Author Archives: S.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

First:  Yes, I’m still Malazan-blogging (Malazanning?), but the world decided to pick this week (with Bryant off on a business trip, of course) to have everything in my apartment building break at once.  So I’ve had to hang out waiting for an array of my landlady’s relatives to come in and prod at things.  It’s been a rotten week.

So I hunkered down on the couch this morning to read the new Bridget Jones novel, not expecting much.  At all.  I loved Bridget Jones the first.  I really did.  She was hilarious and blowzy and foolish and made me feel better about just being fat and depressed.  I loved that book.  The second was was all sorts of stupid.  I didn’t even know Helen Fielding had written a third book until I was casting about on iTunes for something to read, and then whoa!

But here’s the thing.  The third book is called Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.  My mind reeled.  What boy?  She spent the last two books finally getting together with a man who Colin Firth played in the movie.  I mean, seriously.  She won already.  Mad about what boy?

SPOILER SPOIIIIIILER

Continue reading

Sunset

I can see the Pacific Ocean from where I’m sitting.  I can’t see much of it, just a glittering sliver along the top of an apartment building on the street between me and the sea.  I can’t see the waves from here, or the surfers, or the beach.  All of it’s there, though, and I smell salt every time I breathe.

The neighborhood is called Sunset (with its Inner and Outer varieties; we’re Outer).  Nearly fifty well-gridded, numbered avenues march in a straight line toward the sea.  Most are filled with houses like pastel cubes, one apartment upstairs, a garage and mother-in-law apartment below.  Or, like our place, they’re two apartments up, and a combination of garages and baby apartment below.  However it works out, there’s never enough room for all the cars.

Nothing in Sunset seems taller than four stories.  I don’t know why.  I wondered: earthquakes?  Geological instability?  Bryant says, who’d let their block be ripped down to put up the first high-rise?  I wrinkled my nose, and he said, exactly.

Between our street and the one closest to the beach is a warren of long, fenced backyards that no one uses.  The dog owned by the renters two floors below us runs around in a constant circle over a grey stone path in the shape of the infinity symbol.  Once in a while I’ll hear people shouting – five minutes ago, a guy bellowed, “Motherfucking blood type!” from the yard a few doors down – but I never see anyone just hanging out on their little patch of dirt.

What amazes me most in the middle of the day is how deserted the whole thing is.  Sunset is the largest neighborhood in the city.  The avenues are wide.  I could walk down to the corner right now and stand in the intersection and see no one, all the way up to 40th or so.  Buses pass now and again.  Surfers.  I can hear ship’s horns and the Muni’s bell where it turns at the end of Judah.  I can always hear the waves.

The apartment building right behind ours is a pastel yellow block with scaffolding covering its whole rear facade.  I can see straight through the apartment opposite our bedroom.  The woman who lives there has fluttery white curtains and a centerpiece in the middle of her dining room table.  When she eats I can see the back of her head.  It’s always perfectly centered in the window-frame.

I can tell when the afternoon heads into evening because all the cars come home.  There’s something so public about living with all the windows open.  The iron gate across our front door slams every time someone comes home.  The dog two floors down is panting.  The ‘motherfucking blood type’ guy just told a bro he’d be by later.

Birds walk and hop on our sunlights.  The cats sit below and watch in unison.  They love it here.  Sunspots, birds, open windows.  It hasn’t rained yet, but the ocean keeps everything damp.  Laundry takes forever to dry.  Bread molds quickly.  When the fog comes, I can move from one end of our very long apartment to see all the grey roll over.  The rest of the time, it’s a California dream.  The sunsets are particularly fine.

Anxiety, I am in you.

Today is the point in my anxiety cycle when I get to relax.

I’m a hyper sort of person.  I’ve suffered from fairly intense anxiety and depression on and off for the last ten years.  It tends to take its most severe form when I’m faced with any sort of public confrontation.  My husband calls it “the rabbit hole” with worried precision.  I tend to call it “going tharn.”  However you put it, I seize on one particular small worry and magnify it into an insurmountable obstacle.

Case in point:  last week, our neighbors’ trash bins disappeared.  They piled up trash.  A tiny pile, a pile that was Not My Problem, but our buildings abut each other and I had to see it.  Yesterday (the day before trash day), some animal got into their trash pile and scattered it.  I was horrified.  Not just “ew gross” horrified, but sweaty palms, can’t-sleep, control-freak horrified.  When I saw a man down there later cleaning stuff up, I ran down with a trashbag to offer to help, because neighborly!  Well, really because control.  But at the time I said, because neighborly!

The guy turned out to just be rifling through their trash for sellables, but he managed to convince me that one of my building-mates said we’d help with the neighbor’s stuff.  Cue me actually making our usually locked-up cans accessible for a few minutes.  He mostly filled them.  My husband let me know via Skype that I was being scammed, and if I wanted to, I could call the cops.  I went tharn, took our cans back, and went upstairs to stare fixedly at a point in the middle distance.  Two other apartments in our building use those cans.  By midnight, one of the three had a towering (my opinion) stack of stuff.  …and I couldn’t sleep.  I couldn’t.  I could barely say hi to Bryant when he came home.  It was a neat day for us; he bought me a new computer, and it’s beautiful.   But I could barely think about it because I was so paralyzed by Trashgate.

Today, it’s gone.  I made sure the trash guy took it all away.  I put the cans back in the garage.  Two weeks ago, I was paralyzed thinking of juggling parking in our little driveway/garage setup.  This week, trash.  Next week: TBD.  But holy cats, it’d be nice to just not give a damn about little things like that.  Like normal people.

A friend and I were talking about how on reality TV, people flip tables and break up marriages and have public tantrums and act like absolute fools, and they’re paid for being entertaining.  Me, I jostle someone’s table in a crowded restaurant with my hip, and my adrenal gland ramps up like a race car.

By the way, we live two blocks from the Pacific, our apartment is serene and light-filled, my husband’s job goes well, my family is healthy, and the first poem I ever sent to a professional market was just purchased.  And I flip out over trashcans?  I’m recording this for reference in a week, when my anxiety gloms onto the next insurmountable (ridiculous) obstacle.  Read this in a week, Susan.  It’s all going to be okay.

Blogging Malazan, Book 1: Continuing Chapter Two

…now, we flash back.

Tattersail is woken from her warm bed, which she currently shares with fellow (but subordinate) sorcerer Calot.  They’re summoned to a gathering called by High Fist Dujek Onearm.  They hurry in that direction, and then we get to see the first bit of visual imagery in the book that made me go “WHOA.”

Drawing her cloak against the chill, Tattersail paused outside the tent and turned to study the enormous mountain hanging suspended a quarter-mile above the city of Pale.  She scanned the battered face of Moon’s Spawn – it’s name for as long as she could remember.  Ragged as a blackened tooth, the basalt fortress was home to the most powerful enemy the Malazan Empire had ever faced.  High above the earth, Moon’s Spawn could not be breached by siege.  Even Laseen’s own undead army, the T’lan Imass, who traveled as easily as dust on the wind, were unable, or unwilling, to penetrate its magical defenses.

In other words, the besieged city of Pale has found some powerful friends.  Sorcerers called the Tiste Andii, commanded by warlord Caladan Brood (that name!) dropped from the floating mountain to drive back Malazan forces.  The long siege has ground to a halt, except for the efforts by the Bridgeburners to keep tunneling under the city walls.

The sorcerers continue into their meeting with Onearm and the Empress’s high mage Tayschrenn, and fellow sorcerer Hairlock (who is dying so dramatically at the beginning of the chapter).  It’s an uncomfortable meeting.  Hairlock is a dour presence, Tayschrenn a dramatic one, and the plan — to toss six high mages’s power up at Moon’s Spawn — seems a crazy one.  It takes more discussion and some poetry before the front-line mages realize who they’re really up against:  Anomander Rake, one of the Tiste Andii, and Archmage of Moon’s Spawn.  All we know of the Tiste Andii at this time is that they have “elder blood,” and are scary, scary peeps.

The battle begins.  The mages cast fiery spells at the floating mountain.  It stops in place, something it hasn’t done in years.  A portal atop it opens.  Great Ravens pour out, and for the first time, Anomander Rake is seen:

(Italics are in the original)  Mane of Chaos.  Anomander Rake.  Lord of the black-skinned Tiste Andii, who has looked down on a hundred thousand winters, who has tasted the blood of dragons, who leads the last of his kind, seated in the Throne of Sorrow and a kingdom tragic and fey – a kingdom with no land to call its own.

The mages loose all their power, but Rake responds with a black, necrous power that engulfs the whole army as it roils toward them.  This is something different.  “Kurald Galain sorcery.  Elder magic, the Breath of Chaos.”  Hairlock is struck down.  Calot diverts his power to protect his lover and commander Tattersail’s.  Mages fall to demons and fire.  When Tattersail can raise her head again, she sees the cost of this battle:  Onearm’s host is obliterated.  Three of the six mages are dead.

And, something worse:  she can feel that something else was involved, something big, something different.  The scene feels like it was touched by the involvement of …a god?  Hood, the god of Death?  No.  Something else.  Her sight keeps swiveling back toward the young woman who travels with the Bridgeburners, but that seems like a dead end.

Flashback’s over.

Quick Ben and the other Bridgeburners work hurriedly to do something with Hairlock’s fading body.  It’s strange magic, magic Tattersail doesn’t know (to her shock).  They work swiftly to try and avoid the attention of the fifteen year old girl called Sorry in their ranks.  In the end, they hand Tattersail a small package and send her across the killing fields to set it in her tent.  Ravens scatter as the package moves through them.

The siege of Pale is done.  Next up is Daujhistan.  The army doesn’t pause.

Tattersail returns to her tent with the package.  She sets it down and reaches for her prophetic Deck of Dragons.  It calls to her.  She’s indulging in some anguished reflection when the package moves.  Twitches.  Then says her name.  And out of the wrapping steps a yellow marionette that speaks with Hairlock’s voice.  He’s undergone soul shifting, an ancient, chaotic magic.  In his presence, Tattersail’s warren (her magical source and conduit) springs to life.  The deck is calling her.  She has to answer.

First card to set the stage!  The Knight of Dark, black-skinned, half-dragon, with something just out of sight above his head.  Second card!  Oponn.  The Jester of Chance.  A lady and a lord, twins, balancing.  A tiny disc is suspended in the small space between them.  The coin is spinning in the card.  Hairlock commands her to draw a third card, but …no.  She holds.  The marionette is furious, but Tattersail knows what she needs to know.  She hears a spinning coin; Hairlock does not.  The Knight of Dark is out there, unpredictable and cold, but Chance’s coin is spinning.  “Oponn whirled two faces to the cosmos, but it was the Lady’s bet.  Spin on, silver.  Spin on.

Blogging Malazan, Book 1: The Rest of Chapter One

(This has a secondary post title of “Blogging Malazan with a Maine Coon Cat on My Face.”)

Chapter One, continued

A recruiting sergeant in a backwater near the killing field looks up to see a girl in front of him.  No more than twelve, but with old eyes.  She has a specific assignment preference:  the Genabackan campaign, under High Fist Dujek Onearm’s command.  Her name?  “Sorry.  My name is Sorry.”

…scene change!

Ganoes Paran travels an old and forlorn thoroughfare toward Gerrom, a small trading settlement.  It’s deserted, but not corpse-strewn…until he reaches the Constabulary full of suffocated men.  The track Lorn talked about is being erased, bit by bit.

He reflects.  It’s a massive step up career-wise to be absorbed into Lorn’s detail.  He believes himself to be a hard and confident man now, but he certainly hasn’t lived by the old command of “live quietly.”  As he contemplates, he chances upon a green-clothed man in the road, wielding a single long-knife.  His beringed fingers hold up a clay jug.  He offers a drink before informing Ganoes that he’s to be escorted back to Lorn…after a feast and a drink.  The man is called Topper, he’s a Claw (assassin-bodyguard) of Laseen, and he once slaughtered the royal line (in total) of Unta.

They banter, and then we get our first view of a Warren, a magical path.

[Paran] sighed, fighting off a sudden chill.  Within he could see a grayish pathway, humped on either side by low mounded walls and vaulted overhead by impenetrable ocher-hued mist.  The air swept past into the portal like a drawn breath, revealing the pathway to be of ash as invisible currents stirred and raised spinning dust-devils.

It’s Ganoes’ first warren too.  They travel through the warren in hours what would take days otherwise.  They pop out in Unta (Ganoes’ city of origin), pass through a magical void…and end up in front of the Empress on her throne of twisted bone.  He gives his report to Lorn in her tower, the Tower of Dust.  He’s reassigned, but the hunt for the burst of sorcery will continue.

Unta is unchanged, except for his formerly noble role within it.  At his family’s home, he finds his father’s man Gamet, as well as his sisters.  His sister Tavore is severe and uncompromising.  His family’s hall is smaller than he remembered.

(A nice grace note here — Ganoes’ youngest sister Felisin is also mentioned, and as we move to Chapter Two, we see that Felisin is the author of the poetry that begins the next chapter.)

—–

Chapter Two

We’re now in the 1163rd year of Burn’s Sleep.  Two years have passed.

A sorceress called Tattersail observes the carnage of a battle just past, by the fallen city of Pale.  Her emblem of command in the 2nd Army’s wizard cadre is stained and scorched.  She can still sense the sorcery recently unleashed; something waits in the silence.

A voice says, “They’re coming,” and she turns to see a fellow wizard called Hairlock on the ground, destroyed from the hips down.  Only his sorcery keeps him briefly alive.  The two exchange sharp words:  Hairlock is certain he can escape death; Tattersail is not.  They’re interrupted by the arrival of three men and a woman searching for a particular person.  A few words reveal that the new arrivals are the Ninth Squad in the 2nd Army — they’re Bridgeburners, and the sergeant among them is Whiskeyjack, a legend.  All the Bridgeburners are legends.

Tattersail is the last wizard left standing — but the Bridgeburners have their own mage with them, a tall, slender man called Quick Ben.  Whiskeyjack only has thirty men, given the siege just ended.  He had fourteen hundred that morning.  Their siege tunnels gave way, and instead of getting help, the High Mage (and Tattersail’s boss) Tayschrenn stopped them.

(to be continued!)

Big Bad Con Report

Because I’m not going to make posts about every game. >.>

I already talked briefly about the Drama System hack we played (Colony Wars) on Saturday evening.  Since I’ve given up on chronological order:  in Colony Wars, I took the most chances.  I burst right out of the gate playing a frustrated asshole who wanted respect, not bureaucratic flim-flam.  I of course aimed that scene at my husband, since I haven’t quite reached the Gamer Confidence level required to toss character sheets at people I’ve just met.  The experience made me shaky, but that usually means I’m stretching.  I did apologize to my husband about five times because, me.

I would play Dungeon World again in a hot minute.  Great group of gamers (really, everyone I gamed with all weekend was awesome), imaginative group, and a GM who really knew how to take a nugget of an idea and run with it.  The entire thing felt like we segued from one awesome heavy metal album cover to the next.  My ranger rode a halfling-made (therefore, awesome) thatched roof down the side of a collapsing stone spire into a sunless sea.  In Xanadu did rune-slavers steal halflings, and it was a blast kicking ass and resisting mind control.

Let me put it this way:  I would gladly run Dungeon World, and people who know me well know that that’s a rare declaration.

FATE — oh gosh.  Fate still escapes me.  I have to admit it.  I’ve played Core a few times, both one shots and campaigns, and there’s something about it that just exhausts me.  It’s fiddly.  I was able to play Fate Accelerated at the con (CAMELOT Trigger), and I will say that Accelerated beats Core all to hell in keeping me interested.

I hate saying that I still don’t really get how the aspects pile on top of each other.  It’s one of those things like trigonometry that my brain hears and discards.  Every time I’ve played, there’s been a tipping point about 3/4ths of the way through the one-shot or campaign in which the aspects start clicking, and then they’re awesome — but it seems to happen organically, and I wish I knew how to make that happen as a deliberate gaming choice.

I think I need an Accelerated campaign to really get my head in the Fate game.  That said, I liked the structure our GM gave the one-shot a lot. Her obvious enjoyment of Fate also kicked my enthusiasm level high.

And finally, Golden Sky Stories was thoroughly enjoyable.  I was a cat!  A cat henge, a helper kitty who displayed many traits of Cat even when in her human-seeming form.  The mod we played — A Peaceful Town — was just adorable, and I can imagine a really interesting array of solutions to its very small problem.  I was especially looking forward to this particular game because of my friend the GM, not to mention the paradigm shift from the fairly grimdark rest of my weekend.  As Carl wrote in the con game’s blurb:  “There are 1000 RPGs where you can solve problems with violence. This is not one of them.”

I’ll put it this way — as someone who loves acting out grimdark emotional train wrecks as much as I do, I’ve never said “AWWW” so much in a game.  The other players were just as much into it as I was.  My husband the dove henge is still claiming he casts “Tranquility” on me every time he hugs me.  So much fun.

A few other notes about Big Bad Con:  Oy, that is not a great hotel.  But!  The con is organized so well, and the trade-off that comes with the not-great-hotel is the price that allows people who couldn’t otherwise come to the con to do so.  I wish the games started earlier, so the breaks between games were longer.  The food trucks were a brilliant idea.  I will also remember next year that I too can bring bourbon to the table.

tl;dr — Of all the gaming cons I’ve been to, Big Bad Con is by far the most smoothly-run and low-key, with a great group of attendees.  A++, will game again!

Blogging Malazan, Book 1: Prologue and Chapter One

Gardens of the Moon: Book One of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson

—–

Prologue:

It’s the 1154th year of Burn’s Sleep.  Ganoes Paran looks down on riots in the Mouse Quarter of the ancient imperial capital of Malaz City.  He’s young, the son of a wine merchant.  Magic battles rage below.  We don’t know anything, except that it’s a tumultuous time.  High ranking men are dead.  A soldier – a Bridgeburner, an elite – pauses to speak to Ganoes.  The boy asks, is it true?  Did the dead man betray a god?  And the Bridgeburner answers like this:

Every decision you make can change the world.  The best life is the one the gods don’t notice.  You want to live free, boy, live quietly.

Another Bridgeburner with a pockmarked face and a fiddle stops by.  He’s only a few years older than Ganoes’ twelve, but speaks his opinions like a peer.  The soldiers discuss the out-of-control mages laying unnecessary waste to the Mouse Quarter.  They discuss a woman, Surly, who dislikes protectiveness, who takes a new name that means “Thronemaster,” who acts with efficient brutality when the Emperor isn’t around.

And here she is Herself, the woman who was Surly but is now Laseen, blue-skinned, flanked by Claw bodyguards.  Ganoes is stunned by the Bridgeburner’s informality with a woman of immense and frightening power.  The Bridgeburner, the Commander of the Bridgeburners, calls Laseen out on the destruction in the city, only to be ripped a new one and told to get out of town.

Laseen leaves.  Ganoes and the Commander look back out over the town.  They have this exchange:

“One day I’ll be a soldier,” Ganoes said.

The man grunted.  “Only if you fail at all else, son.  Taking up the sword is the last act of desperate men.  Mark my words and find yourself a more worthy dream.”

Ganoes scowled.  “You’re not like the other soldiers I’ve talked to.  You sound more like my father.”

“But I’m not your father,” the man growled.

“The world,” Ganoes said, “doesn’t need another wine merchant.”

The commander’s eyes narrowed, gauging.  He opened his mouth to make the obvious reply, then shut it again.

Malaz City is burning.  The air gains the sweet reek of burning pigs.

 

Chapter One:

It’s now the 1161st year of Burn’s Sleep.  An old woman and a fishergirl stand by the side of a road, watching a massive column of soldiers pass.  The old woman mentions the kin she sent to war before Laseen, “in the days of the Emperor.”  The fishergirl barely listens.

Her bright eyes darted among the soldiers passing before her.  The young men atop their high-backed saddles held expressions stern and fixed straight ahead.  The few women who rode among them sat tall and somehow fiercer than the men.  The sunset cast red glints from their helms, flashing so that the girl’s eyes stung and her vision blurred.

The fishergirl exchanges small talk with the old woman Rigga, then says, “Isn’t it wonderful?” of the column.  The woman Rigga’s hand shoots out, snagging the fishergirl painfully by the hair.  There’s a prophecy to deliver.  Rigga the old woman is also Riggalai the seer and wax-witch.  The fishergirl will be given a sword and a horse and sent across the sea to war, and shadow will take her soul.

Rigga is saying, “Look to the Lord spawned in Darkness; his is the hand that shall free you, though he’ll know it not–” when a soldier interrupts.  The old woman is harassing a pretty young one.  The soldier’s gauntleted hand cracks across the old woman’s head.  Her dead body flops to the ground.  The candles that signal necromancy roll out of her bag.  The soldiers ride off.  Only dust remains in their wake.

The girl is broken in some deep emotional way.  She speaks of her father in her own voice until she suddenly speaks in another voice entirely.  Shadows pour across the road.  A hand falls on her shoulder.  Two men are near, both black-clad, one hooded and tall, the other shorter.  They speak like old-time companions about the dead seer.

The shorter man raises his arms.  The air rends, blackness fades, and seven huge Hounds now sit in the road.  “Something to gnaw on Laseen’s mind,” the shorter man says with a giggle.  The short one is Ammanas.  The tall one, Cotillion.  The Hounds catch up with the column of soldiers; the fishergirl can hear their screams.  Ammanas tells the fishergirl she’s the pawn of a god now, and everything else fades away.

Switch scenes.  A captain rides alongside a woman called Lorn, the Adjunct to the Empress, which makes her Laseen’s personal servant.  The captain is not entirely pleased or comfortable to have such a woman nearby.  She points out that he survived the purges of the Empress after her ascendance.  They have 1100 soldiers with them to patrol where they’re going.  He tells her, “The carnage stretches half a league from the sea, Adjunct, and a quarter-league inland.”

They reach a hill’s summit and look beyond.  Crows and gulls’ cries fill the air.  Beneath a carpet of feeding birds lie nearly four hundred corpses of men and horses. The captain explains:  all these dead had arms drawn.  They fought.  All the dead are the Empress’s troops.  The carnage is horrific.  One man rides out of the gory scene to greet them:  Ganoes Paran from the prologue, now a lieutenant.  He reports that a fishing village nearby is also full of its dead.  But, a man and his daughter are missing.  The wounds to the dead have been made by “natural weapons.”  Teeth.  No evidence is left behind, no scat, no hair.

Lorn and Ganoes share barbed conversation – he’s a noble, and nobles rarely take commissions.  Ganoes speaks of the horrors he’s seen with a bluntness that verges on rude.  He’s therefore surprised when Lorn bogarts him from his current position to become an officer on her own staff.

She tells the truth as she knows it (or as she’s willing to tell it):  the deaths of the 400 were a diversion from a mighty sorcerer’s hidden deed.  She sends him to the next town over to ask about a fisherman and his daughter.  Before he’s off, though, Lorn makes Ganoes’ captain look into any new recruits, either young women or old men, in the Empress’s forces.  The captain agrees, sourly.

(And good GOD I forgot how long these chapters were.  We’ll just adjourn for today.  And perhaps cut down on the detail in the future.)

Blogging Malazan, Book 1: Introduction

I’ve always loved fantasy series.  And archaeology and anthropology.  And long sagas and grimdark history, so when my husband recommended Steven Erikson‘s Malazan Book of the Fallen series (which I believe was up to about #3 at the time), I gladly checked it out.  I was enthralled with the first few books.  Great military fantasy with an absorbing magic system and compelling characters!  A truly diverse range of peoples and appearances and gods and yeah!

After a while, I started feeling Malazan fatigue.  It’s a big slog of a saga, ten books in all (not to mention material from Erikson’s old gaming/plotting partner Ian Esslemont).  It suffers from what I call “Guy Gavriel Kay Disease” (with love, because I do love Kay), in that every badass you meet is slightly more badass than the last badass until it gets sort of ridiculous.  Kay doesn’t go beyond trilogies, so he’s never reached that eventual tipping point of ludicrous levels of power, but Erikson has ten books in which to up the ante, and by book six, I was expecting someone who could split the world with a glare.

Short story long, I abandoned the series before book eight.  I didn’t want to.  I just couldn’t fathom ordering another massive doorstop from Amazon UK and then trying to remember the huge matrix of characters and cultures.  So!  Given that I’m currently in a period of underemployment, it’s a great time to go back, give it another go, and blog every few chapters to see what I think of the whole thing.  I don’t promise anything; it’s a huge slog of a series, as I said.  But I’ll start and give it a whirl, and we’ll see what happens.

Of course, note that I’m going to be blogging plot like crazy.  I hate spoiler complaints, hate them.  And this is a series that was published between 1999 and 2011.  But still:  spoilers!  Nothing but spoilers!

Big Bad Con Game #1: Colony Wars

The XO is so much more than the curmudgeon at the end of the hall; he is the hammer that drives the CO’s and the Marine Corps’ nails into the horseshoe that keeps the horse running down the track.

The XO:  Where the rubber meets the road 

—–

I had a blast playing Commander John (“Johnny”) Ozee in the Colony Wars hack of Pelgrane Press‘s new Drama System.  What’d he want?  Respect.  Respect from those he respected.  To retire with dignity, with his legacy intact, with pride.  What were his dramatic poles?  Conformity and principle.  Stick with regulations and policy and how things have always been done, or push out of bounds for one last blaze of glory that’ll be remembered long after he’s gone?

He wanted more than that.  He wanted the pretty Company security woman for himself, though he kidded himself that he thought of her only as a precocious surrogate daughter.  He wanted the station union boss to keep him in the loop, even though Johnny denied information to almost everyone else.  He wanted to snub the old money families while still expecting the shadowbox of medals and flag – someone’s flag – when he retired.  He wanted to give stirring speeches while underestimating the men needed for all the critical tasks shoved his way.

He wanted the NPC captain who jumped from promotion to promotion like it was nothing to understand that she needed him, even though it seemed fairly certain that she didn’t.  He wanted Frederick to take care of keeping the place running, without having to be bothered.  He wanted civilians to stop crawling up his ass with their fool problems.  Human resources? Company problem.  Labor agitators among the immigrants?  Riley’s problem.

An unknown thing tearing up the far-space colony and ripping apart marines and company men alike?  That’s a problem a Stellar Marine can solve.

In belated praise of Pacific Rim

Because all I said about it at the time was, I really liked it.  And I did!  I think it’s a splendid adventure, and it brought me right back to being a tween in the early 80s watching Voltron and Robotech.  Mecha, and the people who love it.

But there’s more to say about the movie, and why I liked it, and why I have a bit of a fangirl squee over the character of Mako Mori, who has the most sensible name in the entire film.  Stacker Pentecost?  Really?  Idris Elba is magnificent at enunciating ludicrous dialogue so well that I wanted to get up and do fist-pumping cheers, and Charlie Hunnam did a fine job as the tormented beefcake, but it was Rinko Kikuchi’s movie.  And robots.

Spoilers, of course.

I’ll just point this out, for starters:  when the camera lingers on a physique, it’s Hunnam’s.  That alone changes things up.  Mako Mori the character is allowed to be girlish, fierce, stunted, efficient, noble, rebellious, and honorable.  No, in the end, she is not the one to push the button and blow up the other dimension.  She, the far less experienced pilot, passes out from oxygen deprivation, and Beckett saves the day.  That said, this was one situation in which I thought that was fine.  They were partners. He finished what they started.  He could have done none of it without her.

But let me back up.  She’s allowed to be flawed.  She’s allowed to choose her adoptive dad over the handsome dude, even if dad doesn’t hold out long with the sternness.  She’s allowed to be fit and attractive without that being her character’s point.  The character’s arc matches the plot’s high stakes.

As for the movie itself:  holy cats.  I’ve said several times that it’s a WWII movie wrapped up in modern trappings.  You have a diverse group of people on an isolated base racing against time and dealing with interpersonal issues on the way.  The jaegers have nose art and mechanics and an air traffic controller.  There’s even a DOG, for gosh’s sake.  People have to put aside their differences and work together to defeat the enemy.  There’s a stirring (ludicrous?  Yes.  But Elbafied) speech by a leader.

And the visuals!  In one interview, director Guillermo del Toro talked about how the really difficult bit of the whole movie was actually inventing the jaegers.  To make them seem real, his team had to figure out how they would work, how the hydraulics would look, how the legs would support the rest, and so on.  And you see it in the film, how pistons move and hatches slide.  The jaegers have a gravity to them that many effects pictures are sorely lacking.

It’s not a perfect movie, nooo.  What I want is the director’s cut with the hour of character development footage del Toro had to excise.  I want to know more about the Chinese and Russian teams before they meet their demise.  And I want to know more about Beckett and Mori and Pentecost (really?).  But for a movie in which robots punch dinosaurs in the face (not that that’s ever a bad thing), it manages to have grit, heart, fun, and lead characters who saw each other as people and pilots first.  Well done!