#so people are sort of playing telephone with comics craft

[ferronickel]

Resisting the urge to post hot takes about webcomics craft

[marginalgloss]

the red telephone

The thing about Control is that I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve felt such a vast difference between a game’s artistic and technical quality and its total lack of thematic and narrative depth. 

There is a good case for saying that this oughtn’t to be a problem. It’s long been the case that if a video game is entertaining enough, any further ‘depth’ (by the standards established by other media) is unnecessary. This is why we don’t much care if the story isn’t good in Doom. The sense of being there and doing the thing is enough. But Doom isn’t drawing on influences bigger than itself. Clearly it’s been influenced by a variety of things — from Dungeons and Dragons to heavy metal album covers and Evil Dead and everything in between — but Doom is not referential, and it’s not reverential. Doom is complete unto itself. Control is not complete.

Horror films and ghost stories and weird fiction are best when they are about things. Think about The Turn of the Screw and The Thing and Twin Peaks and Candyman, to pick a few examples off the top of my head. They work not just because what we see and hear and read is mysterious. They are compelling because they have intriguing characters and thematic resonance. The Babadook is not just a story about a monster from a book for children. Night of the Living Dead isn’t just about, you know, the living dead. By comparison I find it hard to say that Control is about anything, but it presents itself as adjacent to this kind of work. It is a magnificent exercise in style which trades in empty symbols. It wraps itself in tropes from weird fiction in the hope of absorbing meaning by osmosis.

It feels like a wasted opportunity, because the setup is not without interest. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman supposedly beginning her first day on the job at the Federal Bureau of Control, a mysterious government organisation that deals in high-level paranormal affairs. The FBC is a feast of architectural and environmental detail: a vast Brutalist office complex with an interior that seems to be stranded in time somewhere around the mid-1980s. Everything is concrete and glass and reel-to-reel machines and terminal workstations. It’s frequently stunning.

Unfortunately most of the staff are missing because Jesse’s visit to their headquarters coincides with a massive invasion by the Hiss, a paranormal force which has taken over the building. The Hiss is a sort of ambient infection that turns people into mindless spirit-drones, chanting in an endless Babel. (Conveniently, most of those drones are present as angry men with guns. There are also zombies, and flying zombies, for variety.)

There is, obviously, more to Jesse than meets the eye. She spends a lot of time talking to someone nobody else can see. But there isn’t that much more to her. Like every other character in the game she is a monotone. There is no reason to believe she has any existence outside the plot devised for her here. Similarly, the other characters you meet exist only as the lines they speak to you. It works only when the effect is entirely, deliberately flat: the most compelling person in the game is Ahti, the janitor with a sing-song voice and a near-indecipherable Finnish accent. He is nothing but what he is — he has no past, no future. He has all the answers, if only you knew what questions to ask.

Control is undeniably stylish. The interiors are striking, vast, spacious. Even on the smallest scale the game has a great eye for little comic interactions via systemised physics. You can shoot individual holes in a boardroom table and watch the thing splinter apart into individual fragments. You can shoot a rolodex and watch all the little cards whirl around in a spiral. If a projector is showing a film you can pick the whole thing up and the film will reveal itself as an actual dynamic projection by spiralling and spinning madly across the nearest walls. (Speaking of film, the video sequences with live actors are great fun, and this being a Remedy game, there’s a fantastic show-within-a-show to be found on hidden monitors around the FBC.) And all of this before I mention the sound design — the music, which is full of concrète mechanical shrieks and groans — and the endless sinister chanting which fills the lofty corridors and hallways of this place, The Oldest House. 

All of this is very, very good. And most of the time it’s quite fun to play. I mean, you can pick up a photocopier and fling it at enemies. It’s never not fun when almost anything can be used as a projectile. And then you get the ability to fly! At its best the combat in Control feels messy and chaotic — in a good way — but in a way that has little to do with typical video game gunplay. Staying behind cover doesn’t work because the only way to regain health is to pick up little nuggets dropped by fallen enemies, so most of the time you have to use your powers to be incredibly aggressive. The result is that often you feel like the end-of-level boss — a kind of monster — throwing yourself into conflict with a team of moderately stupid players who think they’re supposed to be playing a cover shooter circa 2005. 

That you are given a gun at all seems odd. The gun feels like a compromise. The gimmick of a single modular pistol that can shape-change into a handful of other weapons is neat, but those weapons are just uninteresting variations on the same old themes: handgun, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, rocket launcher. The powers are more interesting and powerful. But of course the gun has to be there; can you imagine them having to go out and sell this game without a gun in it? What would Jesse be holding on the front cover? 

A gun is an equaliser. It evens the odds between the weak and the strong. But if you’re already strong it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You’re clearly so much more powerful than everyone else you meet in Control that after a while you begin to wonder why the game is also frequently quite hard. The omission of any difficulty settings is notable in a game of this type; it suggests that the developers were committed to their vision in the way that might recall Dark Souls. In fact the hub-like structure of the game is pretty clearly influenced by From Software’s games, and though it’s nowhere near as challenging, it seems to be reaching towards the same kind of thing.

It’s a game which demands you take it seriously as a crafted object. But then it has all these other elements cribbed from elsewhere — the generic level-based enemies with numbers that fly off them when shot, and the light peppering of timed/semi-randomised side activities, both of which made me think of Destiny. So there’s games-as-service stuff wedged in here too, and it doesn’t sit at all comfortably with this supposedly mysterious, compelling world that you’re supposed to want to explore.

This isn’t a horror game. There are one or two enemies with the potential to induce jump scares, but given that you can always respond with overwhelming force, it’s never really unsettling. But it’s clearly been inspired by horror. A source often mentioned as an inspiration for Control is the internet horror stories associated with the SCP Foundation wiki. From there the game borrows the idea that unlikely everyday objects can become sources of immense cosmic power — hence we see items like a rubber duck, a refrigerator, a pink flamingo, a coffee thermos imprisoned behind glass as if they were Hannibal Lecter. A pull-cord light switch becomes an inter-dimensional portal to an otherworldly motel. The great part about this is that these little stories can be told effectively in isolation; it’s always interesting to come across another object in the game and to discover what it does. (The fridge is especially unpleasant.)

But experiencing this kind of thing in the context of an action game is entirely different to stumbling it on it online. SCP Foundation is pretty well established now, but still, there’s a certain thrill in stumbling across something written there in plain text, titled with only a number. When those stories are good, they can be really good. Given the relative lack of context, and the absence of any graphical set-dressing, there’s room for your imagination to do the heavy lifting. 

In Control these fine little stories are competing for attention with all the other crazy colourful stuff going on in the background. You read a note and you move on to the next thing. You crash through a pack of enemies and the numbers fly off them. There’s never a sense of the little story fitting into an overall pattern. That lack of a pattern can be forgiven in the context of a wiki. In Control, these stories start to feel irrelevant when you never come across an enemy you can’t shoot in the face. In a different format, or a different type of game, this kind of rootless narrative might be more compelling. 

But what is this game about? There’s a sister and brother. A sinister government agency. Memories, nostalgia. A slide projector. It’s all so difficult to summarise. When I think about the game all these words seem to float around in my head, loosely linked, but not in a way that suggests any kind of coherence. The game always seems to be reaching towards some kind of meaning but it only ever feels hollow. It feels flat. Yet all the elements that are good about Control must be made to refer back to these hollow, flat signifiers. Sometimes the flatness works for the game, but mostly it doesn’t.

Today, it’s hard to see that anyone could see the point in establishing a website like SCP Foundation if it didn’t already exist. Viral media is not what it was in the first decade of the 2000s. Written posts that circulate on social media have a shorter half-life than ever. It’s almost impossible for any piece of writing over a few hundreds words to go viral in ways that go beyond labels like ‘shocking’, ‘controversial’, ‘important’, etc. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ don’t quite cut it. This kind of thing doesn’t edge into public spaces in the way it used to via email inboxes, or message boards, or blogs. 

Perhaps the weird stuff is still out there. Perhaps we only got better at blocking it out. With the arrival of any new viral content, today’s audience is mostly consumed by questions of authenticity, moral quality, and accuracy. If you think this creepy story might be ‘real’, you’re a mug. If you promote it you might be a dangerous kind of idiot. And that’s fair: there are a lot of dangerous idiots out there. Yet there’s something to be said for an attitude of persistent acceptance when it comes to the consumption of weird stuff on the internet. I know I become gluttonous when I come upon such things. I want to say: yes, it’s all true, every word. I’ve always known it’s all true. 

[superbeitmenotyou]

Spider-Man: Far From Home: The Screenwriters explain the Twists

This text incorporates spoilers for Spider-Man Far From Home.

Back it got here to crafting “Spider-Man Far From Home,” the screenwriters, Chris McKenna and Erik Somers, had an incredibly complex web to weave.

The movie sends Peter Parker and his superhero buddies, Spider-Man, both played with the aid of Tom Holland on category travel via Europe, but “removed from domestic” nevertheless had to grapple with the tragic catastrophe of “Avengers: Endgame,” wherein Peter misplaced his mentor, tony stark.

“Far From Home” additionally introduces Jake Gyllenhaal, an extra superhero who appears to be on abate’s facet but whom savvy comedian-e-book fanatics will automatically admire as Mysterio, certainly one of Spider-Man’s basic foes. and then there’s the rely upon unravelling character accoutrement introduced in ’s “Spider-Man: homecoming,” including Peter’s beginning accord along with his classmate MJ Zendaya.

In a fresh telephone dialogue, McKenna and Sommers whose previous collaborations include “Spider-Man: homecoming” and “ Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” explained how they juggled these abounding plot aspects and got here up with a surprise end-credit score aberration that guarantees to circuit Spider-Man in a whole new course. here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

How did you arrive on the choice to acquaint Mysterio as an ally who’s working with Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury?

Chris McKenna one of the hardest issues with these motion pictures is touchdown on the villain. With Mysterio, there have been models of the memoir where he was at the forefront as an out-and-out villain that Peter and Nick have been chasing around Europe as he pulled off these events, all building to this lower back legend of why he became doing it, which changed into a totally different third act. We went downloads of different anchorage.

Erik Sommers however in the end, as a result of Mysterio offers so lots in deception, it changed into a variety of herbal that it led to a chronicle structure where his whole identity changed into a deceive for a long time.

McKenna There’s going to be people accepted satisfactory with the comics who reactivity to peer right through him, however, you type of can’t be concerned about that if you happen to develop with an artifice like this. You simply ought to achievement so you might get abroad with it lengthy satisfactory so that back the show comes up, people are still having fun with the film.

Mysterio employs enough deep-cut comedian-publication references — together with a back epic involving an alternative edition of the earth — that alike super enthusiasts might locate themselves satisfied in the beginning.

Sommers That truly did aid. Any time we locate ourselves with a twist or shock exhibit of something like this, we are looking to do as lots as we can to give protection to it and abstract from it ahead of time.

McKenna What we saved asserting is that he needed to consider as a true personality, so we desired to supply him a tragic again yarn with the entire particulars of coming from an additional apple, and ensure that the Elementals he’s combating acquainted like a becoming, Avengers-stage threat. surely, it turned into all smoke and mirrors, but we desired to accomplish it as plausible as feasible, and what helped become making Nick acerbity — the battiest man on the planet — apparently fall for it.

Sommers if you consider of what Mysterio is doing as actuality a con, again a sensible con man is going to employ different individuals to help promote his lie.

within the conclusion-credit scene, we find out that Nick isn’t Nick in any respect — as a substitute, a shape-shifting alien from “Captain Marvel” has been posing as Nick Fury for the total film.

McKenna Thematically, we desired to accept as many illusions and twists as viable, and up during the conclusion of the movie, we wanted to make you question everything you’ve viewed before.

however it becomes really a concept that got here later in the manner, and it helped because if anyone within the audience had considerations with Nick fury falling for Quentin’s nonsense, it changed into a nice defence valve to accept.

How a good deal did wonder divulge to you about the big twists in “Avengers: Endgame” in case you begun penning this film?

McKenna We were like, “wait, who goes abroad? and how do they arrive back?” We didn’t basically see “Endgame” except the most fulfilling — might be if we’d common more in strengthen, we might accept fabricated a funny story about Valkyrie using a Pegasus since you really are looking to reference that.

Sommers You’re accustomed every little thing on a need-to-recognize basis.

McKenna the two important things we knew have been the -yr hole and the ramifications it could accept for the individuals who did and didn’t get blipped away. And, certainly, the tony of all of it.

The shadow that tony’s demise casts over this film nearly makes him an alternative version of Uncle Ben from the Spider-Man comic books. back chic bequeaths a magnificent reward to abate in “far from domestic,” it could as well come with a bit observe announcing, “With first-rate power comes amazing accountability.”

McKenna The different “Spider-Man” videos definitely handled Uncle Ben, and “accession” hinted at it, however, you’re appropriate: In a lot of methods, the gravitas really comes from abate’s accord with chic.

Sommers It’s affected that there likely changed into an Uncle Ben and the ache of that accident is lingering there, but this gave each person the probability to actualize a whole new accord between Peter and his mentor, Tony, and to contend with the loss of that, which is a very potent, emotional experience in his life.

within the mid-credits tag, a posthumous video from Mysterio exposes Spider-Man’s secret identity to the world. That’s principal shake-up for this personality. Why acquaint it now?

McKenna We had been challenged via the producers to come up with whatever thing that abate sacrifices through the end of this movie, and after we hit upon that as a group, it grew to become a very horrifying theory: “Oh, no, we will do this! then it’s no longer a Spider-Man film anymore!”

Sommers sooner or later, we realized that because of it afraid us, you need to run toward it.

McKenna, It’s the sort of daring manoeuvre that it grew to become assured, especially with a difficult persona like Mysterio, who’s this darkish father figure. From the grave, is he making an attempt to give abate his “I’m adamant Man” moment? It’s advance aloft him, however, is this a lesson or an abuse?

Mysterio additionally frames Spider-Man for the crimes he’s been committing, which would initiate the next movie in an extremely different region.

McKenna, We have been questioning, “Are we activity as abysmal as we deserve to at the end of the movie?” We performed with the thought that Peter is the one who sacrifices his identification out of call all over the last combat, then it appeared more wonderful if Mysterio tricks him into doing it, but any time we wrote an edition where he was being printed to the world in that fight, it felt like it beneath the achievement. So earlier than it grew to become a tag, it becomes really simply the end of the film: right as he feels he’s dispatched up as Spider-Man, he has the rug pulled out from under him once again.

Sommers We had been basically debating, should still we just show who Spider-Man is, or should we body him for whatever thing and turn him right into an abomination? ultimately, we decided that each was how to go. It’s any such triumph on the end as a result of he’s received the girl and at last, becoming a big swing in the course of the city, so we are looking to knock him down as far as possible.

The greatest surprise of the movie is that the id show is advertisement via J. Jonah Jameson, the daily adenoids blowhard who became played by way of J.k. Simmons within the common “Spider-Man” movies directed via Sam Raimi. Simmons reprises the position right here, making him the first actor from a different set of movies to join the present wonder cosmos as the same personality.

McKenna both of those ideas got here together resplendent quickly. I don’t understand if it became director Jon Watts or somebody else who talked about, “it 'll be each day adenoids, and it 'll be J. Jonah Jameson.” That concept has been lingering round due to the fact that “homecoming”: How will we insert our new version of J. Jonah?

Sommers There had already been some activity in possibly the usage of J.k. Simmons when we brought J. Jonah again, so as soon as it was decided that we have been acting to reveal Peter’s identification on the very conclusion instead of the last combat, it all fell into region very artlessly that J. Jonah would be worried.

McKenna whatever thing that had been amphibian through this complete movie changed into the thought of “false information” and how can you accept as true with everything you see? We had been toying with the conception that Mysterio would turn Spider-Man right into a villain, similar to he did within the comic books, and it acquainted like that again angry into this J. Jonah. because of the Alex Jones of the MCU.

With newspapers on the wane, it’s fun that J. Jonah Jameson has basically become a YouTube personality.

[marielle171gaming-blog]

five Actual-Daily life Classes About vbucks fortnite no cost

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds

The fad for your third-human being shooter recreation has things of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and ingesting Tide Pods.

Fortnite Gold

It was finding late in Tomato City. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the bottom. Gizzard Lizard experienced produced his way there soon after plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by avoiding the Wailing Woods and keeping the storm just off to his remaining. He spied an enemy combatant on superior floor, who appeared to possess a sniper’s rifle. In a hollow below the sniper’s perch was an deserted pizzeria, with an enormous rotating register the shape of the tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who had promptly crafted himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, mentioned, “I believe I’m likely to attack. That’s one among my most important difficulties: I need to get started on currently being additional aggressive.” He ran out in to the open up, pausing prior to a thick shrub. “This is in fact a really very good bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”

Two Adult males enter, a single guy leaves: the fighters shut in on each other. Within the online video recreation Fortnite Battle Royale, the late-match phase is often by far the most frenetic and remarkable. All of a sudden, the sniper released himself into a nearby discipline and started attacking. Gizzard Lizard rapidly threw up A further port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy fire. The aim is usually to obtain, or make, the large ground.

A instant afterwards, Gizzard Lizard was useless—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from numerous vantages, to research what had gone Mistaken. For being so near to successful and yet occur up limited—it was disheartening and tantalizing. One wants to go all over again. The urge is robust. But it absolutely was time for my son to do his homework.

I used additional time as A child than I care to keep in mind looking at other Young ones Participate in online video game titles. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Person, Donkey Kong. Normally, my buddies, more than my objections, chosen this to actively playing ball—or to other common, if significantly less edifying, community pursuits, including tearing hood ornaments off parked cars and trucks. Every single so generally, I played, far too, but I was a spaz. Insert quarter, sport above. As soon as gaming moved into dorms and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I realized that I could just go away. But occasionally I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided notice, the knack that some men (and it absolutely was normally men) looked as if it would have for remaining alive, equally in the sport and in the struggle of wits about the sofa, as if they were being equally playing a sport and performing “SportsCenter” at the same time.

I thought of this the other day when a friend explained seeing a bunch of eighth-quality boys and girls (amid them his son) hanging close to his condominium playing, but largely viewing Some others Enjoy, Fortnite. Just one boy was participating in on a considerable Television monitor, having a PlayStation 4 console. One other boys were being on their telephones, both participating in or watching a professional gamer’s live stream. And the women had been participating in or viewing by themselves phones, or wanting more than the shoulders with the boys. One of the girls instructed my Buddy, “It’s entertaining to see the boys get mad once they shed.” Not one person mentioned Significantly. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—came from the youngsters’ little screens, in the shape of the professional gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.

Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or possibly a guardian or educator of teens, would be the third-individual shooter match which has taken over the hearts and minds—and time, each discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate The usa. Released very last September, it truly is today by numerous steps the most well-liked video clip activity on this planet. At times, there happen to be much more than a few million men and women playing it at once. It has been downloaded an approximated sixty million occasions. (The game, available on Personal computer, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and cellular units, is—crucially—absolutely free, but numerous gamers pay back for additional, beauty options, like costumes generally known as “skins.”) When it comes to fervor, compulsive actions, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has factors of Beatlemania, the opioid disaster, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Moms and dads talk of it being an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: beneath the desk in school, in a memorial company, in the toilet at four A.M. They beg one another for alternatives. An acquaintance despatched me a video he’d taken 1 afternoon while attempting to cease his son from enjoying; there was a time when consistently contacting just one’s father a fucking asshole would've resulted in massive difficulty in Tomato City. Inside our domestic, the massive menace is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Recreation fads appear and go: Rubik’s Dice, Dungeons & Dragons, Indignant Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What individuals appear to agree on, whether they’re seasoned players or dorky dads, is the fact there’s one thing new emerging all around Fortnite, a kind of mass social accumulating, open up to a Considerably wider array of people than the online games that arrived before. Its relative lack of wickedness—it appears to be generally freed from the misogyny and racism that afflict many other games and gaming communities—makes it far more palatable to some broader viewers, and this attraction both ameliorates and augments its addictive electricity. (The game, in its simple manner, randomly assigns players’ skins, that may be of any gender or race.) Widespread anecdotal evidence indicates that girls are taking part in in broad numbers, the two with and without boys. There are actually, and possibly ever shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at these newcomers, equally as they gripe when there won't be any newcomers in any respect.

A colleague whose 13-yr-old son is deep down the rabbit gap likened the Fortnite phenomenon on the Pump Dwelling Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-perfectly teenager surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe took place upon during the early nineteen-sixties. As an alternative to a clubhouse about the Seashore, there’s a virtual global juvenile corridor, where by Young ones Obtain, invent an argot, adopt change egos, and shoot each other down. Wolfe’s Pump Dwelling Young children went on beer-soaked outings they called “destructos,” through which they might, at nearby farmers’ behest, demolish deserted barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking very little homebodies demolishing Digital walls and homes with imaginary pickaxes. Children almost everywhere are swinging away at their globe, tearing it down to survive—creative destruction, of A form.

Shall I clarify the sport? I must, I’m scared, While describing video clip video games is a bit like recounting desires. 100 gamers are dropped on to an island—from the flying college bus—and combat one another into the Demise. The winner is the last one standing. (It is possible to pair up or sort a squad, far too.) This really is what is meant by Battle Royale. (The first Model of Fortnite, released previous July, for forty bucks, wasn’t struggle to your death; it's the new iteration which has caught hearth.) A storm encroaches, step by step forcing combatants into an at any time-shrinking region, the place they have to get rid of or be killed. Together the way, you look for out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, though also gathering building materials by breaking down current buildings. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is A necessary facet of the sport, which is why it is often described as a cross among Minecraft and the Hunger Online games—and why aggrieved mother and father can tell them selves that it is constructive.

Prior to a recreation begins, you wander close to in a style of purgatorial bus depot-cum-airfield waiting right up until the subsequent hundred have assembled for an airdrop. This is the Weird location. Players shoot inconsequentially at one another and pull dance moves, like actors strolling aimlessly all around backstage working towards their lines. Then appear the airlift and the drifting descent, by way of glider, towards the battleground, with a gentle whooshing seem that is certainly for the Fortnite addict exactly what the flick of the Bic should be to a smoker. It is possible to land in a single of 20-1 locations about the island, each which has a cutesy alliterative title, some suggestive of mid-century gay bars: Shifty Shafts, Moisty Mire, Lonely Lodge, Greasy Grove. In patois and in temper, the sport manages to be both dystopian and comic, dim and lightweight. It may be alarming, when you’re not accustomed to these types of matters or are attuned for the news, to listen to your darlings shouting so merrily about head photographs and snipes. But there’s no blood or gore. The violence is cartoonish, not less than relative to, say, Halo or Grand Theft Auto. This kind of are the consolations.

The island alone has an air of desertion although not of maximum despair. This apocalypse is rated PG. The abandonment, precipitated by the storm, that has either killed or scattered the majority of the world’s population, appears to are latest and comparatively speedy. The grass is lush, the Cover whole. The hydrangeas are abloom in Snobby Shores. Structures are unencumbered by kudzu or graffiti and have tidy, sparsely furnished rooms, as though the inhabitants had only just fled (or been vaporized). Apparently, All people over the island, in People prosperous pre-storm times, shopped in a similar aisle at Target. Each time I view a participant enter a bedroom, whether it is in Junk Junction or Loot Lake, I Observe the multicolored blanket folded through the mattress. All those cobalt-blue table lamps: are they available for sale? Perhaps one day They are going to be.

[awinetintedmuse]

On Gods as Characters and Powers in Fiction

Well, I lasted a total of one day before I had a rant that needed writing out. Heads up, this is going to get a bit... literary theory-y, so be prepared. 

First, let’s talk about gods. In fiction, and in my writing, my belief is that in general gods should not be considered characters. They can have characters, they can be characterized, but they themselves should not be characters because of the power they wield. They are the deus in deus ex machina; interactions with them are best served when they drive the plot rather than engage with it. In essence, the one dealing with the problem should not be the god, but the ones engaging with them, because otherwise, there isn’t a problem. 

A few caveats to this though. This obviously isn’t the case if one is writing about gods interacting with each other. It’s also not the case if the god is acting in such a way that he or she is not able to act within the story as a god might. For example, in the Bacchae, Dionysus is a god, but he is in disguise and is thus not acting within the story as the same sort of god that say, Zeus does earlier when he interacts with Semele. 

The reason for this is because of power. 

All plots are driven by problems, that is to say, something needs to happen so that things can progress. A god however, can instantly fix most problems. Even minor gods or gods that do not take on the characteristics of what we in the west think of as gods ( such as Chinese or Japanese ideas about gods, where they can die and are limited in various ways ) can still fix most common issues with no effort. 

Because most gods are immortal, impossibly strong, contain powers that can literally craft the cosmos, and also happen to be able to wield these powers at will, it is impossible to simply craft them in fiction as being equals to anyone without restraining them severely, like how it’s done in the Bacchae. 

The reason for this is because a huge power discrepancy results in conflicts between characters, as it does in people. People resent being constantly overpowered and overruled by those they cannot defend themselves against. If you know that the person in charge could, with a thought, smite you, you’d not so readily speak out against him. Such is the stuff of dystopian horrors. 

But if we assume that what we are writing is not meant to be a dystopian horror, then you end up unable to write much at all. Example, if your characters need to acquire an object, a god can probably just create it, or summon it on his own. There, story over. To avoid this, you end up playing a version of the no telephone trope in horror movies, where you have to go to greater and greater lengths to explain why your characters can’t acquire aid. 

Thus, it becomes easier to simply relegate gods to positions where they are characterized, but not characters in their own right, in the sense that they are not part of the main cast. If they are, then in general you don’t want them simply fixing all the problems and doing whatever they want, because they’ll take over the story. But nor do you want to have to play the game where you have to keep trying to find reasons that they can’t do things without making it seem like they’re giant assholes who could help but won’t. 

Comics, meanwhile, take an entirely different approach. They power up all their characters until there is no difference between them and the gods that exist in their world. 

Wonder Woman fights Ares, Superman fights Darkseid, The Flash is literally the fastest being in existence, ect. The problem is clear: at some point you end up where there are literally no possible challenges for them to face without either depowering them or gaming out the telephone problem in horror movies. 

However, comics have found a third, almost equally awful way to fix the problem: instead of focusing on the characters, focus on the powers themselves and the source of them and make that the constant issue to deal with. 

You may realize that’s why for the last like, 20 years or so, every Flash comic is somehow about the Speed Force breaking/having issues/having heartburn/falling apart, while Superman comics have been spending their time endlessly writing and rewriting various kinds of kryptonite and effects while coming up with mystical reasons why somehow this keeps happening. 

For those of you who prefer Marvel, this is why the Hulk’s powers now come from some kind of mystical source about good and evil or some shit, Spiderman has had his origin written and re-written a dozen times about how he’s the embodiment of the spider totem or something, and the less that’s said about crap like the Starbrand or how Ghost Rider’s writers can’t decide if he’s from hell or heaven the better. 

Essentially, rather than focus on the characters and have them solve problems, writers instead spend their time hashing and rehashing how their powers work and giving those problems to ensure that they never have to actually handle the problem of their heroes being impossibly strong invincible superbeings. 

This is also how you get Batman, the smartest man on earth who is also the best marksman who can literally defeat anyone if he’s got like five minutes of preptime. 

In case you’re wondering, this would be like if in Pirates of the Caribbean they spent their time talking about individual planks in the Black Pearl as the way to defeat the pirates. 

The result is to make most villains irrelevant, or to force them to become impossibly powerful as well. This is how the Joker is now also an impossibly smart superbeing who is invulnerable and invincible and can think a thousand steps a head and can’t be stopped. But that description can be given to nearly any big bad for any superhero these days, because power creep has gotten so bad that it’s everywhere. 

Of course somewhere along the way they realized that there was a fourth option, which was to simply put heroes against themselves. Thus we now have nearly infinite amounts of evil Supermen, Batmen, Spidermen, Iron Men... Hell they turned Captain America into a Hydra Agent because they literally could not find a way to distinguish him from any other hero due to the fact that he’s basically an impossibly strong superbeing himself now. 

Thus I return to my original statement: gods should not be characters. You may have realized that modern day heroes are now gods themselves, at least narratively; sure Batman may not look like Zeus, but he’s equally as insulated from the results of his actions. Sure, Spiderman isn’t Quetzalcoatl, but he’s equally invincible inside the realm of comics. 

Power creep plus a loss of suspension of disbelief has resulted in them essentially being walking, talking deus-ex-machinas. 

Of course, all of this would be bad enough, if series weren’t going out of their way to constantly introduce new, even more powerful entities into their series, which only causes more power creep. In Marvel it’s the Beyonders, in DC it’s now Dr. Manhattan, but before him it was Perpetua or whatever her name was, and before her it was the New Gods, and it’s simply a never ending cavalcade of passing the buck to avoid looking at the core problem. 

Gods, as gods, as omnipotent, all powerful entities, make really really terrible characters. It is impossible to get the audience to buy into the threats they face, and it’s impossible to make them believable. 

Thus, the only way to solve the problem is to not make them as such. Or in the case of gods themselves, to make them the thing that drives the plot rather than the character who deals with the plot. 

[tammara459fortnite-blog]

Fortnite Origami Amazing 8 Movies About Helpful Hints That'll Cause you to Cry

How Fortnite Captured Teenagers’ Hearts and Minds

The craze for the 3rd-man or woman shooter activity has components of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and ingesting Tide Pods.

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It absolutely was acquiring late in Tomato Town. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground. Gizzard Lizard had created his way there right after plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by staying away from the Wailing Woods and holding the storm just off to his remaining. He spied an enemy combatant on high ground, who appeared to possess a sniper’s rifle. Inside of a hollow underneath the sniper’s perch was an deserted pizzeria, with a giant rotating check in the shape of the tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who had immediately crafted himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, reported, “I feel I’m planning to assault. That’s one among my major concerns: I need to get started on remaining far more aggressive.” He ran out to the open up, pausing prior to a thick shrub. “This is actually an extremely good bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”

Two men enter, one particular person leaves: the fighters closed in on one another. During the movie sport Fortnite Fight Royale, the late-activity section is typically one of the most frenetic and thrilling. Instantly, the sniper introduced himself into a nearby subject and commenced attacking. Gizzard Lizard swiftly threw up A different port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy fireplace. The purpose is often to obtain, or make, the large ground.

A minute later, Gizzard Lizard was useless—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from several vantages, to research what experienced absent wrong. For being so near successful and nonetheless appear up short—it was frustrating and tantalizing. A single desires to go once again. The urge is strong. But it was time for my son to perform his research.

I used far more time as a kid than I treatment to recollect viewing other Young ones play video video games. Place Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Usually, my good friends, over my objections, favored this to taking part in ball—or to other popular, if much less edifying, neighborhood pursuits, for example tearing hood ornaments off parked vehicles. Each individual so often, I performed, way too, but I had been a spaz. Insert quarter, game in excess of. The moment gaming moved into dorms raissv.com Fortnite v-bucks and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I learned which i could just leave. But occasionally I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided notice, the knack that some guys (and it was always guys) looked as if it would have for remaining alive, both of those in the sport and while in the struggle of wits on the couch, as though they had been both playing a sport and doing “SportsCenter” at the same time.

I thought of this another working day when a pal described looking at a gaggle of eighth-quality boys and girls (amongst them his son) hanging around his condominium playing, but generally looking at Many others play, Fortnite. A single boy was actively playing on a substantial Television set display screen, that has a PlayStation 4 console. Another boys have been on their phones, possibly enjoying or seeing knowledgeable gamer’s Stay stream. And the women were being taking part in or seeing by themselves telephones, or seeking around the shoulders on the boys. One of many women advised my Mate, “It’s enjoyment to see the boys get mad once they drop.” Not a soul claimed Considerably. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—arrived from the kids’ very little screens, in the shape of the pro gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.

Fortnite, for anybody not a teenager-ager or possibly a mother or father or educator of teenagers, is definitely the 3rd-individual shooter sport that has taken around the hearts and minds—and enough time, each discretionary and or else—of adolescent and collegiate The usa. Launched previous September, it's at this time by numerous steps the preferred movie activity on the planet. Occasionally, there are much more than three million people enjoying it at once. It's been downloaded an approximated sixty million times. (The sport, out there on Laptop, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and cell units, is—crucially—no cost, but numerous gamers shell out For extra, beauty attributes, like costumes known as “skins.”) When it comes to fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has factors of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, as well as the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents communicate of it being an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen display-time abuse: under the desk at college, at a memorial service, in the lavatory at four A.M. They beg each other for alternatives. A pal despatched me a video clip he’d taken just one afternoon even though seeking to cease his son from actively playing; there was a time when repeatedly contacting 1’s father a fucking asshole might have resulted in big issues in Tomato City. In our house, the massive threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Game fads occur and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What persons appear to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is there’s a little something new rising all over Fortnite, a sort of mass social collecting, open to the A lot wider array of men and women when compared to the online games that arrived prior to. Its relative insufficient wickedness—it appears to be typically free of the misogyny and racism that afflict all kinds of other games and gaming communities—can make it more palatable to a broader viewers, which attraction the two ameliorates and augments its addictive power. (The game, in its basic method, randomly assigns players’ skins, which may be of any gender or race.) Popular anecdotal evidence indicates that ladies are participating in in extensive quantities, both with and without the need of boys. There are, and probably ever shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at this sort of newcomers, equally as they gripe when there are no newcomers in the slightest degree.

A friend whose thirteen-year-old son is deep down the rabbit hole likened the Fortnite phenomenon for the Pump Household Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-very well teenager surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe transpired upon while in the early nineteen-sixties. In place of a clubhouse on the Seaside, there’s a virtual world-wide juvenile hall, exactly where Children Assemble, invent an argot, undertake change egos, and shoot each other down. Wolfe’s Pump Home Young ones went on beer-soaked outings they called “destructos,” in which they would, at regional farmers’ behest, demolish abandoned barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking tiny homebodies demolishing virtual walls and residences with imaginary pickaxes. Children almost everywhere are swinging away at their planet, tearing it down to survive—Inventive destruction, of A sort.

Shall I demonstrate the game? I really need to, I’m afraid, Despite the fact that describing online video game titles is a little bit like recounting desires. A hundred gamers are dropped on to an island—from the flying college bus—and battle each other to the Loss of life. The winner is the final just one standing. (You are able to pair up or kind a squad, way too.) This really is what is meant by Battle Royale. (The initial Model of Fortnite, launched past July, for forty pounds, wasn’t fight towards the Demise; it's the new iteration which includes caught fire.) A storm encroaches, slowly forcing combatants into an ever-shrinking region, where they must kill or be killed. Together the best way, you look for out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, although also collecting building supplies by breaking down existing buildings. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is An important element of the sport, which is why it is commonly called a cross concerning Minecraft along with the Hunger Video games—and why aggrieved parents are able to notify them selves that it's constructive.

In advance of a video game starts, you wander all over in the kind of purgatorial bus depot-cum-airfield waiting around until eventually the next hundred have assembled for an airdrop. This can be a Weird put. Players shoot inconsequentially at each other and pull dance moves, like actors strolling aimlessly close to backstage practicing their strains. Then come the airlift plus the drifting descent, through glider, into the battleground, with a gentle whooshing seem which is to your Fortnite addict exactly what the flick of a Bic will be to a smoker. You could land in one of 20-just one regions about the island, Every single by using a cutesy alliterative title, some suggestive of mid-century gay bars: Shifty Shafts, Moisty Mire, Lonely Lodge, Greasy Grove. In patois As well as in temper, the sport manages to be equally dystopian and comic, dark and lightweight. It could be alarming, for those who’re not accustomed to these kinds of matters or are attuned into the information, to listen to your darlings shouting so merrily about head shots and snipes. But there’s no blood or gore. The violence is cartoonish, a minimum of relative to, say, Halo or Grand Theft Vehicle. These kinds of are classified as the consolations.

The island by itself has an air of desertion although not of maximum despair. This apocalypse is rated PG. The abandonment, precipitated through the storm, that has either killed or scattered the majority of the earth’s population, appears to have been the latest and comparatively fast. The grass is lush, the canopy total. The hydrangeas are abloom in Snobby Shores. Properties are unencumbered by kudzu or graffiti and have tidy, sparsely furnished rooms, as though the inhabitants experienced only just fled (or been vaporized). Evidently, Absolutely everyone on the island, in All those prosperous pre-storm instances, shopped in the exact same aisle at Concentrate on. Every time I view a participant enter a bedroom, whether it is in Junk Junction or Loot Lake, I Take note the multicolored blanket folded across the bed. Those people cobalt-blue table lamps: are they available for sale? Maybe at some point they will be.