Category: Writer’s Blog

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs regarding video games, you might remember that I don’t buy big games on release, and I certainly don’t pre-order them. The last pre-order I was tempted to do was years ago when No Man’s Sky was the big talk, and fortunately Dawn talked me out of it as it became an infamous debacle on its launch. Fast forward a couple of years from that and the big talk was Cyberpunk 2077, an adaptation of the venerable 1980s tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 with an updated timeline considering the world was almost to 2020 with no wetware or flying cars in sight. If anything we got Covid 2020 instead… but I digress. The hype surrounding CP2077 was insane enough it was my turn to talk Dawn down from a pre-order, despite the developer CD Projekt Red having a good rep with its Witcher series. Games–particularly ambitious games–that work as promised right out of the gate are such a sad rarity these days we’re surprised when one does. Besides, the requirements necessary to run the game, much less run it well, were really starting to push what our five year old rigs could handle.

But the game on launch ended up having a distinct lack of “well” regardless of someone’s hardware. The botched launches of No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were nothing compared to the crash-and-burn of CP2077, which released in a near unplayable state much less one whose features were going to push gaming forwards to the next level. So much so that even by the time Dawn and I acquired systems (theoretically) capable of playing it, our interest had fallen to “thick shrug” levels.

Because I’m a cynic about these things, I expected CDPR would just cut their losses and move on. But as the article I linked above shows, CP2077 stayed on the radar somehow. People were still playing it. Maybe because as a single-player game it was mod friendly in a way FO76 could never be? And then apparently at some point this year Patch 1.5 dropped, and (at least for PC) fixed and restored a lot of… well, okay, brass tacks would be that Cyberpunk 1.5 seems to be what 1.0 should have been.

I state this because I must justify that it recently went on sale to celebrate CDPR’s 20 year anniversary, and while the sale meant $29.99 rather than $59.99, after some hemming and hawing I bought in at long last. I mean look, I always found cyberpunk to be a cool genre. Take one glance at Santone in Zombie Ranch and you’ll see the DNA of Blade Runner and other such imaginings of future dystopia all over it, even if people aren’t running around with robotic arms.

But I really didn’t know what to expect. I was taking a chance. After all, the narrative since its launch was all about what had gone wrong, what was missing or buggy or half-baked–not what was there, or perhaps more accurately what was there now that the 2022 patch job was in.

What’s there is… actually quite a lot! At least for a guy like me who values exploration, immersion and a good story. Maybe I’ll get more into it in a future blog, but with a pair of good headphones on walking or driving around the main setting of Night City is a great experience, and even if you can’t go into a lot of places the illusion of a bustling futuristic metropolis is there, particularly in the downtown streets at night where your senses are assaulted by holographic ads and diverse crowds in the best way. The voice acting is superb and the in-game models are expressive in form and face enough to make the conversations you’re having feel real. Forget side quests, I can get a thrill in this game just traveling from place to place sometimes.

Now, that kind of immersion would be impossible if the game is crashing constantly or NPCs are sliding around in T-poses, so I’m not going to be any kind of retroactive apologist for CDPR, and I can only hope that maybe, just maybe the industry will slow their roll a bit on releasing games too soon and making paying customers act as beta testers. But long story short, I took a chance on the game and I’m glad I did. Though I’m also glad I waited to do it.

Last December, Dawn and I made our first convention appearance since the COVID pandemic began. It was relatively small and very local and we did okay for the amount of “ring rust” we’d accumulated. Then a few months later we did WonderCon, and that was definitely rough on our stamina at points, not to mention our cat unexpectedly started having epileptic seizures and I almost sent Dawn off solo because of that. But we persevered, possibly thanks in large part to Comic-Con International extending their free drayage program to WonderCon for the first time (that basically means they assist you with load-in and load-out).

Next up was going to be Midsummer Scream at the end of July, which we signed up for back in 2020 to try out after we had been put back on the waitlist for Small Press at SDCC and had decided screw it, we’re just going to go to SDCC as pro attendees and also show our visiting niece around since she hadn’t quite turned 13 yet so was eligible for a free child badge.

Of course we all know what happened next, and as the conventions started poking their heads back out two years later the landscape had definitely changed, as was (unintentionally) reinforced by SDCC when they rolled over our guest badge choices from 2020 and… oh, hey, my mom was one of them. Oof.

My niece was now too old for a child badge, of course, and also not as interested in coming down from Washington State. Just as well since SDCC then also did the thing again where we did get called off their wait list for exhibiting, and even got offered the same placement as we had in 2019. Dawn and I talked and we decided to do something which was probably nucking futs of us, which was accepting that and thus setting up a scenario where we had a marathon convention to do, and then just a few days later would do another three days at the Scream.

SDCC also ended up offering Dawn a table in Artist’s Alley at the last minute, and that offer we declined since we were already feeling pretty stretched thin. We’re considered pros but we’re not pros, you know? We did a circuit but not in the way friends of ours do where they’re going out to New York, Atlanta, Chicago and somehow staying sane and whole.

It’s like, I didn’t even start with the exhibiting thing until I was well over 30, and though Dawn is younger than me she’s still got some mileage on her. Now I’m pushing 50 years old and I wonder if exhibiting is a younger man’s game. Again, we do have good friends of similar age who do the big circuit and make it work, but doing the circuit is their actual job. They’ve literally done things like changing their sleep schedules to acclimate for evening shows, which is not quite like base camp at Mt. Everest but still  above and beyond how the average person would prep. And this year too I’ve seen some people who have been successful for years showing signs of breakdown, either physical, mental, or both. Is convention exhibiting akin to a sport where you only have so many good years in you before you’re out to pasture, so to speak?

I’m a terrible control sample, though. I have bad feet, I’m diabetic, I’m allergic to a distressingly wide range of flora… hell I need a machine just to breathe freely at night. Beyond that I’m not psychologically fond of traveling, either, at least not where I have to pack a bunch of things. Honestly it’s a wonder I get out of the house at all, much less that I came out alive from this recent bout of back-to-back conventioneering. I survived, obviously (or I’d be a literal ghost writer) but I definitely felt beat up.

Likely part of it is a matter of training and conditioning, but man, I sure feel a lot more tired a lot more of the time than I did 10 years ago, to say nothing of my teens or twenties where staying up until 2am playing TTRPGs with my friends was just the time for us all to go out to Denny’s or some other 24 hour venue and have “dinner.”

Anyhow, this isn’t meant to discourage anyone from convention lyfe, but if you can get started sooner than later, that’s probably for the best. And here’s hoping that by the time your mind and body’s warranties decide they’ve expireed, you’re rich and/or famous enough to have assistants!

Y’all probably have heard of “writing prompt” exercises. If not, it’s easy enough to google up. In the context of creative writing, it’s basically meant to get around the problem of writer’s block by offering up an idea to start your pen flowing (or keyboard clacking, or however you like to get your hopefully eventually copyrightable material into fixed form). For instance I’ll pluck one out of the search I myself just did:

3. Misheard Lyrics. Think of some of the song lyrics you have misheard throughout the years. Pick your favorite, and use these misheard lyrics as the title of a new creative writing piece. Write a story, scene, or poem based on this title.

So almost immediately, the song “Purple Haze” as performed by Jimi Hendrix pops into my head with its infamously misheard lyric: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!

Or as many throughout the decades have thought: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!

Maybe in honor of Pride Month we can just imagine that wasn’t misheard at all, but in any case now I have something to potentially build a story around. Of course, this exercise does ignore the whole maxim that “ideas are easy”… because then again, sometimes they’re not, right? “Where do you get your ideas?” asks the stereotypical audience member, craving the wisdom a writer often has no satisfying answer for, or should perhaps probably come up with something better than “a 10-second Google search.”

Anyhow, sometimes I get them from games. Playtime. It’s definitely not unheard of for this to occur, but then there’s the gulf between “wow, that would make a good story” and actually making a good story inspired by it. Or any story at all, really.

How about just recounting it in a way that makes someone else entertained? That’s a story, right? Doesn’t have to be a novel. You don’t have to fire up Photoshop and use your very limited skills to…

*record scratch*

Okay let me backtrack. So I recently started playing this video game called Stellaris which is sort of like Civilization on a galactic scale. You guide your alien empire on a quest for supremacy but unless you’re a fanatical xenophobe, devouring swarm or similarly anti-social collective, you may very well end up with several different species populating your various worlds. There’s a good deal of randomness involved in what alien species might be present in a given game and how everyone feels about each other, etc. etc., and you’re guiding your empire across a period of centuries as leaders live and die and today’s deadly rival might be your staunchest ally fifty years down the road and nevermind that little misunderstanding during First Contact where an entire ship crew got vivisected, right?

But I digress. Your planets have jobs, and one of the jobs is basically the “police” which is more generally termed by the game as Enforcer and as things progressed one of my migrants randomly ended up being The Law upon my tundra-world colony of Alpha Lyncis Prime, but said migrant happened to be a member of a species that looks like a cross between a sea-slug and a blob fish. Not precisely Judge Dredd material, but now that’s the kind of thing dreams are made of. Or writing prompts, at least.

I write a lot about how words change their meanings over time, sometimes so rapidly that one generation thinks of them as completely the opposite of what the understanding was just a couple decades before. Sometimes it’s a matter of slang that was cool back in the day being now considered incredibly dated and corny… “cool” itself being one of those rare exceptions that has kept its–well, cool–for longer than I’ve been alive, at least, while “groovy” has been relegated mostly to ironic use. It’s also interesting to note that certain trends keep cropping up where synonyms for something being good are… bad? This evolves, but the latest iteration would be referring to something as “sick” when you mean it’s actually awesome.

Speaking of which, awesome and awful… or should I say “awefull” as in “full of awe” as in “awe inspiring” — but now that word which might well have been referring to something good now means it’s terrible. Instead only being partly awe is good. Never go full awe.

But I started down this track yet again as I think about Billy the goat, because back in the day there was slang regarding sports games where people would (rightly or wrongly) pin the glory or blame on a single individual for the outcome. Catch the touchdown pass, you’re the hero — fumble it, you’re the goat. Likely that came from the term “scapegoat” but I’d have to look into it further… the point is, you didn’t want to be the goat. Hell, in Spanish-language slang it’s downright insulting to call someone a “cabron” — which Rosa has done, thankfully where Chuck couldn’t hear.

Except now there’s goat and there’s GOAT, right? This confused the hell out of me at first, especially with people those online who considered caps lock as cruise control for cool. MUHAMMED ALI = GOAT!! goes the forum post and I thought “Whaaat? Muhammed Ali was one of the best boxers ever… also boxing isn’t usually a team sport… what’s with the hate?”

Well, now I know that GOAT in this case is supposed to be G.O.A.T. — an acronym standing for “Greatest of all Time.” We’ll not nitpick about which words should and shouldn’t be included in acronyms. Acronyms are made so people can just rattle them off as short bursts of easily muttered code, like the ETA on that AWOL OIC before this LZ is FUBAR.

So is Billy a goat or a G.O.A.T.? I know what his own opinion is, for sure.

In the previous page, Lacey was threatening to shoot. In this new page that threat perhaps carries more weight, seeing as she’s now got the safety catch off and a round actually chambered.

It’s something I notice every time now that it happens in movies or TV that I didn’t even think about while growing up. The bad guy has a pistol to their hostage’s head, threatening to shoot them. The hero hesitates… so in order to show how serious they are, the bad guy racks the slide of the pistol, usually taking it off their hostage’s head in the process, then puts it back now that they’re ready to shoot.

Which begs the question, why weren’t they ready to shoot before they tried taking a hostage? Why doesn’t the hero tackle them the moment they start messing with the slide, a tacit admission that if they’d pulled the trigger the hammer would have fallen on an empty chamber? You never see a bullet popping out in this setup, after all.

Sure, the real-life rule is to treat all guns as if they’re loaded and capable of firing, but it’s just funny to me that the dramatic action of racking the slide means the hostage was technically in no danger up until the bad guy did so. But it happens anyways, because it makes a satisfying sound and is a big cool motion and shows how serious things are now.

Except now for me it has the opposite effect because it reminds me how silly it is. But it’s been a part of cinematic language for so long that people just accept it, the same way they accept that chest compression CPR alone can bring someone back to life. Hopefully they never have the opportunity to be disappointed by reality.

Lacey is being very serious, and the situation is serious. But Lacey and the situation are also on some level silly. That aesthetic fits quite nicely into Zombie Ranch, don’t you think?

Policing language and grammar is ever a slippery choice of career (or hobby).

Don’t get me wrong, since for better or worse I am my own editor for Zombie Ranch and so have to do exactly that, especially before committing to print where fixing a typo is not just a matter of editing a text layer. I also have characters who are not necessarily adept at communicating in formal Oxford English, which is just a fancy way to say they “don’t speak good.”

Yet the very idea of someone’s quality of communication is a malleable concept. You may have heard that in modern writing, “passive voice” is to be avoided. “The ball hit Jed” and not “Jed was hit by the ball.” Some explain it’s because the latter, passive expression sounds “weaker” but as far as I can tell the derogatory view of passive voice is a 20th Century invention intended to conserve words while conveying the same concept. Go back to the mid-19th Century and you’ll see passive voice everywhere, even in military communications where you’d think Generals were getting paid by the word. Sorry, I mean the word paid the Generals.

Woof, that’s active voice but doesn’t make much sense. That’s the rub, isn’t it? The end goal of communicating is to convey ideas, everything else is just window dressing. A message forum question like “how to find code?” sounds ESL to me as a knee-jerk reaction, and yet the more I think about it, do we really need to say “How do I find the code?” or is that just a lot of unnecessary grammatical dressing? Everyone knows what you meant and much in the same vein as passive voice fell out of favor, isn’t this possibly just the next step in the name of efficiency? It’s arguable that the invention of the telegram is what led to the marginalization of florid verbosity (usin’ lots o’ big words) in favor of more succinct communications. Nowadays one of the main ways people communicate is by texting, which is like telegrams in real time. Data plans don’t make you pay per text any more like they used to but speed and compactness of message are big priorities, so who am I to look down upon a message like “where r u?” This may well be the future, like it or not. Today the smartphone, tomorrow the OED and the style guides.

Though in the meantime, you may continue to look forward to complete sentences from yours truly.

Mostly.

How to make webcomic?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve forgotten.

Dang, that would actually make for a pretty good opening line to a novel, wouldn’t it? But what I mean specifically in this case isn’t just “where did I put my keys?” or “what was that dude’s name?”

No, in this case it’s the fact that so much has happened since the last time I really blogged that it’s all sort of mushed together in my head to a useless amount of white noise. It’s the same phenomenon I experience when I have a few hours to kill and decide to watch a movie, but suddenly all I can think of is several instances since the last time I watched a movie where I picture myself clearly uttering, “oh man, I totally still need to watch <REDACTED>” and no it’s not a movie called REDACTED it’s just that for the life of me I can’t recall what it was.

Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing. No? Just me then? Do you perhaps (figuratively or literally) lower your glasses just so upon the bridge of your nose, peer over them and suggest, in none too dulcet tones that “Well, Mr. Writer… perhaps you ought to start writing these things down?”

Perhaps, perhaps. Something to be aspired to. The middle-aged dog learning a new trick. In the meantime there’s so much to say that I don’t quite know what to say at all. Topics, topics everywhere, and not a thought to think.

S’alright though, I’m pretty sure I’m inherently incapable of shutting up. Gimme a week or two and we’ll figure this out.

There’s a whole well-known tendency among creative types to be avid consumers as well as producers of media. Painters go to galleries, directors watch movies, writers read books. If there’s money involved then doing so is even potentially claimable as a business expense for your taxes. Imagine my jealousy of my buddy who is a professional video game developer…

But I don’t think consuming entertainment like this is just “homework” or whatever you’d want to call it. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, right? Even when you’re the one producing it for others you should ideally be doing so out of love and joy, much less when it’s your own relax time. That ideal isn’t always lived up to where job and hobby overlap, but there ought to be some of that escapism element we all crave with storytelling, both for listener and teller. Arguably it should be even more escapist for the creator despite them having to deal with all the niggling nuts and bolts of putting things together… or maybe because of it? Presuming they are able to keep their heads down and block out the real world for a time.

If you’re someone like Stephen Colbert, welp, sorry, what’s happening in the world is something you have to stay wrapped up in even though you’re presenting it in a comedic fashion. That’s what you signed up for. But Colbert never has more of a true gleam in his eye than when he gets to nerd out over J.R.R. Tolkien on the air. Creatives of his ilk might well want to go home at the end of the day and have nothing to do with current events until they get back to the writer’s room. Or maybe they still do, but can frame it in a different context as a viewer.

Something a lot of folks don’t consider is that their therapist might very well have a therapist. Someone to talk to in confidentiality and perhaps unload all of the stress they’ve dealt with from helping other people. And that therapist might have a therapist, and so on… it’s not a situation so far as I know where there’s a Grand High Therapist somewhere and all therapy begins and ends with them. So it may be with the media artist whose career (or semi-career) could be homework, job, therapy and escapism all at once. And whatever they create in turn might help others with the same.

Dawn and I got around to watching Disney’s Encanto this past weekend and it’s been on my mind. A slow burn, honestly, but now I’m as obsessed as anyone else with “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (and it’s safe to say a lot of folk are obsessed since it recently reached #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in the U.S., a feat not even “Let It Go” accomplished).

I haven’t really had any stock in the Academy Awards in many years but I have friends in the movie industry or industry-adjacent and so it’s not something I can entirely ignore. One of my friends expressed amusement that Disney’s backing for Best Original Song went to a different tune than the one currently ear worming its way through America. Apparently the story there is that Encanto’s premiere came after the deadline for submissions for Oscar consideration, so Disney just had to make a wild guess ahead of time on which one of the compositions would be The One and… well, they guessed wrong. To be fair(?) “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is not the kind of song that focus groups and conventional wisdom would see as an Oscar contender or even a chart topper. It’s not a belting solo or a romantic duet, it’s a quirky ensemble piece that’s heavy on the storytelling to the point you arguably need to have watched the movie to understand it.

So I suppose one take away would be — a lot of people have watched the movie. But another thought that’s interesting is just the factor that should be its weakness, which is the heavy storytelling element. I personally am quite partial to songs that “move” narratively-speaking, especially if they’re bangers (as the kids say), but I have learned over the decades how little my personal tastes matter in the larger picture.

This song works, and there’s a lot of analysis that can be done on why it gels together in such an effective way, including a climactic group repeat of individual stanzas that’s up there with “One Day More” from Les Miserables even though the subject matter is basically family gossip rather than revolution.

But one thing that comes to mind is that I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game which is all about con artistry and why people keep being susceptible to its wiles throughout the centuries, and one thing she brings up is the power of storytelling. Facts, she explains, can be argued and refuted. Stories are slippier things to deny and tend to take root much more easily in our psyches, which is likely why ancient parents first made up something out in the woods that would eat you if you wandered off, just like poor little Og got eaten — rather than just rattling off what big fangs a sabretooth cat has.

Stories can have immense power for good and ill, which is a heady thing to contemplate as a storyteller. But in the meantime, it makes it less surprising to me that a mysterious tale spun about a lost relative could resonate with a mass audience, especially if it’s got a beat you can dance to.

Feels like the past few blog posts have been me, me, me… which they usually are since this represents my lil’ corner of the website. We had a near miss recently where we were going to go out to dinner for Dawn’s birthday and pushed it back a day due to reservation issues, then on the day of my dad called up and said he was feeling sick so probably shouldn’t go. We dropped one of our COVID test kits off on his porch that night and lo and behold he tested positive, which sent the family into panic mode all over again and I was playing operator for the concerned texts and phone calls. At this time he seems to be over the worst of it and getting better, hopefully with no long-term complications in his future. As far as I know he was masking up and taking precautions but he likes to run his errands in person and made some trips to the grocery store and post office and such a few days before his symptoms.

So anyhow that’s about my dad, right, not me per se? But it shows how raw everyone in my family still is. Not a good time to go AWOL, for sure. When my uncle didn’t show up for a scheduled zoom call the troops were dispatched to get eyes on and make sure he was okay. Both these gents are getting close to 80 years old but they’re still up and about and very independent-minded, which makes for an interesting balance for me of wanting to give them space but also needing to make sure we’re not out of touch for too long since they’re now living alone.

But yeah, some of you have already been responding occasionally with your own “status reports” and sometimes it’s just therapeutic to share, so, how’s 2022 treating y’all so far?

I’m by far not the only one to observe this but 2022 so far doesn’t seem much different than 2021. And yet, of course it is. My mom and aunt are gone and although our family Xmas celebration went as well as could be expected under the circumstances, it’s nigh impossible not to feel like it was a couple of stockings short. We’ve been feeling sick on and off ever since our convention outing, and some of it has been pretty draining even though any COVID testing we’ve done has come up negative. That said my day job is insisting on people being back in the office (despite escalating infections and the empirical fact that we successfully worked remotely for more than a year) so I can’t help but feel like it’s only a matter of time. Omicron is reportedly milder, especially if you’re vaxxed and boosted, but as someone who is diabetic, overweight, and suffering from sleep apnea I’m not looking forwards to the possibility of rolling the dice, so to speak.

Anyhow, all this means morale at the ranch is still not at any sort of high point and sometimes is pretty low, but Dawn and I are taking all y’all’s advice and moving at a pace we can manage, figuring week to week how our “spoons” are doing. If my day work holds its course it means things will be getting busy very soon and the circumstances of that are going to be extra stressful, which might not be great for the creative juices. But before that we think we’ll be able to get this comic out and another in the week after. Health and spoons permitting.

Groundhog Day isn’t until next February but here Dawn and I are, preparing to squint our way back into the metaphorical daylight after a long hibernation. I mean technically we started that earlier by getting a new comic posted back in November, but here today is another page! And then Friday we’ll be rolling out and setting up a convention booth again at long last for Season’s Screamings.

I think we still have everything. I think it still works. I hope we remember how to put our banner up. Will we see our shadows, or will we scurry back into our hole for six more weeks of winter?

See, now, even my metaphors are rusty. Here comes the nerd brigade in my head with corrections…

– Um, actually, it will be December 17 this Friday and Winter in the Northern Hemisphere in 2021 does not begin until the solstice on December 21st.

– Um, actually, the groundhog tradition states that if the groundhog sees its shadow it will retreat to its den and Winter weather will linger, while if it does not see its shadow then an early Spring is forecast.

– Um, actually, rodents have no influence on global weather patterns and so this is all superstitious nonsense regardless.

But you know, I feel like the tentative squinting will at least be a fact. Luckily we don’t have to be there for setup until noon and the convention is happening right in our backyard… okay, not quite that close but close enough that a run back to our place for anything forgotten is not out of the question. Our booth placement doesn’t seem like the best and we don’t know who our neighbors will be, but as far as getting back into the pool this is not the deep end.

There, that metaphor was better. Enjoy the comic, and if we don’t see any of you this weekend then hopefully we’ll see you next year!

I don’t do the therapy thing. Never have. I don’t think it’s useless universally, but for me I just can’t ever conceive of talking at a stranger about my personal issues and having that help.

Now writing about my personal issues to a whole bunch of people who are more or less strangers? (no offense meant to y’all)… I suppose that’s exactly what’s about to happen here, but hey, I’m not having to pay you anything.

Anyhow, Dawn does see a therapist and said therapist said to her that on the topic of grief and loss due to death of a loved one, it can take up to six months before your mental and emotional state return to a state of normalcy. I suppose I bring this up because by the time you’re reading this, six months will have passed since my mom passed away, and here we are with our first new comic page since she went into the hospital. On the one hand, maybe that’s just coincidence, but on the other maybe it helps to have some occasion to anchor onto even if it wasn’t exactly a happy one. Humanity as a whole does have a fondness for taking days out of the calendar and giving them significance. Anything that helps keep them from just blurring together, right?

Wednesdays were one of those anchors for us, but on the whole I think taking a hiatus from the comic was the right call, and I want to thank you all again for your patience and understanding. As warned, we may not get back to our once a week schedule until after the Holidays — I mean, this whole “six months” estimate is all well and good but the reality is murkier. Our Christmas this year is going to be short a couple of very significant stockings and I suppose I’ve still got some amount of breath held in terms of seeing how that goes.

But I cracked open MS Word and got some writing done, and Dawn got some drawing done, and as a result we have a bit more story to dole out for those of you who were yearning for your Zombie Ranch fix. Your loyalty is very flattering, and though it might not exactly be an action-packed cliffhanger at the moment, I hope it feeds the need and your humble proprietors have demonstrated that in the wake of all the loss, they haven’t lost their touch.

One of the ways I see a movie with several characters broken down is in terms of screen time, i.e. how many minutes each of those characters is “on screen” for an audience. The main protagonist and/or title character would most commonly have the biggest total, but that’s not always true, and such deviations are not always bad, but if your main character turns out to only be onscreen for 15 minutes out of your 150 minute movie, either that’s intentional or something went seriously awry.

You can’t really tabulate a comic in terms of screen time. I suppose you could use pages or panels that someone appears in. Or should you use dialogue balloon count? Both? Should you even bother doing so, when there are all other manner of hobbies calling you, not to mention the dishes ain’t gonna wash themselves?

But part of me is curious if Suzie would still have the biggest count. I might check that out some time, provided one of y’all doesn’t beat me to it.

Astute long-term observers of this comic will have noted that while over a decade has passed for us here in the “real world,” the timeline presented in Zombie Ranch (special presentations aside) covers a span of at most only a few weeks. You could posit this is due to our relatively slow update schedule. But if we actually get into relativity, science provides an alternate explanation, which is that the Zombie Ranch world is in fact moving very, very fast compared to ours.

Hey, don’t talk to me, talk to Einstein. Which might be difficult on account of him being dead, but his special theory of relativity lives on and the time dilation component he predicted may in fact be true. There’s a lot of math involved here but the basic premise (in my layman’s understanding, anyhow) is that the passage of time can be subjective based on the velocity of a given object. Clocks literally tick slower, enough so that clocks speeding along on board satellites in Earth orbit have to be programmed to adjust ever so slightly for the difference.

A popular example is an astronaut traveling near the speed of light who returns from what to them was a ten year space voyage only to find that over thirty years have passed for their planetbound friends and family. Oh, gravity is also involved in this equation, not just speed. You get near a black hole and amongst other issues, time is going to get wonky.

Anyhow, scientifically speaking over a decade may have passed for us but the folks in our Weird New West are obviously moving, not much slower than we, but much faster.

And also, our story has a lot of gravity to it.

So there.

There are exceptions to every rule, and visual mediums of fiction are no, err… exception.

I’ve been watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus and I feel like I’m really starting to sound like a broken record regarding Marvel Studios’ track record because damn if it hasn’t been far better than I expected. I figured I’d watch it just ‘cuz but now much like WandaVision I’ve been eagerly looking forwards to Fridays again.

Anyhow, spoilers to a minimum but the most recent episode has some heavy scenes, one of which is has an elderly black man talking about his past. And that’s it, just him talking, with a few reaction shots and props spiced in. No flashbacks, no ghostly sound effects… it’s about as minimalist as it could get, and also of course breaking the rule of “show, don’t tell.”

Talking heads can easily be boring, or a sign of budget limitations and nothing more. And yet, I found it riveting and all the more effective for leaving things up to the imagination. I was reminded positively of Quint’s speech in Jaws about his time on the final voyage of the ill-fated U.S.S. Indianapolis. The speech in TFATWS was not nearly as pure as that one unbroken tracking shot, but it reminded me of the exception. Sometimes, just sometimes… tell can be better than show.

It feels like that to be an artist (which includes writers, yes) is to be constantly second-guessing yourself. To be an artist producing something for others is to be constantly second-guessing yourself but also forging ahead with it anyhow because otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere.

To be producing art long-term is to eventually be wondering about that saying of either dying a hero or living long enough to see yourself become the villain. All those sins and pet peeves that drive you crazy when you’re a consumer… can you truly say you’ve avoided them now that you’re on the production side? Would you even be aware if you had slipped? If you do notice, are you guilty about it or (perhaps worst of all) do you now just shrug your shoulders and embrace the dark side?

These are the kinds of thoughts that… well, they don’t keep me up at night, and perhaps that’s it’s own sign of degeneration. But I still get them while writing. For instance, one thing that can annoy me is if the author’s voice starts coming through the mouths of every one of their characters in a “samey” manner. Don’t get me wrong, an author’s work should have some mark of style to it, but omnipresent quippiness in dialogue can get old fast. And yet here I am recently wondering if the words coming out of Whitecloud are true to her or is she no different than Rosa’s teasing of Frank way back when? Is Frank himself having the occasional wordy (or at least semi-wordy) retort a betrayal of his character? Basically, am I shoving my own words into their mouths, chortling at my cleverness at the expense of consistency and verisimilitude?

But the story mustn’t grind to a halt from artistic paralysis, so eventually the words have to get published. A lot of times it helps to set them down in a draft, walk away and come back later and see how it reads, and if it doesn’t make me cringe I feel better about it. And then there are times I still fret right up to the moment I have the comic locked and loaded. Sometimes beyond that. But hey, Sturgeon’s Law says 90 percent of it is crap anyhow. I’ll content myself with feeling skilled at least 10 percent of the time.

I’m writing this blog entry later than usual since after the comic was done, Dawn and I decided to take a break and watch Godzilla vs. Kong. At home, mind you… by this time tomorrow we should have our second doses of vaccine and hopefully won’t be laid up too badly from it.

This is around the time of year we would usually have been casting around for some big, noisy movie of no guaranteed complexity to watch in a theater. Just something for the two of us to get out of the house, get drunk at an adjoining restaurant and then toddle across the mall to experience. Kaiju and kaiju-adjacent films such as Pacific Rim and Kong: Skull Island had been heroically filling that need and it was with heavy (but cautious) hearts that we did not continue that tradition in 2020.

But one thing Covid has definitely seemed to do on the entertainment front has been to fast-track the rise of subscription and/or on-demand streaming services, including the heretofore unheard of option of opening up a new film to home viewing at the same time as its theatrical release. They’re still figuring out how all that’s going to work, it seems. Some like Disney are charging premium prices for it even if you already have a subscription to Disney Plus. Some like Warner Bros. are offering GvK for no extra charge to HBO Max customers. That kind of makes it hard to put any revenue figures on the “home release” but it certainly seems to have been a popular choice, as well as exceeding all expectations at the theaters themselves.

While I’m not one of the folks who braved going out to a public showing, after watching at home I definitely feel the temptation. There were a lot of awesome moments I couldn’t help but think would have been so much more awesome on a huge screen with seat-shaking surround sound vibrating through my being. Spectacle might be the simplest form of entertainment but it has its power, and even though I wouldn’t call our home setup terrible it still doesn’t compare to the thrill of a theatrical excursion. I think the fact GvK performed so well at theaters despite streaming being available says a lot. Maybe both options can co-exist, even once the pandemic is past us?

But that’s just a layman’s opinion and the insiders of Hollywood seem to be spinning a different story. I suppose time will tell if everything really does go back to business as usual, or if some new hybrid model emerges for the future.

Where Dungeons and Dragons or really almost any RPG is concerned, the operating principle for the game master is to prepare to be unprepared. Players will almost always do something undreamt of in your philosophy. Is it good as any kind of writing exercise? Maybe, but if you’re the kind of writer who has everything plotted out just so you might end up frustrated when you make contact with the chaos that is other people. If you think you’re having trouble because your own characters are resisting going where you want them to go, wait until you meet the characters of your friends!

A tabletop game master does not have the luxury of the impassive computer environment which can put a stop to stray wanderings by means of a simple waist-high fence. “Railroading” players is still possible but it must be done with great subtlety lest they catch on and become disgruntled; after all, part of the draw of the tabletop session, whether in-person or virtual, is the flexibility and possibility of creating a story ultimately bounded only by the desires and imaginations of all involved — and the occasional critical success or failure. Tabletop is best approached as less of a writing exercise than an improvisation exercise of the kind you might have experienced if you’ve ever taken acting courses or perhaps just watched episodes of Who’s Line is it Anyway? Improv theater does not take “no” for an answer. It takes the starting parameters of a scenario and builds upon it and every twist and turn is met not with the stonewall (or waist-high fence) of a “no” but the evolving path of “yes, and…”

Not every game ends up like this, particularly in D&D which can focus less on character interactions and more on tactical combat depending on what the folks involved want. Now don’t get me wrong, I like my tactical combat as much as the next dude but hey, that’s something computer games already do extremely well. What computer games still can’t simulate is the absolute insanity that can happen when the fence is no longer an issue, and I am well pleased with our current game which has spent its last two sessions “in-town” with the closest thing to a tactical situation occurring when characters were attempting to eavesdrop on other characters. I don’t think our DM could ever have foreseen what’s happening, but to her credit she has rolled with it and still has her plot ongoing even if the party at the moment is more concerned with the social implications of root vegetables than getting out and questing.

I’m not even kidding. “Yes, and…”

Happy news for your humble proprietors… since Dawn and I work our day jobs as part of California’s educational system we qualified to get our COVID vaccinations done. First shot was last Wednesday, second will be early April. We’ll still be telecommuting for the time being but I’m okay with that. I think I honestly adapted better than most, what with already being antisocial and enjoying spending hours at my computer desk.

Antisocial might be the wrong term. Selectively social? I do like the occasional hangout with friends and I’ve missed visiting some of my restaurant haunts. Other than that, online gaming plus chat via Discord has really seemed to fill my interaction needs. In fact I’ve really come to appreciate playing “tabletop” RPG like Dungeons & Dragons remotely, because helper apps like D&D Beyond and Roll 20 exist and have really streamlined the experience, and meanwhile we can use Discord to shitpost commentary and GIFs while it’s happening. If we were sitting around a table we’d be rightly expected to shut the hell up at some point so the DM could talk and/or hear.

One campaign Dawn and I have been playing in has been entertaining enough there are thoughts of jumping on the Podcast bandwagon with it. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime we plug along, but hooray for virtual socialization. It’s been a rough year but just hearing the voices of your friends can go a long way.