Mat's Rants

BDK is currently #205

2011-11-13T01:36:00.001-08:00

The "Most Read" page of the Belfry WebComics Index is a fascinating place. It ranks comics based on how often their Belfry link been clicked on, which is not necessarily a measure of their popularity. But even with that in mind, it's still weird to see the top spots occupied by established comics like Original Life, DMFA, Twokinds and Jack... with comics like Tribal Dance up in the top ten as well. You can click on that link and see what Tribal Dance is if you want, but it might be enough for me to tell you that it is the comic that Lucy and Lydia are looking at in today's BDK, and I didn't exaggerate. The points is that the Most Read page doesn't really have a filter on it to differentiate between comics that people actually look at regularly and ones that lots of people are clicking on because it's high on the list and they don't recognize the name, and the results can be pretty odd. The better measuring stick is the "Most Subscribed" page, which is full of comics people do look at regularly, and has an upper echelon more in line with what you might expect from a furry-biased list of webcomics.

It actually doesn't seem fair to classify Tribal Dance as a "webcomic," because it seems to me more like a finite porn story that has no plans to continue indefinitely. If it does have plans to continue indefinitely, well... best of luck to its artist, one Cobra McJingleballs by name. I suppose if Kit & Kay Boodle can last to the present day, anything is possible.

Now, for me to be commenting on an embarrassingly over-sexualized, badly-drawn furry webcomic just begs for people to point out BDK's early days. Well, I have no real defense. As a general rule, the earlier a BDK comic appeared, the more embarrassed I am by it. All I can say is that I did improve, in both artistic ability and writing, and managed to move away from the glut of sexual themes. You'll find that this happens to a lot of comics, on and off the web. They often start with what seems like a good enough idea at the time, but is actually quite rough. Then the comic builds itself up on that rough foundation over time, with characters becoming more fleshed-out and the creator getting a better handle on what the comic is all about. For example, neither Opus nor Bill the Cat were even in Bloom County when it first started.

I'm saying that I'm as good a cartoonist as Berkeley Breathed.

Are you ready to learn the shocking truth?

2011-10-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

I've been playing an ass ton of Tetris Axis since I got it on Sunday; it's really the first (non-N64 port) game for the 3DS that you can spend a great deal of time with. I think I've used my 3DS more over the last three days or so than I have during the entire period between the system's launch and now. That might be an overestimation, but the fact is that this is the first game that's caused me to actually play the thing, like for reals.

It actually led me to look up a few things about modern day Tetris, but I wasn't prepared for what I found.

Basically, Tetris is controlled by The Tetris Company, whose job is to sit around and wait for game developers to come to them and offer fat stacks for permission to make a Tetris game. But no matter who actually makes a given version of Tetris (Tetris Axis was made by Hudson and published by Nintendo, for example), there are certain rules that every Tetris has to abide by. This is called the Tetris Guideline. If you've ever wondered why every new version of Tetris has that thing where the block won't lock into place as long as you keep spinning it, well, it's part of the guideline. (Coincidentally, that feature is there to keep the game playable when the blocks are falling at super high speeds, and is called "lock delay" or "Infinity.")

As for Tetris Axis, it isn't a perfect package - the modes aren't explained very well, the items in multiplayer are gamebreaking to the point where getting certain ones is an automatic win, and eyestraining 3D is not a good match for the kind of intense staring that Tetris requires - but you can figure the modes out with time (and there are a ton of them), and you can turn both multiplayer items and 3D off. Depending on where you get it, it's also $30, which is cheaper than the $40 standard 3DS games tend to adhere to. And the pickings on the 3DS are slim anyway, so if you have one and want something to play on it that isn't 8-bit or available for $10 on the Wii, I'd give Tetris Axis a high, high recommendation.

Stupid, nosy Internet

2011-09-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

There have been times when I've seen this "TMZ" show. It usually comes down to assholes telling Harvey Levin what celebrities they saw having lunch. Occasionally there will be a celebrity who responded to TMZ's cameras negatively, in which case TMZ puts on the goofy music and tries to make him look like a bitter crybaby for not being able to handle a cameraman asking where he got that bagel. Is there an audience for this? Whose life is enriched by knowing that Christopher Walken was walking down the street? Breaking news, humans: every celebrity walks somewhere every single day! Except maybe Kevin Smith.

Dirk, the pick-up artist

2011-09-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

So yes, I'm returning to this old blog. I tinkered with tumblr a bit, but its actual functionality as a blog is bizarrely convoluted, to the point where I wasn't sure how (if at all) people could interact with it. So, moving on!

This comic was a nightmare. The art didn't turn out as well as I would have liked, the touching-up in Photoshop was unusually trying (you can see where I kind of gave up in Panel 2), and even scanning it was more of a hassle than usual. I think the problem was having three characters in the scene for six panels, paired with having to draw awkward Wii controllers and arm positions, which led to early burnout. Oh well. If people didn't want to see badly drawn kitties, they've come to the wrong website.

What I've been doing in these first few comics is re-introduce the characters. You might notice that I've gone out of my way to make sure all of their names have been mentioned. Thus, the point of today's comic was to introduce Dirk, and as a side-effect, I managed to come up with an explanation for something about him that I always found a bit weird. When I first created him back in 2002, I didn't expect/intend for him to become a mainstay character, so I didn't put a lot of effort into his design, or his reasons for getting pierced in such an unusual way. This story seems as good as any, though, even if Lydia technically doesn't have her eyebrow piercing in either of the versions of that storyline. And yes, I'm pretty sure there's a comic somewhere in which Dirk gets a nipple pierced. BDK's canon is a mysterious place.

The weird thing about Dirk is that he's a really basic character, with no real distinguishing characteristics, and yet I find him quite difficult to draw properly. I don't know why.

In search of the Creatinator

2011-03-01T04:09:00.000-08:00

I love interesting concepts. But they frustrate me.

Last night, through a roundabout series of events, I was introduced to the current incarnation of a cartoon based on My Little Pony, entitled My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It doesn't air in Canada, apparently, so I hadn't seen it before, but my good great friends Marcy - a noted MLP enthusiast - and Mike were able to direct me toward this YouTube channel, where the episodes are watchable. I mainly love the visual style, but I also like the way the pony world of Equestria works, which somehow pushes nerd buttons so completely that I was only mildly surprised to see a cockatrice(!) show up. As follows...

Equestria has plain ol' earth ponies; pegasi, who live in a city in the sky and are in charge of creating weather; and unicorns, who can do magic. They are ruled over by Princess Celestia, who is a both a unicorn and a pegasus. Additionally, ponies are born without so-called "cutie marks" on their flanks, and magically get them when they discover what their special talent is; this comes into play with the three young ponies, who are derided by their peers as "blank flanks" and have thus dubbed themselves the Cutie Mark Crusaders, in search of their special talents. Those aren't the main characters of the show, though. The main character is a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle (and in typing it out, I realized that people should rightfully find that name amusing and maybe think she's a vampire) who Princess Celestia has decided spends too much time studying and not enough socializing. So Twilight is sent to Ponytown or Ponyville or whatever and tasked with learning all about friendship. I'm guessing because unicorns do magic, and friendship is magic.

Trust me, it's awesome.

My problem is that I discovered this a day after I was musing on how interesting the Invader Zim world is. The show itself isn't as good as it's reputed to be - I have the complete series on DVD, and good episodes are far from the norm, with some falling into downright unwatchable territory. But the Irkins are fascinating: a society that exists to conquer and adores snack food, and in which status is given according to height. In this world we have Zim: a tiny, stupid, annoying Irkin who is sent on a wild goose chase to uncharted regions of space to infiltrate a made-up planet's society and gather information in preparation for the Irkin invasion. Of course, it turns out there actually is a planet in that region of space, and that planet is Earth. So Zim's on Earth, idiotically trying to look inconspicuous among people who are also so idiotic that they don't realize Zim is an alien in a bad disguise, but constantly paranoid that he'll be found out if he doesn't keep his facade strong. It's beautiful. Individual episodes go awry when Dib comes into the equation, Dib being the one kid who can see that Zim is an alien and who knows that Zim is preparing Earth for invasion, but if we ignore Dib, we have a great concept.

What this has done, this combination of ponies and invaders, is renew my desire to create a concept that interesting. This isn't a new thing for me, either. I've stopped drawing comics, but I still have creative urges, and I'd love to build cartoony world as neat as these, perhaps in a writing role for another artist. BDK isn't a strong concept; it's basically just following characters in a furry world without anything special about it. Compare that to Commander Kitty, which is also following characters in a furry world, but in which the different species are all natives of different planets as opposed to strictly being anthropomorphic versions of Earth animals living in the same society. Or even Kevin & Kell, in which anthropomorphic versions of Earth animals live together in the same society, but carnivore/herbivore predator/prey roles still exist and have to be dealt with.

I guess I just feel like I'm not finished creating, but I don't know what I want to make. You might say I haven't found the special thing that's gonna put a cutie mark on my ass.

That was gay on a number of levels.

Christmas loot 2010

2010-12-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Though my old blog entries were accidentally obliterated, it has been a tradition for me to show you all the things I got for Christmas each year. So this year, I decided to show you all the things I got.

Tickets to a Canucks game

The Vancouver Canucks vs. the Tampa Bay Lightning, also featuring the jersey retirement of Markus Naslund. This was a gift from my sister and her boyfriend, and was also a birthday gift for my dad and brother; us four men went together. It was a fantastic night, and I'm eternally grateful that I got to see a retirement ceremony in my lifetime.

If anyone's wondering, the Canucks lost in overtime, 5-4.

Various chocolates and candies

Everything in this picture is edible, except the ? block (which contains edible coins) and the dice in the poker-themed package. But hey, they're dice!

Lounge pants

A two-pack, actually. The second pair isn't pictured, because it's on my body.

Turtles

One of the finest chocolates available to humans.

Swiss army thing

A useful tool, featuring a knife, screwdriver/file, toothpick and tweezers.

Cat cards

In a cat-shaped container. All 52 have different breeds on them!

Eraser/pencil sharpener

It's become traditional for me to receive some cool kind of eraser(s) every Christmas. It's sort of a collection I have.

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

The sixth part of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, written by not Douglas Adams, on account of his death. I'm dubious, given that Adams didn't write it and every iteration of the Earth in reality was destroyed, with the main protagonists on it, at the end of the fifth book (spoilers, sorry), buy hey, I'll give it its fair chance.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

After I read Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson immediately became one of my favorite authors. I've since read The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon as well, and enjoyed both, though Cryptonomicon was my least-favorite of the three. I found its modern day/World War II setting less interesting than the fascinating sci-fi futures featured in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Anathem is sci-fi again, and so I bet it's awesome.

(By the way, if you haven't read Snow Crash yet, you're only hurting yourself. It is absolutely required reading, trust me. I waited some ten years after first being told about it before I read it, and I consider those ten years wasted.)

Christmas sweater

Not Christmas-themed, but another thing that seems to have become traditional is that I get some kind of sweater every year. I enjoy getting these, because they're always nice.

Canucks at Forty

A look back at the first 40 years of the Vancouver Canucks' existence as an NHL franchise. This is a high-quality book that I know I'm going to enjoy reading. This was a gift from my brother.

"Nutcracker Cash" Scratch & Win ticket

This was attached to Canucks at Forty's wrapping paper, so it's also from my brother, and it netted me a cool $1.

Kirby's Epic Yarn

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeah, son. Screw New Vegas, screw Black Ops, screw whatever else. It's all about Kirby.

Dominion: Intrigue

One of the four expansions for Dominion, the basic set of which I already owned. This expansion is a stand-alone, and when combined with the basic set, it expands the maximum number of players from 4 to 6. Given that there's me, my two siblings and their respective significant others, being able to play a 5-player game is a good thing. A very good thing, because if you haven't played it, Dominion is a game so excellent, it's replaced Dungeons & Dragons itself at my gaming group's table on many an occasion.

Painting of Lucy

By my brother's girlfriend, who did an utterly spectacular job. I haven't put it up yet because I had to take this picture of it, but it is going on the wall right next to my desk, where I can look at it always.

Selection of neat things

There's some hazelnut praline biscotti, a reed diffuser, some chocolate mint cookies, and some cocoa with marshmallows. This collection was given to me by my boss, who is a good man.

Thoughts on the NHL at the 1/4 mark

2010-11-30T18:58:00.000-08:00

- Man, who knew the New Jersey Devils could be so bad? The Kovalchuk deal really screwed them, and Brodeur's age is starting to show.

- It appears that I underestimated the Flyers and Canadiens.

- Note to self: The Buffalo Sabres are only good in every second season.

- Washington's monopoly atop the Southeast Division appears to be crumbling; Tampa Bay is about ready to start challenging.

- I have some doubts that Chicago will even make the playoffs this year.

- I would love to see the Blue Jackets become a viable team, and they're off to a great start. I'm officially rooting for them to win the Central Division.

- The Calgary Flames are the New Jersey Devils of the Western Conference.

- Is Vancouver worse than expected, or is Colorado better? Why is there actual competition atop the Northwest Division?

- All five teams in the Pacific Division are viable options to win the division or at least make the playoffs. For a division that includes the Los Angeles Kings and Phoenix Coyotes, that's a tremendous step forward.

I'm not king of comedy

2010-11-08T05:52:00.001-08:00

(Here's some background music.)

On October 31st, I decided to end Badly Drawn Kitties. I had written what I thought was a very funny Halloween-themed comic, but wasn't able to draw it properly. In the earlier days of BDK, I probably would have just drawn it to the best of my abilities and thrown it up onto the Internet anyway, but I think I've gotten to the point now where badly drawn isn't good enough for me anymore. Additionally, drawing comics hadn't been where my heart was for some time. This ambivalence, combined with my dissatisfaction with my ability to render what is in my head visually, teamed up to tell me it was time to quit.

On October 30th, meanwhile, something happened which (though I didn't know it at the time) would eventually lead me to question how I've been going about this whole webcomic thing for the last eight-and-a-half years.

First we have to back up a bit, to about August 30th, give or take. Scotty Arsenault had alerted me to the existence of a thing called Frog Raccoon Strawberry, which I began to digest. Now, that comic falls under the umbrella of a webcomics consortium called Dumm Comics. The comics contained therein are, by and large, mediocre, but I eventually began to read them all, just 'cause they're there. One of them, called Mech Lab, was one that actually had a pretty interesting archive, and seemed like it might be headed in an interesting direction. But it had just gone into a hiatus which would turn out to be more or less permanent, and after an interminable string of guest comics, its replacement was finally introduced on October 30th. That replacement is something called Rad Raz (I think it's supposed to be all caps, RAD RAZ-style, but to blazes with that mess).

The inaugural Rad Raz strip on Dumm was not funny or interesting at all, but I got the impression that it was meant to be introductory, so I gave it a pass. Rad Raz had evidently existed prior to its stint on Dumm Comics, though, so there is a body of work to look upon and (as it happens) despair. I glanced through that archive, and decided that this Rad Raz was not exactly an upgrade.

Here's where the part that shocked me came in.

If you go to that inaugural Rad Raz strip and click on the "comments" button below it, you will (I hope) be as shocked as I was by what you find. Comments include:

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Ohh, lol.

WOHO! (homer simpson woho, not a regular one)

fuck YES.

This looks like it's going to be awesome!

I always loved the comics of RAZ when they appeared, I am very much looking forward to this comic.

Seriously? This is what passes for a good webcomic nowadays? This is the kind of thing that people are overjoyed to see?

I was even more offended when the second strip debuted this past Saturday. I didn't even make it to the punchline before I was steamed. Look at the second panel of this thing. I know my stuff is (by its own admission) badly drawn, and I know I ended the comic because I decided I couldn't draw it well enough, but when someone can throw something that lazily written with such an egregious flaw in the artwork onto the Internet... and look at the comments that strip got, too!

The other Dumm Comics aren't a heck of a lot better. Frog Raccoon Strawberry is endlessly charming, though it tends to overuse the "Strawberry is random!" gag too much. The website's flagship, 1930 Nightmare Theatre, has some moments, but is by and large fairly bad. There was a comic called Big Pants Mouse there, which was of neutral quality, but it's been replaced by a new thing from the same artist, Life in the Analog Age, which essentially reflects upon childhood in the 80s and is amusing. The last comic contained in the site is called Skadi, which is actually pretty okay; it doesn't go the way you think it will when you see that the protagonist is a barbarian woman clad in a ridiculous scrap that passes for a loincloth.

Meanwhile, I somehow stumbled upon a comic called Evil Inc., which has apparently been around for a long time. Clicked back a few strips into the archive. Found this one. My heart sank. Is a cartoonist who works on the Internet in the year two thousand ten actually making that joke? Hell, I joked about that joke being overused so long ago, I'd have to spend an hour digging through my archives to find it! And this guy is one of the authors of a book called How To Make Webcomics! (That was italicized because it's a title, but then italicized again for emphasis, which un-italicized it.)

I'm questioning the last eight-and-a-half years of my life.

I wonder now if I put too much effort into BDK. I think my artistic limitations were always going to be a problem, but I wonder if the sporadic nature of my posting could have been avoided if I had just lowered my writing standards.

See, I'm not too proud to point out my flaws, but I do grant myself two compliments. One, I think I'm pretty good-looking. I'm a poor judge, but I think I'm pretty alright. But the second is the important one: I believe that I have an excellent sense of humour. I believe it is my best feature, in fact. When I started BDK, I was content to create strips with jokes that were... I think they were above average, on the whole, though of course individual strips may fall above or below that bar. That was when I was making five comics a week, though. As time went by, I thought more and more about the comedy, and I think my standards went up. That's why I had to end it: when my heart was no longer in it, I couldn't will myself to put forth the effort that creating jokes that were up to my standards required.

But this Rad Raz fiasco is turning my world upside-down. Maybe I should have just half-assed it. Maybe, if the comics I was writing regularly were above average, I should have just settled for "average," been more prolific, and let those mediocre strips carry me to stardom through their quantity alone.

Anybody have any thoughts about the comedy of webcomics?

Errata

2010-10-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

The NHL season starts... oh... thirteen and a half hours from now, so this is my last chance to get in my official preseason predictions. I already made my predictions, yes, but a few things have changed since then. Not much, but enough that there has to be a little movement. So here are the changes:

- In the Eastern Conference, it's become clear that the New York Islanders (who I had placed 13th) have absolutely nothing to look forward to. I'm going to bump them down a slot into 14th place, and elevate the Carolina Hurricanes to 13th.

- In the Western Conference, the Minnesota Wild's chances seem to have gone way downhill since they lost their goalie for the season. I had them at 9th, but I'm going to drop them all the way to 12th. This pushes Colorado to 9th, Nashville to 10th and Columbus to 11th.

So, to recap:

EAST
Washington
Pittsburgh
Boston
New Jersey
Philadelphia
Buffalo
Ottawa
New York Rangers
Montreal
Atlanta
Tampa Bay
Toronto
Carolina
New York Islanders
Florida

WEST
San Jose
Vancouver
Detroit
Chicago
Los Angeles
Calgary
Phoenix
St. Louis
Colorado
Nashville
Columbus
Minnesota
Dallas
Edmonton
Anaheim

Pennypincher Arcade / Metroid: a film by Christopher Nolan

2010-08-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

So the news that's been sending shockwaves through the nerd world - the nerld - over the last few days has been Microsoft raising the price of Xbox Live. Now, I don't have an Xbox, and I don't use Xbox Live, so maybe my opinion is a little skewed. Maybe my opinion is also skewed because I live in Canada, and the price increase isn't as severe here. But I can't help but think that one dollar (or two dollars if you live in the United States) isn't the sort of thing a person would actually notice if it occurred anywhere else that used a similar sort of price model. I just think the video game world is one where people are united in their love of complaining, standing ready to jump onto forums and unload fury whenever anything that is not positive happens, so even if what's happening isn't something that's really going to impact their lives, they still want to bitch about it.

I love Jerry at Penny Arcade talking about it too, comparing the price increase to Microsoft holding all your friends for ransom. Now, the sane person will just go, "Eh, it's two dollars, let's move on." This is especially true if you're someone in a position to receive video games free from companies seeking a kind word, or to be paid by Wizards of the Coast to come play unreleased D&D products, or to use the wealth you've accumulated to host a gigantic fucking convention in the middle of Seattle. If I was in that position, I would not be making two dollars sound like it was encroaching on my ability to send my children to college. I would be saying... well, exactly what I'm saying now. I'd be making fun of people who think that this price increase is a big deal.

Switching gears slightly, I purchased Metroid: Other M today (perhaps with the money I saved by not being an Xbox Live subscriber?). It seems good, and I am enjoying it, though also so different from the standard Metroid game that I find myself having to adjust my expectations and relearn from the ground up. When I first played Metroid Prime, what grabbed me was that, despite the complete change in gameplay, it still felt like a Metroid game. Other M doesn't. The thought that came to me repeatedly as I played it was that it's like a Metroid movie, where it deviates sharply from what we consider "standard" for the setting in an effort to add to the lore. I want to say that maybe it's a bit like Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that way. It also reminds me of The Dark Knight, with the shaky, handheld camera during the (interminable) cutscenes, and the soundtrack that consists not of the music we generally associate with Metroid, but of a tense thrumming.

(An aside about the cutscenes: For a large chunk of the first part of the game, everything you do is interrupted by cutscenes. It hits a Final Fantasy level, where you feel like the only interaction you have with the game is to push forward on the control pad long enough to reach the trigger for the next cutscene. There's a boss battle early on that is itself interrupted by cutscenes! It reaches an insane level, especially at such an early stage, when you're still trying to figure out exactly how to play the game. I think it was a poor design choice to have them so long and so numerous so early, but I think I've managed to get past them now.)

The gameplay is also such a change from normal Metroid that it's jarring. Now Samus is executing timed dodges, jumping on enemies heads and shooting them point-blank, suplexing bugs before shooting them in the face... "Ninja" is a word I've seen my brother tweet, and he's not wrong.

There are some things I wish were more like Metroid Prime, specifically the search mode. I want to scan around and learn about things and piece together bits of story. Other M doesn't give you much at all. If a door requires a certain something to open - missiles, say - it'll tell you, but other than that, it'll just display a red icon and go, "Yep, it's a thing," and then only if it's a thing you can use somehow, and then it won't tell you how. After three Metroid Primes, it's weird to walk into a room full of computer screens displaying maps and images of weird creatures and not be able to examine them for more information.

I think it's probably a good game, and what else are you going to do with your Wii? I just want to warn you not to expect the Metroid you've been playing for the last twenty years.

Let's get ready for the hockey season!

2010-08-11T03:45:00.000-07:00

I did some hockey predictions around this time last year, and right after I did it, San Jose obtained Dany Heatley, which kinda changed everything (my prediction of Chicago making it out of the Western Conference still ended up being correct, though). Now, with Ilya Kovalchuk still in flux, I might be jumping the gun a little here. But I don't think he'll change my opinions regardless of where he ends up, and damn it, I miss talking about hockey, so let's go.

ATLANTIC DIVISION
The powers that be in the Atlantic are still New Jersey and Pittsburgh; some may give Philadelphia more consideration than they deserve because they're Eastern Conference Champions and all, and I think they have the potential to be pretty good, but I don't think they're at a level where they can contend for the division title yet. Now, in the past, I've been guilty of giving Pittsburgh too much credit and New Jersey not enough, so I am wary of that. But I don't imagine seeing repeat champions in this division. For that reason only, I'm giving Pittsburgh the division, but the 2 seed in the playoffs, and I'm giving New Jersey the 4 seed. Philadelphia gets 5. As for the New Yorks, of course the Islanders will be garbage - I have them pegged for the 13 spot in the conference - and I imagine the Rangers will be mediocre, but good enough and with enough teams falling below them to get into the playoffs as the 8 seed.

NORTHEAST DIVISION
This division always fascinates me because, in the five years since the lockout, four of its teams have won it, and none of those teams have won it back-to-back times. This year, I've given serious consideration to Buffalo repeating, but the more I think about it, I can't bet against Boston (and I know one New Englishman who will be pleased to hear that). I'll give the Bruins the 3 seed, and the Sabres the 6. Ottawa proved better than I expected last year, but I think they still have some problems. Still, I'll give them the 7 seed. Now, if you do the math, you'll see that I've already filled seven of the eight playoff spots, and I still have the Southeast Division left to go, so that leaves Montreal on the outside looking in. I have them in 9th place. Oh, it also leaves Toronto on the outside looking in, but I think we all knew they were missing the playoffs anyway. I think Toronto might start their climb back to respectability this year, but I don't think that climb will get them much higher than 12th.

SOUTHEAST DIVISION
Yeah, Washington and lots of it. I give them the 1 seed, maybe even the President's Trophy, and I'm even going to pick them to win the Stanley Cup. So that's all eight playoff spots filled. As for the rest, I think Atlanta is on their way up, in large part because they are currently in the process of absorbing the entire Chicago Blackhawks roster. I'll give them 10th place. Tampa Bay, perhaps more than any other team, has an interesting mix of good veterans on the way down and good young players on the way up which, combined with an apparent calm in the storm that is generally their management situation, could see them place 11th. The real problems are Carolina and Florida, which just don't seem to have any hope right now. I place them at 14th and 15th respectively.

CENTRAL DIVISION
Well, Chicago was poised to become the new Red Wings until cap issues forced them to tear themselves apart. So I think we can look forward to yet another Central Division Title for the old Red Wings. But I still think Detroit is on its way down overall, and I'm only going to give them the 3 seed. Chicago should still be pretty good, so I'll put them at 4th. St. Louis has just been trying so hard to recapture their former glory since the lockout, and I think the demise of the Northwest Division could leave the door open for them to make it into the playoffs at 8. Nashville and Columbus will probably be quite mediocre-to-bad, so I put them at 11 and 12 respectively, though Columbus has an interesting coach now.

NORTHWEST DIVISION
Once arguably the toughest division in the NHL, the Northwest is becoming the Southeast of the Western Conference. Vancouver is obviously the powerhouse here, and I'm going to put them as high as 2nd. From there, everything falls apart in a hurry. I'm going to put Calgary in at the 6 seed, only because I can't think of eight teams better than them and I can't in good conscience put them below Phoenix and St. Louis. Colorado did way better than they should have last year, and so I'm going to push them above as bad as I think they should be, but below as good as they were last season. And just for good measure, I'm going to put Minnesota above them. I put Minnesota at 9 and Colorado at 10. Edmonton... well, Edmonton's rebuild is on, and I think they'll manage to avoid the basement, finishing 14th.

PACIFIC DIVISION
This division was where I made my biggest mistakes last year, though to be fair, I made my predictions before the Sharks acquired Heatley, and who could have predicted the rise of the Kings and (especially) the Coyotes coupled with the apocalyptic fall of the Ducks and Stars? Anyway... This year I'm giving the division to the Sharks once again, and the 1 seed in the Conference; their only real question mark is in goal. I think Phoenix was a fluke last year, but Los Angeles really is on the rise, and so I'll put the Kings 5th and the Coyotes 7th. Dallas and Anaheim both have just nothing going for them right now, but I think Anaheim's probably in worse shape, so I'll put the Stars 13th and the Ducks 15th.

And in the end, I predict Washington defeating Vancouver for the Stanley Cup.

The Mok-ery

2010-07-24T03:05:00.000-07:00

That's pronounced "mockery." It's related to the story that makes up most of this post, though I mixed in a D&D reference just in case you thought that the pony that I am had learned a second trick. I assure you it has not.

So I'd first of all like to welcome you all to BDK's new updating schedule, that schedule being "Whenever I feel like drawing a comic." So how will you know when I've made a new comic? Well, you can certainly check the website every day, but the best way to know is by following me on Twitter, because I'll always tell you when there's a new comic to look at.

Now then, on to the subject of today's comic. I've said before that there were four events in my formative years that led me into this so-called "furry fandom," and today, I'm going to discuss the first. The third will also be touched on briefly, though it is not really important to this story.

The year was 198X. Apparently it was 1984, though my memory of it was not strong enough to give the year the proper identity until recently, so it was "early 80s" for two-thirds of my life. Anyway, some cartoon was on TV, more than once I think, and it fascinated me. But I couldn't remember the name in the years that followed. I was sure it was a movie, and I was pretty sure it was on TV, since this was a time when VCRs were not quite household items, and renting them and cassettes was something of a big deal, at least to me. I couldn't imagine my parents renting this thing for themselves, nor could I imagine picking out out, since I didn't even know what it was. Years went by, and I could only remember little snippets. A fat guy mooning someone. A hero guy and his two friends being hypnotized by some glow. A zeppelin? Also, the characters may or may not have been anthropomorphic animals; I thought they were, but couldn't remember for certain. Not enough to really work with; even with today's technology, that'd be a hard mess to Google and get a coherent result for. I could only describe it as an early 80s animated movie about an evil, glowing sphere of death (and Googling that leads to... well, see the next paragraph). But I consider seeing that cartoon my first step on the path.

In 1996, my vague description proved even more woefully inadequate than it actually was, because it was in fact a perfect description of Heavy Metal, and my well-meaning friend Neil caught that movie on TV and taped it for me. Heavy Metal is, of course, divided into several short segments, and so the two of us endured the whole thing in the hope that one of the pieces might have been the one I remembered. Of course none of them were, and so I was forced into the sad conclusion that there were actually two early 80s animated movies about an evil, glowing sphere of death. I was also forced to watch Heavy Metal, but that was a different problem.

Finally, in the tail end of the 90s, I realized that another friend of mine, Micah, was something of an animation buff, and so I laid out my terrible description to him. After a few seconds of thought, he suggested, "Rock & Rule?"

I would love to see a CAT scan of my brain when he said those words, as parts of it that had lain dormant since 1984 were suddenly the center of attention, the title Rock & Rule exploding with familiarity. For the first time in close to 16 years, I could put a name to the images that lingered in my head. Though Micah also noted that he wasn't sure there was an evil, glowing sphere of death in Rock & Rule, which added yet another layer of uselessness to my description.

Over the next few years, Internet access allowed me to piece together the rest of the puzzle. Rock & Rule was produced in Canada by Nelvana, never given a general release in theaters, and was aired in Canada on the CBC, which is why I saw it. It was released on VHS and laserdisc in the 80s, both of which were of course long gone by now, and a DVD release was "planned." I imagined I might one day walk into Future Shop and see it on the shelf, but the day never came.

Here's where the story kind of loses some steam, but also reaches its point. I managed to find a new copy of Rock & Rule on DVD on Amazon.ca for like ten bucks from a British Columbian seller, and so I bought it. It arrived on Friday.

But now that my journey is over, I find myself kind of torn. I'm not sure I actually want to watch it. Outside of its cult following, the movie is pretty universally panned by people who have no curiosity- or nostalgia-based reason to view it, and the packaging doesn't really give you any reason to think that any good will come of it. But more than that, I worry that having a complete recollection of it based on viewing it with a fully-formed adult brain will dilute the meaning of the fragments I can recall currently. What happens when images you've been carrying like torches for 26 years become just scenes in a shitty movie? Not that it's a shitty movie by any means, but I can tell you that I still to this day have not been able to bring myself to watch the 2003 DVD release of The Lion King - not even once - for fear that it may become less special with overexposure.

(For those keeping track at home, the theatrical release of The Lion King in 1994 was the third defining moment of my furry career. Come to think of it, why didn't they hold off on the DVD release for a year and call it a 10th Anniversary Edition?)

Also, Wikipedia tells me that Rock & Rule is coming out on Blu-Ray in September. Well, I don't know that I'd pay $30 for a Blu-Ray version, and besides, I originally saw it in standard definition on a TV that didn't even have a remote control, dammit. If I am going to see it again, that's how I'm going to see it! Except the part about the TV without a remote control. My TV has a remote control.

By the way, the Mockery is a god in the Eberron setting.

FAQ

2010-06-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

Q: Why do Lydia's ears look like that?

A: She's an elf. She's a character that I made for her a long time ago, an elf ranger named Lyna Flareborn. There's a picture of her on my dice bag!

Q: Why does Rain have fangs?

A: She's a shifter. Specifically, she's a razorclaw shifter, but her claws aren't in view. Class-wise, she's a druid, and her character is still named Rain.

Q: So... what does that make Lucy, then?

A: She's still just a cat. In official D&D terms, she'd be a human. Her character is a human swordmage named Lucinda Windrunner.

Q: What's a swordmage?

A: Oh, I guess you're still playing 3.5, or even AD&D. Swordmage is a new class that was introduced in the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms setting. It's an arcane spellcaster/swordfighter whose spells largely center around making its sword attacks more dangerous and drawing enemy attacks away from its allies.

Q: I don't know what any of the stuff you just said means.

A: Well, it's D&D stuff, so it's not important.

Q: The second panel doesn't make sense to me, either. Come to think of it, neither does the fourth.

A: That's okay. Half the point of the comic is its over-reliance on D&D rules.

Q: So more of these comics are coming?

A: Probably.

Q: Okay, well, let me know when they're over.

A: Will do!

Tobacconism; On the brink; Inside Insider

2010-06-22T01:53:00.000-07:00

- You may be aware of the concept of flavoured mini-cigars, most notably Primetime. They're little cigars with some flavouring on the filter, the theoretical effect of which is that they taste like things like grape, cherry, vanilla and the like. What actually happens is that they taste like tobacco, and if you happen to lick your lips at some point, you'll taste some vaguely-defined sweetness. They are popular because you can buy them singly for a modest fee, somewhere in the neighborhood of two dollars.

Anyway, Canada decided awhile ago that selling cheap, candy-flavoured tobacco probably wasn't the best way to stop young people from being introduced to the stuff. So they declared that these cigars could only be sold in packs of 20, putting them outside the price range (I instinctively attempted to type "ranger" there) of most people without a significant disposable income. I've known this for awhile, as someone who works in a store that sells tobacco, and I've known that the new 20-packs were coming. Then I got a visit from a representative of Primetime's distributor.

She cheerfully let me know that BC and I think Alberta had successfully lobbied to still be able to sell single Primetimes, provided they made a few changes. The changes were as follows:

1 - The filter had to be removed, leaving these new Primetimes as just small, regular, filterless cigars. The centimeter or so of cigar that was previously devoted to a filter is now extra tobacco.
2 - With no filter, the tobacco itself is now flavored, which has the added effect of making the smoke taste much more like grape, cherry, vanilla and the like.

So basically, the government stood by their guns in the face of Big Tobacco by keeping the little cigars available to kids at a modest price, making them taste even more like candy, and removing the filter. Congrabulations.

- I'm not a hundred percent sure yet, but I think I might be nearing the end of my time with Borderlands. I got on board late; I felt it was pointless to start a saved game on Kat's Xbox when it'd be gone within a few weeks, so I waited until it was gone, then purchased a copy for my PS3. It was enjoyable, as you may be aware, but I think I might have hit the point where the difficulty starts to undermine the fun. It used to be that I couldn't wait for guys to jump me so I could start blissfully shotgunning them to pieces, but now when guys jump me, I'm Fighting For My Life! within seconds. I kind of fear getting into a combat situation, and since Borderlands is, at its heart, a shooter, that leaves me in something of a bad position.

I also have a problem with the boss (and miniboss) system this game uses, which is to make the boss enemies' hit points about a hundred times the normal foe. This makes it necessary to throw any strategy other than "run backwards" almost completely out the window in favor of pumping bullets into these things for ten solid minutes. Meticulously preparing a D&D game has made me quite sensitive to the art of increasing encounter difficulty, and while it does largely consist of increases to defenses and hit points, the boost given to bosses in Borderlands does not properly take into account the relative resources available to the player, nor the variety in gameplay experience that player craves. I feared I might not like this when I watched Kat get into boss fights - particularly the game's final battle, which appeared to be the most boring experience a human could have with a video game - and now that I've tried it myself, I know that I was absolutely correct. It leaves me wondering if this is something I want to continue doing.

I won't be too broken up if I do quit. I picked up that 3D Dot Game Heroes last week, and it'll be nice to dig into it more completely. And of course there's LittleBigPlanet, too, the surface of which remains only slightly scored by my scrabbling claws.

- Speaking of D&D, when I fully realized that it was my favorite pastime, I bit the bullet and became a D&D Insider. This gives me access to, among other things, the Character Builder, which I won't say that I had already obtained through illicit means, but I will say I was impatient to get the June update for.

There's something you should know about Wizards of the Coast. They can make fantastic tabletop games, but when the time comes to work on a computer, whether it's something as simple as building a website or as complicated as building a piece of software, they have no fucking clue what they're doing. Don't get me wrong; the final product is usually fine once you get it running, but getting to that point requires bizarre hoops the likes of which you won't see anywhere else, and I imagine there are a million companies out there that could produce the same products in a smaller, simpler package.

I remember when I played Magic Online. Every time I started it up, there would be this intro video showing merfolk and zombies and such in graphics pulled straight from the cutting edge of 1996. Please note that this was approximately 2003. I thought, "Surely there's an option somewhere to skip this video. No company in their right minds would have an unskippable video this long at every startup." Try as I might, I couldn't find an option to skip it. Finally, on an excursion to some furry convention or other, I asked a Magic-playing friend of mine if that video could be turned off. The answer was no. The remedy was to replace the video file in Magic Online's directory with a blank notepad document with the same name as the video file. Astounding.

So I became a D&D Insider and immediately sought to update my Character Builder. The best way to describe the result would be "no dice," which is doubly bad given that we're talking about Dungeons & Dragons. I tried uninstalling the questionable version I had on my computer somehow and starting over with a completely official download. Dice were still lacking. I tried to figure out why, and... maybe I just don't download programs often enough, but the problem was one that I had never encountered in my ten years of Internet denizenship. The problem was that the installer required Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 to run. The idea of a program requiring this was so foreign to me that I didn't even know it was a thing. I didn't know if I had any version of .NET Framework on my computer. It turns out that I had version 1.1, so I updated, but I couldn't help but wonder why nothing I had ever downloaded and installed before, including that illicit copy of the Character Builder itself that I never downloaded, required such Taco Bell-esque layers of bullshit.

Just for fun, once I had downloaded and installed the Character Builder, I discovered that the version the website currently offers for download doesn't include the latest update! Once you've downloaded and installed the program, you have to open it up and follow the prompt it gives to download and install the update as well. Again, maybe I don't download things often enough, but doesn't it make sense to anyone else to have the version of a program you're offering for download be current instead of a month old with the newest patch offered separately? Am I crazy?

The inner workings of Mat's brain

2010-06-04T02:06:00.000-07:00

I was at the Wendy's the other day, and I saw a man wearing the shirt featured in today's comic. The amazing thought occurred to me that there are actually humanoids out there who think that shirts like this, much like "GIT-R-DONE" caps, are great things that are worth spending money on.

On the other hand, I suppose that if there are that many people who haven't seen this shirt and think it's worth buying, perhaps there's a similar number who will see it for the first time being worn by an individual who purchased it. Hm.

On the other other hand, Buddha is not a god, and is rather thin. The shirt is actually referring to Budai. So not only is it old, it's wrong. At least that's what I gleaned from Wikipedia upon double-checking the spelling of the word "Buddha." I'm not exactly a Buddhist scholar, so it is possible that I am wrong here.

Let's talk about something else.

I never cease to be amazed by my dreams' ability to amaze me when I wake up, only for my brain to realize how stupid they are when it begins functioning at full capacity. I already told you about this experience, and the other night I had a similar one. Over the course of that one night, I had three different dreams that contained fully composed songs, complete with music and lyrics. This happens to me fairly frequently, really, and it's a bit frustrating that I seem to be able to write such works in my sleep, where I can't access them.

The first one we don't need to talk about too much. That dream seemed to be a re-fabrication of the TaleSpin movie/pilot, which I think was called "Plunder and Lightning." It had some unfortunate musical numbers in it, and my dream introduced a new one, involving Rebecca trying to convince a reclusive Baloo to work for her with his Sea Duck. Man, I don't know. Oh, and since I know some of you are thinking it, it wasn't sexual. Nothing in this sequence would have been out of place in an actual Disney cartoon.

I don't remember much about the third one. It was a pretty good heavy rock song, I think, that had something to do with Niagara Falls. I remember a serrated metal strip sliding through a series of rushing-water-filled tubes. It's the one I remember the least about, but it's also the one I most wish I remembered, since the other song I thought was good when I was composing it turned out to be the stupidest in daylight.

(Aside: There is a song on Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends called "Yes," Which contains the lyric, "But night makes a fool of us in daylight." This is very applicable here.)

So yes, it was the second one that concerned me the most. It was some kind of love song which, based on the music and voice, seemed to be performed by Wilco. That was the one where I woke up and thought, "Man, what an awesome song my subconscious brain put together!" It was only as my mind started to pull itself together and I started trying to reconstruct the song that I realized that what made sense in dream logic might have actually been gibberish. I could only remember two sets of lyrics: the first line of the chorus was, "But I still like to watch you sleep," which is okay. Then a couple of lines I can't remember. And here's where we run into trouble: I'm certain the next line was something about "beaver's teeth and sour cream."

I guess this means I'm not a genius.

Toons and cars

2010-05-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

There's something someone could say about the fact that I drew a comic about a cartoon constructed for today's children while listening to 70s-era Pink Floyd. Hm.

Personally, I don't find any shame in watching cartoons like Phineas and Ferb. I enjoy watching stupid cartoons like that, ranging in quality from SpongeBob SquarePants to Johnny Test, with things in between like Wayside, Jimmy Two-Shoes, Ruby Gloom and The Mr. Men Show.

Phineas and Ferb is actually one of the better cartoons available right now, if you really watch it. It's very self-aware. It has a formula that it knows it has, builds its episodes by tweaking that formula, and then jokes about how it's deviating from the formula. It also contains something I'm generally not fond of, which is songs in cartoons, but the ones in Phineas and Ferb are actually pretty good, as if they were written by actual songwriters and not a writing staff with no musical background. It's fascinating how that works.

Checking Wikipedia to make sure I spelled "Phineas" correctly (and discovering that I had actually misspelled "Candace"), I discovered that the show was created by people who had previously worked on Rocko's Modern Life and Family Guy, which is about as disparate a comedy background as one can expect. I spend a minute or two pondering how a writer for Family Guy could be so clever, and what I decided was that, in addition to the obvious Seth McFarlane handicap, Family Guy suffers by having too much time to work with. The writers have about five minutes of plot to build around, so they have to fill fifteen to twenty minutes with stupid shit. So they introduce way too extended/repetitive gag sequences; awkward, overlapping, time-wasting conversations; and inane flashbacks to pop culture references. Phineas and Ferb only has half the time to work with, so the writing has to get down to business. Robot Chicken is another example of how limited time works in these writers' favor. Cut way down on the time they have to fill, and they just get better. Maybe Family Guy should be ten minutes long.

Other things.

I had - and have - no plans to buy it, but I've spent an unusual amount of mental energy trying to figure out from Internet opinions whether Blur is any good. And I've had an amazing amount of difficulty getting a straight answer.

The game is, of course, made by Bizarre Creations, which most people know as the company that made Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing. I know them best as the company that made one of my favorite video games of all time: Fur Fighters. I don't blame you if you've never played it, either because its original release came in the waning days of the Dreamcast and you never heard of it, or the title/package art looked stupid, or you saw that it was published by Acclaim and assumed the worst. But it's not what you think (that would be Brutal: Paws of Fury for the Super NES), and if you happen to see the PS2 version (subtitled "Viggo's Revenge") in a vast tub of $5 used games at your local EB, you could do worse things than pick it up and give it a try. I, like most sane individuals, revile everything Acclaim ever touched, so for me to say that a game with the Acclaim name is among the best I've played is a big deal.

Anyway, we were talking about Blur.

I found the concept of it interesting, being essentially a real racing game mixed with a kart racer, but my poisonous experiences with Mario Kart Wii made me wary. I thought that the biggest problem with Mario Kart Wii was the number of players who could be involved in online games and this number's effect on the number of shells and bolts flying around and making playing the game a stammering nightmare. Going from eight racers in offline play to twelve in online meant a 50% drop in your time spent racing and a 50% increase in your time spent being hit by shit. So the idea of progress-retarding power-ups littered over a twenty player field gave me the fear that one would progress around the track less by application of a gas pedal than by the nudging of constant explosions.

Giant Bomb says it's good, so that's a good sign. But Tycho also said it was good, and Tycho tends to like games everyone else hates and hate games everyone else likes, so that doesn't mean much. Further complicating matters is that now, three days later, Tycho says it's bad. It's like the Internet noticed that I had made a hobby of trying to figure Blur out, so it decided to raise the CR. I apologize for the unwarranted lapse into 3.5 rules.

I guess the simple answer would be to maybe rent Blur and play it, but then I wouldn't be playing Borderlands. Also, I have a PS3, and what the Internet has told me is that, should I want to play a racing game, Mod Nation Racers is the way of the future.

Brill

2010-05-17T03:34:00.000-07:00

Today's BDK is kinda terrible, but at the same time, I'm proud of how many jokes I managed to fit into it. Of course, they're all D&D jokes, but that just increases the chances that people who might be offended by it (i.e. girls) won't be able to decipher it.

I haven't been writing blogs lately, as you may have noticed (or not), and I think I've figured out why. It's because all the comics I've been posting for the last... year, really... have been pre-drawn long in advance. So they're not about thinks that are weighing on my mind currently, so I don't talk about them. Well, now that I don't work graveyard shifts and I don't have a buffer of pre-drawn comics anymore, maybe I can get back to drawing comics pulled from current events. Today's, for example, is loosely based on a side conversation that occurred during the last D&D session I participated in.

In other news, Kat's gone. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but homesickness and being separated from her family and friends finally got to her enough that she had to go back to Ontario. I don't blame her for that. I'd be a horrible person if I imprisoned her here, in defiance of her happiness. I think I'm ready to be a single entity for awhile, anyway, though there were certainly some rough moments in the first few days, before the horrors of work began to dominate my mind. One of the defining aspects of Kat's time here was her habit of forgetting where she left her chapstick, and my ability to find it. In a symbolic final lapse, Kat forgot to take her chapstick with her to Ontario, and I found it on the coffee table. As I described it to her, it was very much like how Radar left his teddy bear on Hawkeye's bed when he left Korea.

Ahem.

Upon the spur of a moment, I purchased LittleBigPlanet. Probably because it was cheap and I wanted to cheer myself up with a new toy during my solitary trip home from the airport. I think they call it the Game of the Year Edition, though I don't know which critical outlet gave it that title; I think any video game becomes the Game of its respective Year when it's re-released with downloadable content added to the disc. Anyway, LittleBigPlanet has been available for so long that I won't bother giving it a review here, as (with PS3 pickings so slim) the chances are that you've played it. Either that or you don't own a PS3, which is probably more probable. I will say that I managed to get immersed enough in the level-building tutorial - which they goad you through by showering you with myriad unlockables every time you complete a fragment of it - that, after I finally quit at some 3:30am and went to bed, I woke up with vague thoughts of pulleys, cardboard animals and motorized bow ties floating through my incomplete consciousness.

Random things

2010-05-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

- I had a dream that involved rolling two twenty-sided dice, and the results were 14 and 41. I calculated the odds of this happening to be 1 in 4000. When I woke up, I was impressed that I had done that calculation in my sleep. Then I realized that twenty-sided dice don't go up to 41. Then I realized that the odds of any two numbers coming up on two twenty-sided dice are 1 in 400, not 1 in 4000. Oh well, I tried.

- An offhand tweet from Scotty Arsenault concerning the album cover of Meddle led me to spend some time reading Wikipedia articles about Pink Floyd, which in turn led me to listen to some music by that band. Some I'd heard before (The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall), and some I hadn't (Wish You Were Here). I like Wish You Were Here a lot, as it turns out. Very synth heavy, which kinda makes it sounds like a low-budget sci-fi movie from the 80s, but the album was released in the 70s, so I guess that makes it ahead of its time. I wonder if titling a song about a mentally-unstable friend "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is in bad taste. I'm probably not the first person to wonder that.

Also, in all the times I've listened to it, I never noticed that The Wall is cyclical. I wonder if that makes me an idiot.

- I'm doing pretty badly with my hockey predictions, at least by my standards. I went 4-4 in the first round, and it looks like I'm fixing to be wrong about another two in the second round, thanks to the Sharks and Bruins achieving the success appropriate to their seeds in relation to their opponents' seeds. It looks to me like Pittsburgh has Montreal well in hand, though, so I'm counting on Vancouver to beat Chicago so I can at least stay at .500.

Frankly, I don't care how wrong or right I am if it means Vancouver gets to win the Stanley Cup.

- I remembered that I owned Guild Wars recently (just in time for Guild Wars 2 to be announced, I know), and I started tinkering with it again, as it runs better than almost any other PC game I own on my minimalist machine. I got jaded on it a few years ago when I noticed how many party members are required to enable any possibility of advancing through the world and completing quests and how this number of party members affects the amount of experience you gain, a mathematical equation that gives a result of "You're Never Gaining A Level Again." But then some random level 20 guy invited me to join his guild and join his party of other level 20 guys (I'm level 10, by the way, and 20 is the level cap for Guild Wars). Once you get that high, there's not much to do but build up your guild and help lower-level players become higher level, and so away we go. Also, the game is old enough that I think dick players who don't care gave up on it long ago, which is nice. Will I stick with it? Maybe. So hey, if you play Guild Wars, look for Lucis Quicksliver.

- Just so you know, my backlog of pre-drawn BDK comics is currently seven short of where I'd like it to be, which means I'm terrible.

Avatar

2010-04-26T03:36:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to watching Avatar tonight. I'm debating whether it qualifies as merely "terrible," or whether it requires "fucking terrible" to adequately describe. I mean, it's not Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by any means, but it sure ain't no The Godfather, neither.

Kat had no interest in seeing this movie. She still hasn't seen it. I snuck the Blu-Ray disc into the PS3 in the dead of night, while she slept soundly in the bedroom, blissfully unaware. Her main issue with it seemed to be that she was led to believe that the plot was lifted directly from Pocahontas. I accepted this. I went into the movie with the frame of mind, "Let's set aside the fact that the plot was lifted directly from Pocahontas, and judge the movie on it's other merits."

I will grant that it looks very good. It creates an interesting world (though I wonder why none of the animals in the entire ecosystem of Pandora have fur; my guess is "because it's too hard to animate"), and I'd like to see what else could be done with that setting. I found myself wondering how successful an Avatar pen and paper RPG would be. So let's give it a round of applause for accomplishing that. Where it runs into trouble is when it tries to tell a story.

Now, I'm not talking about the plot. Remember, I'm not judging it on that (though it is lifted directly from Pocahontas, for the record). I'm talking about the storytelling. Avatar is just a terribly written movie. I mean, we can start with the fact that the precious natural resource they're after is called unobtainium. That right there undermines any seriousness the movie may try to build. Oh no, their going to tear down the Na'vi's ancestral home? That's right, but it's for unobtainium. Wakka-wakka-wakka!

Characters are so black-or-white, good-or-evil, stuck-in-their-ways-in-the-face-of-all-logic-because-the-plot-requires-that-they-be-villains that it actually becomes annoying. I also writhed in my chair when Colonel Guy started talking about "fighting terror with terror," which is sin enough by itself, but also there was no overt display of terror on the enemy's part! Then Pilot Lady starts talking about a "shock and awe" campaign? That's right, this movie came out in the year Two Thousand Nine, and is set in the year Two Thousand One Hundred Something, and James Cameron actually invokes the phrase "shock and awe" with a straight face. I know he's been working on this movie for awhile, but has he not revised the script at all since 2003? At the rate he's going, the Na'vi will be joking about the name of the Wii in Avatar 2.

Oh, and just in case you think deus ex machina is not invoked in the end, let me assure you that you are wrong, sir! No literary pitfall remains un-fallen-into. Oh sure, this particular deus ex machina comes with some thin justification, but it's still something popping up out of nowhere to save the day at the very last second.

In closing, Avatar is garbage. Thank you for listening to my speech.

What the...

2010-04-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

I just looked up the word till on Dictionary.com. I wanted to confirm that I was using the right version of the word as a replacement for until. (It turns out that I wasn't; I have previously used 'til, but it turns out that's not a real word.) Anyway! Dictionary.com shows a list of related searches on it's pages, and the related searches on the page for till at this particular moment included the following items:

Till murder
Mutilated emmett till
Emmett till body
Emmett till after beating

What?

This is my new blog

2010-04-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

It has no set updating schedule, and is not necessarily related to BDK. So be warned, you might not be interested in anything that I say here. But you should probably visit it every day, 'cause like I said, it might update at any time.

So here's the latest news. The Canucks just lost Game 3 to the Kings by a 5-3 margin. It was a disgusting display. After the first ten minutes of the first period, I was thinking to myself, "Man! This is the best I've seen Vancouver play in recent memory!" Then LA scored, and the Canucks never looked potent again. Once it hit 4-1 for LA, I gave up on watching it on TV and just listened to the stream of the radio play-by-play on my computer while I made some D&D characters. On the plus side, I made some pretty neat characters. Should a D&D game spontaneously pop up, I will be prepared.

That used to happen all the time. I have no idea how many 3rd Edition D&D characters were made and abandoned after a few sessions when I was a few years younger. That was back before I and all my friends got real lives. Now all we can manage is one 2 to 3 hour session a week. It's sad. 4th Edition has been out for two years now, and I've only ever played an elf ranger and an elf shaman, both of which were the same character at different stages of his career. I did do a delve where I controlled a gnome artificer once, but that was a short, three-player game without any kind of story, and the character didn't persist past that little game, so I don't count it.

Sorry, I don't have much else to tell you at this time. The only other thing I did today was eat a Baconator Double. One could argue that this is noteworthy.