tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81627148250144722822024-03-18T02:02:59.552-04:00The Post Modern Pulp BlogDiscussing Action and Adventure Storytelling in Print, Film, Television, and Popular CultureJack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.comBlogger367125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-39264557671534904062021-03-10T13:39:00.001-05:002021-03-10T13:39:12.843-05:00New Release: THEY KILL FOR GOLD<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_gG6VYiSZ3G8q4EZEyvvzC18KSLHsDA_rPm1N59OkSn6LU5Yd1Oa4X6k0vfnnsJKrMPsAxyxpSfrx71tqvwDzI4xNYlLvkeUoDl3ct8UjGDrWF2Nr_reX11ZP4fHrOj_ODOdw0MVNcyzj/s2048/Ev2VL-4XEAYEyKo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_gG6VYiSZ3G8q4EZEyvvzC18KSLHsDA_rPm1N59OkSn6LU5Yd1Oa4X6k0vfnnsJKrMPsAxyxpSfrx71tqvwDzI4xNYlLvkeUoDl3ct8UjGDrWF2Nr_reX11ZP4fHrOj_ODOdw0MVNcyzj/s320/Ev2VL-4XEAYEyKo.jpg" /></a></div>So, my first new book is out, a fantasy novella that plays heavily into the 80's style, tabletop fantasy role-playing games media tie-in novel fiction vibe. I'll cut-and-paste in here the Author's Note I wrote for the end of the book: <p></p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>I discovered tabletop role-playing games in 1993, when two of my friends acquired the “Big Black Box” edition of a certain “Basic” fantasy RPG which will remain nameless. My enthusiasm for tabletop gaming quickly outgrew theirs, and since I lived in a very rural part of Maine and didn’t have many friends who lived close by, I turned my interest in writing - which was very strong in me even as a teenager - towards an interest in gaming, specifically the world-building and character-creating aspects of it. I didn’t have much of an opportunity for playing adventures, so I filled my time by creating adventure stories.</i></p><p><i>Fast-forward a quarter of a century. I still play that certain role-playing game in its current edition, although now in the winter of 2021 my friends and I play it over video chat, because the COVID-19 pandemic is keeping us from hanging out together as we always did, laughing and teasing and bringing meals and having drinks. I’m a big nerd and most of my friends are big nerds as well, and this is one of the pastimes that keeps us together, some of us since the late-’90s. We’ve gotten older, some of us a little rounder, all of us a little greyer up top, but when the books and the dice and the character sheets come out, we’re all still kinda kids again.</i></p><p><i>This past year has been terrible on a global scale. The pandemic is far from over, all our lives have been on hold in one way or another for a year. We still try to get together online a couple of times a month to fight bad guys and go exploring, discover hidden places and earn fame and fortune in imaginary lands. It’s an old-fashioned style of play, and I try as the Game-Master to make sure the more problematic aspects are left out of the adventures. Still, we’re traditionalists in many ways. </i></p><p><i>And so, this is what THEY KILL FOR GOLD is about. It’s a story of old-school fantasy adventure, hearkening back to those memories of a more “Basic” kind of game and gameplay. The plot isn’t fancy, the world isn’t unique or exceptional, the character motivations aren’t all that complicated. And yet, I enjoyed writing the story and bringing these characters to life. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it. Maybe it’ll inspire you to go dig around in a drawer, find your dice, dust off your old rulebook and some graph paper, and go on an adventure.</i></p></blockquote><p>So far, I've seen a slow but steady trickle of sales, and more interestingly, Kindle Unlimited "borrows" and reads. Very encouraging, as I haven't released anything in <b>two years</b> and this has gone out with very little fanfare. I already have an outline for the second book, and I am developing the story for the third. All in all, I think the idea of simple, fast-paced novellas that draw really heavily on old-school fantasy gaming tropes, but with a modern touch, may in fact find an audience with readers. I've gotten some really positive feedback from a couple of readers already, folks who know the genre I'm trying to fit into and whose opinions I definitely respect, and so that is extremely encouraging.<br /><br />That's it for now, If you think this sounds interesting, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Y6CWP84/" target="_blank">you can click here to find the ebook on Amazon</a>. A paperback edition should be along in a few weeks.<br /></p>Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-13345354117486671202021-03-07T17:33:00.000-05:002021-03-07T17:35:09.209-05:00It's Been 84 Years<p>Well, okay, not exactly <b>that </b>long. But it's been a while. 14 months since our last blog post. If you haven't been living under a rock for the last year, you know that the COVID-19 pandemic turned the planet upside down, and especially for those of us in the US, where things, shall we say, have been a little tumultuous.</p><p>Back in Mid-March of 2020, my work went remote until August. I worked from home for 5 months, with only very rare, clandestine operation-style trips into work in order to pick up something or drop something off in another person's office. Since then, I've been on a 3 days a week schedule since September. Overall, it has been okay. My commute, which is via public transit, isn't so bad, mostly because there are very few people on the train going in either direction. At work, I interact with almost no one. There are days where over the course of 8 hours, the person I interact with most is the nice person handing me my Starbucks through a pickup window. I have become the Maytag repairman, sitting and waiting for a problem to happen, and it rarely occurs.</p><p>Well, most of you must be waving your arms around and saying, "Wait, that should be perfect for a novelist, right? You should be able to get all sorts of things done, right? Why haven't you written three or four novels by now?" Well, nah, not exactly. I'm sure it was great for some folks, but it was hard for me. Constant mental distraction between the pandemic news and worry, trouble with family (especially elder care stuff), troubles with friends and loved ones, national political crisis, and the stress of working-but-not-really working, in an environment that's both dull and stressful at the same time, it all became conditions that aren't great for the flow state necessary to write and complete long-form storytelling.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ev2VL-4XEAYEyKo?format=jpg&name=large" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ev2VL-4XEAYEyKo?format=jpg&name=large" width="200" /></a></div>On the other hand, I wasn't idle. I did work on a number of projects, although some only made small amounts of progress. All in all, I think I wrote about 60,000 words over the course of 2020, which for me, isn't terrible. And the good news in all of that, is I <b>did</b> write a novella - 32,000 words - called THEY KILL FOR GOLD. I'll drop another post about it tomorrow, but in short, it is a fantasy novella that asks the question: <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><i>Everyone wants to be the hero, but what if you're just the hireling?</i> It's a story idea I've had for years, but never got around to writing it because there was always some greater, higher-stakes project that took precedence. Well, this year, I was just too stressed to work on the high-stakes stuff, so I finally settled down and wrote this novella, which will, I hope, be the first of many quick-read adventures.</span><p></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Beyond that? I picked away at a few other ideas, but nothing I want to talk about here just yet. And I do owe you all my 2020 writing in review, which is usually a breakdown of sales and writing progress. It'll take a little more time this year, as my move to publish six of my novels through Wolfpack Publishing means I've got to consult two sets of spreadsheets, rather than one, but I do want to get you some numbers eventually. In short, it was...an okay decision. KILLER INSTINCTS and SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER sold better in 2020 than they ever did before, but my Commando titles actually lost money with the move, and overall I think I either broke even or made less this past year than I did in 2019. Granted, given the situation over the past year, making a good estimate as to what my sales <b>should have been </b>is a little pointless, but I think the long and the short of it is, I should have held onto my Commando titles, and only given Wolfpack the other two novels. Live and learn.</span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">That's going to be it for now - just a quick update. Now that THEY KILL FOR GOLD is out (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Y6CWP84/" target="_blank">link for those who are interested</a>) I'm going to focus this spring on <b>finally</b> writing the second Hangman novel, BATTLE FOR THE BLACKTOP. I've had this idea half-formed in my mind for years, and I think now's the time to get it finished. On that note, I'll catch you all later, and thank you for dropping by.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-18801638634123982832020-01-24T09:00:00.000-05:002020-01-24T09:00:03.546-05:00Fiction Friday: STONY MAN DOCTRINE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGuaZXja6pHbZ3t7EaQ5hkBZ-6KKNrFnDDnMv00y13H5NbBkApso547s9Uab1veG2vCs50pU9xh0mfIDaodKw7jYZd-KzN0CeOFN6rfiiW03fk4a677dw8uKbyBY8-3RsnH2A6-iS5KFHa/s1600/20200123105522214_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGuaZXja6pHbZ3t7EaQ5hkBZ-6KKNrFnDDnMv00y13H5NbBkApso547s9Uab1veG2vCs50pU9xh0mfIDaodKw7jYZd-KzN0CeOFN6rfiiW03fk4a677dw8uKbyBY8-3RsnH2A6-iS5KFHa/s320/20200123105522214_0001.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
My first cover-to-cover read of 2020 was this classic. I first read STONY MAN DOCTRINE back in either junior high or high school - I can't recall which - as my schools had a lot of donated fiction and someone must have had a collection of Gold Eagle titles. I remember back then thinking how amazingly badass the GE books were, with tons of technical detail and blistering action scenes.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
For those of you totally in the dark here, SMD is the first book in Gold Eagle Books' Three-Series "Stony Man" world (I guess Sons of Barabas is also in this world but I don't really count it here) which encompasses the Mack Bolan Executioner series, the Able Team series, and the Phoenix Force series. Essentially the three men of Able Team and five men of Phoenix Force work for Bolan, and in this book they're all brought together for the first time to take on a multi-national terrorist organization called Hydra (no, not THAT Hydra), which is planning to carry out a series of WMD-style chemical weapon attacks against major US population centers unless the US government withdraws all military forces from foreign countries. The President decides that he cannot abandon America's allies, so he calls in Bolan and Co. to hunt down the terrorists and wipe them out.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 6px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
Reading this again thirty years later, it is still entertaining action fare. The usual Gold<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;"><span> </span>Eagle titles are far slimmer than this book, but the author is able to stitch together what're basically two and a half novels' worth of action in order to deliver the first "Super-Bolan" book. Instead of action-interlude-travel-action-interlude-travel as you have in, say, an Able Team novel, this book can just go from team to team to team and keep the action coming.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_show" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 6px;">
One thing I did forget about this book was how early on in the lives of the Able Team and Phoenix Force series this took place. I believe it's right around the same time as Able Team #6, and Phoenix Force #5. It was definitely a cool idea someone had to bring all three series together for a big operation, but it is also evident of why it wouldn't work as a formula for every book - the end battle alone, where all nine combatants are fighting, just doesn't give enough "screen time" to each of the characters, and winds up jumping around a lot in order to show us what everyone's doing.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin: 6px 0px;">
Overall, pretty darn entertaining, and I'm glad to have been able to re-read it after such a long period of time and not be crushed that it wasn't as awesome as I'd remembered.</div>
</div>
Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-57967260708810597992020-01-06T16:02:00.000-05:002020-01-06T16:18:49.726-05:00My 2019 Writing in ReviewMy usual disclaimer: It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past
year. As always, the facts and figures I provide here aren't
meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have
an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and
everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than
others, and that's that.<br />
<br />
In 2019 I sold 1,167 eBooks and tracked 471,533 Kindle Unlimited eBook pages read of my material (that converts to almost 1,900 Commando novel-length reads). This is almost a thousand fewer eBook sales than last year, and about 230,000 fewer KU pages. Interestingly, when I look at my royalties for this year as compared to last, I'm only down about $1,100, but of course, there is a two-month sales/royalty overlap (meaning, the money I received in January 2019 was for books sold in November 2018), and indeed the monthly royalties I received in the first quarter of 2019 are much, much higher than what I received at the end of the year. So you can see what my sales trends look like visually, here's January through November, 2019:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJ8f7RYRGhfBjkTwGmPWWcvm_oSABMfADGOBcmRjFWzOolfsp1BrvgSlZHOBJf8YUn8G-ySjPbMzn6r11P9NEHK4rKVvYWE5_sOWQrSJ0cVuhMj2_ASwRsYaF2cBm8mNC32ZPJckuwhV3/s1600/KDP_2019.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="869" data-original-width="1600" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJ8f7RYRGhfBjkTwGmPWWcvm_oSABMfADGOBcmRjFWzOolfsp1BrvgSlZHOBJf8YUn8G-ySjPbMzn6r11P9NEHK4rKVvYWE5_sOWQrSJ0cVuhMj2_ASwRsYaF2cBm8mNC32ZPJckuwhV3/s400/KDP_2019.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
And here is the title-by-title sales for December 2019:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJEiY35lCpAHvzhTpoOTvFfX0umZWIdKwc3Y2yiaWZtoX_ZR8xtC6-4OW60gAsBxl3HKKrgeWNVwgAhUlHqzWOHmsVlNSZ7nPwLUszyamJt_Qc8LibkzTfu3X_9_ajZOhE4biy45cG4bfR/s1600/KDP_December2019.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="607" data-original-width="1296" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJEiY35lCpAHvzhTpoOTvFfX0umZWIdKwc3Y2yiaWZtoX_ZR8xtC6-4OW60gAsBxl3HKKrgeWNVwgAhUlHqzWOHmsVlNSZ7nPwLUszyamJt_Qc8LibkzTfu3X_9_ajZOhE4biy45cG4bfR/s400/KDP_December2019.png" width="400" /></a></div>
So, why the big downturn at the end of the year?<br />
<br />
Well, a couple of reasons. First off, I only put out one title in 2019. That was my WW2 novella The Butcher of Calais, one of the "Commando Short Bursts" titles. While it was well-received by those who read it, it wasn't read by all that many, and I am not sure if that was because it was part of the Short Bursts series, or if it was genuinely not interesting to my Commando readers. Only time will tell, but it is true that this was the only title I released all year. I will say that this past year I did more reading and research for future books than I have in a long time, but frankly, the motivation to write has been pretty weak this year, and I am fighting hard to get past that wall, but so far, I have been unsuccessful. I'll come up with a great idea, do some good plotting work, a bunch of research, get several thousand words on the page...and then it just fizzles out.<br />
<br />
The second reason my KDP sales have been so low, especially in the last quarter of 2019, is that I made the decision to partner with an independent press, Wolfpack Publishing, and give them the rights to publish my six Commando novels, as well as Killer Instincts and San Francisco Slaughter. The Commando books were released in two three-book omnibus editions, while KI and SFS were released on their own. Since all my previous "Writing in Review" posts have shown that roughly 90% of my sales and income is driven by the Commando titles, this effectively puts the whole of my financial future as an author in the hands of Wolfpack Publishing. For those of you who have always handed your books off to a publisher, that might just be business as usual for you, but for someone who did it all on their own for eight years, that is a big, BIG step, and I did not take that step lightly. However, as life the last couple of years had meant less time and energy for writing, and definitely less energy for marketing, I decided that giving my books to a publishing house that was well known among my fellow authors for a strong record in marketing and sales, I felt they would be able to do the one thing I could not - find readers for my books.<br />
<br />
The ultimate question is, of course, did I make the right decision? Wolfpack's strategy for selling books is to rely extremely heavily on Kindle Unlimited page reads, and almost completely ignore sales revenue. Everything they put out is listed at $0.99, even multi-volume omnibuses like my Commando series. This means that while Amazon paid me $6.18 for every three Commando titles sold, Amazon is now giving out only $.35 for those same three books, and that's before Wolfpack takes their cut. Of course, they target Kindle Unlimited readers and make most of their
money from them, and a page is still a page no matter who publishes it,
but I made a significant amount of my money from sales, not KU reads, so
Wolfpack needs to not only make up what they are taking as their cut of
the KU royalties, but all the money I made from sales as well. This means that now, in order for me to make the kind of money I was making on my own, Wolfpack is going to have to sell a lot more copies of my books - especially the Commando series. And I do mean A LOT, like, an order of magnitude more.<br />
<br />
Can my new publisher come through on those kinds of numbers? We will have to see. The US sales of the Commando titles aren't very promising. They're still in the six-figure rankings, which is...well it's terrible. In the UK the rankings are much better, but the UK eBook market is different, much smaller, meaning you don't have to sell as much in order to get those better numbers, so while the numbers in the UK are "good", that doesn't necessarily translate to sales being great. On the other hand, Killer Instincts and San Francisco Slaughter are now, after all these years, actually selling fairly well. It was always highly frustrating to me that those two books were well-liked by pretty much everyone who read them, and yet these was so little cross-popularity from Commando readers. So, while I will probably not be rolling around in large piles of KI and SFS cash, those books are finally going to be earning the kind of money I always hoped they'd earn.<br />
<br />
I think that's all for this post. Perhaps next week I'll do a post on 2020 projects, but for now, it's fingers crossed. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-86636417274840153442019-10-02T13:07:00.005-04:002019-10-02T13:11:11.794-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: The Beards and Battleaxes RPG?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1d4chan.org/images/thumb/7/7b/WH_Dwarfs_Old_Art.JPG/500px-WH_Dwarfs_Old_Art.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="735" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://1d4chan.org/images/thumb/7/7b/WH_Dwarfs_Old_Art.JPG/500px-WH_Dwarfs_Old_Art.JPG" width="217" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover art from one of the GW army books</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Hello everyone, sorry for a lack of posts Friday and Monday, things were a little troubled on the home front. But here we are again, talking about gaming. After venting my frustration last week, I began thinking of a gaming project I could undertake, something simple, specific, and entertaining to me personally, while at the same time, viable as a product that can be shared to folks out there in the world at large.<br />
<br />
So I settled on a game about dwarves.<br />
<br />
I like dwarves. I've played them in various RPGs. The Dwarfs (not <i>Dwarves</i>, but <i>Dwarfs</i>) were my first Warhammer Fantasy Battle army. They're short, stout, and bearded, just like me, and although beer isn't my go-to form of alcohol these days, I can certainly appreciate a well-brewed pint of ale or stout. Dwarves are also usually portrayed as gruff, curmudgeonly little assholes who don't like taking shit from anyone and hold grudges far longer than rationally reasonable, and yes, guilty as charged on all counts. <br />
<br />
A single player-race game might seem limiting, but it is also focused. It lessens the number of decisions during character creation and reduces the rules and word count, keeping the game tighter. Also, I would probably stick with tradition and limit any form of Dwarven magic to a kind of rune-crafting, coupled with perhaps some kind of holy boons or blessings from Dwarven gods. Again, it limits player choice, but also alleviates the need for a player-side spell catalogue (which in many games can be equivalent to all the other rules put together).<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/b9/d6/27b9d66bb26b5357e2a7e1edcc3e5112.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="616" height="320" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/b9/d6/27b9d66bb26b5357e2a7e1edcc3e5112.png" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From a GW Dwarf infantry minis box</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As for adventures, I think a lot of the major bases can be covered. Dungeon and underground exploration is an obvious go-to, but you can also have dwarves patrolling the areas around their strongholds, overland expeditions, trips to human (or non-human) lands and cities, long-distance explorations, diplomatic trips, monster hunts...with a little thought, almost any adventure type is possible.<br />
<br />
As for the rules, I think I have a good foundation I want to build upon. Originally I thought of going with the core rules I developed for my stalled-out Tankards & Broadswords RPG, but I think for the moment I am going to set those aside and try something a little more basic, and if that doesn't seem to fit my needs, we'll reconsider. I think the rules should be simple, avoid a lot of math, and most difficult of all, not be just a generic system but an expression of the concept of the game. How we get there, we'll have to find out.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
So, I'm going to leave this be for now. Next week I hope to have a few more details on this, and as time goes on, we'll build bit by bit. In the end, this is likely just going to be a downloadable PDF that anyone can enjoy, so we're keeping it as simple and straightforward as possible. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-83012055884898811582019-09-25T12:39:00.000-04:002019-09-26T12:40:10.626-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: Nine Novels, Zero RPGs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUdEvtoz8KJhYYEZa9dZB0zLzctTyftjR6KwGYln_bFJo6xDnFq1ckGhIsDma3w3saxviHQo-662aAK1Y5PB-I_Ch7UStCOF-DnzyTxG7o4T26g8WLukqAUfj5SRjNExoxTvbMVzJMDnRT/s1600/covertest2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUdEvtoz8KJhYYEZa9dZB0zLzctTyftjR6KwGYln_bFJo6xDnFq1ckGhIsDma3w3saxviHQo-662aAK1Y5PB-I_Ch7UStCOF-DnzyTxG7o4T26g8WLukqAUfj5SRjNExoxTvbMVzJMDnRT/s320/covertest2.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Old Cover Draft from Wayyyy Back When</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Going to cut and paste in a series of posts from Twitter that I wrote this weekend. Every year or so, I get this notion of "finally" finishing a small role-playing game product that I can let out into the wild. I don't think I'd sell it, just create a PDF that's available for download, perhaps put a print-on-demand version on Amazon for as cheaply as they'll let me. But year after year, it doesn't happen, and I got thinking about why recently:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I've blogged about it in the past, but it is very strange for me to face that I have written nine novels and many shorter works of fiction, but the thought of putting out a short role-playing game product is vastly more nerve-wracking. </span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">I've been gaming since '93 and writing for profit since 2011. I ran campaigns with several homebrew RPG systems over the years, and tinkered with probably a dozen more system ideas. Yet, I have never had the nerve to finish a gaming product, package it, and put it out there. </span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">At first I thought it was fear of criticism, but being a novelist beats that out of you pretty quickly. Maybe it's knowing that most readers just consume your product and move on, but s</span></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">o many gamers I know are system-tinkerers. It's like running a restaurant where half your customers are also running their own restaurants. Every single person who buys it is going to be deciding whether they could have done this better than you, and how.</span></span></span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Because that's the nature of RPGs. And that's fine, except that means not just criticism, but active, in-depth critique. No 4* reviews on Amazon "Fun read but the action was a little confusing". You have to defend every rule and every wording against everyone who reads it.</span></span></span></span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">And to have that level of exhausting engagement, and so much of my time dedicated to a project that'd probably earn me 1% of what a novel would (if I even put it out at a price, which I probably wouldn't) just seems...not worth it.</span></span></span></span></span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Which kind if sucks, because I love role-playing games, and I have been a tinkering game designer for 25+ years. But the meat grinder which is that middle-aged person's algorithm of time, money, and energy vs reward is difficult to overcome.</span></span></span></span></span></span></i></blockquote>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><a href="http://tankardsandbroadswords.blogspot.com/2015/08/my-rpg-publishing-malaise.html" target="_blank">I wrote a post about this back in 2015 on my Tankards and Broadswords blog (click to go there and read it, it's still relevant).</a> It's funny that in the last four years, despite continued tinkering, I still don't have any kind of RPG product to share. I'm fully aware that the skill set of "Game Designer" and "Novelist" only partially overlap, but I think that is only a small portion of the problem. So, we shall see. I've got a few ideas, and I feel like if I can start small enough, I can build on a little idea incrementally. Only time will tell.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span> </span> </span> </span></span></span>Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-84773424998120635192019-09-23T13:31:00.000-04:002019-09-23T13:31:28.785-04:00Media Monday: Rambo V - Last Blood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b1/Rambo_-_Last_Blood_official_theatrical_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="220" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b1/Rambo_-_Last_Blood_official_theatrical_poster.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
There's no good way to approach a review of this without sinking neck-deep into the current socio-political quagmire. There just isn't. I'm going to do my best to talk about it without engaging this, but I will fail. I'm just putting it out there that this review isn't meant to be a discussion of racism and politics in film, but rather, how to handle such issues in a way that doesn't make you look like a pack of morons.<br />
<br />
Rambo: Last Blood is a garbage movie. There, I said it. Bring on the hate. I grew up watching the Rambo movies on VHS and (edited) television channels, so if someone wants to accuse me of not loving mindless action movies, come at me, bro. I saw Rambo 4 in the theater and left absolutely thrumming with adrenaline because I thought it was, if not a masterpiece, certainly leagues better than Rambo 3, and felt like they at least put some effort into addressing the complexities of the issues at hand with how outsiders view violent civil conflicts, and the futility of "helping" in regions where such help is marginal at best, and bloodily counter-productive at worst.<br />
<br />
Last Blood, on the other hand, appears to have been conceived for the sole purpose of getting to the last 20 minutes of the film, and no one gave any real thought or care as to how the film got there. In order to talk about this, I'm going to have to deal with some extensive plot spoilers, so now is your chance to bail now if you don't want this.<br /><br />Keep scrolling.<br />
<br />
Almost there.<br />
<br />
A little more.<br />
<br />
Last chance.<br />
<br />
Okay then, don't blame me if you're reading this and don't want spoilers.<br />
<br />
The long and the short of it is that Rambo is now living on a horse ranch in Arizona with Maria, a woman who is at least approximate to his age, and Gabriela, a young girl who is graduating from high school and going off to college. The first big problem here is that Rambo's relationship to these two women is never actually explained. At the end of Rambo 4, you see Rambo going to a place that you assume is his family farm, but in this movie, you don't really know who is related to whom. Rambo isn't Gabriela's father, or even her grandfather. There's mention of her mother, and a deadbeat dad, whom Rambo stopped apparently at one point from beating up the mother. I'm not even sure of the relationship between Maria and the younger girl - I think she might be an aunt, but I can't say for sure. Seeing as the film spends at least its first 20-25 minutes establishing the family dynamic, the fact that I couldn't figure out the relationships makes this just sloppy writing. This is especially annoying, because the entire reason Rambo goes so batshit later on is that the girl is so emotionally important to him, the "one good thing in his life".<br />
<br />
OK, according to Wikipedia, Rambo has no relationship to any of these people. The horse ranch belonged to his dead father, and Maria is the grandmother to Gabriela, and Maria just...runs the household? That at least makes sense, but this relationship isn't really ever laid out clearly, which shouldn't be that hard. You at least know that Gabriela's mother died of cancer when she was little, and after that, her father - who was apparently always an asshole - leaves her with Maria and goes off to Mexico. Fast forward to now, when Maria is 18. A childhood friend of hers - Gizelle, who is referred to as a "bad girl" by Maria - is now living in Mexico, and she has found Gabriela's father, who apparently lives in the same Mexican town. Despite Rambo and Maria repeatedly telling her that her dad Miguel was a violent asshole and she shouldn't have anything to do with him, and Rambo even telling her that she should maybe let her urge to visit her father simmer a little before she makes the decision to visit him, Gabriela almost immediately ducks out and drives down to Mexico to go find Gizelle and her father.<br />
<br />
I've already spent two long paragraphs here, so I'll keep this short. Dad is an asshole (surprise) and tells Gabriela to beat it. Gabriela is sad, Gizelle takes her to a club, where she sells (!!!!!!) Gabriela to some sex traffickers, who then drug and kidnap Gabriela. Gizelle then calls back to Maria, tells her she lost Gabriela, and Rambo goes full batshit mode and drives down to Mexico, where he finds Gizelle, realizes she sold out Gabriela, and gets her to point out one of the bad guys. Stuff happens, Rambo fails, and gets beat up by the rest of the bad guys, who decide not to kill Rambo, a guy who just tortured one of their own, and showed up with a pistol and a knife.<br />
<br />
Gabriela gets doped up, gets her face slashed, and is put to work as a forced prostitute. Eventually Rambo learns from an "independent journalist" (who just happens to watch him torture one of the bad guys and saves him after his beating) where to find Gabriela, but alas, after he saves her, she dies in his car as they're just...I don't know, driving around in the dark. Yes it makes no sense. He finally drives over the border and brings her body home, then buries her on the farm. Maria just packs up and leaves. Rambo tells her he's going to leave too, but that's a lie. He goes back to Mexico and kills one of the two lead bad guys in a way so that they know it was him. He then comes back home, preps his murder maze, and in the last 20 minutes of the film, kills everyone. The end.<br />
<br />
You might be thinking, "Hey, this actually sounds awesome, what's the problem?" but honestly, everything is <b>just so stupid</b>. It's not that the characters make stupid decisions - although there is some of that - but that every time the story reaches a point where something could be done in an interesting, intelligent, nuanced fashion, the car screeches off the road and goes into the ditch. By the time you get to the climactic battle at the end, it is boorishly obvious that the entire reason the film was made was to show Rambo running around an underground death maze, murdering bad guys with knives, punji sticks, old-timey guns, booby traps, and other assorted ordnance (claymore mines and hand grenades???). There isn't even any strategy or cleverness to any of it - bad guys just die, over and over, running flat-out into death and screaming in blood and pain.<br />
<br />
I'm sure many of you are STILL shaking your heads and saying, hey, what's the problem? The problem is, <b>it is stupid, sloppy work</b>. This movie could have been a really good reflection on the plight of old soldiers who never really left the war behind. On PTSD and re-integration, on wanting to be left alone, only to find violence at one's doorstep again. And while you might think there's some of this, the movie only ever skims the surface, like a stone skipping across the water, but never sinking, just bouncing back out on the other side of the river. What was the point of the movie? What themes does it dig into? What message does it send? You could get the same thrill just firing up your XBox and killing dudes in some FPS game for a couple of hours.<br />
<br />
And yes, I am skirting the whole "Mexico" issue. The only thing I'll say about that is, you could have told the exact same kind of story, even with most of the major plot elements relatively intact - and not use Mexico as this sort of Hades-esque underworld that you only venture into at your own risk. It is, again, sloppy, tone-deaf plotting that so obviously doesn't care how it is going to be received, and in fact is probably counting on "snowflakes" hating the movie to stir up buzz and get defensive butts in seats in support of the movie. I don't know, and that's not something I want to engage with, but again - there were many directions the movie-makers could have taken this story and at the same time, left its bones intact. They picked a route through some really, really questionable waters, and at the same time, made a film so sloppy and superficial that there's no real substance to back up the choices they made, except to get us to the finale with extreme prejudice.<br />
<br />
Honestly, I am really disappointed. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-68520721880595030812019-09-20T17:05:00.000-04:002019-09-20T17:05:02.508-04:00Fiction Friday: The Stonehaven League LitRPG Series<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51K-mZwcmDL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51K-mZwcmDL.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
The "LitRPG" genre of fiction is...a weird one. It's not actually that new, however. The premise is that these stories revolve around characters who exist within a "game world", i.e., a world that is artificial and created as part of a game. The degree of artificiality in LitRPG stories can be very obvious, or the world can feel completely real, but still exist only as a result of some kind of game.<br />
<br />
The first novel that I know of which seems to fall into this kind of genre, although it wasn't called LitRPG at the time, was Andre Norton's 1978 novel <i>Quag Keep</i>, a story about a bunch of adventurers in a medieval-type world who are actually people from Earth who were playing a role-playing game. Given that <i>Dungeons and Dragons</i> was roughly four years old at the time <i>Quag Keep</i> was published, Norton got on the bandwagon fairly early. Many others have followed over the years, one of the most notable being Joel Rosenberg's <i>Guardians of the Flame</i> series, which started in 1983 with <i>The Sleeping Dragon</i>. Beyond the written word, one would consider the '80s <i>Dungeons and Dragons</i> cartoon series to be a form of this kind of genre, as would, I feel, the movie TRON.<br />
<br />
But the modern form of the LitRPG novel is more commonly based around computer games, and more specifically, not people <i>transported</i> to worlds, but rather, immersed in them through play. As virtual reality is more common these days in gaming (and is growing bigger every day), the idea of putting on VR gear and submerging yourself as your character in a game world is very real. In fact, <i>Ready Player One </i>is a perfect example of this.<br />
<br />
Enough background, though. Author and former (?) game developer Carrie Summers has written an engaging series of LitRPG / GameLit novels, which in the "real world" are set a few decades in the future, where virtual reality gaming has extended all the way to cybernetic implants that dump the virtual reality of the game right into our brain's perception of reality. In her first book, <i>Temple of Sorrows</i>, a young woman named Devon leaves her crappy job to work as a kind of "super-tester" for a gaming company, Relic Online, in order to push the game and it's artificial intelligence to the limits of what a capable, creative player can do.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mlNn2jHUL._SY346_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="230" height="320" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mlNn2jHUL._SY346_.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
Devon logs into the game, stunned at how the direct neural connection to the game world seems so incredibly real - she can feel the wind and the sun, the grass under her feet and the cloth of her clothing. Yet, the world still acts as a Computer Role-Playing Game. She has skills and abilities and she gains experience and levels up. When she kills a monster, the touch of a blade turns the monster's body into "loot" that can be used for other things. Anyone who has played a computer RPG in the last...twenty years or so will be familiar with the tropes of the world and its setting.<br />
<br />
I don't want to give the plot away, but suffice to say, there is plenty going on in both the real world and the in-game world. This leads to dangers on both sides for Devon, something that I found interesting as it kept the story from being completely about her adventures in-game, and raised the stakes a little. And while this book is probably perfectly fine for a YA audience, there is a good deal of violence going on, so those who want action will get that, while those who like the puzzle-solving and "game-ness" of a game world will also have something to look forward to.<br />
<br />
Overall, this is an enjoyable series. If I remember right, I've read the first three books, and I am just starting the fourth. with six books currently in the series. These books are all available in Kindle (for purchase or Kindle Unlimited) and paperback, and the first four are currently available as audiobooks. If this seems in any way interesting to you, I definitely recommend checking them out.Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-50722545926630130912019-09-18T17:28:00.000-04:002019-09-18T17:28:18.701-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: eBay Miniature RescuesToday I just wanted to spotlight a great YouTube channel, eBay Miniature Rescues. Casey is a talented painter and a very nice hobbyist (I've exchanged emails with him before and he was polite and very helpful), who specializes on - you guessed it - finding used and often ill-treated miniatures on eBay, buying them, and then doing a paint-stripping and repainting project with them. His channel appears relatively new, with only a couple dozen videos, but the quality has progressed enormously over time, and the production value of his video work is now absolutely fantastic.<br />
<br />
Here's a recent video where Casey strips and repaints an older Warhammer Fantasy Battles model. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IOsdk7w10Ms/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IOsdk7w10Ms?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
As you can see, pretty darn cool. Although he tends towards the fantasy side of the miniature spectrum, Casey will also do Warhammer 40,000 rescues, such as this squad of Chaos Marines:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O0xGqZ4EsRw/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O0xGqZ4EsRw?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
Although Casey's painting talents far exceed my own, he's given me some of the confidence I needed to begin my own eBay rescue projects. If you are interested in going out onto eBay and finding your own miniatures, <a href="http://postmodernpulps.blogspot.com/2019/09/wargaming-wednesday-dont-feel-guilt.html" target="_blank">as I talked about in a previous blog post</a>, Casey even has a video on some good searching techniques:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MW2wjNpJ5PQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MW2wjNpJ5PQ?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
So, if you have any interest in the second-hand miniatures market, you absolutely should check out eBay Miniature Rescues.<br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-32744294866558635282019-09-16T16:40:00.000-04:002019-09-16T17:02:07.883-04:00Media Monday: Enjoy Entertainment For What It IsAnother short but hopefully thought-provoking post today. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
First, I know this has the potential to draw in issues of social justice and other real-world problems that we are all struggling with in one way or another, and I get that. Entertainment is there, first and foremost, to entertain us, and that usually means some element of escapism. That kind of escapism is different for everyone, and while there are certainly some issues that should always be addressed, there are a lot of people for whom escapism means being able to step away from those issues. I am not going to say this is a good or a bad thing, just that it is a sentiment often expressed, and for those people, that sentiment is real. I guess that is my wishy-washy way of saying that I am trying to not <i>directly</i> address social issues here, but instead a more all-encompassing philosophy of entertainment.<br />
<br />
For me, that philosophy breaks down to "Enjoy entertaining things for what they are, don't hate them for what they are not". No body of entertainment is perfect, nor can any one body of entertainment media address perfectly all aspects of itself that all consumers may find entertaining. If your go-to for entertainment is gross-out comedy movies, clearly that is not going to appeal to people whose go-to entertainment <i>excludes</i> gross-out humor. I see no point in anyone who dislikes gross-out humor watching such films and then complaining about them. This holds true for almost any form of entertainment, and while we might all be forgiven decades ago for going to movies or watching television shows that we were ignorant of, <i>now that we have the Internet</i>, that is a lack of due diligence on the part of the viewer.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dfsYMDRzGpY/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dfsYMDRzGpY/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">OH NO!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I first started (recently) thinking about this when I saw the fan-rage over the teaser trailer to the latest Star Wars movie, Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker. There's a moment with a folding lightsaber - yes, that moment, I can see you folks in the back already twitching in your seats - and within hours, never mind days of that trailer going live, the internet was flooded with people screaming and foaming at the mouth over how stupid a gimmick this was and so on. One particular YouTube channel had a <i>23-minute long video</i> complaining about the lightsaber. Do you know how long it takes to produce a reasonably professional 23-minute long YouTube video? With props and everything? This person likely invested <i>days</i> worth of work to make it, all to complain about something in five seconds of a trailer for a move about laser swords and space magic.<br />
<br />
And you know why? Because the video got tens of thousands of monetized views. But that's a whole other article for another day.<br />
<br />
People like to get outraged about things. Yes, there are issues worth getting outraged about, but the shape of a science fiction laser sword isn't one of them. This obsessive, fandom-ish need to explain and legitimize and pick apart and deconstruct every single aspect of our entertainment media is not only exhaustive, it's honestly annoying. It becomes this battleground where people spend more time arguing over their entertainment than actually enjoying anything. This is one of the reasons I don't visit Facebook groups around WW2 films or books - everyone in there is a rivet-counting asshole, and if they aren't, they get shouted down by the rivet-counting assholes. Every single movie you bring up in such a group, there's going to be someone who hates it because some aspect of it was displeasing to them.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/furymovie/images/d/db/800px-Tiger_131_(3).jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150402023959" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="800" height="132" src="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/furymovie/images/d/db/800px-Tiger_131_(3).jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150402023959" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">THE PAINT JOB ARRRRGGGHHH!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I remember someone complaining about the end of <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> because when the Tiger tank is destroyed by the airplane, the plane didn't have empty bomb or rocket racks attached to its lower fuselage. I also remember someone complaining about the movie <i>Fury</i>, and how "laughably stupid" it was that the Tiger in that movie - in real life the only operational Tiger 1 in the entire world, acquired from the Bovington Tank Museum for use in the film - was in its 1943 Tunisian camouflage paint pattern, and not what one would see on a Tiger in mid-1945. <b>Yeah I am sure the staff at Bovington are just going to paint over and then painstakingly strip and re-paint the only operational Tiger tank in the world just for some asshole in a movie theater</b><i>.</i> I mean, yeah, this is a bit silly.<br />
<br />
I guess my overall point here is, be honest about what you want from entertainment, seek that out, and don't complain about what was never intended to be there. Don't watch Wizards in Space for realistic engineering and physics demonstrations. Don't watch war movies if you'll have an aneurysm over the smallest historical inaccuracy. Don't watch horror movies if you're not prepared to see stupid horror movie tropes in action. Don't watch stupid raunchy sex comedies if you're not prepared to see cringe-worthy sex and gender stereotyping. For a large percentage of the population - for good or for ill - humor is about that which causes discomfort. <i>The Office</i> was all about "cringe humor". <i>America's Funniest Home Videos</i> was all about dads getting whacked in the crotch by whiffle bats. There is no getting away from this - it is at the heart of what is entertaining for some people.<br />
<br />
Now, to circle back to my opening statement, you <i>can</i> be justified in being upset at something when it tries to do that thing, but actively fails to do so. If your entertainment is about female empowerment, but you fall back on cringy, decades-old stereotypes, or if your message is that female empowerment is in some way bad and you're trying to be edgy by subverting this...than people <i>should</i> call you out for what you are, because you are trying to do that thing and doing it badly. This also doesn't mean you can be left off the hook for obvious racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on just by saying "well this movie was never intended to address that". We live in too-aware a society for that to be a legitimate excuse anymore<i>.</i> I sort of look at it like the old doctor's premise, "First, do no harm". As long as you can avoid being <i>actively</i> racist, sexist, and so forth, I feel you are not <i>required</i> to actively address those and other social issues if that is not the nature and theme of your entertainment.<br />
<br />
At the end of the day, <a href="http://postmodernpulps.blogspot.com/2019/09/media-monday-people-read-less-so-what.html" target="_blank">as I mentioned in a recent post about modern reading habits and sources of entertainment</a>, we only have so many hours in the day in which to consume entertainment, so why would we purposefully seek out entertainment that doesn't fit with our entertainment comfort zone? Life is too short and blood pressure too high already for us to do that to ourselves. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-32368847190283168962019-09-13T17:26:00.000-04:002019-09-13T17:26:02.255-04:00Fiction Friday: THE LAST WISH: Introducing the Witcher<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/14/Andrzej_Sapkowski_-_The_Last_Wish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="248" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/14/Andrzej_Sapkowski_-_The_Last_Wish.jpg" width="197" /></a></div>
If you follow video gaming at all, you've likely heard of The Witcher series of open-world RPG video games. They feature the monster-hunting Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, wandering the world and killing that which goes bump in the night. The world of the Witcher is based around Slavic folklore, a flavor of Western monster mythology that is a little removed from what most of us are used to unless you are really into the subject of bestiary folklore.<br />
<br />
But fewer people realize that the Witcher and his world started out as a series of short stories and novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Most of the stories were written in the 1990s, but it wasn't until the mid-oughts and later that they were given English translations. Coming at the end of this year, Netflix is releasing a television series based around the stories, and of course both fans of the books and the video games are howling over how the details shown in the trailer don't do the series justice.<br />
<br />
Curious about both such a popular video game character and what might drive Netflix to pick up the IP, I grabbed the first (chronologically) anthology of short stories, THE LAST WISH. I was immediately hooked. For a book translated from a different language, the prose is evocative and pulls you right into the world, a very dark, late medieval-era feeling fantasy realm, very similar to the Ravenloft setting of Dungeons & Dragons. If you aren't familiar with Slavic folklore, some of the creatures might seem unusual to you, but that slightly alien nature just adds to the creepiness of the setting - this isn't some adventurer going after your usual orcs and goblins, this is a true monster hunter, for whom a blend of swords, sorcery, and dark knowledge is needed to take on the evils lurking in the deep forests and crumbling towers.<br />
<br />
So if you like dark fairy-tale fantasy with an Eastern European bent to it, do yourself a favor and check out Sapkowski's fiction. I'll definitely find time this fall to work my way through more of Geralt's adventures.Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-8894144976089974072019-09-11T12:56:00.000-04:002019-09-11T12:56:05.535-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: Don't Feel Guilt Buying on eBayMaybe this is a more controversial topic than I believe it is, but I find weird the pressure people feel against buying second-hand or portioned out miniatures on eBay. To be clear, I am not talking about buying re-casted (aka, illegally copied) miniatures - that's a no-no and should never happen. I'm talking about buying out-of-production miniatures, or second-hand miniatures owned previously by someone else, even if that person just bought a large boxed set (like Games Workshop's Dark Imperium boxed set) and is selling the individual miniatures a few at a time.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwz7ntFOmeUSKoeDgjg4a9y6_T5GfKiMZqayckdGZb6MLCTcFqjXgRR0227uv62Ojl1TF1ERcIpfONAV0k8EV5wjn5MMZlXvr0nsq_foIlrc-2i3SmPNT2ynDsB4cWYhKP421HJoC6vff/s1600/20190712_201019.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwz7ntFOmeUSKoeDgjg4a9y6_T5GfKiMZqayckdGZb6MLCTcFqjXgRR0227uv62Ojl1TF1ERcIpfONAV0k8EV5wjn5MMZlXvr0nsq_foIlrc-2i3SmPNT2ynDsB4cWYhKP421HJoC6vff/s320/20190712_201019.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These out-of-production models were purchased like this on eBay</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
There can be a lot of reasons why you'd want to do this. For the out-of-production miniatures, you might just like a particular sculpt of a miniature, but it isn't made anymore. For me, I want to eventually buy and paint one of every GW Space Marine Chaplain, but there are only a handful still being made, while plenty of models with perfectly viable equipment loadouts are still usable in the current version of the game. Another reason might be that you're building, for example, a small display army using older, "retro" models. A lot of people these days are making small Rogue Trader-era forces more for the fun of rediscovering the models than anything else.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXGRhjHSsF04Nq0uD6bELUG-ocANC5XeGRe7fgtX3T30knubqdR28aZC6SsSkiund1OfQKGtzTNN7Hl8NowMlTvOsQaWRaEOS0JlJHt6m_A2xDPSdOn4ytDwdmxbBM48SS8Euin0I1zOH-/s1600/20190715_105034.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXGRhjHSsF04Nq0uD6bELUG-ocANC5XeGRe7fgtX3T30knubqdR28aZC6SsSkiund1OfQKGtzTNN7Hl8NowMlTvOsQaWRaEOS0JlJHt6m_A2xDPSdOn4ytDwdmxbBM48SS8Euin0I1zOH-/s320/20190715_105034.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of the above, now stripped of paint and ready for rebirth!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Another aspect to buying online might be to find a model you want that's not available on its own. For Primaris Space Marines, for example, you cannot buy a Primaris Ancient (aka, Standard Bearer) as its own model anywhere except eBay, since it only comes in the Dark Imperium boxed set. The same goes for the Gravis Captain. In the past, this was likewise the case with other armies. The first official generic Ork Warboss to come with a power klaw didn't arrive until the Assault on Black Reach boxed set for 40K's 5th edition, along with Ork Deffkoptas mounted with rokkits (and the old Deffkopta model is <i>absolutely hideous and ancient</i>).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ouZoR55nrNsiSh_29da02g_OEqPrPKhs1O1e74flJkiuiWhDSWbretdPFWpGekMbElT-wtzVvTokOiJumUnZLck1Ahyphenhyphen3cGjnQ0dIJoc35V3pdrNSrQ-SRORJeoMc5PF1n3QcHrb4KpRV/s1600/20190907_183619.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="1549" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ouZoR55nrNsiSh_29da02g_OEqPrPKhs1O1e74flJkiuiWhDSWbretdPFWpGekMbElT-wtzVvTokOiJumUnZLck1Ahyphenhyphen3cGjnQ0dIJoc35V3pdrNSrQ-SRORJeoMc5PF1n3QcHrb4KpRV/s320/20190907_183619.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tactical marines from the 1993 (!!!) 2nd Edition 40K boxed set.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And of course, another reason might be that you want that ONE particular bit for a model you're making. Maybe you like the look of a certain helmet or sword or gun. Maybe it fits with a theme, maybe the normal kit the part comes in only has 1 per box, and you need five. Sure, you're going to pay more money for it, but this is a leisure hobby, and eBay bits sellers are working from a sellers' market. I've bought plenty of little bits over time in order to build units of a certain theme, and while you're paying a premium for having that degree of choice, I never once felt cheated by the prices.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWeW4RcRt3E0szE06d3TcYmeYMgPRHoDwm1WBbP07tXBHPIzr81F1QMv_zf6XKtwTZ0wTe6sskuVTVQWlZHnA1ZYx5SQKvE4ldZgB3QR6PLfn3wNLcLnu3TfUPfHsFnQSnDW6k35L86G5X/s1600/20190828_200134.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWeW4RcRt3E0szE06d3TcYmeYMgPRHoDwm1WBbP07tXBHPIzr81F1QMv_zf6XKtwTZ0wTe6sskuVTVQWlZHnA1ZYx5SQKvE4ldZgB3QR6PLfn3wNLcLnu3TfUPfHsFnQSnDW6k35L86G5X/s320/20190828_200134.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This Chaplain model has long been OOP. His gun is also an eBay bit purchase.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The biggest criticism or worry I've seen from people who don't want to buy on eBay is that you're not giving money to your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS). Sure, that's true, but the same reasons you'd be buying on eBay are the same reasons you're not buying at your FLGS - the models and bits are either out of production, or they come in a larger boxed set and aren't sold individually. No one should feel guilty you're not buying a $160 boxed set from your FLGS when all you want is a handful of miniatures you can get on eBay for a fraction of that cost. And as for the idea that Games Workshop isn't getting your money - well, that's bullshit. They got their money for <i>that particular model</i> when that model was first purchased. It doesn't matter if the miniature is 30 years old - at some point, someone gave the company money for that object, and that's that. I hear this as an argument against used book stores pretty frequently - that it keeps the money from the hands of the author - but that's just a guilt trip. A paperback novel is an object, and there's no reason to not sell or give away an object when you are done with it. Conversely, there's no reason you should feel guilt buying it second-hand.<br />
<br />
So, with that in mind, if you're looking to build a miniatures army, and you're willing to give older miniatures a little TLC, go onto eBay and do a little investigating. You might be surprised at what you find!<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_45Yv_bDxv8TUC_nDjyDBKHwxOapirDeXzC_G10JeJUypaQ21j0YDfv4lNeGefXL9r_ZCOnMFV3C-grRJs8uQdBAdMKefcR2GPNz1kfVSftKBOX9duJUF9x1TagVAPg1eHtHdJp7pmOi/s1600/20190907_182825.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="804" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_45Yv_bDxv8TUC_nDjyDBKHwxOapirDeXzC_G10JeJUypaQ21j0YDfv4lNeGefXL9r_ZCOnMFV3C-grRJs8uQdBAdMKefcR2GPNz1kfVSftKBOX9duJUF9x1TagVAPg1eHtHdJp7pmOi/s320/20190907_182825.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For the Emperor!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-57030179511940389912019-09-09T16:24:00.000-04:002019-09-09T16:24:16.731-04:00Media Monday: The Kindle eBook ReaderI'm not sure when I bought my first eBook. It was probably around 2010, and I think I would have bought it using the Kindle app on a work-provided iPad. Not much later, or perhaps around the same time, I had the app on an iPod Touch (I didn't have a smartphone). This was around the time that I was starting to connect with other authors, and I was beginning work on my first novel, as well as tinkering with short story concepts. Many of the older authors I was talking to were reclaiming rights to their backlists, while newer authors were experimenting with self-publishing, so I bought a few eBooks and began to read.<br />
<br />
Reading on an iPod Touch was OK, especially since the device was small and easy to carry around. Reading on a 1st Generation iPad was more cumbersome, since the tablet is large and comparatively heavy. It is also quite bright if the screen is turned up, but when the brightness is lowered, it is much harder to use. The irritation of having a bright screen shining in my face at close range made reading for extended periods of time rather uncomfortable. Still, I liked the various features the Kindle app provided - the ability to "whispersync" your place in an eBook across multiple devices, and of course, the ability to instantly buy and download a new book. It did not take long for me to see the many benefits in eBook technology.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgat18_-YR0NFVFP6Ak6NwoqLDZms2kkucJJEZTTOH6kHVLB42x_rvnUFiKiYOkfhoxMA5_E6fuPxI_xQ7WU5ER1gn9wkOuYA0yfDG99aNU2S4bIRZgv2b9AuKnV2DESvZJv8_JOte9Me1s/s1600/20190909_151338.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgat18_-YR0NFVFP6Ak6NwoqLDZms2kkucJJEZTTOH6kHVLB42x_rvnUFiKiYOkfhoxMA5_E6fuPxI_xQ7WU5ER1gn9wkOuYA0yfDG99aNU2S4bIRZgv2b9AuKnV2DESvZJv8_JOte9Me1s/s400/20190909_151338.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My 2011 Kindle (left) and 2013 Kindle Paperwhite (right)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Shortly after publishing my first pieces of short fiction in 2011, I decided it was time to get a Kindle. I bought it in December of 2011, and was immediately impressed. While the keyboard might make it a little intimidating or "retro" at first, and the e-ink contrast isn't as sharp as later models, I immediately found the e-ink technology extremely comfortable to read. There was no light shining directly into my face, the side buttons turning the page allowed one to keep reading with a brief twitch of my thumb, and the ability to adjust font size, line spacing, and character density made reading very easy on my eyes, which is especially important for me, as my eyesight isn't great, and paperback fonts tend to be small and cramped.<br />
<br />
A little more than a year later, I did buy a 7" Samsung tablet, and while it was so much better to read on than my tiny smartphone or the large, cumbersome iPad, it still shined a bright light in my face, and once I purchased a larger LG smartphone, I found the tablet redundant. A few months later, addressing the one major flaw in my Kindle (the lack of a reading light), I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2013. While I missed the buttons - and it was harder to take notes with the touch keyboard vs the actual physical button keyboard - the Paperwhite was smaller, lighter, and the adjustable light, which shown across the page, rather than out from behind it, made reading in low light extremely easy.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAH79PnoPgY47caVxO4t4TF4Tc9y9T2JPdVbPgYOfoMBA6-sTxvzeiMv4h385WyJuRByQYMoWEvHVR9SWtQ1elu3aS7brEKP89khkdOLxyNnPWtahvUPe3IwJ0kkUkpqGLnIU7_7eyDOIu/s1600/52057aa1292e9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="672" data-original-width="460" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAH79PnoPgY47caVxO4t4TF4Tc9y9T2JPdVbPgYOfoMBA6-sTxvzeiMv4h385WyJuRByQYMoWEvHVR9SWtQ1elu3aS7brEKP89khkdOLxyNnPWtahvUPe3IwJ0kkUkpqGLnIU7_7eyDOIu/s320/52057aa1292e9.jpeg" width="219" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Way to be an elitist shitbag!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There are a lot of people out there who speak derisively of eBooks and Kindles. Some complain that Amazon doesn't use the EPUB file format, which means Amazon eBooks don't work on other e-readers. They complain that eBooks purchased on other platforms don't work on the Kindle. Neither of these arguments really bother me, since the only two e-ink competitors are the Nook and the Kobo, and frankly, if you tied your line to either of those brands, I'm sorry to say, you've got problems. Beyond that, apps from other booksellers can install on most phones and mobile devices, regardless of file type. Other people complain about DRM (Digital Rights Management - aka, anti-piracy technology), but frankly, that's put in place at the request of the publisher, not the distributor, so if you have a problem with an Amazon eBook having DRM, write the publisher, not Mr. Bezos.<br />
<br />
And of course, there's the "I just love books" argument. People love the feel of a book, the smell of paper, the act of turning pages, blah blah blah. Look, no one is forcing a Kindle into your hands and dragging your books out of your house to throw into the back of a dump truck. Contrary to popular opinion, Marie Kondo isn't telling you to ONLY keep 30 books in your house (I have her book - in paper no less - and she says no such thing). For some reason, people seem to think that proponents of eBooks live some weird minimalist, digital-only lifestyle. I own two e-readers, and I've got sixteen bookcases filled to the damn brim with books. There's books everywhere you turn in my home, and you know what - that's one of the reasons I like the Kindle. I don't have to go digging through piles and bookcases looking for a book, it's right there in the Kindle inventory. I don't need to worry about packing "backup" books when I go on a trip, because I've already got several hundred right there with me.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://whsjohnnygreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sniffing-books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="468" height="240" src="https://whsjohnnygreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sniffing-books.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mmmm, smells like mold, cigarette smoke, and cat piss.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Does it need to be recharged? Sure, maybe every couple of weeks it needs to be plugged in for a couple of hours. My phone needs to be recharged every day, sometimes twice a day depending on how much I use it. A laptop might need to be recharged every few hours. Compared to most of the electronic devices you use every day, the Kindle, comparatively, lasts an order of magnitude longer. Both of mine are 6+ years old, and I can still read 2-3 novels on them before the battery runs out. It takes the barest minimum of device power management to make this a non-issue. And, other than that, I don't see many drawbacks to these devices. The Paperwhite weights about the same as a paperback novel, and the newer versions of the Kindle line are even lighter.<br />
<br />
In conclusion, eBooks and the e-reader have completely changed the way I buy and read books, making it a much more immediate experience. I still buy used, vintage paperbacks for my collections, and I still buy paper books for research because it is easier to find a specific page or diagram in a paper book, but for casual, leisure reading, it's almost exclusively done via eBooks.<br />
<br />
Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-41682062129083594362019-09-06T11:46:00.000-04:002019-09-06T11:46:19.616-04:00Fiction Friday: The Original Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/DragonsofAutumnTwilight_1984original.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="179" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/DragonsofAutumnTwilight_1984original.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Just a quick post today as I wrap up a busy work week. I cribbed this off of my Facebook feed in response to a Tor Books post about the original "Chronicles" Dragonlance tie-in novels, and how formative those novels were to a generation of role-playing gamers and fantasy enthusiasts. For many folks (myself included) we read these books before Conan or Lord of the Rings.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><a href="https://www.tor.com/2019/07/09/how-dragonlance-launched-my-lifelong-love-of-fantasy/" target="_blank">You can read the Tor.com article here</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">No joke, I think the author stole the memories of my early teenage years and used them to write this piece. Until maybe my sophomore year of high school, I'd always eschewed fantasy and science fiction in favor of shoot 'em up men's adventure and espionage thrillers, until one day a classmate of mine loaned me these three books. This was at least a year before I first played Dungeons & Dragons, and long before I tried reading The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. I still have my original three paperbacks, bought after reading this for the first time almost 30 years ago.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">After getting into D&D, I did buy the second edition "Tales of the Lance" boxed set, although I never did play it. Frankly, I feel like it isn't really superior to the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover for 1E that came out in the '80s. I remember seeing this advertised in the back of comic books, before I got into D&D or really understood what it was or how it played. I remember staring at this all the time, thinking it seemed like the most badass thing I could imagine. When I got into D&D later on, I did buy the 2nd edition Tales of the Lance boxed set, but just didn't appreciate it as much as the 1E Dragonlance Adventures hardcover, which I acquired in a used book store my freshman year of college.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_GIT-1tzY_YzChNsa_FbvXWL-yOXRoMu51cF8GvW87fnq9Q4vgUXA2HG8Kn7mxtqL7l26yEQhq2AOJyv-at_qvi5EWCiU3kNWyp20o10fkt758AqIiXPZgCcyDWvrWrtTW1yri1v1DZbW/s1600/DLcomicbookad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1064" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_GIT-1tzY_YzChNsa_FbvXWL-yOXRoMu51cF8GvW87fnq9Q4vgUXA2HG8Kn7mxtqL7l26yEQhq2AOJyv-at_qvi5EWCiU3kNWyp20o10fkt758AqIiXPZgCcyDWvrWrtTW1yri1v1DZbW/s320/DLcomicbookad.jpg" width="212" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">It has been years since I re-read the original trilogy. I started re-reading Kindle editions, and while it didn't disappoint, I had read them so many times, knowing what was about to happen meant I eventually started reading something else and didn't get back to it, but yeah, I do want to give 'em another go, although I am a little nervous as to whether they'll hold up or not. It is simply a matter of remembering that they represent fantasy and RPGs at a certain particular point in time, and appreciate them for what they are, instead of criticizing them for what they are not.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span> </span>Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-68494214042647693652019-09-04T13:12:00.003-04:002019-09-04T13:12:54.264-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: Not Just Dungeons and Dragons<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/TSR1070_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Game.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="371" height="232" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/TSR1070_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Game.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Dungeons and Dragons was the first pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing game I ever encountered. I started playing in the summer of '93, when two of my friends had the "Big Black Box" edition of the DnD Basic Rules set. For those of you who know what the BBB version is...well I don't need to tell you anything. For all you newbies out there, this was a really big intro boxed set that had a ton of "rules cards", a big map adventure, tiny cardboard monsters and PCs...basically everything you'd need to play the first few levels of your characters - which is not unusual for the D&D boxed sets - but in a larger format, with full-color maps and cardboard counters.<br />
<br />
Up until this point, I really hadn't been into "Fantasy", but I had read the first three Dragonlance books (that's a post for another day), and so I had some idea of what I was getting into. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked - in fact, far more than the two other people I was gaming with. I quickly bought the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, and the over the next few years, I bought EVERYTHING that TSR produced - settings, Class handbooks, DM's guides...the works. The biggest problem, unfortunately, was lack of players, since I was living in a fairly rural small town in Maine, and my high school peers, for the most part, weren't interested in gaming.<br />
<br />
When I moved off to college in 1995, I brought most of my gaming materials with me, certain that I'd be able to find a DnD group at a large urban university. But of course, as soon as I found some nerdy brethren and asked who played D&D, I received mocking laughter. "We don't play that game, you dork. We play <i>White Wolf</i> games. Those are <i>real</i> role-playing games".<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Werewolf_-_The_Apocalypse_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="272" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Werewolf_-_The_Apocalypse_cover.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>
I got sucked into a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, and really enjoyed it, and I played a little Vampire and a little Mage as well. My RPG tastes began to grow, and I started buying other games, surprised that there were dozens of games put out by a wide variety of publishers in any genre you could think of. And of course, this was the late '90s, when the Internet gave us the ability to communicate around the world and share documents online with each other, enabling the explosion of what is commonly known as the "indie gaming" revolution. New voices emerged in the industry, edgy people with games that strayed far from the staid boundaries of D&D, GURPS, Rifts, World of Darkness, and other, more established platforms.<br />
<br />
Fast-forward twenty years, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dungeons and Dragons is now well into its fifth - and most popular - edition, and most of the old guard are still around in one form or another. But smaller, indie presses and self-published games continue to arrive on the scene almost daily. In addition, the disdain most D&D folks had for the 4th edition rules, coupled with the death of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in 2008 sparked the "Old School Renaissance", where many gamers went back to the old editions of the game, breathing life back into them and using the bones of their rules sets to create a huge variety of different games.<br />
<br />
Over the decades, I've collected <i>a lot</i> of role-playing games. Far more than I ever have, or ever could, play. I don't know what the current number is, but it is probably creeping up towards a hundred different RPGs and/or editions. And yet, that barely scratches the surface of what's out there, even from larger game companies, never mind "indie" developers. It's interesting that Dungeons and Dragons is more popular and more mainstream than it has ever been, and yet, most people have no idea of the immense variety of games out there - settings, play styles, rules types - whatever your interests might be, there is likely a game for you. And, just to give a minuscule taste, here's a YouTube video I watched last night, which dips a toe into the fathomless pool of games out there:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_cfJYUpD5bY/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_cfJYUpD5bY?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
Yes, the video is a bit long, but if you have <i>any</i> curiosity about role-playing games, it is definitely worth your time to watch, and certainly better than me trying to pitch a bunch of different games. Oh, and it is worth noting that of the ten games they mention, I only own one of these - Call of Cthulhu - and it's an old edition. So if I own nearly a hundred RPGs, and only 1 of them is on this list, that gives you some idea of the variety out there.<br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-9749279002644502822019-09-02T17:40:00.000-04:002019-09-02T17:43:45.515-04:00Media Monday: People Read Less - So What?Now that we've gotten that no doubt controversial post title out of the way - yes, <a href="https://www.thepassivevoice.com/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/" target="_blank">according to this article on The Passive Voice Blog</a>, a recent study on how Americans use their leisure time showed that in the last fifteen years, the amount of time we spend in leisure reading has dropped about 30 percent.<br />
<br />
Now, before you run off and claim this is a sign of the fall of Western civilization, feel free to <a href="https://www.bls.gov/tus/" target="_blank">head over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and take a look at the Time Use Survey data</a>. Unless there's a more select breakdown of this data, their categories are pretty broad, and if I may say so, kind of antiquated. They refer to "computer use", but don't seem to indicate if that also includes mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. They also list "socializing and communicating", but I'm not sure if that includes communicating digitally via messaging or other social media. Further, they refer to "watching TV", but as there are so many people these days who almost exclusively stream their TV content via a computer, what if I am watching television via my laptop? Or I'm watching YouTube or Twitch, but on my television?<br />
<br />
The crux of the worry here, for this blog post at least, is that people are reading less. And I think the above paragraph might shed a little light on why. Although claims have been made that we've been reading less since the 1980s, I would wager the decline has been more rapid in the last 10-15 years, and for obvious reasons. People these days simply have more ways in which to spend their leisure time, and although I don't know if people have more or less leisure time these days, We all have only so many hours in the day, period. Looking back at the 1980s as the starting point for this decline, we have the arrival of cable television and computer video gaming as two major time sinks. Cable is especially important when you look at that time use survey and see that by far, "watching TV" is still considered the largest leisure activity. Once the average person's TV content went from a handful of channels to dozens, including channels that showed theatrical movies, there was a lot more content for the TV viewer to consume. Also consider that this would have been a boom time for cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and then as time went on, CDs and DVDs. "Home entertainment" exploded in the '80s and '90s, even if you set aside home computing and console gaming, which you really can't.<br />
<br />
But what about the books? Someone on the Internet told me that Men stopped reading because [insert awkward and sexist bullshit here]. Well, it is true that a lot of "Men's Fiction" dried up during this time period, but I believe it had less to do with the lack of testosterone in the Publishing World, and more to do with a lack of profit, both for the authors and for the publishers. Most of the serial fiction writing was done on a write-for-hire basis, without any royalty structure, which meant you got one paycheck for your novel, regardless of how good or bad it was. This, along with rapid turnaround times for getting books out the door, and the steady merge-merge-merge of smaller houses being bought up by larger ones, and little imprints being abandoned because they weren't profitable enough, caused a lot of venues for "Men's fiction" to simply dry up. Why should a major publishing house pump out skinny little dimestore novels when it could put out a doorstopper hardcover, then sell the same book six months to a year later as a mass market paperback?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thebigthrill.org/2019/08/on-the-cover-david-morrell/" target="_blank">This article about veteran novelist David Morrell is pretty telling in this regard</a>. His iconic character, John Rambo, first came to live in a novel where (spoiler alert) he's killed off at the end. But Morrell was lucky enough to sell the rights to the novel as a movie deal, and in that film, FIRST BLOOD, Rambo doesn't die in the end. In fact, he goes on to make multiple blockbuster movies, including one coming out this very month. Even the author himself notices that he has a moment of disconnect when he sees his character in its screen persona, so far removed from that character he penned decades ago. Morrell lived through this transformation in the publishing business, where the question stopped being whether it was a good book that would sell, into just how <i>marketable</i> is the book - how far can you carry it into possible TV or film options. What about streaming venues? Video games? A book is no longer just a good story, it is precious <i>intellectual property</i> that can be branded and milked for every possible drop of profit.<br />
<br />
And to circle back to advancements in media for a moment, while traditional publishing houses might have failed not only their authors but their readers, leaving their leisure time to be consumed by TV and video game entertainment, now multimedia entertainment means anyone carrying a smartphone has in their pocket access to whatever form of entertainment they desire - from books, to music, to movies and television, to video games and instructional videos, newspapers, magazine articles, interpersonal and social media communication channels, and much more.<br />
<br />
We have access to more information - reference and entertainment - right now in our pockets than anyone before us in the history of the world. It is only natural that we make use of that access, and such use eats into time that, in decades past, was used to read a novel. And you know what? That's okay. I have always been an avid reader, and I would never tell anyone to <i>not</i> read for pleasure, but there are so many other venues for entertainment these days, and there's nothing wrong with partaking in them, because at the end of the day, if you gain enjoyment out of doing it, that's what's most important.<br />
<br />
Now, does not reading mean we are negatively impacting our vocabulary, our own literacy, our very imagination? Maybe yes, maybe no. I know a lot of early Gen-Xers and Boomers who bemoan that "kids these days" are illiterate and can't write a proper sentence or spelling...and then you see these people post on Facebook, and in my mind, their arguments become invalid. If someone wants to better their vocabulary or educate themselves, the online and digital resources available to them now make the resources available to me when I was growing up pale in comparison. I regularly turn to YouTube or some other online resource for information on a wide variety of topics, and these digital resources can provide information in a way that no written text ever could.<br />
<br />
So at the end of the day, yes, people might be reading less, but does that mean they are learning less? Are they using their imaginations less? Are we simply shifting where we are dedicating our time and changing the way we learn? Is watching a YouTube channel on history worse than reading a history book? Is watching a Netflix series about bank robbers worse than reading a series of novels about bank robbers? Is watching someone stream a video game over Twitch really that different from going to an arcade and watching someone play Pac-Man?Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-14387212615688825892019-08-30T14:11:00.000-04:002019-08-30T14:11:20.448-04:00Fiction Friday: Matthew Phillion's THE INDESTRUCTIBLES Series<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41X5Ar9yUXL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41X5Ar9yUXL.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
Although I have, over the years, dabbled in reading comics and following along with various comic book characters, I was never really particularly drawn to the super-hero genre specifically. I preferred characters like The Punisher or Conan the Barbarian, or comic book stories that weren't really super-hero focused, at least in the traditional sense, like the PREACHER series, or WATCHMEN (which has super-heroes, but wow, not so super or so heroic).<br />
<br />
All that having been said, with the meteoric rise in Young Adult fiction over the last twenty years, especially as it touches on sub-genres like Urban Fantasy, I've seen several authors out there who tie in YA fiction with more traditional super-hero tropes (Percy Jackson kinda feels like this, although the characters are technically Greek demi-gods, but whatever). Again, this really isn't my cup of tea, so for the most part, I've ignored this genre, feeling it's not really something I find interesting.<br />
<br />
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KDY2R2T/r" target="_blank">Matthew Phillion's THE INDESTRUCTIBLES</a> a shot. I've been social media pen pals with Matt for a few years, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Revery-Tales-Dungeon-Crawlers-ebook/dp/B07RZP9XV9/" target="_blank">I've read his DUNGEON CRAWLERS novellas (also highly recommended)</a>. I knew he was a skilled storyteller, so I took the plunge, and I read Book 1 of his YA supers series.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BrWAcuc3L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BrWAcuc3L.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
To say that I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was is a bit of a slight to Matt, so I will say instead that I was surprised how easy it was for me to slide into the YA superhero genre with this first book. The characters were fun and engaging, and his writing style is clean and evocative, without feeling simplistic or dumbed-down for a younger audience. I have since read books 2 and 3, and I am currently well into book 4. The series currently extends to a fifth book, as well as several associated short stories, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Sea-Matthew-Phillion-ebook/dp/B0721JBBKC/" target="_blank">and there is a separate two-volume book series</a> that exists in the same world and timeline as the Indestructibles characters.<br />
<br />
If you enjoy super-hero fiction, or if you have or know a young adult reader who enjoys this kind of fiction, please go check out Matt's work on Amazon. His books are available in Kindle and paperback formats, and he's also made them available via Kindle Unlimited.Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-45782538953594020442019-08-28T14:19:00.000-04:002019-08-28T14:19:52.602-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: A Shout-Out to Tabletop MinionsAs you get older, you find your hobby priorities changing. You might have more money (<i>might</i> being the operative word here), but you are often more careful on where that leisure/hobby spending goes, because you often have less <i>time and energy</i> than you did when you were younger. I haven't had a chance to play a game of Warhammer 40K or Bolt Action in a couple of years, and while I would enjoy doing so more regularly, I'm still happy to spend my leisure time buying, building, and painting miniatures, not with the goal of creating the most "competitive" army (whatever that even means), but building an army that I like, one that feels <i>right</i> to me.<br />
<br />
Along the way, I often turn to YouTube for tips on painting and converting and general gaming/hobby ideas. A couple of months ago, someone recommended I check out a video put out by the Tabletop Minions channel, regarding a way to strip paint off of old / used miniatures. I liked the video and checked out some more of the work on that channel, and it really resonated with me. TM's primary person is a guy who goes by the handle "Atom Smasher", a fellow in his late forties who is extremely relatable if you enjoy miniature gaming as a hobby, but you're not a win-at-all-costs fanatic who is obsessed with extremely competitive games, or a painting snob who shuns anyone who hasn't mastered the arts of wet blending or edge highlighting. For example:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0F4cB-l6ec8/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0F4cB-l6ec8?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
Another recent video that I thought was really pertinent to middle-aged wargame and miniature hobbyists was this one:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/viD2z-bZ1Ck/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/viD2z-bZ1Ck?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
Full disclosure, I have a pair of those dorky-looking magnifying glasses, and they work great. I also have a miniature holder, and it makes a huge difference. Another really good video for us filthy "casuals" who keep putting things off:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HXroy25tREQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HXroy25tREQ?feature=player_embedded" width="480"></iframe></div>
<br />
Anyway, you get the picture. "Uncle Atom" has a lot of great advice, and his videos are very well-done and informative. He comes across as that very helpful older mentor who isn't there to drive you in one particular hobby direction, but instead, offers good advice for people who just don't know what to do or where to turn. If you want some quality tabletop wargaming YouTube content, please check him out and subscribe to his channel.<br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-59005441011376984762019-08-26T12:52:00.000-04:002019-08-26T12:52:50.979-04:00Media Monday: Death KissA bit of a brief post today, as I'm in what's typically the busiest week of the year at work. If you've been around this blog for any amount of time, you know my fascination with the DEATH WISH series, both the two books written by Brian Garfield, as well as the *five* movies made starring Charles Bronson. And of course, it's no secret that much of my fiction writing is inspired by the notion of the urban vigilante.<br />
<br />
So I was definitely curious when the micro-budget crime movie DEATH KISS came onto the scene. Basically, you can treat it as an unauthorized, unofficial follow-up to the Death Wish film franchise, although that is never truly acknowledged. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Kiss-Robert-Kovacs/dp/B07J216T5K/" target="_blank">Death Kiss is available on Amazon Prime Video</a>, and you can check out the trailer here:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/k1qWWyRztgE/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k1qWWyRztgE?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Just as interesting as the movie (and perhaps for some people, even more so), pulp aficionado Bill Cunningham of Pulp 2.0 Press has written a book that does a great job of breaking down the production and marketing of Death Kiss from a business perspective. Allow me to quote my review of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Kiss-Book-Movie-Cinexploits/dp/1796851841/" target="_blank">his book Death Kiss - the Book of the Movie</a>, here:</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span class="cr-widget-FocalReviews" data-hook="cr-widget-FocalReviews"><span class="a-size-base review-text" data-hook="review-body"><span class="">To
preface, I have seen DEATH KISS and read through Cunningham's
dissection of the film, and I write this review from the point of view
of a novelist and storyteller, as well as someone who went through film
school in the late 1990s, when low-budget independent film-making was on
the mind of many of my fellow classmates. I am also a huge fan of Brian
Garfield's original DEATH WISH novel, as well as the 1974 adaptation by
Michael Winner. I've put out articles about vigilante storytelling, and
have written a bit of it myself.<br /><br />I say all this because the idea
of an indie project designed specifically to tap into that
Garfield/Bronson/Winner-inspired vigilante crime story market was
immediately appealing to me. I watched the film DEATH KISS before
reading the "Cinexploits!" case study, and while there were portions of
the film that I might have criticisms about, I think overall, with the
resources available to the director, the overall final product was
entertaining - I honestly enjoyed it more than the 2018 remake with
Bruce Willis!<br /><br />And so, having seen the film, I decided to read the
DEATH KISS case study. It is an excellent breakdown of the idea behind
the film, and how so often in the entertainment industry, the people you
know and the connections you make - both "above the line" and below -
can make or break the project before it even goes into production. The
relationship between Rene Perez and Robert Kovacs - a man with, shall we
say, a particular set of skills - allowed the idea of a DEATH
WISH-styled independent film to grow from the seed of an idea into a
full-bloomed production.<br /><br />Further, and this is something I
especially take to heart as a novelist, Cunningham takes a lot of time
to discuss the pragmatic, commercial, *business* of film-making - about
making sure that your idea isn't just a good story, but that it is a
story you can *sell*, and knowing what markets would be best for your
idea, and making sure that you are delivering a product that fits with
those markets. Artistic storytelling for the sake of storytelling is a
noble concept, but it doesn't pay the rent or the talent. If you are in
the *business* of film-making, you must understand first and foremost
that your business is commercial in nature, and that you must, above all
else, make money from the sale of your product. Period.<br /><br />Of
special note is the breakdown of the ARKOFF Formula. I won't go into the
details here, but it is a point-by-point process epitomized by the
methodology of Samuel Z. Arkoff, who did great business during the
second half of the 20th century producing and distributing commercial
theatrical films. I find the ARKOFF Formula worth studying by anyone who
has an interest in storytelling designed to - first and foremost - get
people to part with their money.<br /><br />As this review is already fairly
lengthy, I will end it by pointing out that the book also includes the
DEATH KISS script, as well as a lot of great details about low-budget
film production. As part of my day job I regularly interact with faculty
and staff that support student film-making, and I have been in many a
meeting where people argue for the best film cameras and the best lenses
and the most expensive NLE hardware builds and finishing spaces. While
more money and resources usually doesn't *hurt*, it often puts people in
the mindset that more money is the answer to the practical problems
they face during production. However, you don't tell a better story
because you don't have the most expensive lens, or because you're only
shooting in 1080 vs. 4K. Good stories are still good stories, even if
they are produced on non-Hollywood grade production equipment. It is
skill, talent, and ingenuity that tells great stories, not the most
expensive ARRI rig you can get from a rental house.<br /><br />If you have
an interest in independent film-making, commercial storytelling, or even
just the idea of taking a 1970s cult hit and using its gravity to
slingshot an idea forty years later, I highly recommend you get your
hands on DEATH KISS: The Book of the Movie.</span></span></span></div>
</blockquote>
So if you are a fan of low-budget film-making, a fan of vigilante action, or a blend of both, check out both the movie <i>and</i> the book. <br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-45029099918102756392019-08-23T10:12:00.000-04:002019-08-23T10:12:33.405-04:00Fiction Friday: Paul Bishop Presents Anthologies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71VSvo18xfL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71VSvo18xfL.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
Astonishingly, the third post of the week! I'm reserving Fridays for fiction posts, and today's post will be a little shorter than the posts on Monday and Wednesday. I wanted to highlight a series of fiction anthologies being put out by Wolfpack Publishing, and curated/edited by Paul Bishop, a retired LAPD detective and venerable novelist. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TBPDWLD/" target="_blank">The first anthology, <i>Pattern of Behavior</i></a> I read as soon as it was released, and while not every one of the stories was entirely my bag, so to speak, all of them were well-crafted tales from highly-talented authors.<br />
<br />
There is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T9PVPYH/" target="_blank">a second book in the series out now, <i>Criminal Tendencies</i></a>, and although I have yet to start reading it, I must humbly mention that I have a story in that volume, one featuring my character Jamie "Hangman" Lynch, the protagonist from my novel SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. If you liked that novel and want to read some more of the Hangman dealing out some bloody vigilante vengeance, look no further (for now) than <i>Criminal Tendencies</i>.<br />
<br />
I do believe there is one more entry forthcoming in Paul's series of crime anthologies, and after that, there is at least one Western anthology on the horizon. All of these are (or will be) available in eBook and trade paperback form, and not only are they priced to move at $0.99 apiece, they are available through Kindle Unlimited as well.<br />
<br />
Lastly, I highly encourage anyone interested in crime and mystery fiction to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Bishop/e/B000APTEIY/" target="_blank">go to Paul's Amazon page</a> and check out the full range of his published works. Paul was one of the authors I connected with early on in my blogging and writing journey, and I am more than happy to promote his publishing ventures whenever and wherever I can. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-1392793050946433862019-08-21T09:30:00.000-04:002019-08-21T09:30:08.779-04:00Wargaming Wednesday: The Pure Insanity of Warhammer 40,000Continuing with my push to deliver more blogging content, I'm dedicating Wednesdays to wargaming and role-playing games. Although in recent years I haven't been able to get in much (or really any) of either tabletop wargaming or pen-and-paper RPG playing, I still count both among my hobbies and interests.<br />
<br />
Today I just wanted to highlight the wargame I am most invested in on an emotional level - Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000. For those who don't know what it is - I'll do this REAL QUICK - a bunch of British tabletop miniatures folks had a set of wargaming rules called Warhammer. It had armies of Elves and Dwarfs and guys with swords and pikes, and orcs and goblins, even skeletons and ghouls and "chaos" warriors and monsters. Basically every fantasy trope you can think of circa 1985 or so, thrown into a blender. Warhammer became super popular, and as it grew, they decided to do a version of the game as a sci-fi skirmish game, which they decided to call "Warhammer 40,000".<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhINPooU-Stge01VHJtIFEbWe7N04Wep0icFxXpDw4uFFOxMZBwBjvwGkJ0pWDJXuS2OnUcPd6VBppA-MMS-WI-4dTzYh3vLFmtXrgDxWkyUnRt8buKg1QomGwMnSw9Pi8v2VRSnjFzRagO/s1600/db7264483cae7c2bd8629567009b760c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="803" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhINPooU-Stge01VHJtIFEbWe7N04Wep0icFxXpDw4uFFOxMZBwBjvwGkJ0pWDJXuS2OnUcPd6VBppA-MMS-WI-4dTzYh3vLFmtXrgDxWkyUnRt8buKg1QomGwMnSw9Pi8v2VRSnjFzRagO/s400/db7264483cae7c2bd8629567009b760c.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just Another Day in the 41st Millennium</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The universe of Warhammer 40,000 has changed somewhat in the 30+ years since its inception, but, well, I'll just cut and paste in the quote that appears at the beginning of most of their products:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<em><span class="asscaps">It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheEmperor" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheEmperor">The Emperor</a>
has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of
Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the
might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing
invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion
Lord of the Imperium for whom <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanSacrifice" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanSacrifice">a thousand souls are sacrificed every day</a>, so that he may never truly die. <br /><br />Yet
even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal
vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the
Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the
Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast
armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his
soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceMarine" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceMarine">Space Marines</a>, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedShirtArmy" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedShirtArmy">Imperial Guard</a> and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StateSec" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StateSec">Inquisition</a> and the tech-priests of the <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MachineWorship" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MachineWorship">Adeptus Mechanicus</a>
to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely
enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics,
mutants - and <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EldritchAbomination" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EldritchAbomination">worse.</a> <br /><br /><a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld">To be a man in such times is to be</a> <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AMillionIsAStatistic" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AMillionIsAStatistic">one amongst untold billions</a>. It is to live in <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dystopia" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dystopia">the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable</a>. <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WelcomeToHell" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WelcomeToHell">These are the tales of those times.</a> <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LostTechnology" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LostTechnology">Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.</a> Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier">grim dark</a> future <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArcWords" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArcWords">there is only war</a>. There is <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HopelessWar" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HopelessWar">no peace amongst the stars</a>, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and <a class="twikilink" href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodIsEvil" title="/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodIsEvil">the laughter of thirsting gods.</a></span></em></blockquote>
<br />
Yeah, it's like that. This is the kind of science fiction wargame you dream up when you're a young British nerd who subsists on a diet of heavy metal, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien, the punk aesthetic, European political chaos, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, the Alien franchise, Hammer horror films, and a thick, heady dose of Generation X nihilism. The "good guys" in the Warhammer 40K universe are the Imperium of Man, but you quickly realize that in 40K, "good" just means not quite as demonically horrifying as the "bad guys", but still pretty goddamn awful. The Space Marines, genetically modified super-humans in a suit of nigh-invulnerable power armor, might be call "the Emperor's finest", but they're also know as "The Angels of Death", and they'd stomp your skull into paste as soon as look at you if they thought you were a threat.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBoBjp5xNO9vwqYWYbHOaMZg-Nc89upy9fyh3Gn_XWB8iKP8LDuXcALkabmjeVbGDaPDjPJn0HPOfb22x0sK2AfMg-SqSPbmYB8zNItm6mdXWmwYbqPMXLTZbEf_vb8qFf5YybcdHMrnmh/s1600/Fuckyeahwh40krt.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="497" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBoBjp5xNO9vwqYWYbHOaMZg-Nc89upy9fyh3Gn_XWB8iKP8LDuXcALkabmjeVbGDaPDjPJn0HPOfb22x0sK2AfMg-SqSPbmYB8zNItm6mdXWmwYbqPMXLTZbEf_vb8qFf5YybcdHMrnmh/s320/Fuckyeahwh40krt.png" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Ello Guv'ner!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Even the Imperial Guard, the "good little guys" who were just your normal humans in basic body armor and carrying basic guns - somewhat analogous to regular army guys of today, just with sci-fi trappings - are often portrayed as psychotically violent and xenophobic, or just plain insane. Many of them come from "death worlds" where everything there tries to kill you, and it's basically Rambo with a plasma rifle and a chainsaw sword.<br />
<br />
Some of my favorite parts of 40K are when things get delightfully subversive. There are nuns in 40K, but they are sociopathic religious zealots running around in black powered armor with all-white hair (white head covering, black outfit, like a nun's habit), blazing away with guns and flamethrowers, slaying heretics and the "impure". The Space Marine chaplain isn't a kindly older man giving you spiritual guidance...well okay he is, but he's also an eight foot-tall crazed murder machine in coal-black armor with a skull-shaped helmet, smashing people to pieces in the name of the Emperor and driving on the troops with his "inspiring presence". Yeah, it's like that. Even the Librarian is a force to be reckoned with, as "Librarians" are actually Space Marines with psychic powers, who can blow your body apart with their minds, set tanks on fire, and cause all sorts of supernatural havoc.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/catalog/product/threeSixty/99800101006_ChaplainTerminator360/01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="800" height="286" src="https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/catalog/product/threeSixty/99800101006_ChaplainTerminator360/01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, this is one of the Good Guys.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If anything, my biggest criticism of 40K in recent years is that they seem to be toning down the darker, more punk-rock elements of 40K in favor of something a little more family-friendly. There are still demons and mutants and heretics, but the Good Guys are a little more Good and the Bad Guys are a little more Bad. While 40K has always bee appealing to teenagers, I think Games Workshop knows that they need to aim for a younger audience, in order to get brand loyalty at an earlier age *and* tap into the "toy money" of the parents, rather than 30- or 40-somethings who have discretionary income, but who can also say "$35 for a single model an inch and a half tall? Ehhh...".<br />
<br />
<br />And that's my other big complaint - the cost. New model kits and new pricing structures mean that a playable, "competitive" army can set you back $400 or more if you buy everything at store prices. Sure, hobbies can be expensive, but the nature of wargaming is such that you feel the need to buy the newest, coolest stuff, as the rules and the "meta" changes to give different armies an advantage.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.redd.it/vib6y64pxze01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="240" src="https://i.redd.it/vib6y64pxze01.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Glorious Old-School '90s Boxed Set Artwork!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
But despite these problems, I really like the universe of Warhammer 40,000. It's cruel and violent and cynical and bloody as hell - in fact, it reminds me of that other British dystopian setting, JUDGE DREDD, in a lot of ways - but back in its earlier times, 40K didn't take itself as seriously as it does now, and I think the new, more serious 40K has lost a little something because of that.<br />
<br />
Now, pardon me while I go burn some heretics - I mean, search on eBay for an out of production miniature...<br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-34789765673750581412019-08-19T10:46:00.000-04:002019-08-19T10:46:37.427-04:00Media Monday: War Fever (1969)Today I'm starting a new push towards regular blogging, and with that, a Monday post every week about some kind of media - film, television, comics, or artwork. Today, I am featuring a film I watched a little while ago on Amazon Prime video, where it is labeled "Salt in the Wound", but the film also has the titles "War Fever", "The Liberators", and its original title in Italian, "Il dito nella piaga", which, according to Google translate (for whatever that's worth) means "The Finger in the Wound".<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZGVkYzMxZDUtNGUwYS00NGVhLTlmODgtM2I3YTI5ZjkxM2YyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="800" height="287" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZGVkYzMxZDUtNGUwYS00NGVhLTlmODgtM2I3YTI5ZjkxM2YyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The plot revolves around Corporal Haskins and Private Greyson, two US Army soldiers who have been accused of crimes (IIRC in both cases, they did commit those crimes), and are sentenced via court martial to death by firing squad. The firing squad detail is led by a shiny new second lieutenant named Sheppard. The two doomed men are driven out to an isolated spot to be executed, but Sheppard gets the directions wrong, and they wind up off the beaten trail. The detail is discovered by a German patrol, and everyone but Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard is killed. The two convicted men and their executioner flee into the wilderness, armed but ill-equipped, and that's when the movie really begins to pick up.<br />
<br />
The dynamic is clear from the beginning. Haskins is a corporal but he's significantly older and more war-weary than Sheppard, who has just come from State-side and has never been in combat before. Greyson is a black man in a white man's army and feels his own bitter resentment towards how he has been treated, and for the first half of the film, he's still in a state of shock, which unfortunately doesn't give the actor much to work with and does a bit of disservice to the character. But Haskins, played by the utterly fantastic Klaus Kinski, sneers and laughs and taunts Sheppard, all the while keeping a Thompson submachine gun pointing Sheppard's way. Haskins doesn't have it in him to kill Sheppard outright, even though he could, and doing so would essentially make him and Greyson free men since there would be no Allied soldier alive who'd know the two doomed men were still living.<br />
<br />
When the trio stumble across a small Italian town, there is some rejoicing, as the locals think the Americans are just the lead element in a much larger force sent to "liberate" their town. There are hints of Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King" here, as Haskins soaks up all the glory and warm treatment he can get, playing up his fake role to the hilt, while Sheppard stumbles through the occasion, trying to keep the Italians' expectations realistic, while at the same time, trying to be diplomatic and polite. Greyson, an object of curiosity as the first black man many of the Italians have ever seen, is treated well enough, but it isn't until he befriends a young boy that his character begins to really open up and is given a chance to have significant dialogue and emotion. And of course, there is the extremely cringe-worthy "romance" between Haskins and a young Italiam woman that he relentlessly pursues, in a manner so aggressive that I honestly found myself physically recoiling from the screen at his advances. This is flat-out the worst part of the film.<br />
<br />
Of course, inevitably the war comes to the small town, as the Germans have decided it is a good place to defend themselves against an advancing American front. They send an element to capture the town, and soon, Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard find themselves having to defend the town from the attacking Germans. For a bottom-of -the-budget-barrel film, the combat scenes are actually quite well done, uncompromising in the violence, and while the editing is done in large part to hide the lack of a budget, you can easily follow the action. I won't give away the ending, but let us just say that all sides pay a steep price by the end of the film.<br />
<br />
Looks like you can watch the full 97-minute cut of "Salt in the Wound" here at YouTube:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gGNAdFudSR8/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gGNAdFudSR8?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<br />
Overall, I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. Despite its extremely small budget, including weapon props that are quite obviously non-guns in many scenes, I liked the story of a pair of soldier-criminals who are doing everything they can to avoid the war, but wind up finding themselves fighting for the lives of civilians they barely know. I also enjoyed the dynamic between Sheppard and Haskins, even though much of it was over the top, due in a large part to Kinski's sneering visage. Also, I believe that I read somewhere this film was the inspiration for the original The Inglorious Bastards made in 1978 (*not* the Tarantio movie of a similar name but different spelling), which involves a group of American soldiers who are criminals, being sent on a "suicide mission". <br />
<br />
<br />Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-14628024869591833832019-03-12T16:38:00.000-04:002019-03-12T17:03:40.275-04:00THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is Available Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98RNwN7Sz-EUNYJs3r0uhLo0N41UHyo9aOy5hkkaNBWW6bERAAgf8cxErVdmSZ8RsuOH2GipvZoszRVkk7JWuoY8c37tFIFhg78hxhgIZ1Hqa8guH0bf2Rp9aT4hUGc2V9mxSf4ysGLEJ/s1600/Butcher_of_Calais_CoverA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1018" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98RNwN7Sz-EUNYJs3r0uhLo0N41UHyo9aOy5hkkaNBWW6bERAAgf8cxErVdmSZ8RsuOH2GipvZoszRVkk7JWuoY8c37tFIFhg78hxhgIZ1Hqa8guH0bf2Rp9aT4hUGc2V9mxSf4ysGLEJ/s320/Butcher_of_Calais_CoverA.jpg" width="203" /></a></div>
The best description of <b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PKR5HQ6" target="_blank">THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS</a></b> is "Death Wish meets World War Two". Andre Bouchard is a mild-mannered teacher of mathematics living with his wife and daughter in Calais, France. The Bouchards survive the siege of Calais and the fall of the city to German forces in May, 1940, but several weeks later, Bouchard's wife and daughter are murdered by German soldiers.<br />
<br />
Driven by grief and rage into a wine bottle, Bouchard's fate is changed by a deadly encounter with a German officer late one night, leaving the German dead and a Luger in Bouchard's hands. With the means and the motive to strike back against those who killed his family, Bouchard prowls the dark streets of Calais, stalking and killing German soldiers. Driven towards more and more acts of violence, Bouchard turns Calais into a battlefield once more, littered with the bodies of the guilty and innocent alike.<br />
<br />
Those of you who've read my first two Commando novels, <i>Operation Arrowhead</i> and <i>Operation Bedlam</i>, and the short story <i>The Train to Calais</i>, know Bouchard as "the Butcher of Calais", but the events that set Bouchard on his path were only hinted at in those works. Here, we see the Butcher as he takes those first steps on the road to revenge for his family, and ultimately, freedom for France - at any cost.<br />
<br />
THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is a novella, of approximately 27,000 words. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PKR5HQ6" target="_blank"><b>It is currently only available as an eBook</b>,</a> but I plan on eventually releasing it as a slim paperback volume as well. Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-73802627787081583552019-01-03T12:29:00.000-05:002019-01-03T12:32:55.719-05:00My 2018 Writing in ReviewMy usual disclaimer: It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past
year. As always, the facts and figure I provide here aren't
meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have
an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and
everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than
others, and that's that.<br />
<br />
In 2018, I sold 2,149 ebooks and tracked 700,444 Kindle Unlimited ebook pages read of my material. This is down a little more than 400 ebook sales and 9,000 KU pages from last year. As mentioned in 2017's WiR, I didn't put out anything new last year, so going into 2018, I saw my sales continue to steadily decline. I ran a small freebie promotion of my non-WW2 short story material over the summer, which resulted in a minor boost to my KU numbers for short fiction during that time, but overall, non WW-2 material still continued to sell terribly all year long.<br />
<br />
In late July, I finally published Book 6 of the Commando series, <i>Operation Eisen</i>. The book has actually sold pretty well, despite some mixed reviews. I was called out by several reviewers for the book's ending, which they didn't like, and this was a major wake-up moment for me, because I had fallen (I feel) into something of a trap, thinking that by this point, as long as I wrote about the same characters and put into the book the same sorts of elements, readers would carry along as usual. To some degree, this was the case, but the book's ending (which was something of a cliff-hanger) was <i>hated</i> by several reviewers, who thrashed me quite severely over it. <b>Lesson very much learned.</b><br />
<br />
Despite all that, the book has so far sold over 600 ebook copies, and tallied 126,000 KU page reads (equivalent to another 500 or so full read-throughs). Not only that, but the addition of another book in the series significantly boosted the sales of <i>all books in the series</i>. That is something very important to remember - even the first Commando book, published six years ago, saw very significant increases in sales and reads with the addition of a new book in the series. <b>Series sells.</b><br />
<br />
In addition to writing, I've continued to teach adult/continuing education classes on self-publishing, and I recently got to speak about writing historical fiction at a small writer's workshop. These might be low-level gigs, but it makes me feel good to be able to educate others based on my experiences over the past seven years. <br />
<br />
My goals for 2019 come down to two interconnected points - keeping myself writing, even if it is only a small amount every day, and putting out new material on a <i>regular basis</i>. 18 months between titles was way, wayyyyy too long a wait. Hopefully, in the next month or so, I will release a new Commando: Short Bursts novella, and after that, I'm going to dive back into several larger, novel-sized projects. I've made myself a daily word-count spreadsheet in order to help track my productivity, because I need some kind of accountability.<b> </b>I'll follow up with how that's going in a month or two.<br />
<br />
Well, there you have it. Sales were slow in the first few months - slower than they have been for a long, long time - but my mid-year release helped me bounce back, and I just need to...wait for it...<br />
<br />
<b>Always be closing</b>.Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8162714825014472282.post-43959646627358361352018-07-30T13:34:00.000-04:002018-07-30T13:34:54.901-04:00COMMANDO Book 6 Title ChangeThis is a brief post to inform anyone who is confused, that the sixth book in the Commando series is now titled OPERATION EISEN. The former title, which was fine to use when I started writing the book, became the name of a police action against a sex crime ring. Since the last thing I want when people google things related to my book is to stumble across articles related to sex crimes, I made the immediate decision to re-title my book. Thus, Book 6 now has a new title.Jack Badelairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10932441028544500024noreply@blogger.com5