on her rough drafts, but that invokes the adage of giving someone a fish versus teaching them how to fish. And I have to answer the question(s) for myself before I can even begin to think of helping someone else. I’ve begun to at least put together a thought or two, but for now I’ve rambled on long enough for one entry so I think I’ll save it for next time.

The story Roberson tells in this week’s comic isn’t made up. It took me some seearching but I at last backtraced a vague but powerful memory of my youth of watching a documentary film where baby birds were dropping dead in a drought. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you even as all the hows and wheres and whys fade away, and yet I had so much trouble finding any sign of it that I began to wonder if it was just a nasty figment of my imagination, conjured up in the mind of a man writing a comic at least in part about the dark side of reality television. I’d say reality television is just a very biased and manipulated version of a documentary, but a lot of the documentaries I’ve seen don’t seem much better. In fact, reality television might actually be the lesser evil in comparison since it doesn’t have any agenda beyond creative editing to make someone look stupider than they are because the producers have decided they’re the comic relief dummy of the show.

But back to my search. I was on the verge of giving up. It didn’t really matter anyhow, right? Zombie Ranch is a work of fiction, so why not just make things up pertinent to my point? Why did I feel such a need to validate that this documentary did, indeed happen and did, indeed leave a mark on my impressionable young mind that still burbles occasionally to the surface decades later?

And then, Eureka. I found it. Animals are Beautiful People:

An ironic title, given the memory that led me back to it. Other memories flooded back. They showed this in class in Junior High. It wasn’t all horror, far from it. In fact we all snickered at the depiction of the annual pilgrimage of the wildlife of the African desert to a certain spot to chow down on fermented fruit, basically spending a few days getting smashed out of their minds drunk in a way human festival attendees might find very familiar. Getting to watch something like that in school, sanctioned by the adults, felt deliciously naughty.

But then towards the film’s end, your soul paid the price. In the midst of a sudden drought, a lake had dried up into cracked earth within a matter of days, leaving the pelicans that had nested there stranded. Well, they could fly of course, so they weren’t technically stranded — but dozens of their just-hatched chicks could not. It was definitely not business as usual, but the adults waited as long as they could before thirst drove them to abandon the hatchlings. I captured some images of what happened next and sent them to Dawn as references… the entire flock of those fuzzy baby pelicans set off across the baking sands on foot, and the documentary crew filmed them as they died. It was all very artistically done, with narration drier than the former lake speaking of the tragedy unfolding and literally referring to it as a “death march.”

Nature is cruel. But more than that, I just could never get over the fact that a whole film crew, presumably well hydrated and supplied, was observing the doomed migration like indifferent gods. It’s the kind of thing that really calls into question the traditions of non-interference with the subjects. Could you help? Should you help? Is this letting nature take its course, or is it ghoulish voyeurism? To borrow from particle physics, we might be changing the outcome just by observing, much less anything more. Compound this with the claims that a lot of scenes in these films are deliberately staged including the aforementioned drunken fruit party and you’ve got a real double standard potentially going.

Now rounding up a flock of pelican chicks and transporting them to wetter environs would probably have been a logistical nightmare that could end up with them dead regardless, but if you had been part of that crew, could you have held that camera over those little dead bodies baking away? And if you did, would that stay in your brain when you tried to sleep that night? Hell, it’s stayed in my brain and I was only watching it play from a shitty VHS tape years after the fact and thousands of miles distant. Imagine being there, sipping from your canteen as those chicks dropped in their tracks, one by one, gasping their last breaths as their all too brief lives were burned away. Would you justify it as the right thing to do? Would you be so callous and hardened that you step through the aftermath just finding the best angle to capture their bodies?

I suppose it’s the same sort of hardening that allows people to clean up battlefields without wondering who the dead were or what dreams they had cut short. Or the hardening that lets people ranch zombies. But man, I’d be terrible at the job, and maybe that’s a good thing, too.

Hype is a dangerous beast. Getting caught up in hype can drown your brain in so much excitement that your critical functions submerge in a sea of serotonin, and before you know it you’ve invested your time, money, and perhaps even emotional well-being in something that could very well fail to meet your expectations. Disappointment after lofty hype can be a harsh fall, and if you’re old enough to remember waiting in line for the premiere of Phantom Menace you may know what I’m talking about. In video game circles we had the debacle of Cyberpunk 2077‘s original release in 2020, and more recently the disparity of promises versus reality in Bethesda’s Starfield. Sometimes the hype gets out of control on the user end, but hype is certainly an age old tactic to sell people on something, precisely because you turn your brain off and reach for your wallet. The gaming industry has pulled some really nasty tricks over the years like having someone on a stage pretending to play a game on the screen “live” when it’s really just curated and pre-rendered footage that ends up never making it to release. I personally am at the point where I don’t care how pretty a trailer is if there’s no actual gameplay shown, and even then see above in terms of having to be skeptical if it’s truly actual gameplay.

There’s still a want to believe, though, especially when something seems tailor-made to fit your tastes. An open-world exploration and building game where you fight weird-ass monsters with modern tech in a post-apocalyptic environment? Where magic and science mix and dreams and reality intertwine? Hey, what’s this?

It looks amazing, but everything about this should be a red flag as far as hype, right? Especially when you dig into it and find out it’s a Chinese game being published by NetEase which is mostly known for mobile gachas and abandoning their decent IPs not long after release. This is a problem track record that shouldn’t be ignored.

And yet, Dawn and I were lucky enough to get into their latest closed beta test over the Holidays and man, despite dealing with all the bugs and not quite completed content, the gameplay loop is there and quite compelling at the moment. It looks beautiful, even in the more grotesque designs of monsters and infected places. Combat is fun, including some Control-esque telekinetic powers, stealth kills, and lots of customizable guns to shoot things with. You level up, you build your home/base, you fight giant boss monsters in confrontations that could easily rival Resident Evil encounters.Even the enemy AI is annoyingly good, at least where the human enemies are concerned. Fighting a squad of soldiers with assault rifles and grenades is a lot different than gunning down zombies — okay they’re not called zombies but the “first stage” infected are totally zombies. There was an event about twenty years back in the timeline called Starfall where a partial dimensional merging caused Earth to suffer global catastrophe and mutation as Lovecraftian horrors and their detritus (called Stardust) ravaged the planet. Humanity struggles on, and new hope has emerged in the form of the PC’s who are not only immune to Stardust but have evolved the power to wield it and strike back. The writing and dialogue are not overly stellar but not terrible, especially considering English is not the primary language for the developers.

So the game is living up to a lot of the hype, especially since we’ve got our own grubby little hands on it and so can be assured we’re not being spoon fed some carefully curated cutscenes. But naatually, no monetization has been enabled yet, and since the game is currently set to be Free to Play on release you know it’s going to be chock full of stuff to spend real-world cash on. They claim that will be purely cosmetic items, but even if they hold true to that, what about NetEase? Will Once Human be abandoned like other games before it?

I mean, I’d hope not since what I’ve seen has so much potential both realized and possible, but the hype beast has to stay in check. This beta run expires in a couple of weeks and final release is set for several months down the road (Q3 2024). A lot could happen between now and then. A lot could happen after it goes public. Either has the potential to bury the good here under a heap of bullshit. There *is* something here, and it’s pretty great, and I’m thinking some of you folks would get a big kick out of playing. But first we’ll have to wait and see if it survives its own dimensional collision with the real world…

For the past several months one of Dawn’s side projects has been trying to put together a game of Traveller, one of the most venerable and yet relatively obscure tabletop role-playing games out there. A science-fiction RPG almost as old as D&D but one that only the “hardcore” gaming crowd might have heard of, much less played or refereed.

Why is that? Well, perhaps because if someone has heard of it, the thing they might have heard would be its most infamous feature which is that your character can die during generation, just by virtue of a bad dice roll or two. You also may end up waaay off the mark from where you imagined being. I will be a naval officer! Well no, sorry, you failed to get into the Academy. University? Nope, a war started and you got drafted into the Marines, where after a few terms you got dishonorably discharged with no benefits after losing a leg in a botched mission. Okay fine, maybe I’ll just try being a security guard… no? Feckless scavenger it is, then… oh yeah and I’m old enough now I have to roll to see if I start feeling the effects of age.

The modern ruleset foregoes insta-death in favor of debt, injuries and enemies as bad outcomes, but preserves the random element and also discourages just going into the adventure as a fresh-faced 18 year old since you won’t know how to do most things, and trying to do things without at least a bit of knowledge is brutally penalized. But who knows what’s going to happen when you start accumulating those terms (each of which adds 4 years) and the dice start clattering?

It feels rare to come out of chargen under the age of 30 and with any appreciably amazing skills, particularly because the game actually starts skills at a rating of zero, meaning you don’t take the minus 3 penalty I mentioned above but don’t otherwise get any bonus to your roll. Also all your ability scores are rolled on 2d6 and you have to get a pretty high roll to even get a +1 out of those.

Now all of this may sound absolutely horrible and unfun, especially if you had your heart set on playing a dashing space pirate only to see that all come unraveled before the game even starts. But I think a reason Traveller persists and is played to this day is that Traveller is meant to be far more Alien or Firefly or Cowboy Bebop science-fiction than Star Wars or Star Trek. It’s not meant to be “heroic” and you might not even be that good at your job, or any job. You’re not out to fight evil or save the galaxy, no time for that when you’re literally trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay the next installment of your starship mortgage. More likely than not you’re going to be a crew full of losers and outcasts whose best years are behind them and whose childhood dreams are in tatters after being put through the wringer of cold, hard reality.

Pursuant to the title of this piece, it’s a “glass half-empty” setting (riffing off the glass of water metaphor) – a pessimistic universe where the odds are stacked against you and it may be triumph enough just to be able to continue putting food on the table or even continue to get up in the morning.

Maybe that’s another reason why it’s not as popular as D&D, since despite all the aliens and starships and such it still might feel just a touch too much like real life to satisfy the needs of escapist power fantasy. Why would you spend all day playing a character having to find work to pay bills when you have bill paying at home?

Good question. Why read (or in my case, write) Zombie Ranch, which is also a glass half-empty setting full of the crushing weight of money issues and governmental/corporate corruption where the working folks are constantly getting the short stick?

Well, maybe the sci-fi trappings are just enough distance to experience the (unfortunately) familiar with some amount of schadenfreude or even actual enjoyment rather than depression. One of the definitions of comedy after all is tragedy that’s happening to someone else. And I’ve always found it easier to root for, say, Hawkeye to succeed than Superman.

Perhaps it’s as simple as noting that when you’re down on your luck, just breaking even can feel like victory. And we relate to characters that keep on going in spite of what seems at times to be a hostile environment.

Ancient history is a relative exaggeration when you’re talking ten years ago, but then again as a webcomic goes it could arguably qualify. Does anyone besides yours truly remember this page, one panel of which has come back around again at last in this week’s comic? If not, then by default I have preserved the secrecy of what was going to happen better than any Marvel Studios set. But then again, if no one remembered, then does anyone care?

That’s the trick. Who are these people and why are we spending time on them? Well, I believe the answer is pretty obvious but I have the luxury of “inside baseball” as it were, where it’s literally part of my job to keep track of things and manage such writerly ingredients such as foreshadowing and exposition. I know there are at least a few of you out there who have read through the archives multiple times but it’s hardly comparable to the legions of superfans crawling over every inch of a piece of a mega-property like Star Wars or Star Trek where many times they have a better grasp on the minutiae than the creators themselves.

Putting aside the modern attitude of giant game publishing companies knowingly pushing out bug-riddled messes to the public, you can also hearken to Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The common complaint of “how did they miss this?” can sometimes be answered by incompetence or malfeasance, but I believe most often boils down to that even a QA team of dozens or a Beta test of thousands pales in comparison to the millions of players that a popular game will have upon release, a portion of whom will immediately set out poking their noses into every nook and cranny and finding every possible exploit and then reporting upon them more or less politely.

But people have limited memory space and this comic has been shambling along slowly, so can I expect them to remember? Moreover, can I expect them to care?

Well, all I can do is connect the dots I’ve always meant to. If you don’t remember I ain’t gonna get mad. And like I tell Dawn every time she points out that, say, some “new” youtube video I comment upon admiringly has been there for years and, in fact, she showed it to me back then: “every day is a surprise!”

Back in my Theatre Major days in college (and yes, we did spell it poncy like that despite being in ‘Merica), they taught us an important shout. That shout was “heads!”

What did that mean? Basically to get the hell out of the way because someone up in the rigging just dropped something heavy. It was most likely short for “heads up!” but shortened to one syllable since every second counts in a situation like that. Also you probably shouldn’t actually be looking up in response since the only good that would do would be letting you see the wrench about to land on your face.

There was the possibility of course that you might dodge *into* the danger by accident, but at least you were aware of it. Plenty of warning words and phrases like this are sprinkled throughout the English language, e.g. “look out!” or “duck!” or even that mainstay of golf, “fore!”

Then I thought of the Flores family, who are obviously bilingual but one of the phenomena that can happen there is that in times of stress you might revert back to your native language. How would you shout “look out!” in Spanish, particularly Mexican Spanish (since when you get into slang it can diverge as much as Australia and America).

A little research and consultation and I had an intriguing answer, which was ¡Aguas!

But wait, you may ask, doesn’t that just mean “water?”

Yes, but it’s all about the context isn’t it? Just like “duck” is a species of waterfowl unless you happen to be shouting it at someone with concern in your tone. Duck is apparently from an Old English word meaning to submerge or dive and was applied to the way that certain common waterfowl will often upend itself seeking something to eat. It also explains the name of the unpleasant practice known as ducking a witch.

In the case of aguas, the derivation of the warning usage turns out to be more in line with “heads!” as it is generally surmised to be a term coming from before indoor plumbing when the common practice was to toss your dirty bathwater (and worse) out into the street, sometimes from an upper window. Not a practice unique to Spain or Mexico, just crowded cities in general, but here it was basically saying there was some nasty liquid about to rain down and you might be well advised to run for cover. And rather than wasting time specifying the particular kind of nasty liquid it was shortened down but everyone knew (or would quickly learn) that it was not going to be the kind of water you’d get fresh from mountain springs.

Fast forward to where indoor plumbing has become commonplace in most cities around the globe including the Spanish-speaking ones, but much like “half cocked” the slang has survived and in modern usage has little to do with literal water or liquid but just a way to quickly and loudly let someone know to be wary. Pay attention. “Duck” and cover.

I’m sure at least as many puns have been made based on that as we’ve done with “duck” but where actual danger is involved it’s probably best to dodge first and think about the particulars later.

This is a huge topic and one I probably shouldn’t be broaching in a short blog piece, but in the midst of some crazy days dealing with my day job it’s been nice to just come home and bleed my brain into a video game, absorbing someone else’s world building rather than having to dwell upon my own. You might recognize the above screenshot as coming from Baldur’s Gate 3, which recently released… and of course here I was somehow stumbling across a zombie reference — not just any zombie reference but a dude trying to sell one and a potential customer being confused what to look for in terms of zombie value.

The above is out of context enough it shouldn’t be any sort of spoiler, and yet I felt it a good example for discussion. Behold fantasy economics, where writers do their best to either handwave or make educated guesses at the worth of goods and services that have no real-world equivalents. The Dungeons & Dragons setting of Forgotten Realms which BG3 utilizes not only has this particular bit of practical necromancy but all sorts of other magic including the actual raising of the dead back to life, prompting the question: “What is the worth of a single mortal’s life?”

No really, that question gets asked in-game, and you can give various answers to it but in the end it’s basically “it depends.” Most people in the game that are killed stay dead. In D&D this is usually waved off as resurrection magic being expensive so that it’s out of the price range of the common rank-and-file. Same for magical curing of ailments and diseases. If we trot on over to Zombie Ranch for a moment I have a similar conceit going on where the cure for cancer exists but not everyone can afford it, including (ironically) most of the Ranchers bringing the raw materials necessary to market, the way a Forgotten Realms herb merchant might deliver their wares to an alchemist shop’s back door but can’t really afford the miracle elixirs being brewed and offered in the front. It’s all still a matter of supply, demand, and circumstance in the end.

Well, except for one thing, which might have made an even better topic for discussion here, and that would be something I could call Narrative Economics. Probably someone smarter than me has essayed about this already and called it something else, but here I’m just thinking how bottom line, having everyone just able to come back to life really screws with stories requiring dramatic deaths. Like *boop*, hey there’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru back, good as new, no need for Luke to go haring off into space with that weird hermit. A supply and demand of death. If a mortal life has infinite or near infinite supply, wouldn’t it become nearly worthless in the balance?

That last discussion is probably worthy of a whole book chapter of dialog from Plato and Socrates, but I think for writers the answer is much simpler which is that you either have to come up with some reason your characters can’t just call the healer for the sick grandma or ignore the fact Cure Disease exists and hope none of your audience really cares. At least you get to be the arbiter of your own question.