A plea to the upcoming MMO Wildstar

Dear WildStar,

I'm not going to tiptoe around here. Please be completely awesome. Not just good, not just great, not even better than WoW. I need you to be completely awesome.

You are vey pretty in a kooky kind of way. 

I cut my teeth on World of Warcraft days after it was released and have been playing, on and off, ever since, but I'm falling out of love. If it were a marriage we'd only be staying together for the kids (vanity pets).

Here's the deal, I'll never be on the highest levels of WoW. I can't spend the time to raid and, frankly, if there was a time I wanted to spend weeks grinding in order to see the coolest content the game had to offer, it evaporated around the time I turned 30- and that was several years ago.

I've been hopeful for other MMO to bring back the magic I felt in the early years of WoW. I went through Lord of the Rings Online, but found it redundant and derivative. I had huge hopes for Star Wars the Old Republic and The Secret World- and they were fun experiences but, you know.... The Secret World didn't feel like a complete game and SWTOR, well, SWTOR is still pretty fun but after going through the story lines there isn't much left to do.

So, WildStar, to say I'm a one MMO man would be lying, and I don't want to lie to you, but if you are completely awesome I will stay with you for years.

All signs so far look good. I've been following you for quite a while and everything I see I like. Extreme customization, a unique talent system, a fun art style and a seemingly huge variety of gameplay options and re-playability all point to a good thing.

Also, My wife and brother are both excited about your upcoming release as well so I'll have people to play with. When I watch your trailers and you Devspeak videos I feel that familiar flutter of excitement. 

And yet... and yet.

I've been burned before. I'd like to go full Yatzee and say I'm not excited by any video games any more but that never works out. So, yeah, I'm very excited. I didn't get a beta invite but my wife did so I'll be looking over her shoulder all weekend, hoping to get a glimpse at some grandeur.

So please, WildStar, be totally awesome. I don't want to be crass here but if you are totally awesome I will pay you up to $15 a month to play you... Ok, this personification of the game is starting to turn weird.

Just be completely awesome, Ok?  

Hundred Book Challenge #9: "A Dance to the Music of time" by Anthony Powell

I really don't know how to start this. Reading through Anthony Powell's 12 book series “A Dance to the Music of Time” is the most rewarding literary experience I've ever experienced.

The painting that inspired the book

According to the list from whence my Hundred Book Challenge comes from, Time Magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, “A Dance” counts only as one novel- I listened to the audio books and it clocked in at around 84 hours and I loved every minute of it. So much so that I am blindsided by how much I miss it now that I'm done.

These books got me through some tough times. When I started writing it I was working in a job I wasn't crazy about for very little money. We had no idea we were going to have a baby. My wife worked in a job that was forged from the depths of hell and we just weren't sure what we were going to do.

I didn't sit and read this through all at once. I spread it around, inserting other books throughout the series. I savored it and that is probably the best way to describe the experience. It was savory.

I listened to this book as I walked my dog around the streets of Cedar City. I listened to it as I tried to tame the yard of my old house. I listened to it after Beth told me she was pregnant. I listened to it as I drove to Provo for the interview for my current awesome job. I listened to it as I drove back and forth between Provo and Cedar City when I was living on my brother's couch. I listened to it as I moved my stuff up here. I listened to it on the night my son was born. I listened to it as I painted the garage on what will become my new house.

In a way that is far more literal than any other story, I feel as if these characters are part of my life. Not only did I take them with me through one of the most transformative sections of my life, the very nature of the book allowed me to see the complete lives of the characters within.

It is a VERY literary, VERY British book. It acts as the memoirs of Nicolas Jenkins from his days as a school boy through to the brink of his death. It also chronicles, in a very personal way, the history of England from the early 1920s to the mid 1970s. Of Jenkins we don't learn much, other than how he interacts with those he comes across.

I suppose I should go real deep into this story, and I'm sure there are plenty of places where that can be found. I just want to make a few observations.

1. The characterization in this book is amazing. There are literally hundreds of characters, some of them showing up only once or twice, but when I go over a character list I remember who each one is and something interesting about them. In a story where almost every character is a middle-class, white, British person the depth of characterization needed to make them all unique is, frankly, mind boggling.
2. It's funny. It made me laugh out loud more than a few times. I thought I'd go into some of the jokes, but I realize it would be impossible without reams of paper worth of backstory. Suffice to say there is a scene where a butler is attacked by a monkey and another where a high-ranking military official bemoans the fact that a specific battalion doesn't have porridge.
3. Kenneth Widmerpool. Widmerpool is my new favorite literary character. He is just so slimy and awful in a wonderful way. Literally everything the man says makes me smile at the clueless, smallness of it all. Widmerpool is the type of guy who would, if invited to a dinner party, would insist on giving a speech about whatever is on his mind at the time and expect everyone to not only listen, but to thank him for it afterwards. I've started calling people Widmerpool from time to time because it's a great way to insult people and you know they have no clue what you are referencing. Widmerpool is the best reason to read these books.

One more thing. I remember listening to a bunch of small-time authors at a writing conference talking about how books are categorized. They were genera fiction writers and they were bashing on literary fiction, saying literary fiction is “uppity” and other obviously sour-grape complaints. They said it was only an excuse to have sex scenes and that “nothing happens so why would I care.”

I wish I could bludgeon these “writers” with the entirety of “A Dance to the Music of Time.” It hurts the universe that these people have been published. OK, that may be sour grapes on my side but still. You shouldn't have to tell a writer to read a book.

Because here's the deal, I wouldn't have read these books if not for this challenge I gave myself. There is a real value in exposing yourself to stories you normally wouldn't come in contact with. It changes you for the better and, speaking as a writer, it can only make you better. So, you know, read something you normally wouldn't. Push yourself a little and the rewards will be amazing.  

Hundred Book Challenge #8: "Neuromancer" by William Gibson

Imagine, if you will, a world where people can spend all their time in an artificial construct of networked computers. Woah.

OK, so this is one of those science fiction books you have to allow yourself to travel back in time in order to appreciate. Before Cyberpunk was a thing. Before the Matrix movies. Before people thought long, black trench coats were cool. If you can get in that frame of mind, this story is pretty amazing.

Neuromancer is good on it's own grounds. Taken as simply a story, which ultimately is how all novels should be taken, it's a lot of fun. Full of mystery and crazy plot twists and so forth- like you'd expect from one of the seminal science fiction works. But taken as a historical artifact, the book becomes far more interesting.

Here is the question: Do you know what cyberspace is? Yes, you probably do. Does it match this definition by any chance?

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.

It's a bit wordy, but yeah. That's what cyberspace is. At least, that's what cyberspace is at it's coolest, most romantic notion.

Much has been written on the influence of this book. I didn't give this book all the attention it probably deserved as I read it mostly in the days just before and after my son was born, but even with that light read I couldn't help but see influence from this book everywhere. Online games, the Anonymous Collective, social networking, how people communicate on the internet- most online interactions seem to stem, partially, from a foundation built on this work.

That makes sense to me. Jack Womack wrote an amazing post-script to the book where he explains what he thinks happens. His theory is that the computing pioneers of the 1980s read Neuromancer and thought it was completely awesome. They then incorporated the style, language and concepts of the novel into the mortar of cyberspace.

If the point of art is to change the world then Neuromancer is completely successful.

So, hey, I'm a father now.

So, hey, I'm a parent now. It's odd. One moment it was just Elizabeth and I and the next moment there was this whole other person. 

There are about a billion thoughts going through my head about having a baby. A son. A, you know, member of the future generation. Don't expect this to be all coherent, but these are my thoughts. 

When I first started dating Elizabeth something strange happened to me. The best way I can describe it is that a dam burst inside me somewhere releasing all these here-to-for unknown emotions. the concepts of love, happiness, satisfaction- all that- ballooned into something far larger than I thought they could ever be. That is how I knew she was different. That is how I knew this wasn't a girl I could live without. more than 10 years on, and things are going well. Down right awesome actually. 

So, now this baby shows up. Throughout Beth's pregnancy I felt love for the little boy growing inside her, but when I saw him come out, when I saw him laying on his mother's chest- minutes old and still wet and a bit...say... cheesy- it was like an all new dam burst inside me flooding me with a whole new batch of emotion. The love I feel for him is so much more than I thought it would be. 

It makes me wonder how many more dams are waiting inside my emotional center. I'm pretty thrilled to find out. 

I was in the room when Beth gave birth. More than that, I was part of the primary decent team. I was called by the captain, told to put on a red shirt and then given a duty. If I was any more involved with the  process they would have given me a catcher's mitt. 

In my grandpa's day, the men were forced to wait outside, smoking cigarettes with a dozen other worried and impatient fathers. In my dad's day, they could go inside the delivery room but were then forced to leave after visiting hours. Today, the tell the fathers to grab a leg and get going. Cutting the umbilical cord was the least of it. Still, I got to see him come out. I saw the hair, the top of his wrinkly little head and finally his whole head- including detached earlobes. It was a crazy, scary experience but it's also the best experience I've ever had. 

Newborn baby poop is like... horrible. I thought I knew what poop was like but this stuff... black and sticky. Like an alien symbiotie about to turn into Carnage. I think babies absorb all the world's evil while they are in the womb only to poop it out in a tarry, viscous ooze. 

I just don't care if people are annoyed. I'm going to show off pictures of my baby. He is a good looking kid and I'm gonna get his face out there to anyone who can see it. Will I lose friends? No. Besides, I got all the friends I need. 

Being a new father is like being in a cult. There is sleep deprivation, a lot of singing and chanting, wearing robes and you are totally dedicated to a person you've only known for a few days. 

Hundred Book Challenge #7: "Falconer" by John Cheever

“Falconer” is a hard story to describe. At it's base, it's the story of Ezekiel Farragut who is in prison for murdering his brother but so much more and so so so much less. 

If I read online summaries of this book I can see I'm not alone in having a tough time explaining what this book was about. Some people say Farragut learns to love again in prison because he has a relationship with a fellow prisoner... but the thing is that bit isn't any more prominent than any of the other bits. I could have just said, for example, that the book is about how Farragut is trying to get a diamond from a fellow prisoner in order to complete a homemade radio.

I think it's fair to say this book is sort of a stream of consciousness but a bit more accessible... call it a primer to “Ulysses.”

This story had me thinking about this report that reading literary fiction improves empathy. I like to think that's true because I read a lot of literary fiction and I'd like to have something to look down my nose about.

Anyway, does all this reading make me more empathetic?

From Scientific American:

Popular fiction tends to portray situations that are otherworldly and follow a formula to take readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and exciting experiences. Although the settings and situations are grand, the characters are internally consistent and predictable, which tends to affirm the reader’s expectations of others. It stands to reason that popular fiction does not expand the capacity to empathize.

Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom. Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.

So, “Falconer” has no real storyline. All it does is follow this fellow though prison. There are no real character transformation, no real protagonist, no real conflict or any of that business. The character of Farragut is far from likeable but, yes, I found myself empathizing with him.

There is one particularly unusual passage I'll relate to you here... the buildup to this is a bit convoluted but suffice to say Farragut's boyfriend is looking to escape when a visiting cardinal comes, but then it rains and the cardinal may cancel the visit... here is the line:

“The naked man was worried. If it rained there would be no escape, no cardinal, no nothing. Have pity upon him, then; try to understand his fears.”

This is literally the only time the narrator breaks the fourth wall. It was so stark and shocking that, yes, I obeyed what he did. It was crazy and it worked. I almost started crying for this character for whom I couldn't think of any real redeeming characteristics.

You know, this is how literature can be a bit transgressive. It's not about rooting for the villain, it's about realizing that the construct of hero and villain is false. If the villains are not villains then the heroes are not heroes and so much of how we want to see the world falls apart, but what is then constructed in its place is something that allows for more empathy. You don't have to love someone to understand them or pity them.

Of course, all this empathy can cause, at least in me, even more frustration with people around me. People who are so blind to the world that even something a stupidly petty as a political party or a favorite football team is enough to demonize “the other.”

Of course it all falls apart there because I then realize I'm not empathizing with these people who frustrate me.

Well... this is only the seventh book in the Hundred Book Challenge so maybe when I get to the end I'll be all sorts of empathetic- even for people who drive me crazy for their lack of empathy. 

Hundred Book Challenge #6: "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John Le Carre

It's the anti James Bond or Jason Borne.

We tend to romanticize spies but in the end they are just professional liars.

Recently, I started questioning why we make heroes out of certain groups of people based on occupation. Solders, police, fire fighters and spies. Maybe it's some sort of fantasy. There are some things to say about these people- they do save lives.

Still when you look into the lives of these people you come to the depressing realization that they are just normal people and that is kind of bad thing because you don't want these people to be normal. You want them to be better than that.

My time as a reporter showed me that police, solders and fire fighters are not special people. They make stupid human mistakes like everyone the only thing is their stupid mistakes can ruin people's lives.

In “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” We see Leamas, a British operative in charge of handling all the double agents from East Germany shortly after the building of the Berlin Wall, but they are being discovered and killed so Leamas is told to become a double agent himself by effectively ruining his life and reputation to the point where the communists come to him.

To say more would be spoilers but this story is full of twists and turns and I honestly didn't know how it would end until I read the last paragraph. Without giving much away (in other words... spoilers) you don't know if Leamas will live or die and, more to the point, which would be worse.

There isn't action or adventure in this book. Instead we get an accurate portrait of the moral inexactness of Cold War era spying and government in general.

To quote the protagonist, “What do you thing spies are: Priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”

There is no good side or bad side here. London, representative of Christians, Capitalism and freedom is just as guilty of atrocity to the world in general and to poor old Leamas specifically as the Communists.

Do the ends justify the means or does that question even mean anything? It's hard to say.

Ironically, this story led me into the cold. After I finished reading it, at about 1:30 in the morning as I sat up next to my sleeping wife, I couldn't sleep for several more hours. It left me shaken and empty, but in that movement it was more successful than any spy story I've encountered. Emotional movement is probably the key to any proper story and as such I appreciate the experience.

I'll have a real hard time enjoying any James Bond films now though. 

Hundred Book Challenge #5: "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chanler

… but who killed the chauffeur?

“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is the first of the Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novels.

I was about to say that if we ignore Dickens' “Bleak House” and the Sherlock Holmes stories... and some Poe and King and Christine I had no experience with detective novels before reading this. Obviously the fact that I've read all these others, including the fantastic Mrs. Marple books by Christine, I have quite a few detective novels under my belt. Still, “The Big Sleep” felt different. And for good reason, but I'll get to that in a bit. 

One side effect of this entire Hundred Book Challenge is the fact that I'm going to walk away from it with about a hundred thousand more books to read. After going through “The Big Sleep” I will have to read the other seven-odd novels that star this hard-living, hard-drinking detective.

Here's the thing: Marlowe isn't very cool. He is smart and almost every lady that comes across him tries to get him in bed, but he turns them away with a terse remark before going to a bar to drink and then going home to be alone. He seems to be constantly on the edge of falling into a deep depression. He is smart, but that intelligence alienates him from people. He is alone. He plays chess by himself. He drinks and drinks and drinks.

The story starts out as Marlowe is given a seemingly simple case: He is asked by a dying old rich man to figure out who is blackmailing one of his two wild daughters. Things spiral out of control into the seedy underbelly of 1930s Los Angeles complete with pornography, illegal gambling, murder, sex, betrayal and all the rest.

The story is pretty tight and the outcome is satisfying, but the mystery and the intrigue is not what makes this story run. That's where the chauffeur comes in. In a somewhat smaller story point a chauffeur dies. I try to follow these stories closely but at the end I couldn't figure out who was suppose to have killed him. I turned to the Internets and discovered that no one knows.

Here, I quote from Wikipedia:

In the case of "The Big Sleep", there is the famous question of who killed the chauffeur. When Howard Hawks made his film of the novel, the writing team were perplexed as to the answer. Hawks contacted Chandler to inquire and Chandler replied he had no idea. This exemplifies a difference between Chandler's style of crime fiction and previous authors. For Chandler the plot was almost secondary; what really mattered was the atmosphere and the characters. An ending that answered all the questions and neatly wrapped every plot thread up was less important to Chandler than having interesting characters who behave in believable ways.

Think about that for a second. It's like the polar opposite of most stories out there. Characters are stock and serve to forward plot. It's such a part of popular fiction that when it somewhat unnerving when we are presented with something different and more realistic.

Hard-boiled detectives are suppose to be cool, smooth characters not almost-broken men held together by a shaky morality and cheep whiskey. Much of his character building has been parodied and copied to death to the point where it's hard to remember this is one of the great originals.

Though it does play on my mind still. Who killed the chauffeur. Even though I know there is no answer the insidious little post-post-post modern dweeb inside me who scours the internet for story plot holes I can pull out when I want to be smarmy to my friends wish I knew just who killed the chauffeur. I suppose another point of the Hundred Book Challenge is to kill that guy and replace him with the guy who insists his friends read all these books he knows deep down they'll never ever read. Such is the life of a bookish person.

Maybe that's why Marlowe is so alone?

A couple of housekeeping things about this blog:

First, things have been a big sparse here lately. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what sort of blog this will be. Also, with my wife almost ready to burst with baby my mind has been on other things. Still, I'm not quitting here. Stick with me through the growing pains.

Second, I realize some time has gone by between my last Hundred Book Challenge entry and this one. I am still reading like crazy however. I am nearly complete with the 12-novel series “A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell that Time Magazine considers one novel. If anything I've upped my reading time to include more things. After I get through that behemoth things will get a bit more regular.