Sunday, December 5, 2004

Just another tricky day for me

My comment threads have been broken since yesterday. Squawkbox’s home page won’t come up, either, so it looks like their host provider may have crashed in a truly spectacular fashion. I’ve sent them several very irritated emails, but, well, if their host provider is down, they won’t get them until after the provider comes back up… an annoying little irony.

About three weeks ago, the Falcons had the Bucs in their home stadium, and they essentially chained the Bucs to the bars of the cell and used them mercilessly for the full four quarters.

Today things were a LITTLE different. As in, a big Bucs victory, 27 to 0. That’s ‘0’ as in ‘zero’, as in ‘zilch’, as in ‘zip’, as in ‘nada’, as in ‘nuttin goin ON’, which is pretty much an excellent summary of what the Falcons accomplished today against the Bucs. Oh, they threatened. Twice Michael Vick threw absolutely beautiful passes into the end zone, where they were intercepted by Bucs defenders. The Falcons’ defense, however, looked hapless, and the Bucs seemed to very nearly score at will.

The two key elements in the game, however, were, well, essentially, one key element: the Bucs stopped making killer mistakes. The Bucs had very few penalties in this game, only one turnover, and they took the ball away from Atlanta half a dozen times. Even better, newly hired kicker Jay Taylor, fresh out of the Arena League, showed us what a successful field goal looked like… something we’d very nearly forgotten, over the past two seasons with Martin Gramatica shanking the ball halfway to Idaho every time he teed off.

Eventually I’m going to get to some HeroClix stuff, maybe… I’m in the middle of playing out a match on my card table using a lot of my new figs, and especially employing a lot of my new Feat cards… but first, I want to talk about My Typical Day, and specifically, why I miss my late and much lamented three day weekends so much.

Right now, I owe roughly a Tolkien trilogy of email to a few of my regular correspondents. I am very serious about being both punctual and thorough on my email. I answer it quickly and I answer it at length. A serious email, however, eats 2 to 3 hours of my life, and it does it like that… when I’m immersed in the compositional flow, time simply blows right by me.

I have, at times, been lucky enough to have jobs where I can do my email at work, and I love that shit. I mean, seriously. That is simply ideal. Sitting there typing away on something that makes the work shift go blazing by, and getting paid for it, too. Then I go home and I have all that time there to, basically, loaf. I like to loaf. I enjoy it. When I’m working a full time job, the various hours around the shift are exactly enough hours to dick around with and not accomplish a goddam thing. It’s why I hate overtime; my dick around time goes away. It’s why I dislike being unemployed; in addition to having no money, I have TOO much time to loaf, and I get very bored.

Although that situation is generally a better one than, you know, overtime. Or, actually, to be honest, working a full time job, assuming I’m not about to be evicted or something.

However, at my current job, I cannot work on my own email because I spend all day doing Sprint’s. So never mind that.

My typical work day goes like this. I get up around noon. I leave for work at 2:30. I hit the shower, which begins my evolution into workday readiness, at 2:00. For the two hours between noon and hitting the shower at 2, I check my email, answer a few smaller ones, maybe hang some notes on Mike Norton’s blog, read a little… I loaf. Two hours isn’t enough time to answer a substantial email or, generally, to do a blog entry, and I wouldn’t want to try and do either in that two hours anyway, because… you got it… it will burn through those two hours like Formula I racing burns through high octane, and suddenly I’m looking at a need to get ready for work. I never like to rush that, which is one reason why I get up at noon every day.

Once I’m at work, I stay until 6, then come back home for lunch. I head back to work by 7. I stay there until midnight, and come on home. I then stay up until 4 a.m. or so, watching a DVD or reading or playing a HeroClix game against myself or something like that… you know… being a potato. I love doing that. Then I go to bed.

This is my work day. When I’m in my work day, I dislike working on blog pages or lengthy emails, because, again, all I’m doing then is burning through the few hours that I have, and making another work day roll up on me all that much sooner. I’ll do it if I have to, but, well, I don’t like to, and will generally put it off if I can.

Bringing it back around to why I miss my three day weekends so much… yes, it’s two hours less I have to screw around with in each work day. When I was working 1 to midnight, Wednesday through Saturday, I had to get out of here at 12:30. I generally got up around 10:30, 11 o’clock (I need some ‘get it together’ loafing time in the morning; I have never been someone who can jump out of bed half an hour before I need to be somewhere and get there on time). This meant I was usually in bed by 3 a.m. at the most. So, yeah, it trimmed down on my workweek goof off time considerably.

But Oh, That Extra Day Off.

This weekend I have to do some stuff. Like, today, I had to get up and watch the Bucs game. I don’t have much else scheduled other than that, but that killed three hours or so. This blog entry will kill another two hours, putting me at around 6:30, 7 p.m. by the time I post it. That leaves an hour until the Sunday night TV I watch starts, and The Simpsons are actually on this week… although I have a nagging feeling that ABC is showing some idiot awards show at 9 instead of the TV shows I usually watch, so that will free up the evening… kind of… although I’ll probably watch My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss at 9, anyway, just because it’s one of the few reality shows I’ve seen that humiliates and plays cruel pranks on exactly the sort of people who deserve it. (Oh, you know they do. In the only episode I’ve seen prior to this, the guy playing the faux billionaire took these idiot contestants on a tour of his faux mansion and told them that he had acquired the actual historical Excalibur, showing them this admittedly rather old looking sword in a glass case. He admitted in an aside to us viewing at home that this was actually a medieval replica they bought on E-Bay and backed a car over several times. For the rest of the show, those idiot contestants couldn’t do anything except marvel about how this guy had Excalibur, which proved his heart was pure. I’m telling you, FOX can drop these people into a live minefield blindfolded and I’ll eat popcorn and cheer ‘em on.)

Tomorrow I need to take a package over to the post office, which is, I don’t know, a mile away or so, and of course I’m on foot, so that’s not the kind of casual errand it is for me in terms of time that it is for all of you. I also have to do laundry. I mean, I don’t HAVE to, but I should, although, as I type this, I’m thinking somehow or other I’m probably not going to actually do it. So maybe I might get out one long email tomorrow.

But, with a three day weekend, I could easily dedicate one day to just getting caught up on everything at my keyboard, and then STILL HAVE A WHOLE WEEKEND TO LOAF IN.

I sincerely doubt I will ever get my three day weekends back, though. I am aware that the supervisor of my team was taking a lot of shit from a few other people on the team for giving me three days off, especially with one of them being Monday, which is always our busiest day at work (after the day off Sunday) and is generally a black out day for everyone else where I work (meaning you don’t get it as a scheduled day off EVER, and you generally can’t ask for it off either unless you have seriously piled up brownie points). People were so riled up about it that I actually heard people bitching about it when I was there… and bitching about people when they are around to listen is one of the major taboos at every workplace I have ever spent time in. People will hammer the daylights out of you when you’re not around, but they generally either ignore you or act very sweet towards you when you’re there. For me to actually hear various people bitching about me having three days off in a row, with Monday being one of them, it has to have been a constant refrain when I wasn’t there.

Now, having bored everyone into a coma talking about my time management skills, or lack thereof, let’s talk about something else I dislike, that seems to be baffling to a few of my recent new email correspondents:

I do not like it when people say things about me that I feel are not true.

Most people will agree with this and say they don’t like it, either, but it’s been my experience that with most people, they simply don’t like the bad stuff, and they don’t generally trouble themselves to try and figure out if the bad stuff is true or not. They just don’t like to hear anything negative about themselves. I’m not saying I’m superior or anything, I don’t like to hear bad stuff about myself, either. But I do tend to think about it, and if I think the bad stuff has some merit, I’ll own up to it and if I agree that it’s a criticism or an observation that seems to me to need correction, well, I’ll work on being a better person. Somebody recently called me a bully in an email, and I'm mulling that one over quite a bit. I dislike bullies intensely, and I don’t want to be one. I don’t know if I am one or not, but I’m giving it some weight. I will say I don’t think I’m as big a bully as Aaron Hawkins used to be, but, well, that’s kind of like saying I don’t think I ride a bicycle as fast as Lance Armstrong. The question is whether or not I ride a bicycle at all, and, well, I’m not sure. But I’m chewing it over.

The thing is, what seems to baffle some of my newer correspondents is that I do not like it when people say nice things about me that I do not believe are true, either.

This, honestly, seemed to utterly bewilder Julian Perez. He lavished praise on me like a grocery store baker trowels frosting on a birthday cake, and he seemed to be rather stunned and hurt when I did not respond with anything more than a growled “shut up, you”. And someone else who has recently started writing to me has been saying all sorts of excessively nice things about me, and honestly, it just irritates me. When people start throwing around the word ‘genius’, based mostly on reading my Martian Vision articles, I very nearly break out in hives. I do not believe I am in any way a genius, and it troubles me, and rankles me, when people aver otherwise. Nearly as much, or just as much, maybe, as it does when people call me a psychotic and a stalker, essentially, because some other guy whom they’ve never met either says I am.

If people read my work and enjoy it, that’s fine. If they read an article I wrote and it causes them to think about something and come up with an interesting response, that’s even better. And if they want to say they like my writing, or they find my work interesting, or they think I’m a funny and entertaining writer, that doesn’t bother me. I agree with all of those things. I re-read my work and enjoy it, I think my work is capable of provoking thoughtful and interesting responses, and I think I am a funny and entertaining writer.

However, none of this has anything to do with my quality as a human being. My work does not reflect on that, in either a negative or a positive fashion. I recently had someone insist that they could see certain things that must be true about my own nature and behavior from my writing, especially given that so much of my fiction has very thinly disguised versions of me in it somewhere… but even there, I would argue you cannot really know much about a writer, personally, from reading his writing. If you only read Harlan Ellison’s writing about himself, you would think he was the greatest guy who ever drew breath (and many people who have never met Mr. Ellison apparently do). However, if you read some of the things that people who have actually spent time with him say about him, and you stop and consider just how utterly insecure and obnoxious someone has to be to get married and divorced that many times, and you then try to read even Mr. Ellison’s own autobiographical words about himself (as well as his raging, raving screeds against anyone who has ever exasperated him in any way) you start to realize that, well, whatever Harlan Ellison may be (and he’s certainly a complex, controversial human being), “the greatest guy who ever drew breath” just ain’t it.

I have had the unfortunately dubious pleasure of meeting, or at least, having some kind of informal, personal interaction, with a few of the people whose creative work I admire the most in this world. Of those people, I will say that last I knew, Scott McLeod was a good guy, and George Perez struck me as being a very classy human being on the one occasion I met him and another occasion I got an email from him regarding something I wrote about him in one of my articles. Of the others, well, they did not stack up so well. And I am fairly sure that if I had ever met Robert A. Heinlein in person, although I would have been struck absolutely dumb with overwhelming, near worshipful awe for his tremendous talent and all the work he has produced that I have enjoyed and been greatly influenced by, still, I would not expect to in any way like him. I’ve read nearly everything he has ever written, including non-fiction and excerpts from his personal correspondence, and he was… well, he seemed unpleasant, to say the least.

All of which is simply meant to say, you cannot judge people by their creative product. It is a natural and common mistake to make, and I used to make it too. I used to simply assume that if I really loved the way somebody wrote or the way somebody drew, then they must be a wonderful person in real life. But it doesn’t always, or in my experience even often, work out that way. Nor does it work out that the people whose creative work you really dislike are always bastards. According to the Late Great Jeff Webb, Jose Delbo is a helluva nice guy.

It is, of course, very satisfying when the people whose work makes you want to spit turn out to be utter assholes; I’m never more pleased than when I see Chris Claremont sneering and beaming and pontificating in some interview like the gigantic smirking toad that he is, and while I don’t make a habit out of reading John Byrne’s website, every time someone sends me one of his quotes, I quietly revel in the irrefutable truth that one of the worst writers ever to abuse some of my favorite characters is a galloping asshole. (Of course, that one works both ways; as a very sincere admire of Byrne’s penciling talents, it’s disappointing to me that he turned out to be such a thoroughgoing wet end as a human being and a writer, too.)

So, anyway, when people read my work and enjoy it and they write to me, I certainly don’t mind talking about the work. Or about our mutual interests, like Doc Savage and Space Ghost and I don’t know what all. But personal observations based only on my creative work often strike me as presumptuous, and foolish, whether they are positive or negative.

I’m just not comfortable with what I perceive as sycophancy, and I have never had the patience to suffer fools gladly, if at all.

I don’t know. Maybe that makes me a bully. Maybe I should be more patient with, and try to be kinder to, people who read an article in which I try to figure out how the heck Iceman’s powers can possibly work, and spend hours of my finite lifespan doing it, too, and who then decide I am a genius, and tell me so.

But… nah. That’s crazy talk.

Observations from the field

Trick Shot is going to substantially transform the way HeroClix is played.

I know most of you don’t play HeroClix, but imagine a chessboard. Now imagine half the chess pieces have the ability to attack opposing pieces from a distance, but only if they have a clear shot with no pieces in between them and their target.

This is essentially like HeroClix, except the ‘chessboard’ is one of 20 different detailed maps scattered with various different terrain features that can also act as obstacles, and that often contain buildings whose rooftops provide elevated terrain that gives shooters an advantageous sightline over other the heads of intervening blockers.

With Trick Shot, however, one of the new Feat Cards, any character on your team with one of two specific powers (Plasticity or Ranged Combat Expert) can gain the ability to effectively shoot at anyone within their range, regardless of whether their target is hiding (using a power called Stealth) or is blocked by objects/characters that would normally be in the way.

What this effectively means is that if you have a sharpshooter with Trick Shot, you can park him somewhere where no one can take a shot at him, and still utilize him effectively. It’s a game breaker.

Another Feat Card that’s working well is Passenger. I tasked a new click called Vanisher with Passenger. Vanisher is, in the comics, a mutant who has the ability to teleport and who, quite sensibly, decided to use his powers to steal things. As a click, he has a power called Phasing/Teleport, a speed of 14, a minor range strike and not particularly effective damage, and without the Feat Card Passenger, nobody would ever play him. However, Passenger allows any fig with either Phasing or Leap/Climb to carry another fig along with it, and that makes the Vanisher a very handy piece indeed. With that speed of 14, he hauled M.O.D.O.K. right the hell across the board and got him set up on a rooftop overlooking the entire other team.

(In ‘character’, he teleported M.O.D.O.K. across the board to that rooftop, of course.)

Now, every time a fig uses Passenger, that fig takes a click of damage, so Vanisher is going to burn out fast if I use him to tote too many figs around the map… but still. He’s VERY handy. Only because of the Feat Card.

Taunt, which allows a fig to make a ranged attack for 0 damage on any opposing fig within 6 squares, and if that attack hits, the opposing fig has to either attack the Taunting click, or move over adjacent to that click, in the next turn, is just made for Deadpool. For one thing, Deadpool is apparently a real jerk in his own comic (I’ve never read it, but I’m given to understand this is so) so you’d think a taunt would be second nature to him. For another, Deadpool starts with a click of Stealth, so you can park him on a piece of Hindering Terrain and when he Taunts someone, even if that person has a range strike, they can’t see him, so they can’t shoot back at him. They have to move over adjacent to him… and since Deadpool also has a very effective damage dealing power called Blades/Claws/Fangs (he carries a couple of swords around with him), this lets Deadpool hammer the poor Taunted fig on the following turn, usually for some good points.

And you have to give it up to Loki, Norse God of Evil. WizKids took their sweet time giving us a fig of one of the most influential and powerful Silver Age supervillains of all, but they didn’t screw around when they finally took their thumbs out of their asses. Even without any Feat Cards amplifying his abilities, this sneering Aryan deity is still a flying fig who has a speed of 12 with Phasing, allowing him to carry one other figure anywhere he wants to on the board (we presume he’s also teleporting, since Loki doesn’t exactly carry people around on his back in the comics). He also has an attack of 12, two range targets, a range of 8, and the power Psionic Blast coupled with a damage of 3… meaning he can attack two targets up to 8 squares away, and if he hits them, he does three clicks to them regardless of any defending powers they may have. (Loki just used his Psionic Blast to pretty much ruin both Bishop and Polaris’ respective days, after they’d been throwing their weight around a little too much against the likes of Deadpool and M.O.D.O.K.)

That list of Loki’s powers, by the way, is nowhere NEAR complete; smack him a couple of times and he’ll be magically setting up barriers, or Incapacitating you, or doing something else really mean you’d never expect.

Fantomex did a couple of clicks of damage to M.O.D.O.K., to which ol’ Big Head responded by Psionically Blasting Fantomex’s head off. Serves him right for messing with AIM’s main man.

I haven’t used Pounce much, mostly because I don’t have many (or perhaps any) Leap Climbers who only have a damage of 1 or 2 in the game. (I am playing Tanarac, but his damage is 4, so he’s excluded from Pouncing.) I gave both Northstar and Gladiator Haymakers, but neither of them got any chance to use them before they got beat up… Gladiator is now on his last click and can’t use a Feat Card that would do some damage to him, and Northstar has already lost his HyperSonic Speed. Of course, he’s down to Flurry, which allows him two close combat attacks in a turn, so Haymaker might work out well there.

All right. The loathed and despised Eagles are giving an asswhippin’ to the Green Bay Packers, so I need to go turn the TV off and do something else, at least, until around 8, when I’ll check and see just how long this ridiculous exercise has delayed The Simpsons tonight.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.