Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 23

Every Tuesday I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

Now we return to Batman. I brought up Batman last out of the three because I think that he is more complicated than the other two. Whereas Superman and Spider-Man are very bright, positive characters (Superman is powered by friggin’ sunlight, for crying out loud), Batman dresses up like a figure of the night to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. (Note that when anyone bothers to bring it up, Batman only seems to have as much notoriety as Spider-Man. Also note that heroes themselves are in some level of awe of Batman, while Spider-Man’s friendly attitude and years experience make him a something more of a witty sidekick for his superhero team-ups.)

Proactivity? For the most part, Batman is no more proactive than many heroes. That said, he is always proactive. The watchword for modern Batman is ‘preparedness.’ When overused, it’s a tired cliché (“Trick Question: Batman always has kryptonite in his utility belt.”), but Batman actively anticipates problems and prepares for them. Which never goes wrong. (See OMAC. See “Tower of Babel.”) But when it does go right, it’s effective and it’s cool. Even when it goes wrong though, it isn’t a hit on Batman’s level of heroism. As one of the smartest, most dedicated crime fighters on Earth, Batman is in some way obliged to be proactive and to do more than throw a few batarangs at threats when they pop up. As genre-savvy as he is about not killing, he is equally un-savvy about operating on a larger scale. Superheroes will never be able to solve all of the world’s problems (see “Superman: Peace on Earth”). 

Like Sisyphus, they will try and they will fail time and time again. Unlike Sisyphus, they will continue trying of their own volition because to give up would be far worse. What’s more, for Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman, to give up is not in their nature. Okay, maybe for Spider-Man, but only because he has to fight for both halves of his life instead of getting to have both.

An aside for a moment about Spider-Man: Superman can change between many aspects of his life because of his super-speed and the fact that his job lets him take long stretches of time off of work. Batman…I don’t have to explain why being super-rich and anti-social makes your personal life super-easy. Web-slinging is awesome, and while he could get away with it, making a living taking pictures of himself paid the bills (which many, many disappointed users of social networking sites are now realizing is something that only happens in comics). However, petty social obligations, the need for regular paychecks, the oversaturation of the Spider-Man picture market, and less petty social obligations like marriage meant that Spider-Man has almost always had to work three jobs; something to pay the bills, being Spider-Man, and trying to be a normal person as Peter Parker. That he isn’t gifted with enough power to handle these things easily or little enough interest in connecting with his fellow human beings to simply ignore that aspect of himself, he rakes himself over the coals, not to be human or pay his bills, but to be a hero. Given the choice between giving up being a normal person and giving up being Spider-Man, he opted to give up neither one in a classic example of myopic morality.

Anyway, that determination of Batman to continue trying to improve the world (most recently in the form of Batman Inc.), despite past (catastrophic) failures, is proof that he is not only proactive, but that he is also has a kind of determination that makes it clear why he’s a top-tier hero.

Honesty? Hells no. Yeah, you can trust The Goddamn Batman, but trust is a long way from honesty. One of the appeals of Batman is that he will fight dirty; dirty includes deception and misdirection. Again, depending on what version you’re using, one of his primary weapons against the underworld is his status as an urban-legend. I’ve watched him and Superman “purge” Earth of kryptonite, even fighting new Aquaman in the process. In the end, Superman gives him one of the last pieces, “just in case.” Batman thanks him and otherwise indicates his appreciation for the act, then goes back to The Batcave and stores it in his safe full of fucking kryptonite. Granted, that was “Superman and Batman” and that series is universally terrible (okay, the art is good), but it’s not exactly out of character for him.

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I'm Glad I Brought a Clipboard

My weeklong experiment with ads passed pretty quickly. Shortpacked (optional review) and Hijinks Ensue, who clearly cost more than anyone else, but who also returned the most per cent of that investment.

The numbers themselves--in terms of who's reading are--inconclusive:

The people reading just about doubled from April to May, but then the number of people reading from March to April also doubled, which isn't even "people," but just plain old hits. I could have just doubled the number of people obsessively stalking me.


Still though, if stalkers gave themselves pats on the back for making their stalkees feel...a vague, but powerful sense of positivity, then I've got about two who need shoulder surgery right now.

Maybe someone's just reading the archives.

The ads started on the 22nd, and I clearly broke 100 hits per day while the ads were up, but just like with the larger view, things were already trending up.

Discarding a Project Wonderful conspiracy of jump-dolphin click-ninjas or just plain old internet weirdness, I'm pretty happy with the results, especially considering that the price was right.

And considering that I only expended a quarter of the budget I had set aside for this thing, I will be back at it again. However, things are pretty busy at work right now and I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up with Monday through Friday updates (even if Tuesdays and Thursdays are just reruns people have never seen before.). I'm going to wait until I have a rather have a nice pad of blogs built up before I go at it again.

Also, I think those guys at Shortpacked are tired of looking at my ugly banner ad. 

The fulfillment of prophecies ancient and magic

I was going to do an indepth walk-through of the essential elements of Magic. The setting, the game, the design philosophies, the tactics and strategies. I was going to spend about five weeks, giving a Kingdom Hearts introduction to Magic: the Gathering.

It was going to use a different format each week to cover The Mulitverse, planeswalkers, the colors of mana, the card types, then work on casting spells, attacking, and the mechanics and specific color-based tactics, formats, and the current environments and sets.

Five weeks is actually pretty generous in terms of how quickly I could have covered this information in depth. I'm running a six-part series on formats alone that is neither comprehensive, or designed for beginners.

I'd gladly do it; since my Magic mojo is at an all-time low, I could use the filler on my "It's the Magic" feature, but I couldn't do it with enough spice or creativity to make it worth doing. Any beginner could more easily learn the rules and setting on the official Magic website (you should at least be reading the Daily Arcana!) and after quite a bit of brainstorming, I just couldn't find a delivery method that would also amuse experienced players.

It's the Magic: It's Not the Magic

The idea I had for introducing people to Magic went awry...in a good way. However, in order to do it I have to break my promise from last week...but I've got Batman instead:

Source unknown.

I hope this makes you feel, in some small way, compensated for your time.

Timewalking Archive Trap: The End of Aberrant

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap is presents select treasures (for very liberal definitions of "treasures") from yesteryear for the sole enjoyment of my readers. This one is dated 2006:

So it's over. The plot twists, the character development. The plot holes and character deconstruction. The puerile secrets, the highs, the lows, the intricately detailed non-player extras who were both the recipients of a great destiny and one of so many nameless bodies thrown on an indifferent pyre, the other non-player characters with hastily-hatched names and concepts to match ideas that were quickly constructed, vaguely defined, and much loved.

The best parts of life are the ones we do not plan for. We hope in those irregular occasions and events that we anticipate, but somewhere between the honest satisfaction and honest disappointment we lie at the end of a rainbow, under a continued hype that keeps us believing things were as good as expected--or at least better than they were--if not out of the simple need of hope for a varied, exciting, and worthwhile life, then out of a plain refusal to believe in failure.

In boredom.

In a daily regularity not worth sharing.

Not worth remembering.

Not worth telling.

Not worth living.

Not worthy.

It is the irregularities that make life more or less than this. It is the unusual which makes one's life special or miserable. It was the unexpected that found us in Aberrant. My controlled chaos, my friends' chaos and control. I have, at times, seen myself as a Disney villain. It fits the toothless acrimony of my villains and make them particularly suitable for portraying comic-action villains. I monologue, I underestimate my players, build superweapons that disable the heroes' superpowers and forget that Warlock carries a shotgun and a flack jacket.

In fact, I don't think Warlock's done much non-dramatic warlocking in a while...

We had characters that were complicated, and some that were simple. A bravo driven to overcome any opponent; one of the most powerful beings on Earth, who when he hears that an experimental compound has exploded in Nebraska calls his parents in Denver to see if they were safe, then flies out to cauterize a giant's knees off.

A redeemable Irish kid who made Spiderman look about as lucky as a millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. He gives up, but when history gives him the opportunity--the hope--to change things for the better, he steps up like a hero.

It wasn't perfect--nothing is--but it was good fun. The adventures were too big sometimes, the tasks too easy, the separation between honest roleplaying and self-insertion was thin at times (on both sides of the storyteller's screen), but we had fun. That's what we were there for, and that's what we left with most days.


"Death is not the end of a character, it is the final piece of character development."

Linkstorm: Your Use of Language is Neither Cunning for Fit for Sex Puns

 

I don't think I've mentioned the "We Say Gay" thing before. I'm a little late linking it because it got passed, and luckily, the passed version doesn't ban everyone in schools from saying the word "gay." It only bans if from being in lesson plans, which isn't quite as bad, but still isn't so great.

[Caption redundant]

Banning the word, even in this narrow context, smacks of close-minded people trying to pretend that something doesn't exist so they don't have to deal with it and they can keep whistling in the dark while what they call evil continues marching on around them.

Also a pretty big fan of pretending that homosexuality doesn't exist.

Putting aside the issue of the lazy morality that makes ignoring a problem easier than addressing it, language should never be static. Language should never exclude. Language should adapt and absorb and assimilate.

I do lament the loss of Aboringinal Languages, Ayapaneco, and Navajo. Not because of anything unique to those languages, but because they represent an imporant human diversity created by language. I have no hope of a future of humanity dominated by a handful of dominant languages.

New languages are something I like. Scientists have developed a rudimentary language to create two-way communication with dolphins which is totally awesome. Yes, Esperanto didn't work out so well, but Klingon certainly has.

Even learning about how we learn about languages is important. If words are connected too loosely while trying to understand them, nothing happens. If they're connected too tightly your choice of computer-based diagnosable mental illness may result. The assimilation of language and meaning are fundamental to the human experience and understanding that better will always provide a return on our investment. The same cannot be said of being exclusionary, and certainly not being exclusionary for political reasons.

Even disjunctions, those irritating, distracting "er"s, "ah"s, and "um"s that punctuate language can actually help children learn to speak better. Those are not bugs, those are features.

Not a feature.

Yes, some words may be unpleasant, but they and the concepts they represent exist. We cannot simply expunge everything we don't like from our experiences and pretend like it does anything but make our world that much smaller. Life is a series of unpleasant experiences punctuated by brief periods of closeness with others, as well as other nice moments that aren't necessarily sexual at all.

The insistence that we faciliate the willful ignorance of others is nothing short of astoundingly self-centered and should be rigidly opposed and mocked for the absolute childishness that it is.

Whenever there are words we don't like, it would be preferable to simply banning them or crying about them to take a cue from an actual wordsmith and just be a fucking grown-up about it. Guys, every time a British person gets in some verbal fisticuffs with an American and wins, a bald eagle dies. Don't be that guy.

But hey, if you aren't so great with words, or just aren't that smart don't speak.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 22

Every Tuesday I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

Superman is one of the best heroes because he cares about people individually. What he does isn't to help save lives or protect society, but to save people. Individual people. He wants to live a normal human life, but he also can't ignore the ways that he could help us. Then by putting on a costume, he commits himself to being part of a larger society of superheroes that he again can't ignore his duty to. He must become the paragon and symbol of superheroes to the populace of Earth because heroes need their trust to operate.

 

Source: Kelly Callen

It depends on the interpretation, but Superman isn't who Clark Kent really is. Clark Kent isn't really who Superman is. I think that somewhere in between is Kal-El, the Kryptonian that loves Earth and its people and feels compelled to protect it. Superman is Kal being everything he needs and wants to be, a fully-expressed super-ego of absolute integrity that exudes confidence and inner peace. That's what he shows to the world to let them know that Superman will always take care of them. In reality, he will always take care of them--there aren't many things Superman loves more than humanity—but he's a real person with self-doubt, worry, and even moral quandries. His moral myopia isn't quite as myopic as Spider-Man's, and heaven knows it's not quite as diluted, but...

...man, now that I think about it, I can't think of too many moral dilemmas that Superman's had. I mean, every so often he does snap and you think he's really going to kill Darkseid, but he doesn’t. While he occasionally has certain doubts about himself or what he does, usually, those are personal and he doesn’t have any compunctions about what needs to be done as Superman. In the comics I’ve seen him in, he’s usually presented with fairly straightforward scenarios.

If you know who did this incredible picture, let me know and I'll be happy to link them.

Intuitively, that moral myopia I attribute to him is something that he just has by dint of being in the scenarios I’ve seen him in: something bad happens and he doesn’t hesitate to swat it or repel it. He respects all life and believes in freedom, so his intervention in the affairs of man is minimal. He is almost exclusively reactive, and I think that works for him because we never expect more of him. The people who propose that The Dark Knight proactively murder half his rogues gallery rarely ever volunteer the belief that Superman do the same for Darkseid, Braniac, or the Parasite (though I’m sure Braniac is a special case, seeing as how he isn’t ‘murdered’ so much as ‘destroyed,’ which in turn isn’t much more effective—given his propensity for copying himself—than a good sleeper hold. And how does a massive, complex Kryptonian artificial intelligence store full backups of itself on 20th century human computers? Kryptonian file compression technology? Heretofore unmentioned Kryptonian programming conventions that focus on elegance over keeping up with the Moore’s Law?)

Superman’s vague moral code, lack of proactiveness, and general good faith in the face of being invulnerable are pretty much balanced out by the fact that he’s apparently smart enough to keep expectations pretty low. The man is a hero.

In all seriousness though, he’s proven on several occasions (in the modern age at least, if not earlier ones), that even without his powers, he’s willing to fight the good fight and take risks to do the right thing.  What’s more is that he’s worthy of the people’s trust. While he does sometimes have to fight his urge to return to his Kryptonian roots (New Krypton storyline), he does realize that The Kryptonians are pretty much elitist jerks, and humans, despite also being jerks, aren’t nearly as elitist and don’ t have heat vision, so tend to be a bit more receptive when you tell them to quit being jerks.  So, he has good intentions, he’s dedicated to doing the right thing, and he’s willing to risk everything to help others. 

The depth of his convictions is evident in what he does as Clark. Superman could have been the best construction worker or banker or private eye or politician ever (though inevitably, something heavy would’ve been dropped on him, revealing his secret identity).  In his personal life, he works for truth and justice as a reporter. Whenever stories let Clark Kent be a reporter, they’re given room to explore what makes him a good person instead of just good hero, and while I am generally talking about qualities that make Superman one of the best heroes out there, being a good person is a part of that. Especially when you’re trying to talk about the man between Clark and Superman, a venn diagram of seeing where their decency overlaps is a good thing. Caring for others, searching for truth, and helping people is something that Clark does. In fact, Clark--again, this is when stories focus on it--manages to pick up the proactivity slack that Superman leaves behind. What Superman can’t fix with fists and heat vision, Clark can attack with publicity and proof. There have been a number of Superman stories which have ended in a win with fists, but cemented with a victory in words.

Selflessness, care about people, and honesty define the most heroic aspects of Superman.

Still though, not the best at gift-giving.

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