Today is the ninety-fifth anniversary of the Armistice of Compiègne, which ended World War I, or at least the war between the Triple(or more, really) Entente and Germany, on November 11, 1918. Starting the next year, many of the Entente nations declared national holidays on the anniversary of the armistice. In the United States of America, it was known as Armistice Day until 1954, when Congress officially changed the holiday to Veterans Day, which has remained associated with the holiday ever since. Now, in the US we have a holiday in May for the remembrance of those who died in the armed forces (talked about first here and again here). Veterans Day, on the other hand, is dedicated to honoring veterans serving, retired, or passed away and to connect that honor to our everyday lives in a way that is distinct to the respectful rites of Memorial Day.
Today, I'm going to quickly highlight Veterans Day with a short list of great science fiction books. These books fall into the great tradition of what is known as the military sci-fi subgenre. Military sci-fi comprises story where military hierarchies, tradition, logistics, and/or tactics factor as heavily into the plot and setting as alien worlds and futuristic technology. What's interesting about these sorts of stories, when compared to traditional space opera, sci-fantasy, or social drama sci-fi, is that it respects the interaction of characters and traditions as somewhat timeless in the scope of how men and women conduct war. The three books I'm highlighting below, however, are not just really good pieces of military sci-fi; they're also all written by veterans, which allows a reader to analyze the book meta-textually. In so doing, these books aren't just great action-packed sci-fi classics, but they're an alternative way of approaching and analyzing some specific veterans.
They're also pretty quick reads, too.
Starship Troopers was written in 1959 and has remained one of the flagships of the subgenre of military sci-fi ever since. It's less of a conventional war story as it is part snapshot of a military oligarchical society and one teen's coming of age within that tradition. I've been a fan of this book since the fourth grade, and I think I've bought it at least a half-dozen times over the years out of a compulsion to always have one at hand. (Not unlike the way Jerry keeps buying copies of The Catcher in the Rye in the movie Conspiracy Theory.) Starship Troopers was written by Robert Heinlein, who graduated from Annapolis Naval Academy in 1929 and retired as a Naval Lieutenant in 1934, and is one of a smattering of not insane pieces of sci-fi written by him. I also recommend Space Cadet, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Red Planet for anyone interested in more of his books, but many of his others are really out there. But this one is a fairly short, fast-moving read that provides a good survey of the major themes of this category of fiction.
The Starfist series of novels is a great collection of 14 novels set in the 2400s. The premier entry in the series, First to Fight, was published in 1997, and presents the marines of the 34th FIST (Fleet Initial Strike Team) performing glorified police work on an inherently unstable world in the middle of yet another brushfire war. If you ignored the publication date, you might think the fiction is reactionary to early War on Terror military stories. The two things I really love about this series of books both relate to the elegance of the series' conceit: it all follows a specific company starting in a specific year. In the early installments, this means that the Confederation of Human Worlds has yet to make contact with intelligent (and hostile) aliens, and the conflicts of the first four books are about dousing political fires on the outskirts of human space. Secondly, the authors consistently draw characters and resources from a genuine military company, meaning that characters that are dropped as names in one book might become main characters you root for in later books, and that the politics of the unit's organization mean more to you as the series goes on. The series was written by David Sherman, who served 6 years in the United States Marine Corps before retiring as a Corporal, and Dan Cragg, who retired as an Army Sergeant Major after 22 years in uniform. They give the series a concentrated level of (US) military culture that sometimes comes off as a bit stereotypical but is always consistent and oozes bravado throughout.
Orphanage is the first of a series of seven (and counting) novels set in a near future interstellar conflict. The first book especially takes a lot of stylistic inspiration from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, though with a lot more action and dialed in characterization of the supporting cast. The first book begins with earth getting bombarded by aliens from the outer reaches of the solar system. As the entire planet reels from the devastating attack, they mount a suicidal expedition to counter-attack the alien presence on Ganymede. The mission is considered so dangerous that the powers-that-be declare that all soldiers selected for the mission must be orphans of the war, earning the book its title and setting a desperate, wounded motif for the series. Robert Buettner, who served as an Army intelligence officer, eventually takes the series into bigger themes, as the war forces humanity to reach out to other stars to battle the aliens throughout the galaxy. There's a lot of great sci-fi that plays intelligent homage to several other authors and series, though the focus and style of the action shifts greatly throughout the books as the nature of the war itself evolves. This is a great feature if you're prepared for it, but if you aren't it can be jarring as politics, logistics, and ethics quickly take the fore.
I hope you take the chance to thank the service people in your life this Veterans Day, and definitely check out these great novels whenever you get the chance. Besides being enjoyable nerd-fodder, they just might encourage you to think differently about these issues next Veterans Day.
Blech. So another fat pause in posts, and when I finally bring myself back into the habit, it's with much less fanfare than I'd hoped.
It began, as so many things do, with the birth of my son, the beginning of many epic projects, and an all-but-inevitable slide into insomnia (or in-zomb-nia, as my loving wife insists I pronounce it). I saw several movies that I'd really wanted to write Nerdviews on, but things kept piling up and most of the movies this past summer were more disappointing than anything else. Perhaps in the coming weeks I'll write-up mini-digest Nerdviews, with just a couple of sentences (heh--yeah, sure--just a couple of sentences) to sum my feelings on a lot of the movies I've neglected over the life of this blog. I think the superhero sequel to the Dave Lizewski movie (keeping it family-friendly, yo), Oblivion, Pacific Rim, and Despicable Me 2 all merit mention, but I've also been kicking myself for not reviewing Dark Knight Rises and Amazing Spider-Man. And with Agents of SHIELD officially picked up for a full first season, I need to give that a write-up with a special surprise element tacked on. Filmatleven.
Most importantly, I've still got to get my most important new article series started: Nerds of Interest. Intended to be a series of features on different nerds I've met and taken an interest in, I should've posted the first article in this series months ago. I've already interviewed the really nice ladies behind Horsefeathers Cosplay as the first in this series, and I owe them (and you) a big apology for not getting that put up post-haste. They have helped inspire me to finally bite the bullet and get into cosplay fully and truly, and I definitely want to honor their influence and that of Cosplay4UsAll in my hobby insanity.
Along those lines, I made my first foray into cosplay. And as one should
expect of me, it's been intense, grueling, full of mistakes and petty
triumphs, and way too rushed by conservative cosplay standards. You see,
October 10th was the one year anniversary of Star Citizen being
revealed to the public and opened up for crowd-funding, and they made a modest event out of the observance. On September 19, they announced a photo contest to coincide with the event, which would close a mere two weeks later. Never one to let reason bar me from setting a goal, I decided that I would make a Star Citizen cosplay in that time. The (sorta) end result was a pretty feldercarb picture of a frakkin' awesome work-in-progress cosplay that didn't even place or get mention in the photo contest. I'll post more about this costume and my progress towards completing it later, but for now here's the underwhelming photo:
Those who follow me on Facebook or Google Plus can see some of my other pictures as well.
I'm not cowed from the hobby, but I don't think I'll put up any more pictures without taking the time to get some decent ones taken with a decent camera and photographer. No offense intended to my wife, but I felt like a motorized tripod with a remote would've been a better setup. Alright, I guess I intend a little offense with that comment. Anyways, the point is that this first frustrating entrance in no way dissuades me from cosplay. Expect to see a lot more on that in the future.
Another article series that needs posting: Nerd Level Up Program. A simple series of fitness and general wellness goals I've set for myself, I've already hit enough of my modest goals that I've essentially backlogged two or three level up posts. This actually dovetails with my interest in cosplay, but working out regularly was one of those things that was always a part of my holistic life goals.
My RPG muscles are starting to atrophy. I haven't sat down for a proper tabletop session in well over a year, and the lack of RPG goodness in my life is really unacceptable. On the homefront, I'm this close to actually doing verifiable work cleaning out my dungeon basement game room and facilitating game play down there. On the blog front, though, I've been planning a couple of things for a while. The GURPS Centurion project is still under way--more character write-ups and eventually several comic pages.
I try to keep a bead on the search terms that bring people to my blog, and every once in a while I come across a really unusual set of search terms. Months ago, I found a particularly interesting phrase on my stats page: "GM tips for scaring their players." My my my. I just love that there is a GM out there looking for tips to scare their players. So at some point in the future I want to make an article of tips for getting emotional reactions from your players: fear, sadness, awe, and elation.
On the back of my embarrassing cosplay failure, I decided to throw myself into the concerns of others, like an infested Terran from Starcraft. In the middle of my clumsy cosplay sprint, I got in touch with one of the fine members of Grievance Gaming, Shrivasta, about helping their group with a charity drive for Extra Life. Here's a little statement from Shrivasta about the event, coming up November 2nd:
As many of you know, Grievance will be participating in Extra Life next month on November 2nd, 2013. Extra Life began in 2008 as a way of honoring a young lady named Victoria Enmon. Tori’s battle against acute lymphoblastic leukemia inspired the Sarcastic Gamer Community in a way that is difficult to describe. Members sent in video games and bought gifts to keep Tori’s spirits up despite numerous hospital stays and three bouts with the deadly disease.
Tragically, Tori lost her battle with cancer in January 2008.
Since then, the gaming community at large has participated in the Extra Life project, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in the US as well as Canada! This year is no exception. In November, thousands of gamers will be participating in a 25 hour marathon gaming session for charity!
This will be the first Extra Life team for Grievance, and we aim to make it an annual tradition. We’ll not only be taking pledges for the hours played, but we will also be auctioning off items to the community to raise additional money for Extra Life as well.
I've been a fan of Extra Life for some time, and the Grievance Gaming guild is a fun group of gamers, so when I happened across Shrivasta on Facebook, I decided to do a little something myself. Since I'd made some paperweight-sized ODST (from the Halo franchise) helmets in the past, I thought it'd be great to make one with a custom base and a medic paint-job and add it to the Grievance auction. Here's a picture of the early print of the model, before I got really hands on with the piece.
Please spread the word about this worthy cause and seriously consider donating. And if you want your own ODST medic sitting on your desk, be sure to get in touch for that auction.
So all this stuff is nice enough, but it doesn't mean too much if I'm not going to post regularly, does it? Well, the number of followers I currently have means I need to post at least twice a week, but over the past three months or so I figure you readers have a back log of 31 posts. So as I get back into blogging here, I'm going to try my level best to put in an extra 31 posts (in addition to the two weekly you've already earned), so that by December 31, 2013 you should have just as many posts in the past year as though I hadn't been MIA the past three and a half months. I don't know how reasonable that will be, but it's a good goal to close out the year, and it's quite obvious I've got enough content lined up to fill those spots.
Man, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.
On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.
If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) interview with Larry Hryb (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:
"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"
"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"
"You're not on the development team, are you?"
And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:
1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers. If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.
2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information. Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.
Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: they would reverse their DRM and online policies, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.
More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.
And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, jumped in to defend Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the Gears of War franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his eloquent erroneous defense of their plans, he's sounding off that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.
What it is:Fairytale Games is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a Hunger Games sort of scenario.
Why it's exciting: The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.
What it is:Anthymn is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.
Why it's exciting: This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)
What it is: Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's The Thing, throw in a global apocalypse and old school Fallout-style gameplay, and you have Frozen State, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.
Why it's exciting: I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.
Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year Pathfinder, Battletech, Star Wars, Cosmic Patrol, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.
So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?
Getting daddied up.
Again.
Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)
Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.
The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the Disney Alien Encounter, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.
And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.
So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.
Today's post has been a long time in coming. Like 22 years in coming. Accordingly, it's super long.
A little while ago, I got to cross a big entry off my personal, nerdy bucket list. I got some actual stick time in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. Now it may be hard to appreciate why that was such a big life moment for me, so let me rewind things a bit. Say about, oh...two decades ago, more or less. When I was a lowly little five year-old with a whole nerdy life ahead of me.
My mother wanted to move down to Houston, Texas, where my grandfather was "living" at the time. I say "living" because after spending a summer and a half in Houston, I've determined that no one actually lives in Houston. At least not in the summer. Instead, they melt and dip in and out of a constant state of humid, clammy heat stroke while shuffling from one climate-controlled environment to another. Living in Houston in the summer is kind of like living in a state of reverse cryogenic freezing: you're only alive and active when in confined, artificially cooled spaces; the rest of the time you're in a state of quasi-death. And that's forgetting the insane proliferation of cockroaches in the area--huge, impossibly numerous, and insidious. Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout. In any case, my family decided to move down to Houston. Out of ignorance. And my mother and I moved down there in May 1990 to start looking for houses while my brother and father tried to wrap things up in Illinois.
So the two of us moved into a small Houston apartment, and with no friends and only a handful of toys to play with, I immediately fell back on my favored tools of entertainment: pencil and paper. I up-ended a moving box and slid it against a wall in the corner, and then I began plastering images on my large, double-wide pad of drawing paper. The first drawing was a space battle, with X-wings detonating Tie fighters while Star Destroyers looked on helplessly. I taped that to the wall just above the cardboard box. I then sketched out the cockpit controls for an X-wing fighter, which I knew by memory (I vividly recall as a five-year-old considering every visit to the video store a tacit pledge to rent one of the Star Wars trilogy). The controls I taped down to the top of the moving box. Then, sitting in front of the wall, I piloted my hastily improvised space fighter into harrowing dogfights and epic space battles, hands holding an invisible control stick and pounding the scrawled out buttons in quick succession to realign my deflector screens and adjust my targeting computer. I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast. I grew up on Star Wars and old scratchy VHS recordings of Battlestar Galactica, and space battles have always kept me up at night.
"Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout."
Another life support function in Houston was the arcade. In a region where the summer is full of weekly reports of heat stroke deaths, parents are rather less eager to pack their kids into plastic tubes in outdoor playgrounds, apparently. So everywhere we went in Houston we tripped over the most God-blessed bounty of video arcades I have ever known. Places like McDonald's substituted their playgrounds with attached arcades, and shopping malls had elaborate, sprawling video game arenas that compared to nothing else I've seen in my life except the ill-fated Disney Quest ten years later. Yes, Houston may have been the worst region to settle, in my opinion, but once there those Texans accidentally made themselves a nerd haven where you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a video game cabinet.
At the shopping mall my family went to, they had a massive arcade that featured a bank of eight Mechwarrior simulator cockpits that were the precursor to the Tesla Pods I've raved about in the past. They had surround sound, multiple monitors, and banks of sexy working buttons and control surfaces. I was in love. But my ten year-old brother, in a pique of superiority, informed me that it was way too expensive: a five minute match in the simulators would blow half of my arcade allowance. "And besides," he'd tell me in that big brother way, "you wouldn't know what to do with all those buttons and controls. It'd be a waste of money." But for my brother, apparently, it was right up the future pilot's alley, and the fifth-grade schmuck would proceed to hop into matches and whoop and holler and throw his Mad Cat mech into the thick of missile-firing fights and laser-burning bust-ups. He'd even had the audacity to occasionally pull some of my share of the arcade allowance to get in extra matches, and I was stupidly ensorcelled enough by the explosions and sci-fi gratification of watching from afar that I would usually let him.
"I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it
would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner,
muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a
blast."
We didn't move to Houston. My family collectively bailed out on the humidity capital of the country after less than six months. But the glories of the Houston arcade scene and the dream of the simulator cockpit (also known as a simpit) have stuck with me ever since.
Which I'm sure you've guessed by now.
That was also the year that a certain game called Wing Commander came out. A space sim in which the player got to slip into the cockpit of a fighter and partake in interstellar wars, it was the ultimate boon to my fevered brain, letting me fire blasters and pull extravagant maneuvers to shake enemies off my six. The following year, Wing Commander II came out, and we played that one to death, too. And when I say we, I mean I would harangue my brother into booting up the game on our cyclopean* DOS machine and then I'd bumper-car my way through space until he'd get fed up and take over. Which was often necessary, because I could get Angel killed in the easiest of fur-balls. Not to mention I had a knack for blasting through missions by the skin of my teeth and missing all chances for extra objectives and commendations. It was great. And it lasted for just one more year before we converted to a Mac family and my gaming life shifted to real-time strategy games like Warcraft and, eventually, Myth. Even when Wing Commander got ported to Mac, I didn't get as into it. Maybe it was no longer being threatened by my brother for every botched Immelmann turn, or maybe it was that the game lost its mystique when it wasn't hidden behind an inscrutable DOS command line, but I didn't keep up with the rest of the series.
Years passed and I always looked back on Wing Commander fondly. My brother and I got into Mechwarrior 2 and tossed around simpit ideas until he got fed up with my "strategy" of attacking his Atlas-class mechs with gnat-sized Elementals, which often resulted in five to ten minutes of me hovering around him, unable to cause any damage but impossible to hit with the mechanical titan. My brother joined the Air Force and relegated all our nerdy past-times to me while he went off and, y'know, flew actual planes. The Wing Commander movie came out, and I stubbornly still enjoy it no matter what the rest of the world says. Heck, I'm listening to its soundtrack right now. But there's been nothing like those years in the early 90s, when the Mechwarrior simpits and original Wing Commander games were freshly ingrained in my fantasies. Both genres declined--the first reduced itself to more and more shallow action games, and the latter faded away in the midst of game developer takeovers. Playing a worthy simpit game remained fixed on my bucket list, but it was such a dim hope I was barely conscious of it most of the time.
Then I got to play in the Tesla Pods last year, and reality didn't even remotely quench the nerd-fire that burned for simpits. It heightened its roar, and within days of that experience, I started in on ludicrous plans of building my own sci-fi simpit. I could start with a cockpit, and then maybe build off of that into having a simulated bridge for a capital ship--that'd be the ultimate family gaming experience, me barking out orders while managing damage control and ordering my son to launch a fighter and keep the bombers off us. Oh yes, that'd be sweet. I researched games that might fit these lofty ambitions, looking especially for ones that had good mod support so I could conceivably rework everything to fit my vision of space. There were a few that looked promising, but I passed on all of them for one reason or another. And then, most ridiculous of all, I began researching the idea of making my own game. Sure, it would be clunky and ugly as sin, but I could always make it look like a stylized icon system, right? It'd be just like the Command School from Ender's Game.
Not even my boundless enthusiasm could BS me for long, though. That was an insane idea that would never happen. I'd never make my own game, and no one was making the sort of game I wanted. Nothing was going to come along and justify the huge effort of building a simpit, and nothing would be worthy of it if I ever made one anyways. The space simulator genre was dead.
Then last fall brought with it a new dawn. A project popped up on Kickstarter called Star Citizen. It was the first game in ten years that Chris Roberts would be making.
Chris Roberts.
His name had tickled my ears the first time I saw the Star Citizen campaign page, but I didn't realize what I was in for until I watched the KS video and virtually soiled my actual chair:
"They said I was dead. They said console was the future. Now they say mobile and tablets are the future. I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am a PC game."
Waaah! Glory shot of the Bengal carrier.
"And I am a space sim."
Oh, those first 30 seconds of that video grabbed me by my childhood fantasies and has not let go of me since. I can't watch it without getting excited. Chris Roberts was the creator of the Wing Commander franchise, and he was coming back to the game industry to make something gloriously ambitious. I pledged to the campaign immediately and followed the updates doggedly, as every new addition to the project's goals brought it closer to everything I've wanted from sci-fi gaming:
Sprawling, fully-realized ship interiors. Star Citizen is going to allow the player to explore larger ships, walking down the corridors and into the bridge of carriers and other capital ships. What's more, since the game is going to feature seamless transitions (ie, no load screens) from in-cockpit action to walking around your mother ship, the interiors of the ships are actually going to be consistent with the physical shape of the ship. Unlike the Normandy from Mass Effect, which is depicted as physically smaller and the wrong shape to accommodate the interior spaces you explore in the course of the game.
Out-of-cockpit gameplay. In addition to being able to simply walk around and idly explore in the innards of your big ships, Star Citizen is going to include a shooter-like experience for boarding actions. This integration and mingling of the two genres is going to be inspired, as you know I kept wishing for some space-combat crossover in the Mass Effect series and never got it. Now Star Citizen promises to give capital ship action, fighter brawls, and man-to-man gunfights in tight-packed ship corridors. It's like Chris Roberts has a checklist of my favorite recurring dreams. If there are cute redheaded witches, bottomless tubs full of spiders, and machine zombie hordes, it'll be official--he's ripping off my REM cycle.
A vast forking campaign based on performance and decisions. Long before Bioware ever gave you a non-choice at the end of an epic game, the Wing Commander series had them licked with a campaign that featured meaningfully divergent endings. Endings were based on direct plot choices and mission performance, so just barely clearing your mission objectives as opposed to wiping the board completely might change what your resolution was. They're going to be bringing that legacy back for Star Citizen, and since they've announced 50 missions for the main campaign of Star Citizen (called Squadron 42), I wouldn't be surprised if some of those missions were mutually exclusive based on what path you take your pilot through the plot. Tasty. Persistent universe. The most exciting and lauded aspect of the game is Star Citizen's ongoing online experience. A variation of an MMO, Star Citizen proposes to let players shape a dynamic economy and play the game the way they want to play it. If that involves mining, trading, and exploring more than direct combat, that's cool with them. And that's very cool with me. I'm always a fan of games that let you go off the rails, even if I find myself not wanting to do so.
Playable capital ships. This was a later stretch goal met in the incredibly successful pledge campaign, and it promises to allow players to potentially gain control of ships as large as their mile-long carrier ships in the final version of the game. This goes hand in hand with cooperative and social play, as even some of their smaller ships are said to be nerfed if you don't have meat in all the crew seats. The 4-man Constellation ship, for instance, will feature two manned turrets and a detachable short-range fighter (a la the Serenity's two shuttles) in addition to the ship's pilot. Beyond that, you'd be looking at dedicated guilds needed just to get the most out of destroyer, cruiser, or carrier-class ship.
Mod support. With how great the core game is shaping up to be, and how visceral and engaging, I feel like this feature is almost perfunctory. But then I think about trying to model a full-scale battlestar in Star Citizen and scramble out in a viper (mk II, of course) to scrap a toaster onslaught. Ooookay...maybe I do still want mod support. And since they're talking about using that as a way to test the feasibility of fan-created additions to the game, I can definitely see me spending a lot of time turning some of my rough designs into something fully realized for this game.
Support for multiple monitors and multi-function displays (MFDs), TrackIR, and advanced controllers. And there it is. Star Citizen is going to support the ultimate simpit gaming rig with this simple promise. You want a three monitor display wrapping in front of you? Okay. How about a dedicated screen for your sensors? Sure. Joysticks, throttles, keyboards, and gamepads? Whoa whoa whoa now--you're a little nuts, aren't ya? That my friends, is a game that isn't simply worthy of the simpit I've been dreaming of these past 22 years--it demands one. Never mind that I'm a more artistic, fine detail sort of builder with minimal wood-working experience. Never mind that I've never wired anything like this before. Never mind that I will building the first PC of my very own from scratch to form the heart of the ultimate gaming rig (that I can afford). It is going to happen. It must happen. So let it be written; so let it be done.
Cloud Imperium Games is collectively working on realizing my dream game and the dream of tens of thousands of gamers all over the world. It's safe to say I'm going to be blogging more about the different aspects of this game in the future. I've already posted at least one article's worth on the subject of space mining in Star Citizen on the website's forums. I'll also be chronicling my progress as I work on my simpit and related projects for this game, so don't worry: I didn't run out of words with this article.
More's the pity, right?
*Seriously, Google spellcheck? You don't know the word 'cyclopean'?!?
I need to start off with that, because this post might make you think otherwise. Starting with a title that asserts that parenthood is where bachelors go when their wicked days are over doesn't help either, I'm sure.
Raising a toddler is like living with a super-villain from a really bad, cliched comic-book. You start out with an origin story whose popularity is directly related to a gory and outlandish event. In this case, it's the miracle horror of childbirth. Then, you have the super-villain's pathetic phase. This is when his clothes don't match or fit, he's too inept to do anything much except try to snatch whatever falls in his lap. He's bad at it, so you don't give it much thought and you don't crack down on him too hard.
You put him behind bars, which is a big mistake.
In comic books, imprisoned super-villains fall into two categories: those who brood and wait to be broken out, and those who become more powerful and dastardly, crafting terrible plans and developing new strategies, and eventually break themselves out.
Toddlers are like that villain when he's figured out the guards' patrols and has lined up his heroic nemesis' weakness. They learn the combination of the cute d-bag and exploit it without mercy. You try to establish a routine or interrupt their plans, and they devastate you with an impromptu red-faced hissy fit, tossing and turning on the floor. This will often happen in public, because toddlers--like burgeoning super-villains--love to have an audience of idiot innocent bystanders. Also like in the comics, the innocent bystanders will stand around and watch rather than help or get out of the way.
"Raising a toddler is like living with a super-villain from a really bad, cliched comic-book."
And every good super-villain prides himself on ruining the hero's most special moments. Killing their romantic interests is usually a safe bet for the comic book antagonist, and a savvy toddler will try to do the same between mommy and daddy. The constant assault on the daddy's literal progenitor is usually a great and easily repeated way of doing it, especially when coupled with the NRBB--No Reason Bedtime Bonk. That's when you're in bed, and your loving wife innocently invites the toddler in just so he can smack your junk before bed. Or better yet: to start your day. It's a real Folger's moment: "The best part of waking up is drop-heel to your nuts."
But the thing that is most precious to the father of a toddler: Saturday morning. The chance--or rather, the illusion of a chance--to sleep in is one of the most dizzyingly sweet rewards you can get after a long week of working, daddying, and nerding. And the boy envies that most of all. He sets his sights on your Saturday morning, puts wheels in motion, and without fail your precious sack-time is twisted into a morass of growling threats and red-faced mortal combat.
"...toddlers--like burgeoning super-villains--love to have an audience of idiot innocent bystanders."
For instance...
A few months ago, I was stupidly innocently under the impression that I might get to sleep in on a Saturday morning. My dearest went to work early that morning without waking up The Boy, which I took to be a good sign. (Comic book wisdom: not getting any recent reports of activity from your arch-nemesis is always a bad sign.) Then, when seven o'clock rolled around he made his strike, opening with the familiar cute-jerk combo:
"Daddy. Up. Up Daddy."
Ugh. I rolled over and flopped a stubbornly-still-sleeping hand towards my cell-phone-cum-alarm-clock. I only wanted to sleep until eight. Just an hour more... I rolled over an glared a twilight-myopic Telltale Heart eye at the door and the imagined baby assaulting my sleep, saying:
"B'cky! Jus' gimm 'ther m'nut sleep!" My face was still buried in the pillow, and my mind still trying to latch back onto my recurring Terminator dream.
"Up. Up. Daddy. Up." He said insistently, but without variation.
I shut my eyes. If he wasn't going to raise his voice, cry, or start doing damage, I was just going to phone it in, too. My eyelids shuttered and rolled me back into the skull-infested future where only I could save the girl from the endless hordes of stupidly slow zombie-machines. Du-dut-dut...du-DUT! Du-dut-dut...du-DUT!
My eyes snapped open. I sucked in breath and felt my chest seize in Dad-panic.
I don't hear anything.
"No, no, no, no," I babble as I flop out of bed and tilt on unsteady legs to the bedroom door, without glasses or any clothing other than socks and my Captain America boxer-briefs. (Yes, I have a pair, and yes you can see them.) I swing it open: oh good--his door's still closed. But there's plenty of danger in his own room for The Boy to find, and I needed to check on him.
"Comic book wisdom: not getting any recent reports of activity from your arch-nemesis is always a bad sign."
I open the door and see my son. Naked.
"Pshew!" The Boy says, throwing both his hands forward in an Iron Man dual-repulsor blast.
A gullible and sleep-derived lunatic, I fall into the trap and smile at my cute, R-rated Marvel fan. Then I go to the side of his crib to scoop him up and put some decency on him. I step into a puddle of pee on the carpet beside his crib. Pretty fresh, too (I'm ashamed to say I know), because it was still a puddle and sitting more or less on top of the carpet--all the better to soak into my socks. Then, as I overcame the urine-shock and went to pick up my son, I noticed a brown smudge on his crib sheet. And blanket. And an overturned, wadded up diaper.
I trembled in horror as my nose testified to the chilling truth. My son, who was now sweetly cuddling against me, with both arms wrapped around me and his head on my shoulder, was covered in excrement. From his jaw to his pudgy toes, he was a giggling smear of poo. And there were chunks that were big enough to rub off on me. Now, I couldn't very well let him go--I wasn't going to have him Cat in the Hat Comes Back his pestilence all over the house--so I had to hold him tightly against me with one arm while the other stripped off the crib bedding and tried to clean his mess as best as I could. And meanwhile, my suddenly affectionate son decided to rub my hair.
Oh yes. Mine is a truly diabolical son.
So we hopped into the shower together and shared a good cry while I tried to put to rest this insidious dream of a nice Saturday morning.
What's more, later investigation revealed that the pee had not gotten within the confines of the crib at all. The pint-sized mastermind must have pooped, stripped his diaper, rolled around, and then stuck his winky through the crib bars to deliberately pee onto the floor where the dreaded Daddy would stand.
Yesterday was Memorial Day, and though I already posted about the holiday this week, I have a bit more to say that strikes a much more
personal note. But before I get started, let me offer two warnings. This post is something of a conceptual spoiler for Ender's Game. It's not a particularly bad spoiler--nothing you wouldn't get from reading the back of the sequel Speaker for the Dead--but if you are very spoiler sensitive, you may want to skip today's post. The second warning: this post is rather more serious than most of my articles on this blog. If you're new here, this post is an important link in the chain of my blog, but it may not be representative of the tone and content I strive to achieve here. I suggest reading some of my posts from this past weekend instead to get a better feel for Ben's Nerdery.
Seriously now, the spoilers shall flow. And probably also some sissy tears. You've been warned.
I've talked a little bit in the past about the profound impact Ender's Game had on me as a young fan of science-fiction. The drama and the kid-centric cast, the strategy and meditative tone, the spectacle of the battle room and the culture of the school, all helped it to affect me greatly. But nothing moved me quite so much as the concept of the Speaker for the Dead. The concept is introduced after Ender completely annihilates the alien Buggers threatening humanity and is confronted by the psychological immensity of what he did while conversing with the last queen of the entire alien species. It's a philosophical breakthrough for Ender, for the Buggers (Formics, to be politically-correct), and for the masses of humanity who read the Speaker for the Dead memoir and establish a cultural role around it. It's a cathartic moment of truth and acceptance, where Ender anonymously pens the misunderstanding from the aliens' point of view and in turn dispels the hatred, fear, and confusion left in the aftermath of his own actions. His work isn't just accepted as a way to honor the essentially-extinct Buggers specifically, it's also promulgated throughout human culture as a typical role at funerals. The Speaker for the Dead is a sort of investigator invited into the lives of the bereaved, hunting for truth and clarity. The Speaker isn't concerned with honoring the dead with flattery, but with objectivity and scrutiny, and when they speak at a funeral they share a sort of homily that conveys who the deceased really was--including their flaws, their secrets, and their impact on those around them. I find it a profoundly moving concept, and one I've carried with me for almost 15 years now.
Some time ago I mentioned a rather unpleasant experience where my wife, toddler, and I took a flight out to California. That weekend was for my grandfather's funeral--the last of my grandparents, and the one I've always wanted to understand and know the most. I never really got to know him all that well, but his legacy permeates my mother's family and everything I am today. And I can't think of a better time to be his Speaker for the Dead than the day after Memorial Day. It's worth pointing out that I'm neither objective nor an investigator, and I do want to honor my grandfather's memory with love as well as truth. So while I'm a poor Speaker in that sense, this needs to be said and would never be said by anyone else.
"Seriously now, the spoilers shall flow. And probably also some sissy tears. You've been warned."
When I talk about Grandpa, let's get an outrageous assertion out of the way: he's a greater hero than Captain America. I don't just refer to his heroic service in World War Two, but also to his legacy as a father and later in life as a stubbornly social and outgoing person. For the faults he certainly had--the ones I recall and the ones I'll never know about--I truly wish I was more like him, and I'll always feel like every mistake I make is falling short of his example.
Grandpa grew up in a patriotic family of four high-spirited brothers and three sisters. Each of the brothers were named after a president of the United States. No kidding. Grandpa was the second youngest of them, but that didn't prevent him from joining his older brothers in fights that always sounded to me like sober bar brawls. Their father also supported Germany in the 1930s, and as Grandpa's oldest brother saw the way politics were going at the end of 1941, he took it upon himself to set his brothers straight: they should not talk about their father and his political views to their friends. They would disown him on an ideological level. Grandpa was maybe 14 at the time. I can't fathom what that was like, and I thankfully will never have to. My greatest divide with my father is over watching subtitled movies.
Not only did my grandfather distance himself from his own father's views, but in 1944--at the age of seventeen--he enlisted, underage, into the United State Marine Corps, trained at Camp Pendleton, and was shipped out to fight in Okinawa, Japan. He fought throughout the close of the Pacific campaign, and in the process he brought back his share of incredible stories, scars, and a spiritual side delivered through an artillery shell. A side he certainly never had as a brawling German boy in Texas. He'd been sitting in a foxhole in the Pacific, huddled in the dark of night as bullets sprayed the area and a heavy barrage of artillery was tearing shrapnel through the air. He'd say that the artillery would come down in these arcs of ground-shaking explosions across the landscape. Boom. Boom. Boom. Tracing lines of craters as they demolished men in their foxholes. And he could here a line of death coming towards him, the shells raining down closer and closer to his position. Boom. Boom. BOOM. Thud. Just as the shells had zeroed in on him, a dud landed just feet away from him, within his own foxhole. And that's when Grandpa decided to talk to one of the chaplains in his unit.
"The Speaker for the Dead is a sort of investigator invited into the lives of the bereaved, hunting for truth and clarity."
He became a marine chaplain's aide, later going to seminary to become a Baptist pastor and raise a family in Southern California after the war. He married and had five children living in California. And then he got divorced, stepped down from the church he'd been ministering to, and moved to Texas. I never knew much about this more than what I just shared. Something happened, and growing up I knew never to ask my mother about it--a sage decision based on how she'd cry whenever I tried to pin down details. And as my Grandpa married a woman my mother's age in Texas and had three more children, the assumption in my mind growing up had always been that he had done something. He left, he abandoned my mother's family when she was in college and her two younger siblings still at home.
My mind naturally inserted slander to connect the dots of what I knew had happened and what must have led to it. There was no malice in it, and I wasn't even that far off in my conclusions, but they were still just assumptions, and I had nothing to put in its place in my perceptions until I was twenty-six years old. And even then, my mother could only share it with my wife--I've never heard the details myself. My Grandpa had been having affairs, and between his own guilt and the rumors, he soon was asked to leave the church in the midst of his marriage breaking up. With my grandmother raising the children, I suppose it was all he could do to get away from the stigma to head back to Texas, where he'd grown up.
My grandfather aged and lived his life in Texas, quite separate from the rest of my mother's family, for some time. I wouldn't say he aged gracefully, but he aged exuberantly. He rode horses and played pranks and was always a social bee. He got divorced a second time, had a couple of heart attacks, and finally a stroke drove him from his home in Texas back to California to be attended by his eldest daughter. I'd visited him a few times in Texas and knew him then as a head-strong crazy driver, a witty back-talker, and spoiling push-over who couldn't say no his younger kids or his grandchildren. But it was only after the medical problems, the wandering through his empty house and helping pack up his belongings, that I started to get a picture of the man. He was proud, ashamed of getting old, and had trouble letting go of the insanely fit young fighter he once was. The war still haunted him, especially so later in life as his health and focus declined, and above all he never stopped loving everyone he met. We'd be at a restaurant and he'd strike up a conversation with a bus-boy or try to hook the waitress up with my older brother. He never had trouble seeing the person behind the role or the function society placed on them--he always saw and addressed the individual in front of him.
Not long after Grandpa's stroke the World War Two memorial in Washington, DC was completed. My aunt and cousin brought him out to DC, where my family met them and spent the weekend touring the capital. Grandpa was only able to walk a few steps at a time, and even then he needed someone to hold onto him and keep him balanced. If no one was attending him, he'd lean progressively further and further forward, his short bow-legged strides becoming a faster and faster shuffle as he'd inevitably fall over. My cousin was a high-schooler at the time and she'd never exactly been built for helping one hundred sixty-pound septuagenarians around, so I took it upon myself to be his wheelchair chauffeur (and walker when he got too stubborn to point). I was eminently proud of myself that weekend. Not for the service itself, but for being attached to a man that I'd respected so much--and in a place specifically geared to honor him. I was his color guard--a slack, unfit civilian in glasses to guard a hero from Okinawa from falling on the concrete.
"...a head-strong crazy driver, a witty back-talker, and spoiling push-over who couldn't say no his younger kids or his grandchildren."
When we got to the memorial itself--the field of gold stars projecting out from the marble arc--Grandpa just had to get out of his wheelchair. Wearing a light jacket and USMC WWII Veteran cap, his arms and legs quivered as he pushed off of me to come to the best state of attention he could manage. His eyes slowly surveyed the memorial, and by that point I was certain that each one inspired a vivid memory from the war--and probably also of a time where his body wasn't constantly betraying him with frailty. Then he saluted, and stood a little bit taller. I held my hands just below his armpits in case he started to lose his balance, but he held that salute for what felt like a good minute before slowly going back at ease and wobbling back into my arms. Drained, he sunk back into his wheelchair, probably as out of breath from the emotions as from the exertion itself. My whole family was worked up at that point, and my mother and her sister were gushing over Grandpa and hugging him when a woman a little bit younger than my parents came up to him.
"I'm sorry, but could I just say thank you for what you've done?" she asked. "For serving this country?"
Now, I have a defiant streak in me a mile long, and this was after I'd read The Things They Carried, so I felt an urge to go Tim O'Brien on this woman. "For what he's done? What do you know about what he's done? You want to thank him for wearing a cap and looking like a sad old man, a great photo op, but do you care about what he's thinking right now? Probably hating that the prime of his life is tattered by these traumatic memories, that memories of youth for him are memoirs of death? I'm sure him being here, weak and emotionally raw, just makes your day, lady. A real nice visit to the World War Two Memorial..." But Grandpa was a better man than me that day.
"I was his color guard--a slack, unfit civilian in glasses to guard a hero from Okinawa from falling on the concrete."
"What's your name?" he asked, weakly shaking the woman's hand as she started to well up with tears. He then talked to her, and asked if she had any family who had served. I don't remember her replies, but I remember the way Grandpa, in a moment where I could only imagine feeling bitterness and resentment, took the time to talk to a random stranger and focus on making her feel good. Of course, we were surrounded by women at this point--the stranger, my cousin, my mom, and my aunt--so making her feel good meant that they all started sobbing while I stood amazed at the long-suffering smile on my grandfather's face.
That was nine years ago.
Since then I'd made countless pledges to chronicle Grandpa's life--to sit down and interview him while his senility still left him a spry conversationalist. College stymied that for a little while, and then his health slipped. He lost the ability to reliably focus on phone conversations, and the last time he visited, five years ago for my wedding, he struggled to keep conversations going at the best of times. I prayed that he'd get better, and swore that when he did, when I could interview him, I would write down his story, in his words, and know the man.
He never got better. And then, years later when I brought my family to his memorial service and held my son while talking about my hero and a man he'd never meet, it struck me how unfair it all was. That I'd never hear these stories in his own words, never learn how a German scrapper from Texas ever became such a mild and playful pastor. Never how he endured the shame of his own weakness and divorce, or what he was thinking when he first enlisted. Instead, he's dead. Dead and gone to a better place. And I'm left with only a vague composite testimonial instead of a relationship with my grandfather. I want to be bitter, to indulge in it. But then I think of that day in DC. I think of those feet shuffling in worn loafers across the concrete, and the way his stride would get faster and faster and then finally his knees would buckle under the strain of his pace. And on that February day, as I listened to family talking about Grandpa, I understood the man: he wasn't falling. His body may have been feeble, but he never lost his eagerness, that sparkle in his eyes that was just as likely to come from a visit from his nurse as talking to a janitor at his hospital. He had limitless energy, and that shuffle wasn't a fall--it was him rushing. Always eager, always wanting to set his own pace. And even in the end, when I'm sure it seemed like he was falling to the limits of his body, I know my Grandpa--he was just in a hurry.
I know this has been a long post, and I appreciate anyone who's read it through this far, since there's been scant humor or conspicuous nerdiness. But in being the Speaker for my Grandpa, I want to share with you a little bit of what drives me as an individual, a father, a son, and yes, even as a nerd. You see, Captain America is a great cartoon figure--a stylized and gratifyingly entertaining symbol of the greatest generation. But Grandpa, he simply is the greatest generation. He joined when everything stood against him and fought just as bravely as any man did. Then he went home and lived a life and fought a thousand other battles. He won and lost some, and even his family misunderstood him, failed to appreciate him, and abandoned him at one point or another. He still failed, still loved, still tried, and still reached out to family, friends, and strangers with a warmth I will never fully understand. He was a fighter. He was a flawed man. He was a soldier. Grandpa.
I hope you had a great Memorial Day. And I promise more snarky humor and frothing fandom tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. In the past, I've written about the history of the holiday and listed off several suggested nerdy activities related to honoring those who've sacrificed their lives for others. I have a strong military tradition on both sides of my family, so this holiday is particularly important to me. My father, my grandfather, and several of my uncles have all served in the military, and their service informs who I am and how I think. My brother serves in the Air Force today, and one of my highest priorities as a father is to ensure that my sons grow up honoring and appreciating the military legacy of my family. But since I'm just a civilian and a nerd, I approach this problem from a different angle.
So today, I'm going to spotlight a special event that happens every year in Union, Illinois. The Illinois Railway Museum hosts a reenactment weekend each May called "WWII Living History Days." This event features the museum grounds as a parallel for the strategic rail-yards of Anzio, Italy in 1944. With over 150 re-enactors dressed as Allied soldiers, German soldiers, partisans, and civilians, they set up camp around the open lawns of the museum grounds and occupy the period-authentic trains and trolleys that guests can ride. And all of this culminates in a pitched battle as Allied forces assault German positions over a quarter mile of scrap yard and rails.
Military reenactments are a fairly common staple in the midwest, and I've probably gone to at least a dozen Civil War reenactments throughout my life. But this was the first I'd ever been to that was set in World War Two. For those of you who don't know, reenactments are like interactive performance theater with an emphasis on education and authenticity over individual characterization. So a bit more museum docent than Tony and Tina's Wedding, but still with an eye towards entertaining and engaging youngsters as much as any dinner theater. Of course, I don't know of any dinner theater with firearms and tactical maneuvering, so a good reenactment blows them out of the water right there. Now if someone made a Godfather dinner theater experience, wow. That'd be cool.
"But since I'm just a civilian and a nerd, I approach this problem from a different angle."
This was another event that my wife and I had heard of years ago when she was first pregnant, but we didn't want to try it then because we were stupid first time parents scared of every time our unborn son got the hiccups. At least my wife was, and I was just too cowed by the whole Alien-like process to make any imperative suggestions. This year, my wife was hugely 8-months' pregnant, but neither of us were really all that worried about anything other than the process of waddling her onto the 1940s passenger car. Plus, my son is a fanatic for trains, and so we made this year the first for yet another annual outing.
Stepping past the gates onto the grounds of the Illinois Railway Museum, we found a small camp of several tents belonging to Allied forces, completely decked with bedrolls, cots, personal gear, and a selection of weapons. Re-enactors in uniform squatting on camp stools swapped stories and would explain the significance of their paraphernalia to anyone with questions. Opposite them was a train platform with a 1940s passenger train taking on riders. We got aboard--I'm not sure how my wife hefted herself aboard, as I was carrying my son who was bucking for my vitals in mad locomotive mania--and shortly after we took our seats, some squads of the occupying forces lined up on the platform and boarded as well.
"Now if someone made a Godfather dinner theater experience, wow. That'd be cool."
The train took us out to the far end of the museum's property, stopping on the way for the Germans to pile out and capture an American flight crew. One of the pilots was brought aboard and kept under armed guard just a few seats behind us. A German officer tried to recruit my son to watch over the prisoner, but my boy was conscientiously uncooperative towards that assignment. Mostly, he was too busy chanting "faster, puffpuffpuff, train go faster!" as the wind blew in through open windows through his flaxen hair. On our way back, the train stopped again, this time to pick off some partisans cutting telephone wires. But while the Germans piled out of the train, three jeeps full of American GIs pulled up a nearby road and attacked them. With the train under Allied control, we returned safely to the station where we'd left to amble about the museum freely for a bit.
Toddler snatches canteen in 3...2...1...
You don't amble anywhere freely when you have a toddler. No more than you get to amble freely in a game of tug of war. Even if you're stronger and sure to win, the constant struggle of trying to restrain the rampant, sprint-grab-and-shake interests of a two year-old defines the experience. Sure, we might go where Daddy pushes the stroller or carries the Buck-Buck, but the conflict is what defines the journey, and there is nothing free about it.
"You mean this isn't a gigantic cast-iron jungle gym?!?"
My guy, for instance, loved the playground and picnic area near the trolley station. And apparently by his determination, the trains on display inside the museum buildings were indistinguishable from the brightly colored toddler-friendly playground outside. It didn't matter if he was looking at a sixty foot-long thousand-ton locomotive with six foot-tall wheels and covered in more protruding bolts than Pinhead from Hellraiser, my son wanted to climb it, and fought constantly for the privilege. We got to see some awesome sights though, and our little train-enthusiast was cotton-mouthed with panting joy throughout the afternoon.
The highlight for me, though, was the battle of the rail-yard in the mid-afternoon. The crack-crack-pow of eardrum-splitting rounds going off was a lot of fun, and put me at once in the middle of my favorite movies, vague histories, and secondhand family stories. It also freaked the crap out of my son. Even though he was at least thirty yards away from any of the noisemakers, he looked about as worked up and flushed as my childhood Cocker Spaniel in the middle of a thunderstorm. Which was license enough for mom to call a hasty retreat and end to our day, even with the echoing crack of rifle fire pinging off sheet-metal buildings around us as we left.
"You don't amble anywhere freely when you have a toddler."
If you are in the Midwest next May, I strongly suggest you look up the Illinois Railway Museum and see if you have a chance to visit during the re-enactment weekend. And if you're elsewhere in the country, look around for similar events in your region. It's a great visceral way to make learning something insidiously fun and ear-poppingly unforgettable.
UPDATE 5/26/2013: So after rereading this post today, I realized I'd neglected to expound on a lot of key stuff. Some of it I will save for a future post, as I'm having trouble bringing over some of my shaky Cloverfield-esque video, but for now I've expanded the Cosplay section of this post a lot, including a video of the Silent Hill nurse disturbing GenCon.
Today is a very special post.
A titanic post. And not because it's a lumbering, arrogant compensation-device bound to hit the biggest humiliating force of nature in the ultimate example of post-industrial hubris. It's a titanic post because it's huge.
Today's blog is about my impressions of Chicago Comic Entertainment Expo (C2E2) 2013. In a lot of ways, C2E2 was the final impetus that got me back to blogging here on the Nerdery. It's a fantastic convention here in the Midwest that has grown by leaps and bounds since it started in 2010. I'd heard about it in previous years, but never really felt the pull to go. That was largely true this year, too. Despite how much I'd loved attending Fire and Ice, I knew C2E2 would be vastly different and the basement-dwelling homebody nerd inside kept telling me I didn't want to go to such a vast, impersonal convention. Plus, I hate going into the city, and it'd be expensive, and a dozen other chirps of procrastinating unambition from the drowner within. No, I wouldn't go, and I was pretty certain I'd be a happier nerd for it.
That worked well enough until my wife happened to win a pair of weekend passes to C2E2 from a local radio station. Whoa. My cheapskate crutch snapped under its own weight as now the only real cost of C2E2 would be entirely volitional--I'd only spend money if I couldn't keep a steady grip on my wallet. So we'd be going, I reluctantly agreed. Reluctantly still, because that infernal pasty guy who never leaves the game room still wasn't that excited about going. But he was okay with doing research. And research is what did him in.
"It's a titanic post because it's huge."
Just looking over C2E2's website was enough to melt away the pasty contrarian in a wash of pure white fire. Hundreds of artists in Artists' Alley, a huge swathe of the convention floor dedicated to tables for artists from all sorts of comics, each with prints to sell and commissions to take. "Oh, I do love the artwork," crowed the little drowner, rubbing his clammy murderous hands together. "Maybe I could get something with the Avengers in it--or Ms. Marvel. I likes Ms. Marvel..." The creature's resolve was already cloven. Then I went over the guest speakers and panels. "Marvel vice presidents and editors talking about future of comics?" he drooled into my inner monologue, dropping his articles like a slob. That was a sign of weakness, as even the demented internal voices of the Nerdery's fragmented subconscious are grammatical sticklers. Once I clicked on the featured guests, the fight was done. "Ron Perlman?! Hellboy?!" screeched the drowner in helpless fanboy giddiness as I dropped my blessed silver claymore down on his clavicle, splitting him wide. There would be no second thoughts, no hesitation. I would meet the Perlman and would make his signature mine. Oh yes, I would make his signature sit on my Hellboy Director's Cut and it would be most sweet.
And so I went from being staunchly opposed to going to being ravenously excited about the proposition of meeting the man who is the hub of my Movie Web (it all begins and ends with Ron). Not even the brutal and graphically rendered slaying of my slacker subconscious could allay my enthusiasm for leaping into the unknown and coming out with my trophy in the form of Ron Perlman's handle scrawled on my DVD set.
Seriously, my mouth is watering right now.
So I went after all. The first day, Friday, I brought my 14 year-old brother in law because my silly pregnant wife was having a sympathy attack over my two year-old who'd been sick that week. Seriously, the sympathy attack is one of the most illogical and destructive beasts of living with a pregnant woman--and the sympathy never flows towards you, either. It pretty much always opposes your enthusiasms and has water in its eyes even when 'everything is fine'. Bah, I didn't have time for that on April 27--that was my day to capture Ron Perlman's script on my tomes of Hellboy! So I picked up my brother-in-law and we rode the train down into the city, while I gave him a primer on the birds and the bees of comics, Nerdery, and what wonders we would inevitably see (since I knew so much).
"That was a sign of weakness, as even the demented internal voices of the Nerdery's fragmented subconscious are grammatical sticklers."
Saturday my son was feeling better--actually, my son was feeling better on Friday, but after a day of sympathy attacks my wife was feeling better--and so I took the missus with me on the continuing nerd fest while my son terrorized my parents for the day. It was great, and we got to see even more awesomeness, despite being hamstrung by my wife's over-encumbering pregnancy. Although I did find that drafting behind her made navigating the dense crowds of the convention much easier--no one wants to bump into a strange 8-month pregnant lady at a nerd gathering.
Then on Sunday we brought my son. Decked in a Spider-Man hoodie and wide-eyed over the spectacle of getting to ride a train for the first time in his life, and into a tunnel no less, my little sidekick was beside himself with manic joy at the con.
It sucked.
For those of you who are considering bringing a toddler to any convention, let me prepare you for it. First of all, the ladies will constantly be complimenting you on how cute you are with a blonde-haired blue-eyed toddler in your arms. And it is cute. Guys will say it's awesome to see your little Web-head going fwip-fwip to show how he uses his web-shooters. And it is awesome. You'll also have to lug a thirty-five pound snatching kleptomaniac around all day, wrestling him into your arms while he donkey kicks your junk in an effort to get to the toy retailers' alley or to sprint ahead of the line to sit in the Mach 5. You get to watch his hands so he doesn't yank people's hair as countless strangers with fascinating heads pass within claws' reach. Yeah, maybe it is cute. But it's also a pain in the arms, back, and gonads, and people give you funny looks for every tantrum he throws rather than thank you for restraining him from ripping their redheaded wig off at the scalp.
And to top it all off, when my son saw a perfectly realistic Spider-Man posing with other people, he was totally speechless. The shrieker gasped and his slack-jaw look of wonder had all the pronouncing power of an old fish. Just flapping lips, wide-eyes, and a faint press of air that could only vaguely be translated into words.
"Hey, who is that, Bucky?" "Spider-Man."
"Well then, call him."
"Over here, Spider-Man."
"No, Buck, he can't hear you. You gotta call louder." A small pinch on the thigh, trying to either throw some sense into him or encourage him to narc on me to the red and blue hero.
"Spider-Man. Spider-Man come 'ere." As faint as ever, though plaintively urgent this time.
"Hey, Spider-Man! Can we get a picture?" I called out as the cosplayer turned his back and began to move on. I trotted up to Spider-Man and showed him his quiet doppelganger. My son's arms swung wide and he pitched his body forward to embrace Spider-Man and transfer into his arms.
"Spider-Man," he said, voice now contentedly smaller than ever as my wife and I got some of the only pictures of him both awake and still from the whole day. When that was done, he hugged Spider-Man around the neck.
"Bubye, Spider-Man. See you later."
Yeah, maybe it is awesome. But I still don't recommend it.
In the interest of breaking down my impressions into easier-to-digest chunks (yeah, right, like I do that), here's the major categories of attractions at C2E2 that thoroughly enchanted my weekend.
Celebrities
There was a tremendous amount of star power at the con. Convention veterans like Burt Ward and Julie Newmar were there, as well as a bunch of stars from The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Felicia Day, Sam Huntington, and Patton Oswalt were also there meeting fans and signing autographs, but the biggest three in my esteem (other than The Man himself) were the Babylon 5 trinity: Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, and J. Michael Straczynski. I'm actually a very belated fan of Babylon 5, only recruited through Netflix Instant Watch, so I didn't have any signable goodies for them. If I did, you can bet I would've hit them all Friday morning after stopping off at Ron Perlman's table.
Ah, Ron. I was pleasantly surprised that going straight for the autograph tables immediately after getting to the con Friday morning was the way to go. There were hardly any people at all getting autographs yet. Except for Ron. Out of maybe 40 fans getting signatures at that point, I'd guess that twenty of them were in line for him. I felt perversely proud of Mr. Perlman for it.
"I would meet the Perlman and would make his signature mine."
Now, I had a really stupid pact in my mind to be charming and erudite when I met one of my cinema idols. There was a vague scenario sketched in my mind where I could say the right words that would get the celebrity to want to strike up a friendship with me and go play wargames or something. Unfortunately, the Ron Perlman fan in front of me was a svelte She-Hulk wearing booty shorts and a tattered tank top, so by the time I got up to the front of the line of fans all I had really determined was that I should not make an ass of myself. See how that went with my poignantly-remembered transcript:
Taking my Director's Cut in hand, Ron says, "Where would you like me to sign it?"
"Right there on the front," I answer dryly. At this point, I'm thinking: Man, his head is really a normal size. Yeah, I know. Somehow, over the years of seeing him tower over other actors in these grand roles, I'd gotten the impression that he'd make me feel like Frodo's scale double once I met him, never mind the reality that he's only an inch taller than me. So for an awkward silence, I just chanted: Don't talk about the size of his head, Ben. He will totally go Angel on you if you freak out on him. Be cool. So I was being cool. I was also suddenly aware that I was standing in front of Ron Perlman and I wasn't talking--not cool! "I really love the video commentary on this set. Your comments are especially well-informed and they show how well you know and appreciate the material," I say, silently complimenting myself on not sounding like a lunatic.
"Yeah? You know, I don't think I've ever sat down and watched the video commentary since we recorded it," he says with a smirk. Ron can smell loon.
"Really?" I ask, idiocy welling up within, boiling over. "Well, if you want to watch it you could borrow it. I'm going to be here all weekend." Now, I had thought that would be a clever way to ingratiate myself to the celebrity, still clinging to the delusion. Of course, I went home and started blogging zombie party favors, so you know the story doesn't work out that way.
"Oh, that's okay," Ron said with that Vincent smile. "I'm pretty sure I have a copy at home."
Oh my giddy-odd. Did you really just say that? He probably thinks you're a loon. Just get the picture taken with him and go.
"Mind if my brother takes a picture of us?" I say through the stupid-stupid-stupid in my throat.
"No problem," he says, magnanimous in the face of demented fanboy.
Wow, his hand is like not really warm or cold. It's a just right hand. Shut-up! Don't say anything but thank you!
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
Ron Perlman's frakkin' shaking my hand!!!
Artists
Walking through Artists' Alley is a real chore. And I don't simply mean because it's super-crowded navigating the rows of tables and aisles choked with fans to find the artist you're looking for. I mean because there's so many awesome pieces of art on display. Each table sports a dozen or more display pieces, and then they have entire portfolios of art prints that you can pick up right there. I really liked chatting about the art with the creators--especially the couple that were really impressed by the details and elegance of their work. Even surrounded by fans, they were genuinely impressed by viewers who saw and loved the details. And then there's the great commission prices for artwork. You can watch artists at work on those commissions, sketching iconic characters in real-time while you chat about the latest scandal in nerd interests. You know: Star Wars being ruined for kids these days, the New 52, and Michael Bay. Yeah, it's definitely a part of the con where I could envision spending an entire day next year. (Oh, did I mention I am definitely going next year? Spoiler alert: I'm going next year.)
One of my favorite pieces of art was one I found on Friday, by Stephen Bryant. I was drawn to his table by his painted covers, in particular a piece called "The Power of Three" featuring Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and Liz Sherman. Having just come down off my I-met-Ron high, I picked it up right away and started talking with the artist and assistant as I went through the rest of his portfolio. Then I found my favorite picture of the con. Entitled "Iron Man: Dreaming Big", it featured a young boy lost in a thick volume of Essential Iron Man, with a image of the cinematic Iron Man floating above his head, springing from his imagination. Oh, I love that piece, and so that got added into my impulse purchase as I gushed to my brother-in-law over it and proved much more socially competent with Mr. Bryant than I was with Ron. Then, joking as I realized I was breaking my own personal promise to 'not spend that much,' I grabbed a print from Stephen for a friend whose birthday was coming up. It depicted Deadpool in Eddard Stark's classic "Winter is coming" pose. The best part? I had been at the con like two hours and already spent almost as much money as I would've on the two weekend passes. Oops.
So then the rest of our time we spent in Artists' Alley on Friday was ulterior-motive scouting. For those of you who aren't married, that's when you look for products to show your spouse to make them assume you must've spent a lot more money than you really did. "Hey, I know I picked up three art prints, but if I was really out of control I would've picked up a dozen. See? Look at all this great art I didn't buy...Can we get that one, too?" So on Saturday we grabbed another 5 or so art prints, this time impelled by my wife, and we really only stopped because of failure to visualize where they could go in our house.
Artists' Alley: totally worth a day on its own. Don't go there at all if you don't want to spend money. Just don't.
Panels
The panels were great, and varied from intriguing and intellectual to creators having mass love affairs with their fans. The rooms where the panels were actually located, however, were harder to find than a matte surface in Abrams' Star Trek reboot. If you're going to the con for the first time, know that all of the panels are held upstairs, and--while there are stairs leading up inside the main convention floor--the stairs you want are actually up the escalators before even entering the main floor. Yeah, those other stairs just lead to a sort of island food court that is designed to fulfill the same function as the Lost Woods in the Zelda games--be as confusing as possible in a confined, closed space.
The panel with the Marvel leadership was great, and since that was a Friday panel, I had the pleasure of sharing it with my brother-in-law who was pretty ignorant of all things Marvel that weren't in the last batch of movies. (I say was pretty ignorant because I think he went home that day a genuine Marvel fan.) It was a great time that made me proud to be a Marvel fan. In a fairly packed room, the Marvel heads were funny, personable, and showed they not only knew their fans as an abstract demographic but also were able to read us as a collective batch of Midwest nerds sitting in front of them. I loved it, and by the time I left they had sold me on Marvel Unlimited and gotten me excited for the upcoming Project Gamma.
But of course, my absolute favorite panel was Ron Perlman's Q&A on Saturday. In a massive hall filled with probably fifteen hundred people, Ron fielded questions direct from fans in a frank, crassly charming hour or so (too too short). There were a lot of good questions asked, and it was clear the room was full of true fans. A couple of fans just gushed over Ron more than ask questions, and he handled it with hilarious and dirty back-talk. He even shared a few details that I'd never heard before, one of which was clearly a tender subject for him, so it all felt intimate despite being so grand. I wanted to ask him a question or two, and I would have done so, but by Saturday it had dawned on me how dumb I came across the day before. So I kept my trap shut.
An aside: my wife would tell you that at one point I got quite animated and pointed to some random fan thinking he was Guillermo del Toro popping in on the Q&A, but that's ludicrous. First, I totally never said that. Second, I don't get dumber the closer I get in proximity to Ron Perlman, but I might get more loony. Thirdly--and I'm not admitting anything--but it would've been an awesome publicity stunt if the director of some of Ron Perlman's biggest movies, including his next one Pacific Rim, had just shuffled into the room and stolen the show for a few minutes, right? I mean, it's not a totally dumb idea. But I never said that, so it's all just my wife's gravid eccentricity.
Cosplay
Oh my, the cosplay. I'm going to have a lot to say about this in upcoming posts, so I won't go into much detail about what cosplay is or anything other than to say that I was overwhelmed by how much good cosplay was on display at C2E2. And I don't just mean hot costumes. I'm talking about people with cinema-quality outfits, or with realizations of costumes not yet seen in live action that absolutely blew me away. Even before getting into the main hall on Friday morning, there were at least a dozen people I wanted to take pictures of. I snapped a few, but not nearly as many as I would've liked. Partly because I was keeping an eye on my brother-in-law, and partly because I was certain that I'd see all of the really good cosplayers in the costume contest they'd have later that night. In short, I was a putz. Don't be a putz. Take tons of pictures. Because you will see hundreds of awesome, well-done costumes, and the contest itself was only 30 people. Granted, I saw great cosplay on the stage, but I missed out on great photos for second-guessing myself.
I don't think anyone suffered more for their cosplay than this girl. Chelsea from Lionheart Cosplay and Makeup Effects went as a female Carnage--the insane symbiote that makes Venom into an occasional hero by comparison. She had white-out contacts, painful-looking dentures, and that latex tongue hanging from her jaw. Probably the greatest crime about the whole affair is that a lot of the fabulous, scrupulous details of her costume were really hard to notice and appreciate from a distance. When I talked to her after Friday's contest, it was clear that the entire getup was exhausting her in real-time. Lionheart, indeed.
The greatest thing about the fantastic cosplay at conventions like this is that it's by far the most social aspect of the experience. You might not have any interest to talk to some random comic book guy, but when you see someone dressed up as a perfect Hudson from Aliens, or the Red Ranger's T-rex dino-zord, or frakkin' Captain Planet, you just have to talk to them. I myself really enjoyed dragging my shy brother-in-law to the side of the stage after Friday's cosplay contest and talking to some of my favorite cosplayers from the night. I won't go into too much detail, but I'll say I met some really cool people that I hope to meet again and even feature on this blog in the coming weeks.
One of those people was Courtney from Cosplay4UsAll. She dressed up as the nurse from the horror game series Silent Hill, and in that costume she won the crowd's approval for best cosplay in Friday's costume contest. Besides having a great costume, she also had far and away the most disturbingly accurate twitch-walk that perfectly emulated the horrors from the Hill. The contest's MC (I believe her name was Trin) simply wigged out as Courtney shuffled up onto the stage, and as we all cheered I'm pretty sure she was planning an escape route. I love the roleplay aspect of cosplay, and the fact that Courtney stayed in character for her stage walk was fantastic. Included below is a brief video of her creeping around GenCon 2012. Even after the show, when I met her and the rest of the family composing the Cosplay4UsAll team, she stayed disturbingly mute. It was only when we I started talking about video games that she had to break character to brag on some of her Mass Effect and Borderlands cosplay as well. Even then, she kept it hushed so other people wouldn't see her talking. Great people, and I'm already working with them on another project. Filmatleven.
My brother-in-law, being a typical high school boy with little or no knowledge of true Nerdery (I mean it, some of his honest questions absolutely killed me--like when he asked if the vintage Captain Power toys were from the 60s), really loved this Deadpool cosplay. Wise-cracking, uber-violent, and gun-toting, Deadpool is a fun Marvel character that is known for breaking the fourth wall with almost cartoony antics. So when this cosplayer, Michael, dressed as the "merc with a mouth" he went over-the-top, and was naturally pitch-perfect as Deadpool. A scratch-built 60-pound cannon, Deadpool's "The Solution" was a big crowd-pleaser. At least it was once it got assembled and lugged up onto the stage.
Finally, I was really impressed by the large number of quality Iron Man costumes at C2E2. Friday alone we saw at least three or four Iron Man cosplays that were good enough to make you do a double-take. I found it particularly fun when we stopped to have a bite to eat and an Iron Man tromped through the food court area, liking stalking up on a blonde or a cold one. Or looking for a mechanic to help him take a bathroom break. Either way, it was one of the nerdy little moments that was ridiculously common at C2E2--like seeing Ms. Marvel in her Warbird outfit resting her heels while munching on some celery. So mundane and disarming. So priceless.
And yes, I like Ms. Marvel. Shaddup.
If you were thinking about going to C2E2 before, it should probably be a foregone conclusion now. It's a fun convergence of a lot of nerd elements, and the chance to rub elbows with so many nerds in such uninhibited surroundings alone is worth it. Also, keep an eye out for more pictures and a lot more coverage on cosplay as Nerd Butter in the next week or so.
