Dunkirk and the Slow Death: A Movie About Nothing

Christopher Nolan proves once again how easily dazzled people are when something seems deep, because, I suppose, Dunkirk seems like a deep movie, all about the desperation of war and whatnot; but, really, Dunkirk is a movie about nothing. It is a movie that says nothing. It is a movie that does nothing. Well, nothing other than lazily follow the pseudo-protagonist around as he spends the movie running away.

In fact, nearly the whole movie is about running away. It's a movie about running away that is capped off by Winston Churchill's famous we-will-fight-them-everywhere speech.

I know. That's so deep. Except that it's not.

It also contains a bunch of purposeless non-linear elements. And don't get me wrong; I have nothing against non-linear story telling... as long as it serves the purpose of the story, but this felt more like it was there because people expect it of Nolan. You know, it's his signature thing so he has to include it even if it doesn't belong in this movie. So what we get is incongruous shots of a mid-day dog fight cut with scenes of a ship sinking in the middle of the night.

Oh! But maybe that's deep!
No, not really. It's just sloppy, bad story telling.
And that doesn't even touch on how we cut back to the same dog fight toward the end of the movie but seen from a different character's perspective.
Basically, the whole movie is out of sequence. None of it serves the story. And some of it is actually conflicting.

But, you know, Nolan is so deep.

I'm not even going to talk about the acting. Generally speaking, the actors all seemed bored. I think Nolan wanted them to seem bored, so I suppose that's good acting, but it makes a movie that comes in at only about one hour and forty-five minutes feel like you were watching it for three. But, maybe, my problem was that I didn't watch it in the theater. I wasn't fully immersed in the bigness of it.
Except that it's really a small movie.

Look, let's use the potty meter to measure this movie. In a good movie, you don't want to have to get up and go to the bathroom because you're worried you might miss something but, in this movie, you could have gone to take a nice long dump and come back to find that you missed... nothing at all. Maybe some more guys died, because people keep dying all around the pseudo-protagonist, but it's almost certain you wouldn't have missed any important dialogue because there's really not any. Hmm, now I'm wondering how long the movie would be if you kept only the bits with dialogue. 20 minutes?

The biggest issue with the movie is that it is very unclear about who the enemy is. Or any context about what's going on at all. Sure, maybe Nolan just assumes that everyone should know enough about World War II to supply that for themselves, and maybe everyone should, but it's abundantly clear that a vast amount of people don't know anything about World War II and have no context for what's going on. Shithead Nolan couldn't even identify the Nazis as the enemy in the opening text. No, he just says, "They're surrounded by the enemy."

What the actual fuck, Nolan? You can't do better than that? What enemy? Aliens? Goblins? Ravaging hordes of barbarians? No, it was Nazis, and you should have been clear about that.

But, then, it's painfully obvious that this was your go-to for trying to win a best picture Oscar after losing with Interstellar, an artsy movie about WWII. But this movie shouldn't have been nominated at all. It's just a hollow piece of chocolate that is ultimately disappointing because it has no substance. Bad chocolate, at that.

The High Cost of Magic

I've mentioned before that I play Magic: The Gathering. Well, sort of. I mean, I sort of play. I used to really play, and if you want to read more about that, you can go here, but, these days, I only sort of play.

I just don't have the time or money to really compete, right now, but it is fun to go play a tournament every so often. However, in the short time I've been back into playing again, I've noticed a disturbing trend. Now, stay with me even those of you that have never heard of the game, because I have a point, so I will try to keep my technical talk as general as possible so that you can follow along.

Cards in Magic have a cost to put them into play. In general, that cost becomes higher the more powerful the card. So, for instance, a goblin,

which is weak, only costs 1 to put into play while a dragon,

which is quite a bit more powerful, costs 6. In the past, these costs were basically unaffected by the cards rarity. In the above example, the goblin is a common card (easy to get) while the dragon is a rare card (difficult to get). But this wolf

is a rare card and has the same casting cost of 1 as the goblin while this common wurm

has the same cost as the dragon.

What this did for Magic was allow people to play at whatever level they could afford. You didn't have to own tons of rare cards. The rare cards allowed slightly more flexibility and some advantage but not an overwhelming advantage. The same Terror card, a common and cheap to cast,

could kill a rare card as quickly as it could a common card. Basically, you could build a strong deck without having to have rares in it. In fact, I used to keep a deck built entirely of commons (with a few uncommons) around just to show people you didn't have to have the rares. People would bring their competition decks to test against my common deck (which always resulted in sales for the store I worked in when I would beat them).

This model of Magic was a good one. It allowed a broad base of players to play and to play on a fairly level playing field. You didn't have to own thousands of dollars worth of cards to be able to compete.

That model of Magic no longer exists.

Just within the last couple of years, Wizards of the Coast has switched to a model that lowers the cost to put rare cards into play. For example, this Loxodon Smiter

only costs 3 to put into play and he has some pretty fantastic special abilities. It's half the casting cost of the above dragon and wurm and nearly as powerful. This common card, not nearly as powerful as the Smiter,

costs 5 to put into play. To which you might say, "There's still the Terror card," but, no, they took that card out of the game, so there is no card that will destroy a creature that's that cheap to cast. What you have instead are things like

which costs 3 (as opposed to Terror's 2) and only works on flying creatures (but is, at least, common) or

which costs a whopping 6 and isn't even common; it's an uncommon. Perhaps the best example can be seen here. Lightning Bolt

was a common card that could deal damage to a creature at a cost of 1 but has been taken out like Terror has. The closest to it is

for double the cost, which may not seem like a big deal but, trust me, it is. And it's still not enough to take care of that Smiter from up above.

All of that to say that Wizards of the Coast has shifted the focus of the game from one that allows people of all financial means to play to one that favors the players with lots of money to spend gaining rare cards and the even harder to get, but even more powerful, mythic rare cards.

What this has caused is fewer players showing up to tournaments. I don't go more than once every couple of months, but even I have noticed it. And, after talking with some of the guys in the game shop that hosts the tournaments, player numbers are about half of what they were two years ago. What you end up with is fewer players spending money on packs and cards. Sure, those fewer are spending more money than they were before, and it may make up for the attrition rate of players for a while, but that can't last for forever. The end result is a strong but small player base where once you had a very large player base. In the end, it's bad for the game.

The cost of Magic, both in the game with the casting cost of the cards and outside the game on the wallets of the players, has become too high.

Of course, this kind of problem is not restricted to the guys at Wizards of the Coast.

When I was in high school, I was pretty big into the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony.

The series involved the use of puns. In the beginning, the puns were few, just added in as a bit of fun, but, by book four, Centaur Isle (get it?), the puns were becoming part of the story and, later, in such books as Isle of View (get that one?), the puns had eclipsed the story. The reason was a fan-based one. Fans of Xanth began sending in puns to Anthony, and he would work them into the story with acknowledgement to the sender at the end of the book. But he lost the story somewhere in doing this and lost readers like me that wanted that story thing to be involved. He was left with a loyal but small fan base and, although Xanth is still going on, there is no call for any other kind of writing work from Anthony because he has become just that one thing.

I think authors can easily be pulled into traps like this. Basically, they can focus in too much on writing just one kind of thing because that appears to be where the money is. They lock themselves into just writing fantasy or just writing romance or just writing... whatever because "that's what people want." Usually, by the time you've realized you've put yourself in a box, it's too late to get out. As Anthony says, publishers don't want anything else from him anymore.

David Eddings did the same thing after the success of his The Belgariad. Everything he wrote after that was just that same story over and over again for two decades because that's "what people wanted."

All of that to say (all of that because I wanted to talk about the whole Magic thing since it's something that I've noticed and am not happy with) that it's a dangerous thing to narrow your focus too much to only appeal to a particular audience. The more you narrow, the more people you will lose.

So, yeah, I like fantasy and stories with fantastic elements, but I don't want to be "just a fantasy author." I don't want to get locked in like that. I want to write good stories, all kinds of good stories, so I'll keep trying new things. Some of them may not work.

But some of them will.

"Like An Axe Through Bone" and "The Harlot"

It's an interesting thing to see what other people will do creatively with something you've come up with. It's also interesting to see how you, yourself, react to those things. All you have to do is watch a couple of kids playing with one of those kid's toys to know what I'm talking about. Because my daughter has a giant dollhouse and because we recently had an issue around this that relates, let's imagine two five-year-old girls playing at one of the girl's houses with her dolls and dollhouse. In most circumstances, you will not have to wait long before you hear the owner of the dolls and house proclaim, "You're not doing it right!" A well-meaning parent will run in and try to explain that there is no wrong way of doing it, but the owner will continue to protest, "She's doing it all wrong," and, eventually, the girls will get banished from the dolls.

What's not being understood by the other people involved is that the girl (who owns the dolls and house) has an entire world created in her head around her dolls and the house they live in. When the playmate comes in and starts asserting her version, it pushes the girl that owns the toys out of the world she's created. Unless it's something you're prepared for (and what five-year-old is prepared for something like that?), it can be difficult to allow someone else to play in your sandbox. I mean dollhouse.

[Note 1: This is nothing like what happened with my daughter. That involved actual breakage of her stuff when she wasn't in the room, but the dollhouse makes a good example.
Note 2: Girls are actually able to learn cooperative play much earlier than boys, so the whole "you're not doing it right" is something that is much more common from boys.]

All of that to say, when you invite someone to play in your world, you have to be okay when they change the rules. Especially since it's the way that the rules get changed that makes the stories interesting.

Bryan Pedas, in his story "Like An Axe Through Bone," has "changed the rules" of the House Universe. It's no longer 1983; it's the now. The Howard family has been moved forward in time to accommodate a contemporary setting. With the Internet and e-dating. The Howards are in the story, but they're just there to support the actual story, the story of a man who has lost his wife too soon and has allowed his imagination to become his only escape from the pain.

Or is it just his imagination?

It's a great story with goblins and dragons, but those things are not the story; they're just in the story. There are barbarians and lots of fighting and dying, but those things are not the story, either. The story is one man struggling against himself and the pain he's wrapped up in.

I think you all should read it.

Soon.

By the end of this month. I mean, that's when it will be available: by the end of this month.
Shaodow Spinner -- coming soon!

Today, though, is part 23 of the serial release: "The Harlot" FREE! today, Monday, June 10 (and tomorrow, June 11)!

Here's today's complete list of FREE! parts:
"Part Twenty-three: The Harlot"
"Part Twenty-two: The Undying"
"Part Twenty-one: The Chase"
"Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Ten: The Broken Window"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part One: The Tunnel"
There you go! 17 out of 23 available parts! Grab them while you can >ominous music!<

[Note 3: If you're interested in watching the excitement with my A Game of Thrones 1st edition, you can see the auction here.]

Let's go for a walk... Part 8: The Ruins

It's been a while since we've been on a walk with my dog, so I figure it's about time to do that again, especially since I got sidetracked, last year, by A to Z and never told y'all about the ruins. Actually, I did mention them back in the post about Goblin Town, but I didn't go into too much detail.

This area was first settled by the Russians. They set up here in the early 1800's in order to hunt these guys:

The sea otter. The sea otter has the thickest fur of all other animals, so their pelts are very valuable. You know, more valuable than gold and all of that. [As a total aside, they were hunted to near extinction by 1900, at which point less than 1% of their estimated original population was left, as few as 1000 of them still in the wild (from a population that may have exceeded 300,000 in 1800). No, it wasn't just the Russians that did this, but they were (mostly) responsible for it in this area.]

What the Russians found here, though, was more than just sea otters. They found an area infested with goblins, goblins that also hunted otters but not to the extreme that humans did.

Initially, the Russians set up Fort Ross.

The fort was to defend against goblin attacks. They even joined forces with various Native American tribes to fight against the goblins that were being agitated by the swelling numbers of settlers.

Eventually, the Russian-American Company collaborated to build a stone fortress just down the creek from where I live. It must have been an impressive structure based upon the ruins that are still there. You can see the outline of how big the structure was in the remains of the foundation.

The goblins didn't take kindly to the building of a castle in the midst of their lands, so they mustered their various tribes for a large assault against the humans with the intention of driving them out of their lands. It was a terrible battle. Vicious. Bloody. The creek ran red with the blood of the fallen for weeks.

The humans lost. And the goblins tore down the castle, leaving no stone upon another.

But it came at a tremendous cost to the goblins. The survivors were forced to join together into one tribe just to survive. Retreating to their tunnels,

they have remained hidden through the years as the humans came back and completely overran lands that were once theirs.

However, of late, they have once again been growing bold and can often be seen crawling out of their tunnels at dusk to scavenge for food and other bits and pieces of things they find useful.

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 4)

The time of the death of my boss, the owner of the used book store I worked at, was a time of change in my life. Not because of his death, but there were some ways in which it was related. To make a long story short, though, I ended up hooking up with a gaming group in Shreveport. I should reiterate, at this point, that I had never been a "gamer" as the term was understood at that time (which has nothing to do with how it's understood now, which all has to do with video games and MMOs). I'd played some Battletech, but that's about it, and I'd done that mostly with people who also were not gamers.

I had, however, been on the fringe of the... let's call it the gaming community... for years. It's hard not to have some acquaintance with gamers when you work in a store that sells comic books. For one thing, I ended up being the one that would order all of their gaming equipment. And, as you have heard, I'd been painting miniatures for gaming purposes for more than half a dozen years by that point. So I ended up involved in this group of gamers in Shreveport, one of which happened to be my cousin, whom I'd also gone to high school with and played Battletech with and spent one (disastrous) semester at college with, and several others of whom I'd also gone to high school with, although I hadn't known some of them at the time. One of them had known me because of my painting, but, evidently, he'd never stuck in my head, probably because he was a junior or senior while I was a freshman.

This all started out with some RPGs. Actually, it started out with the Warhammer RPG, and ended up with RPG once a week at this guy's house, which ended up in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. He had this huge army of goblins and orcs, and, as it turned out, tabletop gaming was what he and a couple of the other guys were really into. As it also turned out, all of these guys are guys that I had been in high school with. Have I mentioned before that I went to a smart kid, geek high school? Well, if you happened to gloss over that fact, this ought to be all the proof that you need. Evidently, the whole strategy tabletop game thing lends itself very well to a higher IQ level, so we had had a pretty high concentration of tabletop gamers at my high school.

All of this, again, caused a change in my painting career.

As I've stated, I had been painting exclusively with oils up to this point. The question of me painting came up, because some of the guys knew I'd painted miniatures for people back in high school, so I showed them the few things I had, which included the green dragon.

(Remember, this is not how he looked at the time. Back then, he had metallic green plates, for one thing.) One of the guys very soon began asking me to paint some figures for him, but he wanted them done in acrylics.

I didn't own any water based paints. At all. I was working on my mechs,

and I was using oils on those. I told him I'd paint for him but that it would need to be in oils as I wasn't reinvesting in acrylics.

He continued to bug me about it. And bug me about it. Until I said something along the lines of "if you want to buy me some acrylic paints, I'll be glad to paint whatever it is you want me to paint in acrylics." I was, of course, joking, because it never even entered my mind that someone would want me to paint for them so badly that they would go out and buy me paints to do it with. About a week later, he showed up with this big paint kit that came with something like 20 or 25 different colors of paint and a selection of brushes and asked me how many minis I'd paint for him if he gave it all to me.

This lead to me painting for nearly everyone in the group at some point or another. Any time anyone had a miniature or unit of miniatures they wanted to look especially good, they brought them to me. I spent several years painting figures for people and not painting my own.

The strangest thing in all of this, though, is that one day I went into this comic shop, a little hole-in-the-wall shop, that I had never been in before. I often stopped in small shops like that, because you could often find good deals on "hot" issues of comics, so I'd stopped in to look around. My cousin may have been with me. I think someone was, at any rate, because, somehow, my name got mentioned, and this guy, the owner of this shop, a guy I had never seen before, knew who I was. "You're that guy that paints, right?" I think I had that deer looking at headlights look, but, evidently, my fame, or whatever it was, had proceeded me.

This guy literally pulled out a couple hundred Essex 15mm Confederate troop miniatures and said, "What would you charge me to paint these?" I think I made a bad deal in regards to those particular miniatures, because I'd never done 15mm figures before, and I just didn't know the kind of monotony I was getting myself into by agreeing. I used so much grey paint over the years painting figures for him it wasn't even funny. Except, I think it was funny to my cousin, because he used to laugh at my Confederate soldier painting assembly line. At any rate, the rates for me painting for him went up every time I took on a new order, and I was so sick of those guys by the end, but I couldn't bring myself to just tell him "no," because he couldn't do it himself (he showed me some of the figures he'd tried to do), and no one else could either. No one he knew, anyway. I wish I had a picture of that army that I painted for him, but this was more than 15 years ago, and it never occurred to me that I would have a reason to have pictures of them one day.

The point, here, for this section of this story is that it's not a good idea, necessarily to marry yourself to just one medium. Or on genre. Or whatever. It's good to try new things. Of course, the big issue for me at the time is that I couldn't see the benefit in reinvesting. I figured I'd been doing fine with oils for, well, years, and the truth was that I had been doing fine with them. BUT! But I surpassed everything I'd been doing in oils by the switch to acrylics. There was just so much more I could do. Washes, inks, dry brushing, detailing. I couldn't do any of that stuff with oils, and I knew that, but I'd lost sight of the value in it from not having worked with acrylics in about 10 years, since I'd stopped doing the ceramic stuff.

In the same way, I don't want to get trapped in any one particular literary genre. I like fantasy. I really do. I probably prefer fantasy, in fact, in my reading, but I like a lot of other stuff, too, and I'm finding I'm having more and more story ideas that aren't related to fantasy at all. I want to try new things.

I think a lot of people trap themselves in their own heads with these identity ideas, "I'm a romance writer" or "I'm a fantasy writer" or "I'm a sci-fi writer." It's like locking yourself in a box. Get out of the box. Try new things. Write new things. Play with new things. There's no telling what you may find that you're good at!

Next time, we'll finish this story up.