Posts Tagged ‘television’

Making:

I’m coding a nifty image doodad for the Monkey so I can use Flickr’s JSON feed capability to pull in a prettier and more custom-styled slideshow to replace the Picasa show that’s up now on the HM home page.

For Vegas After Midnight, I’m writing flavor text drafts for the characters representing the 16 face-cards, the 4 aces, and the Joker. It feels good to be focused on this again. I like how it is coming together under the Don’t Rest Your Head umbrella.

For Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, I’m sketching some very loose notes of custom bits to mix into the setting, so that once I find a group to play, we can put our own stamp on it. Basically, my scheme is to commandeer one of the minor Barathi houses, House Lupini, and flesh them out by blending in some cultural and societal bits I wrote up about the Raehalan (from Canon Puncture’s Sojourn 66 PTA series). I’ve made up a basic house sigil (see pic at left) that I’ll be sharing on the S7S wiki, and writing down some basic ideas as well. I don’t want to go too far with it until I can sit down with a whole play group and do some collaborative setting brainstorming. But it’s a fun exercise, and it’s actually helping unscrew my brain to let the VAM creativity flow. And the blogging ideas, too, for that matter.

Enjoying:

Not much of note going on in the TV-watching arena, except that I must say I am liking Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire quite a bit more than I expected to. Yes, it is juvenile, campy, and has moments where the humor falls flat. But it has provided me with as many moments of laugh-out loud entertainment as 30 Rock and The Office do, and I actually think the underlying storyline has a pretty sincere mythic feel to it. I don’t know this for sure, but the show feels to me like it is written and guided by people who actually understand fantasy and geekery, and I even suspect some of them are familiar with roleplaying games. The humor seems to be an homage rather than a satire. If the writers and actors are given a chance to get a feel for characters, I think the consistency will improve and this will emerge as a consistently enjoyable show. Although it probably helps to have a little Skyy (or your mild mood-enhancer of choice) in your system.

Reading:

Comics – I’m catching up on the last few issues of Northlanders, Green Arrow/Black Canary, and the first issue of Warren Ellis’ new steampunker, Ignition City. Northlanders rocks as always. GA/BC is nothing spectacular, but hey, they’re a couple of my favorite characters and their current exploits have me in a decent state of enjoyment.

Novels – I’m still marking time with the mildly palatable The Pirate Queen by Alan Gold until my name comes to the top of the library waiting lists for either Morgan’s The Steel Remains or Butcher’s Turn Coat. Or maybe I ought to go sell off some of my old books at Half-Price Books and maybe scratch up enough flow to buy my own copy of one of the titles I want.

Playing:

Not a darn thing lately. But I have to believe that’s about to change. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.

It’s time for my Making, Enjoying, Reading, Playing entry for the week. Use the comments to share your own MERP, if you’re of a mind.

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BSG at the UN: Wow, That Actually Worked!

David Moore shared this with me, I’m passing it on. Some of the BSG cast went to the U.N. and talked about how good sci-fi can address real-world issues pretty effectively. And Edward James Olmos took the opportunity to school the U.N. assembly on the notion that using the word “race” as a term of separation is totally asinine, because there is is only one race, the HUMAN race. And then he shouted “So say we all”.

And most of the assembly shouted it back at him. Yep.

One of the threads I’ve been following recently – in fact it will be one of the items of discussion on the upcoming Canon Puncture episode #61 – is a Story Games discussion about how  “Crappy movies make awesome games!”. In the past couple days the thread itself has devolved into a sad-but-inevitable series of arguments about whether or not this movie or that movie is actually “crappy”, but nevertheless, I really like the actual intent of the original post, which I interpret as this: even if a particular person thinks a particular bit of filmed media is ‘crappy’ or ‘bad’, the setting, themes and other aspects of that ‘crappy’ media could still make for a really awesome rpg milieu.

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Crap.

One of my favorite TV shows killed off another character, this time one that I really liked. I won’t say who and I won’t say what show, even, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Double crap.

Dinah Lance, the Black Canary, is leaving the Birds of Prey. So one of my favorite comics characters is being written out of my favorite hero team book. Joy.

Look, story happens, I get that, and I support it. Characters die or disappear or leave town. If it makes sense to the tale, if it enriches it, then fine. But then there are these cases I’ve mentioned above, and I’m pretty sure neither one of them was done with the story foremost in the creators’ minds.

Expedience. Lazy writers who can’t figure out how to grow a story WITH a character, so they end the character and usually introduce some other schmuck in her/his place.

This isn’t real life. No one I care about actually died. I’ve got perspective, I know it’s a TV show and a comic book.

But I love story. And I honestly don’t believe the stories these characters were in were really done with them yet. I think it was expedience or laziness. Some suit somewhere said “do this” and some writer couldn’t figure out how to make it work within the story, so they do the drastic but easy thing and excise a great character.

We are not amused.