The Best Flavor

I am finishing up Michael J Sullivan's Riyria Revelations and am pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story.  While I wholeheartedly endorse the series, the more interesting thing to me is the author's interview.  Most specifically, this:

           "For years now I have heard few...lament that repetitive theme....they are tired of the same old hero-               
            vanquishing-evil and want something new.  Something more real, more believable.  Which to me 
            sounds like someone saying they love chocolate, the just wished it wasn't so chocolatey and that it 
            tasted more like vanilla."


Having an established genre author admit to the feelings he describes is akin to NASA spontaneously admitting that we faked the first moon landing.

"Are you sure the wind rippling isn't going to give it away?"

It drives me insane that every new speculative fiction I pick up spends a thousand pages developing a deep, resonant theme that parallels the real world.  And there will be no MacGuffin.  If I found myself wanting to read Atlas Shrugged again, I would gouge my own eyes out with a rusty spoon.

As seen in the last reasonably tolerable Kevin Costner movie.

So, you see, I don't want to read it, I get suckered in by Tor's shield on the spine.  Then I read 300,000 words of political intrigue, conspiracies, and judiciary debate about the rights of the parasite wurms of Arenon IV.  All I really wanted was a wizard burninating some orcs.

Sullivan goes on to defend his own work, which makes his Oz-like unveiling a little less impressive.  But ultimately, the idea that someone can't just write a boring old hack n' slash novel is depressing.  Joseph Campbell described thousands of concurrent mythologies that all feature similar elements.  They endured because they were entertaining and popular.  We can read them today because they are always fun.  No, KJ Parker's Engineer trilogy isn't better than Brook's Shannara work.  But it is worth spending the few days it will take to finish the books.

Similarly, the constant quest to destroy any hope we might have that our future generations will even know what a poem is has become mindbogglingly stupid.  I've got a list, here's the order of the list that it's in.

It goes Reggie, Jay-Z, Tupac, and Biggie, Andre from Outkast, Jada, Kurupt, Nas, and then me.

1)  Poetry can rhyme

2)  It can even be iambic

3)  Nothing on your tumblr can be considered poetry.

4)  Poetry does not have to be spoken in front of an audience of students with suspect scruples.

5)  If you are doing a "slam" or "reading," keep in mind that talking like William Shatner does not turn your 

     diary into poems.

6)  Punctuation was invented for a reason.*

7)  No one likes an ampersand.

*This.  This is why.

I'm thankful that the bow-legged, greasy, bastardized version of poetry exists at all, but I'm not going to invite it in for dinner, because I don't want it to mess with my kids.  I don't have kids.  I once wrote a fifty page critical evaluation of Frank Herbert's Dune so I know all about sucking the fun out of a good story.  I just don't want that to become the only real way of interacting with a book.

The way the publishers and the market treat stories with too much cliche isn't like complaining the chocolate is too chocolatey, it's like banning chocolate and forcing everyone to enjoy their damn vanilla.

"You will like it, or you will be forced to keep publishing on Smashwords."

Cats, Internet, Get Your Cat Picture Here!

You can't believe everything you read on the Internet.  In fact, unless you want to buy a new computer, the best course of action is normally to assume that everything on the Internet wants to steal your identity, freeze your bank accounts, and have conjugal relations with your closest friends and lovers.  There are no magic pills that will increase the size of you or your gentleman friend's appropriate anatomy (if there were, there would literally be no other advertisements during the Super Bowl, and someone would be able to buy Sweden).  No one actually needs your help to recover a lost fortune.  There are no easy tricks to getting thin or having whiter teeth (although not eating or smoking can help, I don't personally recommend not doing either of those things). 

But when I tell you that the following image is one of the most adorable things you will see today, you can trust that I'm not after your Social Security number.  Instead, I only ask that you download my novel, and I'm not even really asking that, there's just a neat sidebar that conveniently has a picture of the book's cover that also takes you right to where you can order your own copy.  I know how hard it is to grasp the concept that someone in the vast miasma of faceless forum jumping actually cares about how much you smile today, but I do.

In fact, there's even the possibility that you steal this picture, slap a funny caption on it, and become instantly rich when your insight into the feline condition makes its way through cyberspace to the overcrowded desks of cat-lovers across the globe.  If that happens, wouldn't you say I'm nearly the best friend you don't know on the 'net?  You would, right?  I need a friend.  My cats spend most of the day doing things that aren't nearly as huggable as the two pictured below.  When they do manage to find time to cheer me up, it's never happens until after they sit in a circle around the litter box while I shovel their poop into plastic bags.  At that point, it is clear to me who is entertaining who.

What I'm saying is, when you get a chance to jumpstart your happiness with a double helping of adorable, you should take it.  Unless it comes in the form of a blinking, flashing, wiggling pop up ad.  Or a strangely grammatically incorrect e-mail.  Or a tweet from someone who joined up only a few hours ago.  Really, I guess, you should probably only rely on me and the following picture.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was to question how much the orange-furred cat weigh that his or her tiny paw is enough to send rippling spasms of pain through the grey kitty.  Maybe the Garfield-style kitten is Garfield-sized.  Or it could be a ninja cat.  More realistically, I guess the cat could have learned pressure points from a Vulcan.

Then I realized that the cat on the right might just be yawning, except that the sheer terror on the face of the orange fuzzball suggests that he or she is about half a second from fleeing for his or her life.  I have never found myself fleeing from someone who was yawning.  Just the one time that I was being chased by a narcoleptic banger near Harlem.

Maybe the grey cat is roaring, imitating something he or she saw on television like most children are prone to do (for this reason, I do not allow any of my cats to watch "The Lion King" or the under-rated Val Kilmer classic, "The Ghost and theDarkness").  The power of his or her primal howl is enough to brush back the hair of the smaller feline on the left.  It could send paroxysms of fear that reduce the orange animal to a shaking, quivering, cowering mass.  While on safari, by which I mean while listening to the tour guide at Busch Gardens, I once had the opportunity to come face to face with a roaring tiger.  I chose not to take that opportunity, because I have no desire to wet myself in public.  That hasn't been funny since, what, tenth grade?

Possibly the least cute option would be if the cat on the right is belching, having just finished his or her allotment of canned tuna for the afternoon.   More than once, it has happened to me that one of my furry companions just can't help but attempt to recite the ABC's instead of quietly expelling the fragrant gas into a remote corner of the apartment.  If that's the case, I can certainly understand the other's reaction, since cats, while they tend to have impeccably shiny coats, do not seem to care nearly as much about dental hygiene.

Even if the last turns out to be the impetus for the captured image, it is still quite adorable, as who among us has never laughed at a baby gurgling on her parent's shoulder at Chuck E. Cheese, just before leveling the dining area with the kind of acrid stench that makes even the robot animals pinch their nostrils.  And maybe the cat on the left is just performing one of those all too infrequent dental check-ups, the equivalent of asking someone to feel your breasts to make sure you don't have cancer (this happens, like cat teeth-brushing, only about one thousandth of the time that it should, if you care for my opinion).

You may giggle harder if you visit a tweenage angst-ridden blog, or if you hop over to Cracked to get your fill of list-based humor for the day, and I have to recommend checking out GatheringMagic for your gaming fix, but when it comes to cute, this kind of adorable is all sold out in stores.  With such a limited supply, it only makes sense that we all take the chance we have now to look at that picture again.  Now that I look at it, maybe the grey cat laughs like Danny Devito's Penguin.

You wouldn't like it if he was laughing at you, either.

In My Day

Quick, how much did you spend on Magic when you first started playing?  Did you buy tons of packs, or singles?  How old were you when you learned how to draft?  How old when you stopped casting Craw Wurm?*

The most terrifying thing about Craw Wurm is that I once traded a Bird of Paradise for one.

Nostalgia in Magic is powerful.  I still get the same shiver cracking packs of the newest set as I did when my cousin first took me down into my grandparents' basement because he had something to show me.  Recently, I was at a tournament when I found myself sprawled headfirst on the sentimental plane where everyone listens to late Beatles music, owns a piece of power, and people trade Savannah Lions for Tundra Wolves because of first strike.

Huh.

The WNBA: Where Nostalgia Happens by Ben Snyder

I recently had the misfortune of reading an article that tried to convince me that the WNBA is a real sports league and that the players in it are talented athletes with a fantastic product.  Having grown up with the Internet, especially during impressionable years by which my primitive brain associated recommendations from the Internet with naked women and snarky, laugh out loud humorous writing, I have previously encountered pro-WNBA sentiment, and followed the advice of said bloggers to my television-watching doom. 

I wasn’t going to get caught again, so instead, I sat down and penned this article, which I will attempt to convince someone to publish somewhere online (conveniently, I work with a website that will not only allow me to write sentences like the one you are reading right now, but is in desperate need of content, so they’ll post just about anything I send them).

Every argument against the WNBA can be summed up in one simple statement: there is nothing fun about watching women play basketball.  Women’s track?  Love it.  Women’s football (soccer, really, but I hate calling it soccer, I’m no purist but I really loathe the word)?  Better than reality television.  Women’s tennis?  Breathtaking.  I’ve thought this for decades, probably because my mom used to play and also because some of the athletes are not only gorgeous, but they really could compete head to head with the men, a comment that unfortunately comes off as chauvinist.  I wouldn’t want to compete with a talented woman in an essay-writing contest, and even if I were 2003 Andy Roddick, I wouldn’t really want to go against Serena or Venus.

Women’s basketball?  Boring.  This comes from having spent at least two years involved with women’s basketball, including getting my ass kicked by a girl in pick-up games after her practices.  I don’t believe the women playing the game aren’t better at what they do than other women, and even most men, but I do believe that what they do is as exciting as waiting for the water to boil.  The pace is glacially slow.  David Stern answers labor questions faster than most plays take to develop in a sport that is specifically designed for engaging and fast-paced play. 

High scoring games tend to be clinics in lay-ups, screens, and spot-on outside shooting.  What do those have in common?  They are not exciting.  No one goes to the playground to watch some high school talent shoot one hundred three-point buckets except for people getting paid to do it.  (Aside: If the WNBA or anyone else, paid me, I would watch all 40 minutes with the kind of intensity physicists devote to figuring out if that particle really traveled faster than the speed of light.  However, I still wouldn’t enjoy it)

Proponents of the sport point to crisp passing, genius play-calling, and fundamentals that are much more solid than the isolation one on five that most NBA teams play as reasons to enjoy the game.  This would be great, except that the NBA used to look like that, too, and it is infinitely more popular now.  As an experiment, I will suggest watching video of games from the 70’s and early 80’s before watching re-runs of the Celtics/Bulls first round series from two years ago.

Actually, it’s funny that I should mention it, since I actually did that the last time I was back home.  See, I have a collection of late 80’s, early 90’s VHS tapes with names like “Super Slams of the NBA,” “Michael Jordan’s Playhouse,” and “1984 NBA Finals”.  Because I was riding a massive nostalgia wave at the time, I actually watched the tapes using a contraption I bought at a Goodwill thrift store for $3.  (You don’t need to point out that ESPN Classic routinely shows these games, usually at times of the day reserved for soft-core porn and “Dazzling Diamonds”)

As I sank into the montage music and visions of He-Man, Thundercats, and Transformers flitted through my brain, I became more and more aware that what I was watching was terrible.  Everyone stood where they were supposed to stand, offenses flowed like well-oiled machines, and in the earliest tapes, no one jumped higher than two feet for fear of offending someone else.  The more I watched, the deeper my depression.  These games, for all the excitement I remembered of them, were terrible.  Lebron, Wade, Kobe, or even Kevin Love (ok, maybe not Kevin Love) would have dominated the piss out of these teams.  To them, everyone would have been moving in slow motion. 

Take a step back from the nostalgia express; now imagine that instead of finding a recycled VCR-TV combo at Goodwill, you actually paid real money to watch the crap.  That is the WNBA fan experience.  “Expect…Everything You Saw in a Basketball Game Played 40 Years Ago”.  And the worst part?  They aren’t even wearing those same short shorts…