A Dangerous Business

It’s getting hard to avoid the near-constant ticker of celebrity death news gushing redly from the jugular of the internet. Jackson-Fawcett day was the worst so far, but while the parade has slowed, it nevers stops. I was wondering what’s going on with this, and a couple of trends popped up in my mind.

The most obvious to me is that there are so many celebrity deaths now because we have so many celebrities – their fame is so fleeting that there are more than ever before. You can be famous for managing someone famous, for being on a reality show, for landing a jetliner in a river. You can be famous for winning or losing at politics, for being rich and skanky, or for being on TV for any period over 5 minutes. The TV networks’ endless thirst for new content to shovel at us has led to this death march of low-grade micro-celebs into the maw of our popular culture, with every giggle, tweet, comment and fart offered up as relevant and entertaining.

I’m not saying that pop culture is new, by any means. But it is a young person’s game, and I’d suggest it’s taken this long for the bloated corps of pop culture talent, first formed in the 50s and ballooned grotesquely in the 60s and beyond, to begin to age and die off. We’ve spent 40 years feting youthful product as a kind of nouveau nobility, and now the first few waves have withered, brown leaves fluttering out of the consciousness of the corporations who crowbarred them into our lives.

As a related issue, I think more and more deaths are saturating our cultural consciousness simply because these same content creators need more and more content to flog. Death sells, even if it’s the death of entities like Billy Mays or the Taco Bell chihuahua, passings that would have gone un-noted and only privately mourned twenty years ago. Nowadays a culture conscript serves from the moment he is noticed and dragged into the spotlight until the day his passing can be packaged and sold, if not beyond. God dammit, there are 500 channels to fill.

Or maybe I’m being self-centered in thinking this is some sort of universal phenomenon, this apparent acceleration of celebrity mortality. Maybe I’m just noticing more; maybe the people who are dying off are the ones I grew up with instead of strangers from my parents’ lives. Maybe I’m just more cognizant of death generally. Maybe my parents began to feel the same way around this age, once the stars of their favorite kids’s shows were all gone.

It will only accelerate. Soon a celebrity, a real one that you remember, will die every day. Then every hour. One day, which I hope to not see, a babbling mutlitude of talking heads will offer up a constant stream of potential vicarious bereavements, their regretful voices like rain on a tin roof, so constant and insistent that it becomes no sound at all.

-ssr

Waiting For the Gate to Open

glad_pee

It’s kind of sad, but even with all the online matches I’ve played by now, I still get butterflies in my stomach right before my first match of the day. I’ve played a jillion WoW battlefield matches, I’m getting pretty confident in my DoW2 play, and that first loading screen always feels like I’ve been called up to present my book report. Win or lose, the feeling goes away after a match, usually during the first match once I’ve gotten a few orders off, but til then I’m a sweaty-palmed wreck.

What the hell, Fyre? Does this ever go away? Or am I just some sort of congenital foie blanc?

-ssr

Chat Box

Sonic Rob: I want that hard counter feel
Sonic Rob: that crunch

FyreHaar: the positive click
FyreHaar: of a seat belt
FyreHaar: or a clip into a nine mm
FyreHaar: that moment of rightness

Sonic Rob: we should market a toy
Sonic Rob: that just is a machined piece of metal that makes like 4 or 5 of those
Sonic Rob: like a tension sheet

FyreHaar: yes
FyreHaar: yes we should!

Sonic Rob: I think it would sell well
Sonic Rob: there could be bits that pop out and you seat them back in
Sonic Rob: buttons to crunch, slides to move
Sonic Rob: every time you pop something into place something else pops out
FyreHaar: you mean a nine mm?
Sonic Rob: well, but not gun shaped
FyreHaar: spring loaded
Sonic Rob: a little thing you could put in your pocket for the bus or stressful times at work
Sonic Rob: we could sell a silent model that just feels clicky
Sonic Rob: and a loud one for home
Sonic Rob: any time you feel stressed, spend 5 minutes replaying one of those “field strip an M-16” moments in your head with this thing
Sonic Rob: you will feel badass and right as rain

Squishing From Beyond the Grave

Reality show contestant found dead in Canada motel

HOPE, British Columbia – Police said Monday they have identified and are investigating a woman who allegedly helped a former reality television show contestant hide from authorities in his native Canada after his ex-wife was found dead in the U.S.

Sgt. Duncan Pound of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not release the identity of the woman who checked Ryan Jenkins into a remote motel in British Columbia days before he was found dead there Sunday of an apparent suicide.

[snip]

Jenkins, a contestant on VH1’s “Megan Wants a Millionaire,” was accused of killing his ex-wife, a model whose body was so badly mutilated when found in a trash bin outside Los Angeles it had to be identified by her breast implants’ serial numbers.

This is a horrible story, of course, and I feel for the victim and her family. Even if we can’t be surprised at her husband’s actions, given his crass and bestial line of work, we can still be appalled. On the other hand, I can’t be the only one absolutely transfixed by that last detail, can I? A model’s corpse is savagely disfigured to try and hide her identity, and they figure out who she is because her fake boobs have serial numbers in them? You know that’s going in CSI next year, right? It’s like zomething out of Zoolander, where everyone underestimates the cunning of a model. Or even worse, the cunning of a baggie full of silicone.

One shudders at the crimes to come once murderers get wise to this.

-ssr

Book Review: Joan of Arc: A military leader

Joan of Arc: A military leader by Kelly DeVries

This book’s narrow scope is the primary factor in its success. For all the examinations of what Joan of Arc meant, as a saint, as a feminist (?), as a heretic, etc., this book focused on what she did.  Why is Joan so famous? Because she kicked the crap out of the English when no one else in France seemed to be able to. How did she do it? She wasn’t afraid to send thousands of her countrymen men to their deaths.

So this book looks almost exclusively at the details of Joan as a military leader. Excellent research and quotes from sources of the day as well as later examinations. DeVries has a wonderfully concise prologue wherein the political landscape of France at the end if the Hundred Years War is described. The stage is set and Joan’s entrance onto the scene is placed in an enlightening context.

A tad dry at times, but overall a very good illustration of the deeds that made The Maid into a legend.

I give this book four out of five medieval gunpowder hand cannons.

-fyre

Chat Box

FyreHaar: sweet lord
FyreHaar: miserere nobis
Sonic Rob: noobis!
FyreHaar: OMG!!
FyreHaar: Miserere Noobis!!!
FyreHaar: This is our Guild!!
Sonic Rob: we have a guild?
FyreHaar: for anything we might need a guild/group for, we have a name
Sonic Rob: ah
Sonic Rob: wot’s miserere?
FyreHaar: Miserere nobis means lord have mercy on us
FyreHaar: or just, have mercy on us
FyreHaar: Miserere Noobis, have mercy on Noobs

An End to XP

I was thinking again about the upcoming 40K MMO, and what I might do if I were designing it. One interesting sort of design question that I’ve been pondering is whether you could get rid of levels in an RPG, or in an MMO at all, for that matter.

Levels are a nice way to measure and reward player progression steadily. As long as players do stuff for which you give them XP (or whatever your leveling currency is), they will eventually level up, along with that nice heroin-shot-in-the-vein feeling that always accompanies a good ding. Levels also allow players to easily compare characters against one another, and they are a handy way to gate content, for example by only allowing characters of a certain level into various content.

Still, levels feel awfully artificial in the context of most fiction, and it’s the fiction that draws in people like me. Worse, XP in particular lends itself to grinding, that soul-sucking treadmill that so many gamers put themselves on in the course of turning their fun into work. I was pondering what you might replace levels and/or XP with, at least in the context of 40K, and began thinking about campaigns. Nobody talks about how many levels a Marine captain has gained, but they often mention how old they are. This doesn’t really have enough reward for player effort; you can’t get old any faster or slower than other people, and you gain age even if you don’t play at all. The other thing that often arises in a discussion of a marine’s history is what campaigns they have served in. Ding! Continue reading An End to XP