FerretBrain

You can see the most recently posted comments here, 20 at a time; or, if you prefer, we've got a news feed...

http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on The Death Paradox at 06:49 on 09-03-2010 - link Reviving a two-year dead article to promote a pet author. The ultimate faux pas?

Have any of you read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? It's one of the only examples of an interesting, thought-provoking imagined history I've come across. (Specifically, it's a history of the human race from the mid-20th century to billions of years in the future, over the course of which the species changes unimaginably several times.)

That reminds me of Evolution by Stephen Baxter, except Evolution starts billions of years ago and ends billions of years in the future and Baxter probably has even less characterization than Stapledon. His books generally aren't as event-driven as they are concept-driven, in the vein of the sci fi authors who have this technology/science concept rattling around in their brain and want to create a story as a way of airing it out. (It's telling that he's co-authored four novels with Arthur Clarke.)

On the other hand, Evolution is almost always told from a relatively low-to-the-ground POV, either a person or an over-the-shoulder third-person-limited type thing. So it's about the grand sweep of history and the transformation of species, but only insofar as it can be evidenced by actually looking at members of those species in snapshots taken over the course of millions of years.

Plus he proposes the idea that predator dinosaurs were actually intelligent, with language and tools, but they tended to build things that were pretty biodegradable and so their artifices don't show up in the fossil record. Totally awesome.
Sister Magpie on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 04:28 on 09-03-2010 - link Yes, child labor laws. Almost all memorable TV characters under a certain age were played by twins. I don't know if it always happens in movies, but they might have just figured it was easier with their shooting schedule.
Melissa G. on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 01:41 on 09-03-2010 - link It has to do with child labor laws from what I understand. Kids can only work for a very few amount of hours and having two kids playing the same characters doubles the amount of filming time. Or so I've been led to believe.
Arthur B on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 00:18 on 09-03-2010 - link I thought I'd heard of other cases where it had happened, thanks for confirming. :)

It should be said, though, that the kid is barely in the film enough to justify hiring two actors to play him. The character could have probably been cut without too much effort and I can't think of a single significant way in which the film would have been changed - except they'd need to find another reason for DiCaprio and Brooks to wander off and find Charlie.
Viorica on Six Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back at 23:49 on 08-03-2010 - link which sounds like a bizarre decision, but the kid is young enough that I suppose having twins play him means they can substitute one brother in for when the other gets tired

It's actually a pretty common technique in the film industry- the Olsen twins played the same character on Full House, and twin babies played Sunny Baudelaire in the Series of Unfortunate Events movie.
Andy G on Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land at 15:41 on 08-03-2010 - link The game sounds a lot like the kinds of online games or treasure hunts that are used in teaser marketing campaigns, but I guess those have different expectations of quality since they're not intended as "proper" games.
Daniel Hemmens on Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land at 13:09 on 08-03-2010 - link Not a lot to say except, yeah, that's a big part of what bugged me about it, and I'm glad it wasn't just me (I sometimes worry that it's a personal failing, I sometimes get the same problem with first person narratives that don't seem to have a clear idea when the narration is located relative to the text).

It's interesting that we seem to have both fallen foul of precisely the opposite assumptions. For example you seemed to assume that you were supposed to read the "main" story to the end before taking any of the "unicorn" options, I assumed you were supposed to find all the unicorns before finishing the story. I assumed there'd be stuff outside the main content, you assumed there wouldnt be.
Arthur B on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity at 22:22 on 07-03-2010 - link Snowdog is, indeed, the protagonist of the hilariously bad Business as Usual.
http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity at 18:34 on 07-03-2010 - link I actually don't particularly remember the politics in that first book, but then I don't really remember much of anything, other than it had necrons and one of the C'Tan in it.

The most memorable moment, I think, came in Warriors of Ultramar where Uriel and That Other Guy managed to take out the entirety of Hive Fleet Behemoth by themselves. Well, okay, no, someone gave them the Anti-Tyranid Syringe, which they took by themselves into the queen and injected her with, blowing up everyone.

Also, good lord, I just found that he ended Warriors of Ultramar on an underhive ganger repeating "Business as usual" to, I think, a hot be-catsuitted female sidekick. Was a guy named Snowdog one of the characters in "Business as Usual", because if so he reappears and takes up vast wodges of Warriors of Ultramar.
Jamie Johnston on Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land at 16:07 on 07-03-2010 - link Hmmm. Interesting.

Long reply follows. Short version: I basically agree, and in particular I think the presentation makes it very difficult to know quite how to imaginatively engage with the thing.

Long version:

I had a look at the game... er, the story... the thing before reading the article and then stopped after the first chapter because I wasn't so gripped as to make me contrive a mental excuse to delay going to the shops.

If I'd just found it randomly while wandering around the internet I wouldn't have gone back to it after that, but since I wanted to read and understand your article I did a bit more after coming back from shopping. Even then, though, I got as far as the SDA blog in the third chapter and just stopped and read the article in stead. I stopped there because, seeing how long the full version of the first blog-post was and seeing that there were four other posts after that, and that there were other links from that chapter still to follow, and that there would be more chapters, I realized that I really didn't care enough about what was going on to want to do that much work.

I hadn't done any of the unicorns yet because, since it seemed to be perfectly acceptable to go back to earlier chapters, I felt it made sense to wait until I had as much information as possible before deciding who to trust. Maybe that cautious approach wasn't the best way to get excitement out of the experience. It made me feel like I wasn't on anyone's side and didn't trust anyone in the story at all, which meant I had no emotional investment whatsoever in the outcome and all that kept me going was vague curiosity. Three chapters in, I'd discovered nothing especially interesting: the corporation showed no signs at all of being any more evil than any other pharmaceutical company; there was every sign that Ella was completely off her rocker; the SDA didn't appear to have committed any actual acts of terrorism but nor was there anything particularly cool or ideologically coherent about them to make me think they might be a good thing; and although Mayu and her associates did seem a little bit phoney I suspected that might just be because they weren't the world's greatest actors. There just didn't seem to be any real mystery beyond Ella's insistence that her friend's death was part of some kind of conspiracy involving a stolen memory stick, and, as I've mentioned, the game-story-thing had so far made me feel entirely free to distrust her, which I did.

I think you're right that much of the problem is with expectations. Since this thing isn't an example of any established form, there are no formal conventions and one simply doesn't know how to approach it. Mind you, I think possibly the thing itself could do a better job of telling you what to expect, or at least not leading you to expect the wrong things. Unlike you, I didn't think for a moment of looking for information beyond what was contained within the website or linked to it, which meant I was rather disconcerted when the online newspaper article linked to the MHRA website: 'What? This site is massive: every single link on the front page is a live link to another page! Am I seriously supposed to read all this? Oh, hang on, this isn't part of the thing, this is the actual website for the actual regulatory body.' Now, much as it's quite cool to add a sense of realism by integrating the story-world with the real internet like that, what they've effectively done there is to challenge my expectation - that the whole experience would be self-contained and wouldn't require any outside research - which, we infer from your experience, was actually a correct expectation and shouldn't have been challenged.

I felt there was another unhelpful tension between realism and storyness in the way the whole thing was set up. The fact that a lot of the content comes in the form of web-cam videos and mock-ups of actual websites, including (as I've just mentioned) further links to the real websites of real things, means that although you know it's a (I keep wanting to say 'game' but that's plainly the wrong word) contrived fictional experience you enter into a mental state of 'Okay, I'm playing the role of somebody who's sitting at a computer and using that computer to solve a mystery or achieve whatever it is I'm meant to achieve here.' But then that does two things. One is that it tends to draw attention to the unreality of the other bits of content: at one moment I'm getting content by literally navigating the internet, the next I'm apparently asked to imagine myself looking at a type-written sheet of paper that seems to be a coroner's report only parts of it are blurred out so I can't read it. How am I supposed to mentally relate to this bit of paper? If it were real I'd pick it up and look closely at it, but I can't because, unlike the websites that are literally here in front of me exactly as they would be if this were really happening, the piece of paper doesn't actually exist. And I'm not even sure how I'm supposed to imagine it existing: it has every appearance of being type-written, but the parts that are illegible haven't been redacted using a black marker pen but blurred using a computer: am I meant to imagine holding in my hands a piece of paper that's been scanned in to Photoshop, attacked with a blurring filter and then printed out, or is it just the on-screen image that's been blurred and if I had the real paper I could read it? The thing makes you constantly switch between different degrees of suspension of disbelief, which is quite hard work (for me at least). But more than that, there's a basic problem of plausibility arising from the fact that a lot of the time I'm being asked to imagine that physically I'm going exactly what I really am doing - sitting at a computer and clicking things and reading them on the screen - the only difference being that I'm imagining the content is real when it isn't. Because it makes me ask myself, How, sitting at this computer, did I come to be invited by this woman to do these things, and why am I doing them? Has she, in between being apparently locked up and / or given medical treatment, made this website and put it up on the internet in the hope that someone will find it and help her, and I am that someone? If so, why is the website designed to give me the option of helping the people who are keeping her captive; and, more importantly, why have I decided to do what she's asked me to do, when for all I know it could be an elaborate new 419 scam? Or is the website just the interface for engaging with the game-story-thing and therefore something I should exclude from the imaginary world I enter into? If so, how should I imagine I got involved in this business, and how should I think of myself receiving these bits of information, and from where should I imagine I'm following the links that take me to the various web-pages? The same with the video snippets: some shots give the impression that Ella has actually got hold of a webcam and recorded messages addressed directly To Whom It May Concern and whacked them up on the net in the hope of someone finding them, but within the same three-minute video we also get footage of Ella that appears to have been shot by her captors, omniscient-third-person-non-existent-camera footage like you'd get in a TV drama, and point-of-view footage that could either be Ella pointing a camera at something or drama-style non-existent-camera footage showing us what she's actually seeing.

Some of this may just be the result of my being excessively literal, but some of it seems to be come from the same confusion that led you to expect things to happen as a result of reading the source code (which would make perfect in-story sense if we were supposed to imagine that the whole website had been created by Ella) or entering your e-mail address (which, again, would make sense as a way of communicating with the characters, and in fact might be a rather better way of delivering the non-web-based content: e.g., you get an e-mail from Ella saying 'I've managed to find this coroner's report but parts of it have been blacked-out, here's what it says...'). All in all, it seems to be trying to take the multimedia possibilities in umpteen different directions at once, any one of which could be interesting but which together just interfere with one another.
Arthur B on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity at 10:24 on 07-03-2010 - link I confess that I only read as far as around two-thirds of the first book of the Ultramarines omnibus I tried to read. But I did actually think there was promise to the political machinations and the rebellion that served as a backdrop to that book. The thing about the Space Marines is that they are basically used as tools by the rulers of the Imperium, so their work would logically often be inextricably tied in with the internal politics of the worlds they visit.

The problem was that McNeill handled it so woefully badly. He basically used the political subplot as filler to cover up the fact that he couldn't fill an entire novel with a story about Space Marines.
http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/ on One Galaxy's Burning Hatred For Humanity at 05:47 on 07-03-2010 - link Your commentary on Graham McNeill has made me think about him. So far, I've read the Ultramarines omnibus, the Horus Heresy book False Gods, and the Chaos Space Marines book Storm of Iron that it turns out the last Ultramarines book is a sequel to. Of those five, the only remotely tolerable ones were Dead Sky Black Sun and Storm of Iron, and even then just barely. There's already fourth and fifth Ultramarines books, with a sixth coming out later this year, and I fear that Ultramarines: The Second Omnibus isn't too far away. At least The Lost comes out in paperback soon, and Abnett is working on a third trilogy in the Eisenhorn/Ravenor region. But I digress from my main point, which is agreeing with your excoriation of Graham McNeill.

(As an aside: When I read Hammer of Daemons, I was struck by how it was similar in premise to Dead Sky Black Sun but ridiculously, ridiculously better, and was actually somewhat put out when I found out that Ben Counter's book came out years after McNeill's. Major differences between the two: Alaric is proactive and at least decently characterized, whereas the rod up Uriel's ass has a rod up its own ass and all he does is wander around the Chaos planet and wait for the Chaos Space Marines to kill one another.)

One of the most annoying things McNeill does is bog his books down with utterly boring political machinations. It's the bland stuff in Storm of Iron and Dead Sky Black Sun, and his tales of underhivers and Arbites in Warriors of Ultramar are virtually unbearable. It sounds like he indulged himself with more of the same in "Business as Usual".

The other annoying thin McNeill does is give awful, horribly static characters. When I first read Horus Rising, I was so impressed by its characterization and suggestive demands-a-resolution plot that I grabbed the next two Horus Heresy books and at least one Abnett omnibus. Reading False Gods pissed me off because McNeill chucked all of Abnett's deft characterization out the window and replaced it with zero-dimensional Angry Marines, who do nothing but alternate between fits of sulking and fits of pointless, stupid rage. The subsequent Horus Heresy books by Ben Counter and James Swallow were much better, and at least had some interesting portrayals of the spread of a new faith, but Abnett's enthralling characterization of the Luna Wolves never really came back. Disappointing.
Arthur B on Pwned by Chaos at 13:37 on 06-03-2010 - link It came out in 2001. It's never been updated to the newer cover styles of the GW books, so I reckon it's been out of print since at least 2003 (when the Gaunt's Ghosts books were given a new cover style) if not earlier.
Rami C on Pwned by Chaos at 04:05 on 06-03-2010 - link This sounds really interesting. How long ago was it written / how long has it been out of print for?
Niall on The Timeless City of Evil at 09:49 on 05-03-2010 - link HARM and Trillion Year Spree are indeed both smashing, as far as I'm concerned. Very much looking forward to the reissue of the Helliconia trilogy (which I've never read) later this year.
Arthur B on The Timeless City of Evil at 00:58 on 05-03-2010 - link Well, have a care, the very next Aldiss I read I didn't like at all.

Though I will check out HARM and Trillion Year Spree if you think they're worthwhile...
Alasdair Czyrnyj on The Timeless City of Evil at 23:40 on 04-03-2010 - link Not sure if this is the right place, but congrats Arthur: you've finally convinced me to start reading Brian Aldiss.

Right now I've just started on HARM, which is either the tender story of a British Muslim being tortured by an Orwellian Anglo-American security service or a thrilling adventure of a mildly insane man on a decayed space-opera colony planet. Or possibly both.

I've also been flipping through Trillion Year Spree, which I still think is one of the best histories of SF money can buy, despite the fact that it ends in 1986.
Arthur B on The Emperor Commanded Me to "Make It So" at 10:44 on 03-03-2010 - link Well, luckily in one of the later Mage's Guild quest a totally legitimate kill-target counts as an innocent (I think maybe I was meant to listen to him cackle evilly before I hit him), so I've had the funky visit in my sleep and can start the Dark Brotherhood questline once I get back to the game. (My current plan is to finish the Fighter's Guild, do Knights of the Nine, have a slow spiral into villainy via the Brotherhood and the Thieves' Guild, then head for the Shivering Isles...)
https://me.yahoo.com/a/gNLVidA.xeLuPiOU_2B_USM.HYNFjA--#b0b6b on The Emperor Commanded Me to "Make It So" at 03:05 on 03-03-2010 - link *enters discussion wearing an Elder Scrolls fanperson hat* *or Daedric helm*

It's a pity you gave up on Morrowind, I found the resolution of the main story quite interesting. It's one of the very few prophecy-driven stories I've ever seen that takes a moment to reflect on the nature of prophecy, and finishes on a satisfyingly ambiguous note in that regard.
(I admit I'm only about halfway through the main quest line in Oblivion, so I've yet to see how it compares.)

I'll echo Daniel and recommend the Dark Brotherhood quests. They're more creative and well-drawn-together than the others, with some very interesting twists and surprises. Plus, you get some really sweet goodies out of them, cool black armour aside.

Another comparison you could make is between the scope of both games. There are a great deal more factions, quests and items in Morrowind, and with less guidance offered the player has to explore and talk to people more than in Oblivion. I guess this is a good thing, as it forces you to engage a bit more with the fantabulously-constructed game environment. On the other, hand, it can also get rather tedious, particularly when the person you're looking for has accidentally fallen off a cliff or something.

P.S. I'm with you on the voice acting. Sean Bean makes my heart melt.
Viorica on Categorically Misguided at 18:30 on 02-03-2010 - link has a whole couple of shelves labelled 'lesbian crime'.

There's an Anne Perry joke I could make here, but it would probably be in bad taste . . .

« last 20 - next 20 »