So... if you like detective novels, but supernatural stuff and games a la Wolf Among Us ain't your bag, I have another humble (but emphatic!) suggestion: Bosch. Amazon's first original series that really demands some attention. Check out this sweet intro song:
Right? Tell me that wasn't written for a crime show set in Los Angeles.
If you enjoy modern crime fiction, you are almost certainly familiar with Michael Connelly's haggard, irascible hero, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. He's the finest fictional detective fictional Los Angeles has seen since Ed Exley et al from Elroy. Like all lovable cop leads has an explosive temper and a habit for pissing off his superiors, but he also does things by the book.
The books he stars in feel tremendously grounded, but they borrow a few devices from mainstream detective novels to keep things moving. Those devices, like serial killers who 'fixate' on specific cops, do not derail the natural way cases progress. Instead of happenstance, or magical lab work, Bosch solves things with good police work; forensic tests, digging through files, consulting pathologists.
In addition to clever plots, Connelly is known for his dialog. Everybody on the force speaks with the language you would expect from an LA cop. Full disclosure: I don't know any cops. But the diction, and the interplay between characters makes you believe this is what cops sound like, and that's the hallmark of compelling writing.
All these elements translate to the screen handsomely, and the cool thing about Connelly is that he sees the adaptation process as an opportunity to tell a new story. I think I heard he was unhappy with Clint Eastwood's movie adaption of Blood Work, but I enjoyed the fact that the film told a slightly skewed version of the novel. Not a "nix Tom Bombadil so the movies aren't five goddamn hours long" cut, but a "let's do something different here" cut. Cheekily enough, a character in one of the later books refers to a movie adaptation of the detective's life (situating the film in-universe) and decries it for slander.
The show steps things up a notch, merging plot elements from three different novels. This gives writers enough material to carry a ten episode season, and creates this meta-fictional, reverse jiggsaw for readers to deconstruct. Yeah, it can be conventional. Tropey, even, at times. But it never felt formulaic to me.
If you like crime stories, but you've burnt out on CSI, Law & Order, NCIS, Criminal Minds, etc., this is a good change of pace. Something strong to tide you over until season 2 of True Detective.
If you have Amazon Prime, you can already watch the show. And if you are wary of another subscription, the individual episodes are also available for purchase.
If you purchased The Wolf Among Us and haven't gotten around to playing it yet, bump it to the top of your gaming backlog.One of my best friends gave me the same advice and I am very grateful he did.
It really does an amazing job of balancing the deduction of a detective novel with the fantastic nature of Fables; much better than a lot of urban fantasy (Dresden Files and Angel to name a couple). There is black market magic, a supernatural serial killer and a couple other brutal Fables who didn't warrant a place in the comics.
You don't need to have read any of the Fables comics to appreciate the story (though if you've read through volumes 1-3, you'll avoid all potential spoilers for the comic and enjoy a couple inside jokes). I'm actually finally reading through the series (courtesy of the same best friend), and playing Wolf alongside it really enriched my appreciation of the comic, which can drag at times.
It may just be the subject matter, but I enjoyed it a lot more than The Walking Dead. Also, it's almost as fun to watch as it is to play (to hear my wifetell it). If you can play it on a TV (either through a console or a linked laptop) playing with an audience that can frantically shout at you to pick a specific dialogue option adds a new dimension of fun.
If you do not yet own it and you like Telltale's stuff, or just narrative driven gameplay in general, you can get it for the song on the next Steam sale. Part of me hopes there is a Season 2, but it also segues into the comic so well and tells such a tight story that I'm satisfied with it by itself.
After I finish the Adversary Arc of the comic, I may write a little something about the Fables mythos as a whole.
So I know a lot of people recommended I read Ready Player One. It sounded like a lot of fun, and I aim to entertain, so I read it. Here is my take on it:
On the whole, it was kind of an unnerving experience. The many recommendations I have received make all the sense in the world. Like the main character, Parzival, I am obsessed with nerdy popular culture and revel in my geek esoterica. It is quicker for me to recount the fan circles I am not taken in by (Doctor Who, My Little Pony) than all the ones I love or participate in. I also design ARGs for a living; sprawling campaigns of concatenated puzzles and minigames. Some of them are even competitions or contests like the Egg Hunt that drives the plot of Player.
In fact, I think Ernest Cline's greatest success is that he makes more plausible use of the puzzle-chain plot device than any other author I've encountered to date, including Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, or even any narrative-driven puzzle game. Curators of relics, villains, and ancient architects typically do not spend their days designing puzzles and riddles. But game designers do exactly that, so for once, it makes perfect sense. And that's good because it's a premise that makes for a fun ride.
I was also really taken in by Cline's description of a dystopian America where people live in perilous stacks of mobile homes and their only respite is a utopian online world. Dat situation. It has this beautiful William Gibson tech-speculation by way of Douglas Adams absurdity thing happening. I really wanted to read that book. But what followed was a lot less smart and funny.
Referential humor is a great literary garnish, or social flourish. I enjoy it when people toss out a well timed quote, but I like it even better when they casually drop a line or two without making a big deal out of it. That's the fun of inside jokes. They create common ground, and make denser, dryer, or more somber material light and animated. But the references aren't garnishes here. They are the entire menu.
That may have been enough if I was slightly more attached to the zeitgeist of 80s pop culture that is the core of the book. But I was born just a few years too late for that, and I think I read it a few years too late as an adult. If I read it as a teenager, I think I would happily overlooked the flaws that now bug me and just enjoyed the awesome multiverse that is OASIS. It indulges this child-like manic mania to mash things up. You got Blade Runner in my Star Wars! Voltron in my Dungeons and Dragons! And yes, I love all of this shit! But where's the through line? Where are we going with this?
In a weird way, Ready Player One is the polar opposite of Big Bang Theory, but it spins me so far around the emotional spectrum that I wind up in the same place. BBT always struck me as the sitcom equivalent of locker-room ridicule; laughing at (rather than with) nerds. The jokes are dumb, the references feel disingenuous and most of the characters conform to cursory archetypes. I know many other nerds feel differently. Maybe as the personification of suburban American normativity, I'm desperate for the opportunity to feel persecuted. Whatever the cause, I feel bored, or angry, or uncomfortable watching it. And even though there is nothing insincere about Player, I felt the same things reading a lot of it.
Pages of context for things that target audiences will already know (who Gary Gygax is), mixed with paragraphs of exposition for bits of world building that won't matter again (like the gun vending machine at the end), and this uptopian attitude toward how great online games are. The characters have all gone so deep down the rabbit hole of this escapist wonderland that I feel like no light will ever reach them. They effortlessly (but unintentionally, I think) embody so much of the negative aspects of modern 'nerd' culture, that it's like looking in a terrifying funhouse mirror. We have a bunch of hateful escapist elitists who mistake caustic sass for sharp wit and have no ambition beyond being good at games.
Artemis is an abstract manic pixie dream girl with very little personality beyond the references she spouts. Aech is a sounding board for Parzival, and her reveal is under-explored (it also makes Parzival look as self-absorbed as he is). The Daisho Bros are truly dated and offensive caricatures of Japanese people (believe it or not, the entire culture was not minted from Akira Kurosawa samurai flicks). But the worse really is Parzival. He is a haughty, snide prick who always has some kind of ulterior motive. His aunt was a bitch, but I don't think we get a full page worth of regret, or pathos, or mourning, when she and an entire tower of families are blown up because of he just HAD to give somebody the finger.
The nature of the quest also really bugs me. Basically, being a gunter means investing more of your life in other people's creations than creating anything or attempting something yourself. To do this, you must shun reality (which is admittedly awful in Cline's future) and to a large extent, other people. I mean, I just think about what happened to all the other gunters who get wasted (or lose their characters) so Parzival can become unfathomably wealthy. Was it worth it for them? Maybe if he goes through with his promise to end world hunger... but that was never really his motivation. And can we expected a kid who has never really experienced real life to take on that lofty goal when he arguably only took it on to impress a girl? God knows he didn't have time to research the regional variabilities of malnutrition, or the multitude of factors that contribute to food deserts--I'm pretty sure Parzival would have to be about 80 years old to have memorized all those books and shows and in addition to mastering so many old school videogames.
I can hear people who read my first effort shouting at me: "Hey Hank! Remember that chapter where your protagonist receives a decade of fighting experience and instruction in just two days?" Yeah. Yeah I do. I could counter and say that was fantasy, not sci-fi, but that's a deflection. "Remember how your book is also a high stakes last man standing competition against nebulous evil?" Yes. And this is what bothers me most about Player: it reminds me that my first effort is more somber, but ultimately just as shallow. It was fun to write and I am sure that Ready Player One was a blast for Cline to create as well, and I think that in itself is praiseworthy. But I always kind of hoped that if you can do that (have fun creating a thing) and put it in front of your ideal audience, they wouldn't react like I am acting now.
Maybe it is enough though. Ready Player One was well received. Optioned for a movie. NYT best seller. There will always be a guy like me, pissing on the parade. Maybe I should learn to shut up and smell the success, or even look carefully to it's example when it comes time to revise The Harrowing. After all, it made a very complicated world accessible to a broad audience, and fit sex, violence and swearing into a story that feels an awful lot like YA fiction.
But moving forward, I prefer to look at Ready Player One as a reminder to try and do better.
So here's a lamentation I wrote about K-roq a few days ago. It was more topical then. Here's the context link: http://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/2wwkb1/kroq_fires_lisa_may_and_doc_on_the_rock/
Seems strange for a washed up radio morning show DJ to talk about "technology catching up with people." You'd assume endangered species would try to ban together. But I guess Kroq already considers Kevin and Bean to be luxuries, so Doc and Lisa May had to go.
To me, it's another sign of a fairly steady decline. Kroq billed themselves as a "New Rock" station for as long as I can remember, and it was a meaningful signifier. Around the time they switched to "Always Alternative" the variety in their set lists plummeted; occasionally you will still hear some of that old Offspring, or Sublime, or Metallica, but most of it is the same 8 alternative singles played over and over, ad nausea. I generally like those singles, or at least I start out enjoying them, but so many good songs have been played into the ground. Gotye, Dirty Heads, Tove Lo, Hozier....
Lately I've been listening to Alt Nation on Sirius. It doesn't have as much of the nostalgic 80s and 90s punk and metal sounds, and it also plays the hell out of hits, but there is a little more variety and a steadier drip feed of new music. You also don't have to endure Kat and Stryker's obnoxious endorsements. I was neutral about Mercedes Benz before, and now I actively dislike them thanks to Kat's commercials. Don't get me started about Morongo or Jeweler's Touch.
Even Loveline is losing its touch. They really need a permanent female voice in there, and while Mike is the second best co-host behind Corolla, Dr. Drew should pass the torch to somebody who can still give a shit. He's jaded, impatient with callers, and generally sounds burnt out. His perspective is also starting to show its age, particularly in regards to internet related issues.
As for the Kevin & Bean morning show... well. It always kind of sucked, didn't it? That was the sum total of its charm. But Lisa was a crucial counterpoint. The sane, nice person in a room full of clowns. And Doc was this weird grizzled interruption, like pepper in a stew. I haven't heard the new "female personality" yet, but Kroq can afford her, you'd be a lot better off shelling out the cash to bring back Lisa May. Sirius also comedy stations. With acts that are "haha" funny instead of "this is very weird and kind of sad' funny. Think I'll switch to those.
I don't think the station is necessarily dead, these are all problems that it can bounce back from. But even acknowledging this decline hurts a little. For fifteen years of my life, it was the only musical station I would listen to by choice California. Hell, it was the only way I knew how to talk about music. "Who do you listen to?" "I dunno actually. Whoever Kroq is playing right now." "Have you heard this song?" "Do they play it on Kroq?" This may be why my more musically adept friends hate talking to me.
So, there was a lot of stuff I meant to review last year but never got around to posting or finishing. Here it is. If I'm forgetting any other dropped threads, call me out on it and I will correct the oversight.
Big Hero 6
So good. Haven't enjoyed a Disney Film this much since The Golden Age, with the exception of Toy Story. As a huge nipponophile and a fan of San Fran, the film's aesthetics scratched an itch I did not know I had. The plot was predictable, but I also couldn't think of a better way to do it myself, which is a feeling I rarely have after walking out of a theater (whether or not it is true).
It's also tremendously refreshing to see a kids movie with a message other than "believe in yourself really hard and you can do anything!" Finally, it had one of the best trailers in years (linked)--I watched it periodically just because it was entertaining--and the movie managed to pay off what the trailer promised.
So glad this won best animated instead of...
The Lego Movie:
Maybe the hype gave me unrealistic expectations, but I wasn't wowed by this one. Good voice performances all around, and mix of stop motion and CGI really was novel. But this film is a Grand Wizard in the Cult of Self-Esteem: You can achieve anything if you are confident enough and try your very hardest.
The reveal at the end felt odd rather than heartfelt, inspiring a series of uncomfortable questions: how long has that kid put up with his asshole father? And did that kid have to ruin the fathers meticulously built and organized city? Couldn't Will Ferrell buy the son a few sets to be used just for fun? There's something to be said for having a huge collection of masterfully built Legos. It also conveniently derails and neuters the anti-consumerism thrust of the narrative that we had been following all along. Which is convenient, because following that thread to its conclusion is problematic for Lego.
Arrow:
The writing is spotty, the acting soap operatic, and smoldering looks stand in for character development at least once an episode, so this should probably be listed as a guilty pleasure. But I feel no guilt, I have no shame. The creators of the show know the DC universe and seem love it more than the current writers and editors of DC comics.
Unlike Agents of Shield, Arrow isn't hoarding everything good to be optioned later. In fact, it borrows awesome people from Batman, Titans, and Justice League mythos. Deathstroke and Huntress spring to mind; great villains who translate very well to the superhero show as a soap opera format. I also really love Ollie's supporting cast. Diggle and Felicity are aggressively likable in a way that isn't forced, despite being archetypes.
The first couple episodes put me off because they were almost nonsensically dense in terms of introducing people, but it builds steam as it goes. I'm still very early in Season 2; Grace and I tend to binge on it and then let it lie fallow. I think the show actually lends itself to old-school week-to-week watching. After two episodes back-to-back the angst becomes a bit much. I think the pacing makes more sense with real-time breaks and the cliff hangers have more of an impact.
I do hope they ditch the Island thread soon, though. It was a strong initial conceit, but even by the end of season 1, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of Ollie's trajectory. In general, I have issues with prequels; always prefer to know what happens next. It's actually done quite well, and does the best thing a prequel can do: raising questions about the present situation rather than just laying things to rest. I would prefer some more time with Ollie decompressing and ditching those feral instincts. Spending more time to develop him in the present. Like, I would love to unpack Ollie's fairly abrupt and firm decision to stop killing people. I know this isn't a 'meditative' show but I feel like there could be a space for that there.
Yes, Ollie. We get it. The island sucked. You were tortured. You had to kill a lot of people. Console yourself with another hot chick.
Gotham Central:
When you look at what DC comics is pushing out today (at least in their primary universe) and compare it to this, it's baffling and infuriating to know this series came out a decade ago.
For those who don't know, it explores Batman's city through the eyes of the police. It demonstrates that Batman's respect for cops is neither unfounded nor lipservice, while simultaneously showing the oft-referenced corruption in a way that hurts you as a reader. It blows away today's TV procedurals; supervillains and vigilante politics allow Rucka and Brubaker to deviate from the standard cop-show formula in exciting ways.
I think one of the jacket blurbs said it was more like The Wire: Gotham City, than Law & Order. The series did more to make Batman real for me than Chris Nolan's trilogy did (and I say that having loved the Dark Knight trilogy). You learn about the political dance the police force has to do to use the Bat Signal and avoid the appearance of condoning vigilantism. The arcs are still driven by superhero devices, but the breathless pacing and surreal action is actually more to my taste than The Wire's meticulous, slow-burn immersion.
One of the things that surprised me, is how much I came to really care about the police in the Major Crimes Unit. Very human personalities dealing with everything from inter-office romances to discrimination to balancing dangerous, taxing work with a family life. The ending made me sad, and mad, and begging for more closure... but now that I've had some time to digest it, I think it was the perfect way for the comic to finish. It ends on a powerful, intensely personal note, after exploring the full range of the DC universe's scope of threats.
Consequently, I can't bring myself to watch Gotham yet, because I know it won't measure up. As soon as somebody made the decision to turn it into another batman origin story, instead of focusing on the "normal" people in Gotham City, that show was going to fall short of what it could (should) have been.
Coming Soon
There may have been some other stuff I meant to write on last year, but can't remember what. Here's some stuff that's coming up:
Gunpoint has some of the best writing in video games ever; especially for a high concept game that could get buy without story; much less interactive dialog trees and branching narrative paths. Haven't wrote on it yet because I haven't beaten it (shameful considering how short it is). It's cheap and great so go buy it. Go for the writing, stay for the fun core mechanic.
Finally got around to reading and finishing Ready Player 1, which I know a lot of people have recommended or asked for my opinion on, and I will have something on that up in just a day or two.
I'm also still working on my bit about The Magicians trilogy. It really is my favorite series. And I absolutely see how it isn't for everyone, but some of the people whose opinions I hold in the highest regard and agree with most often, absolutely hated it. They couldn't abide the protagonist, which was really weird because I sympathized with Quentin Coldwater very strongly. It's a very strange feeling I want to explore with my friends, and not because I want to convince people I'm right, but more because it's an unusual thing to get the feels about and I think I may be an emotional exhibitionist / attention whore. Those three books are also the single most prominent influence on my writing, especially what I'm working at now. .
In closing, I will tell you that Bosch is great and advise you to go watch it now so we can get a second season and keep writing without worry of spoiling anything.
If you have any suggestions for other 2015 topics, please let me know.
