Month: June 2013

Thoughts On Tauriel

Who the hell is Tauriel, you might be thinking to yourself. It’s a reasonable thought. She’s the ninja-elf-archer lady featured in the new Hobbit trailer. Played by Evangeline Lilly, she’s an addition to the Hobbit cast that doesn’t appear in the book. If you’ve read the Hobbit or if you saw part one of the movie, you can imagine why the filmmakers might have felt the need to modify Tolkien’s pristine work: it’s literally all dudes in Middle-earth, otherwise.

Seriously, it wasn’t until Galadriel appeared in her cameo during An Unexpected Journey that I realized she was the first (and ultimately the only) woman in the entire film.

I don’t care that it’s otherwise accurate to the book; it feels off. It feels weird. It reminds me how I felt the moment that I realized there are precisely four women in the Star Wars universe: exactly one badass princess, one rebel leader who doesn’t get named in the movie, and Jabba’s slave girls. And three of those women don’t appear until Return of the Jedi!

Well, I guess there’s Luke’s aunt in the first movie. So, five women total. Glee.

I’m glad there’s at least one female character in the next Hobbit movie. We can acknowledge that these books, however, wonderful they otherwise were, were written in a time and place where nobody was talking or wondering about this kind of thing. Fine. Great. I’m not proposing we rewrite the books. But that doesn’t mean we have to stick to every convention, especially not when these are the stories that are shaping the next generation.

The majority of kids growing up now are not going to be re-enacting the books. They are going to do exactly what kids have always done when they watch a movie. After the movie, they call a character when it’s time to play. “I’m Aragon!” “I’m Legolas!” “I’m Luke!” “I’m Han Solo!” I wonder how it feels when the only character that looks like you is a minor or supporting role. Or a villain. Or doesn’t exist at all. I literally can’t imagine it, because I had the privilege of being sci-fi/fantasy’s most targeted demographic. It probably doesn’t feel too good, though.

At least Star Wars had Leia and Lord of the Rings had Eowyn (although I’ll note she wasn’t part of the Fellowship a.k.a. the main characters,so . . .)

Without Tauriel, the Hobbit is a movie about fifteen dudes. I don’t mind the idea of a movie about fifteen men sharing an adventure together. What I do mind is this implied idea of a world where women don’t seem to exist. That strikes me as odd. What I do mind is that in a cast of fifteen protagonists, there are approximately zero women (although, to be fair, most of the dwarves are purely ancillary characters themselves).

I’m glad there’s someone that the younger girls get to call when it comes time to play. Until we get to the point where more inclusive sci-fi/fantasy books have been around long enough to become classics, this is the road I hope we take. I hope we continue to carve out some characters for the girls, even if they don’t exist in the original text. Frankly, I hope this goes further! Why not pull a Battlestar Galactica and change a male character into a female one? The Hobbit could have spared a dwarf or three for this purpose.

Let’s not stop with adding women, either. Let’s see some homosexual characters. Transgender characters? Sure! Some non-white characters that aren’t orcs, klingons, or any other variant of the “noble savage/barbarian hero/warrior race” archetype. Yes, please.

In short, let’s hope for sci-fi and fantasy created that cater to people of all demographics, not just mine. ‘Cause, you know what? I had  plenty of heroes who looked like me growing up. I got to have Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne and quite a few other heroic characters to identify with. I was spoiled for choice. A lot of kids weren’t, though. A lot of them were ignored or marginalized.

There are enough stories and characters that everybody should have someone. And don’t tell me it’s unimportant; growing up, these are the stories that provided the lens through which I engaged the world. These are the stories that helped make me me.

My stories told me, over and over, that I looked like the hero, the protagonist, the main character, the star. If you wonder what privilege looks like, that’s it right there.

Console Wars

I think I’m just going to sit this one out. I’ve served my time, you know? I fought in the trenches of SNES vs. Genesis. That was probably the only time I’ve ever been on the winning side of one of these wars. My loyalty to the Nintendo Army saw me through the N64 vs. PlayStation vs. Saturn, but the end of that conflict, I was shaken to my core. My loyalty wavered and I looked for another outfit to serve in.

Eventually, I decided to take the green and black. I enlisted with the Xbox. That was 2001.

It’s been thirteen years of fighting and arguing and justifying. I’ve seen a lot of things in my time. Lost a lot of good friends. And now as the next console war begins to loom on the horizon, I have to ask myself: was it worth it? Was any of this worth it?

How much more can a man be expected to give for his consumer electronics? How many more forums and tweets and Facebook posts can a console warrior be expected to slog through before his spirit breaks and he finds himself wondering what the hell he’s doing with his life?

If I live long enough to look back on my life, this is the moment, I’ll say. It was during the opening salvo fired at E3 3013 that I finally lost the will to fight. 2013 is when I put down my pretend gun and went home.

I’m done. I’m out. You’ll all just have to carry on without me.

Okay, now that the satire is out of the way: seriously, I’m so fucking sick of “console wars.” Why is this a thing? Why is this still a thing? Maybe this is just part of a gamer’s life when you get old. Maybe every gamer reaches this moment and has this epiphany: “this is some bullshit.” Or maybe not. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I don’t like talking about this particular hobby because of the straight-up insanity that exists in the fan base. All of them. They’re all crazy. We are all crazy. It’s impossible to have a discussion anymore. Who knows, maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe I’m just finally now realizing it.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

I realize that if you’re not a gamer, nothing about this post will make sense to you. That’s okay. In fact, you’re better off not knowing.

Thoughts On Death

(Author’s Note: I originally meant to write about my reaction to an article I read about medically assisted suicide, but it became a personal reflection on death and dying instead. I’m going to post it anyway despite the intimate nature of these thoughts. I hope that you will consider them with respect. Thank you.)

We don’t talk about death. That’s the rule.

It’s not just an unwritten rule, either; it’s illegal to want to die in almost every state except for four. Unless you live in Oregon, Washington, Vermont or Montana, you are not allowed to ask for help to end your life, no matter how ravaged you are due to disease, no matter how much dignity you’ve lost, no matter how onerous life has become, you have to tough it out to the bitter end.

And to that I ask: why?

No, that’s not right. I know why.

Part of it is because of the pervasive and poorly-defined concept of “the sanctity of life,” which is a somewhat ironic condemnation when it’s coming from a vegetarian. In fact, I support the sanctity of death because of my respect and love for life. The sanctity of death is necessary for there to be any such thing as a sanctity of life. The word sanctity is used without understanding what it’s supposed to mean. People think it means being alive is more important than everything else, but that’s not correct. Is being alive more important than living with dignity? Is being alive more important than being without agony?

Regardless, we don’t talk about death even though it’s the one thing that we all have in common. It’s our common bond and our equalizer: kings and beggars both die. Men and women of every race, every creed, every class, every corner of the world. We all die.

Everything dies. Even the planets, stars, and galaxies die. Reality itself will likely die someday due to entropy. We’re all in this together. Nobody’s getting out alive.

Why are we afraid of that? Why don’t we talk about the most common element of our shared humanity? We celebrate life in all its forms, save for the one aspect that gives life its greatest meaning. We plan weddings, graduations, the births of children, and all of life’s other many milestones, but when it comes time for the grand finale, how many of us think about it? Ever? Instead, we let others plan it for us and define a moment that should be ours, assuming there’s even somebody around at that point to pay attention. Not everybody has even that much.

It’s not a question of wanting to die; I don’t really want to, but wanting isn’t really the point. It’s about accepting that I will and you will and we all will.

It’s about having a healthy respect for life.

And to me, stretching life out long past the breaking point isn’t about respecting it at all. It’s the same as the author who pushes out repetitive novels of earlier and better works or the movie franchise that had too many sequels or whatever other creative thing you enjoyed until its creator squeezed it too tightly, trying too fervently to get every last drop out of it rather than letting go and moving on.

The best stories are the one that end when it’s their time to end.

The saddest stories are the ones that are forgotten because they hung around far past the point of anybody caring because they weren’t allowed to end.

So, here’s me, right now in a point in time and space, thinking about the future. Thinking about the end and how I want it written.

Here’s how I want my story to end. I might not get this ending; every writer knows that sometimes your characters throw you for a loop or the story takes an unexpected twist. But assuming it all turns out as planned, this is the way my story ends.

I want to be at home.

One of my greatest fears is dying in a hospital. I don’t like hospitals; they’re cold and mechanical places. I feel terrible every time I walk past the open door of an occupied room in a hospital, because I imagine myself lying in that bed, looking out at the people walking past the door and knowing that they don’t know me and they don’t care that I’m dying. Hospitals are very lonely places, no matter who you’re with. I don’t want to die in a lonely place.

I want my final moments to be experienced in my favorite place: my place. I want to see my pictures and my books and whatever technology I have and whatever pets I have. I want my family to be there if they can, but I don’t want them to feel the need to keep a vigil over me for fear that I might die alone. So long as I’m in my space, no matter where that space is, as long as it’s home, I won’t be alone.

This is why I support the right to die.

I should be allowed to decide these things. I should be allowed to experience my last moment with dignity. It may be that this never happens: my death may be sudden or it may be an unexpected accident or it may be that I never experience the slow, wasting away due to disease and this right is unnecessary.

But if it does end with me in a ravaged state, I want to know that my life and my story end with the respect that I, and every other person who ever has lived, ever does live, and ever will live deserve.

Because to ignore it and pretend that it won’t happen isn’t just irresponsible. It isn’t just magical thinking. It means we forget, or worse, ignore the needs of those who are dying for fear that they might remind us of our own deaths. Some people might say there’s nothing worse than death. I can think of many things that are worse than death.

Being forgotten in your life’s final moments is worse than death.

Being ignored in your life’s final moments is worse than death.

Dying in agony is worse than death.

Dying without dignity is worse than death.

There are many things that are worse than death and we perpetuate them every time we shun the dying to a corner and turn our eyes away.

This is why we should talk about death.

On Reading Signed Copies

I really, really like getting signed copies of books. At this point, I have enough signed copies that it constitutes an actual collection. Best of all, I have signed copies of books by most of my favorite authors: George R. R. Martin, Jim Butcher, John Scalzi, and many, many others. At some point, I plan to reorganize my shelves to keep all my signed books together so I can look at them while working on my Gollum impression.

But.

You knew that was coming. I would never write a blog post like this unless there was a but.

I love my signed copies. In fact, I love them so much that I hate reading them.

Here’s the thing about me and books. When I’m in a book, I take it with me everywhere I go. My current book becomes my teddy bear; it’s with my all the time. It goes with me from home to work and back. I carry it on my lunch break and read it during lunch, which is especially dangerous to the book because I walk a mile or so during my lunch break which means much manhandling along the way.

This is one of the reasons why I will get library copies of books I already own, or buy copies of books that I’ve already read at the library. Reading a library book takes away the pressure and the anxiety. Now, wait just a goddamned minute, you might be thinking indignantly to yourself. Matthew Ciarvella, don’t you work in a library? Are you saying you don’t care about what happens to your library books?

I do work in a library, hypothetical blog reader. And that means I see the inner workings of the public library system. It means I have a library collection I maintain. And that means that, to be honest, I’m not as worried about the condition of my library books because I know the fate that awaits all library books.

That’s the thing about library copies: they’re finite. If you’ll pardon the expression, they have a shelf life. No library book lasts forever, because if it’s popular, enough handling will destroy it. How many times do you think a book can be checked out and read before it disintegrates? Well, depends on the book. I’ve seen hardcovers that survived ten years and roughly 100 check-outs before they had to be retired and I’ve seen paperbacks that destroyed themselves after five check-outs.

That doesn’t mean I’ll mistreat a library copy. It’s not mine, after all, and even we library workers have to pay for a book when we lose or destroy it. One of my life’s greatest shames is the fact that I lost a brand new copy of The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. I still have no idea what happened to it.

When I read a library book, I know at some point that little book will be removed from circulation. It’s not meant to last forever. If it was, it would be in an archive. Or, as you’ll see now that I’m returning to my main point, in a private collection.

My signed copies are books that I want to keep with me for the rest of my life. Each one is special. It represents an experience I had both in reading it and taking the time to meet the person who wrote it; if I have a signed copy of your book, that means you’re part of my personal Pantheon of Writers. It’s not the greatest pantheon, all things considered, but how many people ever get to say they’re part of a pantheon in the first place? That has to count for something.

Signed copies are valuable and special things to me and while I know that part of a well-worn and tattered book is the mark of a book that’s been read and enjoyed, there’s enough of a draconic-hoarding tendency in me that I want my books to remain pristine. Which makes it tricky when I really, really want to read a book that I have a signed copy of and can’t easily get from the library due to the fact that it has a waiting list on it. When that happens, I have to make a hard choice.

In this particular instance, I’m going to be reading my signed copy of Faerie After because don’t want to wait for the library copy to come in.

But you can be certain I will be reading it very carefully. Possibly with gloves on.

I realize that this probably means I am a crazy person.

Chapter Woes

I would like to say that I’ve been writing for the past few hours, but in reality I’ve been sitting at my computer staring at this chapter and hating where it picks up. So I stare at it until my attention wanders and then I go poke around on the Internet for a few minutes until I feel bold enough to look at the chapter again.

The problem is I hate where the chapter breaks, but if I try to combine it with the previous chapter, I’ll end up with this monster chapter that’s three times longer than anything else in the book.

Contrary to what I was led to believe, writing does not seem to be a sexy or glamorous occupation. Ah well. Back to staring at this chapter for a while.

The Snake Keeper Chronicles

Given that ophidiophobia is the most commonly reported phobia in the United States, it’s unlikely that you’ve ever looked into the husbandry practices necessary to care for python regius, known by its more common names the royal python and the ball python. If you had, you would come across various warnings and reports that these snakes are “picky eaters” who are known for “refusing to eat for weeks at a time for seemingly no reason.” It’s generally considered not worth getting worked up about unless your python regius is going on six months without eating. That is a long time!

My ball python, Morrigan, is the second snake I’ve ever owned. My first snake was (and still is!) a corn snake named Maize. I named him thusly because I was about eleven years old when I acquired him and when you’re eleven years old you think that naming a corn snake Maize is the height of sophistication and wit. You may also be doing the mental arithmetic regarding how old I was when I acquired Maize and how old I am now. That is correct: Maize the corn snake is fifteen years old. It is entirely possible that he will live for another five more years: the given age range is fifteen to twenty years.

Sufficient to say, snakes live for a very, very long time. This is why there are only two kinds of snake owners: those who will only ever have one or two snakes in their entire life and those who end up owning about a thousand snakes and have a dedicated “snake room” filled with their pets.

While corn snakes live up to twenty years, ball pythons are supposed to live for about twenty years but have sometimes lived as long as forty years! I could very well be taking care of the snake pet until I am sixty. The mind boggles!

Corn snakes have a reputation for being easy to care for and this is accurate. Feeding Maize takes very little effort. Thaw the mouse, give the thawed mouse to the snake. He eats it. Repeat weekly. It doesn’t matter to a corn snake if the mouse is cold. It’s a goddamn mouse and he’s a goddamn snake and he knows how to conduct this business.

Morrigan, though.

Unlike a corn snake, a ball python cares very deeply how warm the mouse is. In fact, if the mouse is not the precise level of warm, she will ignore it. If it’s too warm, she will ignore it. If it’s the wrong time of the day, she’ll ignore it. If she just doesn’t feel like it, she’ll ignore it. If I did my laundry in the next room four hours earlier, she’ll ignore it. You get the idea.

Feeding a ball python is a careful process that requires patience. However, the feeling that you get when she does eat is very, very rewarding. Today, I tried a new method of thawing her mouse slowly in cool water first and then running it under hot water from the tap. This was a little more hydro-intensive than I would like but it did the trick perfectly. Not only did she eat, she snapped at the mouse almost as soon as I gave it to her. This is a far cry from the bored way she tends to poke at the mouse for up to an hour before eating it. I don’t even mind the fact that she almost got one of my fingers, even though I was being very careful to avoid that exact event.

If I had to sum it all up, I would describe my experience thus: the frustration of feeding a picky ball python is surpassed only by the relief and happiness when she finally does eat.

Captain’s Log: Modern Day

It’s one of those nerd questions you’ll answer eventually: who is your captain? Kirk? Picard? Janeway? Those other guys from the Star Trek series that I didn’t watch? Usually after giving your answer, you justify it. Kirk was the original captain and the heroic space-cowboy. Picard was the diplomat. Janeway was tough as nails. And so on.

Picard has always been my pick for captain, but my reasons go beyond the fact that The Next Generation was my favorite series. Part of the reason is that Patrick Stewart is just an amazing guy.

If you want an example of the kind of person I think all men should aspire to be, take a look at this video of a fan Q&A session at a convention. The entire video is excellent but it’s at about 5:44 that really stands out as Patrick Stewart discusses his own childhood experience watching his father’s domestic abuse of his mother:

As a child in my home, I heard doctors and ambulance men say, Mrs. Stewart, you must have done something to provoke it. Mrs. Stewart, it takes two to make an argument. Wrong. Wrong. My mother did nothing to provoke that. And even if she had, violence is never, ever a choice that a man should make. Ever. 

It’s a cultural cliche to scorn people for regarding actors and celebrities as heroes. Kids shouldn’t look up to movie stars, not when there are doctors and soldiers and police and scientists and so many others who are working hard to save lives without any of the fame or fortune that the celebrities of the world receive. And those people are heroes, undeniably.

But I think it’s important to recognize, too, the contributions to the world that a person like Patrick Stewart can make with moments like these. When a person like Patrick Stewart speaks, people listen. The power of language holds within it the power to change minds. It’s a power every bit as real and valuable as any new technology, maybe even more-so.

So it’s important to recognize those who use their voices and their status to help champion these messages. Star Trek seems to be a bastion for these types; I’ve already talked about why George Takei is excellent. Whether it is on behalf of gay rights or speaking out against violence against women, I’m glad that their voices are being heard. I’m glad that sometimes, the people who play our fictional heroes turn out to be pretty heroic in their own right.

The woman in the video who asked the question has her own write-up of the moment that’s worth your time. It has a few pictures that are particularly poignant.

Exploring Forgotten Lands

When I worked at GameStop, once or twice I managed to get a free copy of a game. They were usually promotional copies that were given out at manager’s conferences, the idea being that if you play and enjoy a free game, you’ll generate more sales through the enthusiasm you pass off to customers. I should note that this plan didn’t always work out if the game happened to be terrible.

I acquired several games like this during my few years there but there were a couple that I never got around to playing: Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and EverQuest II. The reason I never installed or played either game was twofold: first, both games came out during the darkest days of my World of WarCraft addiction, so the idea of playing another fantasy-themed MMO was neither appealing nor necessary. Second, both of these games required subscription fees. Even though the discs were free, I’d still have to pay to play; it wasn’t like getting a free Xbox 360 game where I could try it out at no cost to myself beyond time invested. For those reasons, my copies of Vanguard and EQII sat on my game shelf for several years, unopened and gathering dust.

Although I’m cured of my WoW addiction, every so often, I still get this strange, random urge to play an MMO for a little while. When this urge happens, I’ve found that the best way to satiate it, rather than reinstalling WoW is to try out one of the many, many MMOs that I ignored during their release due to the WoW addiction. Sometimes, this doesn’t end well: my brief time with Lord of the Rings: Online was uneventful and plain to the extent that even the promise of being a wizard loremaster wielding a sword and a staff together couldn’t hold my interest. I played for a few hours and then uninstalled the game.

Yesterday, the Vanguard box on my game shelf caught my eye. I’d read somewhere that the game had gone free to play, which meant I could try it out without having to pay anything. What the hell, I figured. I installed the game and made a Dark Elf Sorcerer.

Generally speaking, Vanguard is one of the many casualties that tried to compete with the WoW juggernaut and lost. I’m honestly surprised that there’s still support for it, when better loved MMOs like City of Heroes have been shut down. Maybe that’s the secret to Vanguard’s life-span. It’s not so popular that its maintenance costs outweigh the benefits of keeping it online. Or maybe Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) is just that determined to keep it going.

Coming into an MMO like this years after the fact is a somewhat surreal experience. Unlike returning to WoW, there is no nostalgia filter that colors your every experience. Things feel both new and old at the same time; familiar due to the mechanics that all MMOs now use and yet alien because you’ve never seen this class or this world. There’s also the feeling of stumbling upon something hidden, something that’s been passed over by the rest of the world. There are still people here having fun and enjoying their game. It’s their own little world in a way that the WoW juggernaut can’t be. Everybody knows WoW. Everybody has their Horde or their Alliance experience; you’re not unique or special there.

Playing Vanguard feels like being a virtual-world archaeologist. The mechanics are pure WoW: push button, kill stuff, talk to guy, kill more stuff. The fact that I can play a dark elf is a large draw for me, even though I realize, mechanically speaking, this isn’t really a big game play alteration. I’m a little bit curious to try out some of their other classes, particularly the Necromancer and the Blood Mage. The Blood Mage sounds especially cool: a vampiric sort of healer that restores her party members by siphoning life away from others.

Will I stick with Vanguard for long? Probably not. The reality is that I quit WoW because I was bored of WoW. I was tired of quests, tired of reputation grinds, tired of push-button, kill stuff mechanics. The MMO genre has stagnated into a Pavlovian treadmill: kill stuff to get better stuff that helps you kill more stuff. That was a fun cycle the first three times I ran it, but now I want something else. I want to do more in a virtual world than just kill things. I think back to my time with Ultima Online and how much fun I had playing interior decorator with my own house. I want gameplay that moves in that direction: world simulation instead of just theme-park experiences.

In the meantime, however, exploring Vanguard is an interesting experience. It feels like a forgotten land, not by virtue of its world design, but by the fact that this is a place that few gamers have wandered. There are 10 million+ gamers who know the world of Azeroth. I’ve spent more than my fair share of time there. I know all its lore. I know its conflicts. I know it and I’m bored because I know.

I don’t even know what the world in Vanguard is called and for a person whose two basic motivations in a game are exploration and the story, that’s a strong draw. So I’ll play and I’ll wander and I’ll find my way through a virtual world that few have known or likely ever will know.