This site is updated Thursday at noon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance, and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Click here for the writer's bios and their individual takes on the gutter.
Recent Features
Red Eye
15 hours on the road and I was my own red-eye on I-94's corridor of stripclubs, fireworks and roadkill, racing past dead deer in Michigan, then Gary, Indiana's steel mills and through Chicagoland, the Sears Tower in the distance waiting for its evil eye, till the highway gave out in Wisconsin. Yes, I went to WisCon 32, the world's oldest feminist science fiction convention. And there I felt deeper fatigue than 15 hours, 2 countries, 4 states and 2 time zones. Zombie fatigue.
Prince Caspian, a lesser-known entry in the Narnia series, is a book with not much substance. The recent movie actually streamlines the story, eliminating flashbacks and so forth. What fills the running time back up? Why, war of course.
Continue reading...
Peanut Butter and Jayne
No matter the genre or subject, every reader has her Absolute Favourite writers. The ones whose books she’ll charge the stores to get, and drop everything to read. Diving into those books is a particularly edifying treat, a gourmet of literary delight. But there’s more than one kind of favourite. Sometimes a reader wants plain and simple -- sometimes the hankering for peanut butter wins out over a new gustatory adventure. Occasionally, you just want something comforting, familiar, and, though it may not be the fanciest item to ever hit the palate, a taste you know you’ll like.
That’s pretty much how I feel about Jayne Ann Krentz.
When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma's house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive nest, I went home with the New Mutants.
The New Mutants, my introduction to superhero comics, were the teenaged superteam taught by Professor X. The X-Men were more powerful and had more exciting missions, sure, but I identified more with the younger, more awkward characters and the lower key, more plausible storylines. Plus the title had just started -- I was able to collect the dozen or so earlier issues of the New Mutants when the X-Men were already in the triple digits. But I wasn't really hooked by either power fantasies or collector fever; it was the social dynamics. As I delivered papers, I imagined what it would be like if I were a new student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Would my sudden appearance irk the hothead Brazilian, Sunspot? Would I be taken under Cannonball's big-brother wing? Could I turn Magick from the dark side, or at least long enough to get a smooch?
Which goes a long way to explaining why I felt at home in City of Heroes (NCSoft, 2004).
This massively multiplayer online role-playing game is one of the most sociable I've seen. When you customize your avatar's appearance, powers and name, it has the feel of dressing for a party -- you can choose to dress appropriately and give people a sense of your real-world life (The Acerbic Accountant!) or dress daringly to bring out your inner self (Leering Lass!). Naturally, the clothing options are skewed towards the crimebusting -- i.e. there're no Buddy Holly glasses and there are several styles of medieval helmets -- but the colour palette is infinite. (Well, nearly. Marvel launched a lawsuit against the game, since dismissed, saying that it's set up to mimic their intellectual property. So if you give yourself a huge body, green skin, purple shorts and call yourself the Incredible Bulk, you will find your name mysteriously changes to something less libelous. Lame and intrusive behaviour on the parts of both plaintiff and defendant.)
When you do decide what kind of hero you want to be today, you make your debut in Paragon City, a retro-futurist-styled environment packed to the gills with your fellow heroes. It's fun just people-watching in the public square. You can check out the outlandish costumes, the hero names and watch their antics. Unlike a party, if you get bored you can go get a mission from City Hall -- your first one acts as a tutorial, gets you to kick some thug ass in the bad part of town. This starts you on your way levelling up and collecting medals and earning "inspirations," "enhancements" and "influence."
I was lucky enough to have a higher-level tour guide to show me some of the highlights of Paragon City, Cold Bob. Cold Bob has a number of chilly powers. He's normally clad in blue but when he's flying with his superteam, the Northern Rangers, he wears the team colours of red with a white snowflake on his chest -- the Rangers are a Canadian superteam that's "mostly social." He recently was able to level up to the point where he can fly because the Winter King had been threatening the city, which offered a series of missions and scenarios throughout the winter. Cold Bob was excited about this kind of realtime gameplay, which allowed the designers to react to the players and innovate on the fly as a complement to conventional pre-programmed gameplay. He also told me the story of how when Christopher Reeve died, a group of heroes got together and saluted in memoriam.
Cold Bob also showed me some dance moves, as one of the things you can do is throw down a boom box and play music. Impromptu dance party! Someone else liked the rave music Cold Bob was playing and danced for a bit, and we chatted via word bubbles that appeared above our heads.
I was impressed with the range of body language and variety of social gestures Cold Bob showed me. Most games with a mission component have very little of the social component, and vice versa -- online worlds like there.com focus on social interactions but it's easy to lose interest if you're used to goal-based games. To go back to the party analogy, there's a reason people play games to break the ice: it's more comfortable for a lot of people to have something to do other than stand around with a drink in their hand.
City of Heroes strikes a great balance between the social component and mission-based gameplay. Where I felt this most strongly was when I was recruited by Goddess Within to back her up against some Clockwork robots in a warehouse. Many of the challenges you face are very difficult to face alone, which encourages collaboration. We were running across town together and chatting occasionally, and I thought, "This is just like hanging out with the New Mutants."
I can tell you, now that I have spent over 100 hours (in the last month!) in Paragon City, there is a lot more to the city (just in terms of architechitural design, and groups of villains) than the bare surface we scratched together four weeks ago! Outside of Atlas Park, there's ruined cityscapes, there's forests, there's caves, there's dock lands, there's industrial parks, there's abandoned cemeteries, there's hilly terrain, there's rivers and lakes...you name an environment, and one way or another, Paragon City probably has a zone that contains it! If all of Paragon City was this sort of idealized modern urban environment, the game would be kind of flat...but the beauty of this game is, it feels almost infinite in its selection of things to do, heroes to see, villains to fight, areas to explore, challenges to tackle...and the game is constantly evolving! New story arcs, new villains, new powers, new in-game features (in the coming months CoH will be rolling out an expansion #4 to the game called "Colliseum" where heroes get to fight each other, player-versus-player, in tournaments!)
You should see Cold Bob today: in the last month, I've worked him up to level 22; earned about 50 different badges (for both defeating villains and just exploring the city); got a bunch of new powers including flight; earned my cape; earned a spare costume; joined a new supergroup (getting second spare costume for that); and just generally made a lot of both player and NPC contacts throughout the many zones of Paragon City...
I can tell you, now that I have spent over 100 hours (in the last month!) in Paragon City, there is a lot more to the city (just in terms of architechitural design, and groups of villains) than the bare surface we scratched together four weeks ago! Outside of Atlas Park, there's ruined cityscapes, there's forests, there's caves, there's dock lands, there's industrial parks, there's abandoned cemeteries, there's hilly terrain, there's rivers and lakes...you name an environment, and one way or another, Paragon City probably has a zone that contains it! If all of Paragon City was this sort of idealized modern urban environment, the game would be kind of flat...but the beauty of this game is, it feels almost infinite in its selection of things to do, heroes to see, villains to fight, areas to explore, challenges to tackle...and the game is constantly evolving! New story arcs, new villains, new powers, new in-game features (in the coming months CoH will be rolling out an expansion #4 to the game called "Colliseum" where heroes get to fight each other, player-versus-player, in tournaments!)
You should see Cold Bob today: in the last month, I've worked him up to level 22; earned about 50 different badges (for both defeating villains and just exploring the city); got a bunch of new powers including flight; earned my cape; earned a spare costume; joined a new supergroup (getting second spare costume for that); and just generally made a lot of both player and NPC contacts throughout the many zones of Paragon City...
Predictably enough, you get to see The Hulk smash. But he also pets a kitten. Recreates the Pieta. Feeds a deer. Is afraid of a bug. Whitewashes a fence. And does much, much, more - all for charity - at the 100 Hulks Charity Auction Gallery. Also, Part II. Also, Part III.
~
View all Notes here. Seen something shiny? Gutter-talk worth hearing? Let us know!
15 hours on the road and I was my own red-eye on I-94's corridor of stripclubs, fireworks and roadkill, racing past dead deer in Michigan, then Gary, Indiana's steel mills and through Chicagoland, the Sears Tower in the distance waiting for its evil eye, till the highway gave out in Wisconsin. Yes, I went to WisCon 32, the world's oldest feminist science fiction convention. And there I felt deeper fatigue than 15 hours, 2 countries, 4 states and 2 time zones. Zombie fatigue.
Prince Caspian, a lesser-known entry in the Narnia series, is a book with not much substance. The recent movie actually streamlines the story, eliminating flashbacks and so forth. What fills the running time back up? Why, war of course.
No matter the genre or subject, every reader has her Absolute Favourite writers. The ones whose books she’ll charge the stores to get, and drop everything to read. Diving into those books is a particularly edifying treat, a gourmet of literary delight. But there’s more than one kind of favourite. Sometimes a reader wants plain and simple -- sometimes the hankering for peanut butter wins out over a new gustatory adventure. Occasionally, you just want something comforting, familiar, and, though it may not be the fanciest item to ever hit the palate, a taste you know you’ll like.
When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma's house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive nest, I went home with the New Mutants.
I was lucky enough to have a higher-level tour guide to show me some of the highlights of Paragon City, Cold Bob. Cold Bob has a number of chilly powers. He's normally clad in blue but when he's flying with his superteam, the Northern Rangers, he wears the team colours of red with a white snowflake on his chest -- the Rangers are a Canadian superteam that's "mostly social." He recently was able to level up to the point where he can fly because the Winter King had been threatening the city, which offered a series of missions and scenarios throughout the winter. Cold Bob was excited about this kind of realtime gameplay, which allowed the designers to react to the players and innovate on the fly as a complement to conventional pre-programmed gameplay. He also told me the story of how when Christopher Reeve died, a group of heroes got together and saluted in memoriam.