This Saturday I'll be at the Salt Lake Public Library at the invitation of Utah Sequential Artists and Illustrators. Alan Gardner, newshound-in-chief at The Daily Cartoonist, and a founding member of USAI*, did the poster above, and I love the caricature. Here are the details again, because copying and pasting text from an image is tedious: July 11, 201510:00 AM @ Salt Lake City Public LibraryConference Room A I'll have slides, I'll answer questions, and the whole thing will run for about 60 minutes. Seating is limited, and the event is open to the public. A few seats will be reserved for USAI members.
From Tuesday through Friday my family and I are participating in "Trek," which, in the local dialect of Mormon-speak, is interpreted to mean "hiking and camping with handcarts, hymns, and harmonicas." Just like our pioneer ancestors. I joked that this event was a cross between a Mormon Pioneer cosplay and an Oregon Trail LARP, but I've been told that this is not the case, and no, I'm not allowed to pretend to have died of dysentery so I can go home. If it sounds like I'm making light of it, that's because I make light of pretty much everything. Especially things of which I'm frightened. Camping in general has lost its appeal for me. Hiking? Sounds suspiciously like work. Doing them together, so that after a long hike you get a crap bed and food you carried and zero long soaks in a hot bath? Let's just say it's not Reese's Peanut Butter Cup math. I am not, however, a heartless, spineless fool who cannot see the benefit in these things. Sandra and I have been given the opportunity to walk the trail our ancestors walked one-point-six centuries ago, and we get to do so with all four of our children. The window of opportunity for this activity is pretty much this year, or never. Our kids are growing up and growing out. If we want to be miserable, all six of us, together in Wyoming, this is the time to do it. Am I making light again? Perhaps. We won't have "electronic devices" with us, which is Trek-speak for "no phones, no music-players, no movies, no laptops, no getting any work done Howard, and if you want to take pictures the camera must only be a camera, not a smart-something." If I want to tweet anything I'll have to write it by hand in my journal, and carefully count the characters on my fingers to make sure I don't use too many. I am issuing an electronics exemption for my Fitbit, which I will be wearing for the whole trip. I have it on good authority that the pioneers had 1) odometers, and 2) timepieces. Besides, this is the damaged one (the replacement from the manufacturer is still in the packaging) and the repair scars I've inflicted upon it exemplify the old saw about thrift:
On Saturday, June 27th, we had a Planet Mercenary RPG play test at LibertyCon. Alan Bahr ran the game, and Steve Jackson joined us. Our small band of mercenary officers was cast as follows:
Disney/Pixar's Inside Out is one of those films that I didn't really enjoy, but which I believe to be incredibly important. It's certainly clever enough and deep enough to entertain grown-ups, but I believe the target audience for Inside Out is children who need a memorable, functional model for understanding how emotions control their perception of the world. In terms of societal value, then, Inside Out may be the most important movie Pixar has ever made. The world is definitely a better place with this movie in it. In terms of entertainment value, your mileage is going to vary wildly depending on the manner in which you've built your own models for understanding your brain, not to mention your awareness of mental health issues. I believe that the film is trying to portray an ordinary emotional crisis for a young person, but as I watched the destruction wrought upon the model of Riley's mind I was terrified. I stopped seeing the film as a quest to restore happiness, and started seeing a descent into madness whose only possible happy ending began with immediate medical attention. Since that's probably not what the movie wanted me to see, it didn't work as well for me as it did for the audience full of college-aged kids at the Thursday night showing. They laughed and cheered while I white-knuckled. I know that this is *my* problem, not the movie's problem, and in spite of the fact that I'm sure there are others who will white-knuckle during Inside Out, I stand by my earlier statement: this movie is incredibly important. Whether or not they see it in the theater, kids should see it, and then spend some time talking about it. Oh, and it will almost certainly be fun for them, too. My movie rankings are based on the amount of fun I had in the theater, and on that scale Inside Out enters my 2015 list at #11, and is the first Pixar film I've seen since Cars 2 that has failed to crack my Threshold of Awesome. Please don't let that fool you into thinking Inside Out is not awesome. There are other scales than mine, after all. (cross-posted from howardtayler.com)
I had forgotten how good a proper comedy can be. Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy, did everything right. I laughed hard, and left the theater on that happy high that comes from laughter with, rather than laughter at. This isn't a sit-com kind of movie where we laugh at the absurdity that grows out of an absurd situation. It's a comedy with character, and the absurd situation is actually kind of terrifying. In order to maintain tension we aren't allowed to laugh at it very much. That's fine. There's plenty of funny elsewhere. After having seen Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, and now Melissa McCarthy in action roles, I'm afraid Scarjo's Black Widow finishes in a distant third place. Theron's Furiosa was amazing, and set a new bar, but I'm putting McCarthy's Susan Cooper over that bar and in first, because she was the only one of the three to ace the delivery of the stand-up-and-cheer moment. I could write a 5,000-word treatise going into more detail about how this works for me, but I have comics to make and an RPG to write. I'll just say that Spy clears my Threshold of Awesome, and leaps to the top of my list. I had so much fun... UPDATEOne of the reasons this movie worked so well for me is that it treats its genre, the super-spy thriller, in much the same way my own Schlock Mercenary treats science fiction. This quote from writer director Paul Feig is telling:
Let me lead by saying that Jurassic World cleared my Threshold of Awesome, and enters my rankings at #2, just behind Avengers: Age of Ultron. Sandra, Keliana, and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and had no regrets about springing for the IMAX 3D showing. The film made good use of the technology.With that out of the way, the film has some weird flaws. Most of the interpersonal stuff falls flat, and while we do get lots of on-screen dinosaur goodness, Sandra and I both came away feeling like the filmmakers didn't want to bother with "sense of wonder."There was story purpose for this, I suppose, since we are told (but not actually shown) that the crowds want bigger, faster, meaner attractions.Which the park provides, of course. Chaos and catastrophe ensue. Rawr chase chase chomp rawr shoot shoot scream rawr repeat. To good effect, of course, but if the action had been supported by a really well-crafted human story it would have been more powerful. If the film had been allowed to cast off a couple of the less-engaging human stories, the action could have been dialed up a bit, and Jurassic World would have shone as a really good monster movie.Don't get me wrong: I wasn't actually disappointed—I have a threshold for that on my list, and this film escaped that handily—but I did have to tip my head to the side and raise my eyebrows at the film a couple of times to quietly say "really, movie? That's as hard as you're going to try to sell that to me?"(Note: in IMAX 3D the movie can totally see you do that, and it will feel guilty for having let you down. Try it!)I can't say much more without spoiling things. Sandra made a great observation which I won't share for exactly that reason. Spot on, though.Fans of the original John Williams soundtrack will be delighted by Michael Giacchino's work on the soundtrack for Jurassic World.William's themes are present (and properly credited) but this is definitely NOT a re-hashing of leitmotifs we've already heard. It's fresh, and powerful. I've enjoyed Giacchino's work on other soundtracks, and knew by the end of the film that this one goes on that list. I'm listening to it as I write this, and I'm totally not thinking that something is going to chomp me from behind. Totally.
I've been posting Schlock Mercenary to the web for a full fifteen years.Thank you for being there for however many of them you've been there for. I'm going to celebrate the event by going out to see Chris Pratt run with a pack of velociraptors, and then I guess I'll ink a week of comics and write some RPG text.
I really enjoyed San Andreas. I went in expecting to see a ridiculously over-the-top depiction of an earthquake, and I was not disappointed.There was also a surprisingly good human story in there—surprising because while I could see the formula, and while everybody played straight to type, I didn't care. I was engaged, and had a good time. They did screw up the last line of the film, missing a great opportunity that probably wasn't obvious to them until after all the set dressing had been added, but still, they missed it. Oh well.San Andreas enters at #8 on my "how much fun did I have at the theater" scale for the year, and the unexpectedly enjoyable character story (visible recipe pages notwithstanding) squeaks it in above my Threshold of Awesome.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)
Schlock Mercenary