Tell Microsoft I'm Not Speaking To It

For the last few months, I've been using Microsoft's brilliantly useful Windows Live Workspace. It allows me to open my Microsoft Word documents anywhere and edit them easily within the Word application. This has allowed me to write and edit my fiction from several different places, such as my home computer and the computers at work. So far, so good. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided they're going to cancel Live Workspace and transfer everything to SkyDrive.

Any my version of Word doesn't support SkyDrive.

That leaves me with three equally unpalatable choices. One, go back to much less convenient work-arounds, such as emailing myself documents or using another, less integrated service. Two, use the crappy in-browser editor Microsoft gives you with SkyDrive, which is about equal to this cheapo text editor I'm using to write this blog. Three, buy a new version of Microsoft Office for around a hundred fifty bucks just so I can keep going with the service I've gotten used to.

I can shrug off most inconveniences, but I'm furious about people messing with my writing. You can't dangle this great service in front of me and then take it away from me if I don't pay you more money, Microsoft. That's just not right.

I can't help but think it wouldn't be difficult to continue to support Workspace. It gives me less storage space than SkyDrive, which is fine by me, since I'm only using it for text documents. If I chose to voluntarily keep using Workspace, I could save Microsoft some storage space. Yeah, storage is currently ridiculously cheap, and I'm sure it's assigning employees to keep the system running that's the issue, but that doesn't make me any happier. This just stinks of Microsoft wanting me to buy a new product just so I can keep doing something they offered me before with my old product.

I'm genuinely upset. I don't know what I'm going to do. I genuinely want to keep using this service, but I don't have that kind of money. To add insult to injury, Workspace still assures me it's in Beta. Does this mean there will never be a release version? Have I been teased this whole time? I'm so mad I can hardly even type. I'm so mad my skin's turning... kinda... green. I... can't... think straight. No... not again...! I........


RAAAAAAAAAAAAR! HULK SMASH!

A Very Half-Assed Reaction to The Legend of the Seeker

I watched a single episode of The Legend of the Seeker, on which I will now base my opinion of the entire show. It wasn't even the first episode, but episode 18 of season 2, because that's the closest to the beginning Hulu would show me for free. I obviously don't care enough about writing a review to bother spending money on it, or even the time it would take to find a pirated stream of the first episode. Here be spoilers, but since I have no idea who is whom and what's going on, it would be difficult for me to spoil anything majorly.

The villain is hideously cheesy. He has a goatee, long hair, a cape, and speaks with a British accent. To add an even more obviously derivitive level of cheese, he's dead in this episode, and longs to come back to life, missing "the taste of a crisp apple." At the very end of the episode, he grabs an apple out of a basket, takes a bite, and looks meaningfully at the camera. I wish I could make this up. At that point it went from ripping off Pirates of the Carribean to being an outright homage to it. (I called him Cheesy in my mind, since I could never figure out what name they were saying.) He was also the hero's brother, which he constantly reminds the viewer by calling him "brother" at the slightest chance. Makes me wonder whether fantasy worlds are really just composed of three extended families. And a bunch of peasants, of course.

Perhaps because the episode was so late in the series, there was no character development for any of the main characters. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what any of them do. One of them seemed to have the ability to take over the mind of anyone whose eyes she looks into, which they called "confession." I guess having grown up Catholic confused me about the actual meaning of the word, but it would explain some things about organized religion (oo, burn, but I don't really mean that about religion; I only wonder if the show/writer did). There was also a wizard (played by the gyrocopter pilot from the Mad Max movies) who could shoot fire from his hands and said everything important with his eyes OPENED REALLY WIDE. There was one laugh out loud moment when he "cast a spell" by holding his hand off-camera while the spell sound effect went off. BUDGET-TASTIC.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is that the show all felt like it was set in a generic medieval world. The villains wore chainmail and tabards fresh from the prop department and got chopped up with minimal effort. Major plot events unfolded in a generic tavern. Everyone wore tunics and boots and dresses. The hot warrior women villains wearing tight tight leather seemed to have been lifted from any half-assed modern fantasy novel, which I suppose is what the source novels might well be. I confess to never having read them and having no intention to do so. So really, this review is more like quarter-assed at best.

The show was also rife with generic fantasy names. I have a theory that you can judge any fansty story by adding together unpronouncable names and generic words capitalized to form proper nouns. It's like golf: the higher your score, the shittier your fantasy. There were more than a few of the former: when spoken, I count any word as unpronouncable if I have no idea how to spell it even after hearing it a half-dozen times in the show. Of the latter there were plenty: The Keeper, The Seeker, The Spirits, The Midlands, The Stone of Tears, The Creator, The Lands of the South, The Sisters of the Dark, The Veil... seriously, is there a shortage of proper nouns in this world? It's like whoever was coming up with names for things just gave up halfway. Along these lines, I could call my magical chair The Chair, my keyboard The Keyboard, and my computer mouse Raymond, because I also haven't mentioned that half the characters have completely normal English names like Walter, while the other half have generic fantasy names. Here I should give an example of one of those generic fantasy names, but I wasn't paying close enough attention to actually pick any up. Or know how to spell them.

The episode centered around what I can only call a wacky caper by two minor villain characters, as the 'story' plot it was woven into consisted of The Seeker trying to take The Scroll from The Sisters of the Dark to protect The Veil, and the writers may have realized this was way too generic fantasy to hold even their core watchers' attention. So wacky buddy hijinx it was. (I realize it was the Scroll-of-Something-or-Another, possibly the Scroll of MacGuffin, so I didn't list it above, but they DID refer to it for most of the episode as simply 'The Scroll.')

To reiterate, there were plenty of fantasy staples: an evil temple, a tavern, a Renfaire town market, bad guys in chainmail carrying crossbows, Burning Hands, a villain with a goatee and English accent, an old wizard with long white hair, a generic fantasy hero with a destiny and no charisma (I'll rant about destiny some other time), cold-hearted villain women who are both way too good looking and way too thin to be a combat threat, etc, etc, etc.; I could go on about these at length, but it also seemed like the heroes were just too darn powerful for me to think they might not succeed. They blew through dozens of bad guys hardly taking a scratch. In one scene the characters find it almost laughably easy to transfer a character from one body to the other and bring another character back from the dead. This scene had me in near stitches because the actress spoke the 'magical language' (repeating the same phrases over and over) with an ahfahl Amahrucan accahnt. Nothing ruins the magic of a made-up language like that swallowed R.

The hero of the spoof Krod Mandoon, although that show was absolutely awful, seemed kind of likeable for his everyman personality and sense of humor. The hero of this show (the titular Seeker) only seemed really focused, because he just looked at things intensely. Or maybe he just needs glasses. But like I said before, this episode didn't center on him, and I'm not sure if he got more than ten lines in the whole thing.

There were, however, some moments I found kind of cool. ... Okay, I've sat here for literally five minutes since typing that, and none come to mind. But there really were some moments that made me think, "Hey, that's kind of cool." At the end of the day, every criticism I've had, I say with love. This is the corny, derivitive crap that I've seen pop up again and again in books, magazines, roleplaying games, TV shows, and movies. And, like an annoying friend who just keeps coming around, it's grown on me, and now those silly tropes and over the top plot devices are familiar and, yes, even dear to me.

The production values, while TV level, weren't the worst I've lived with, and I do love me some fantasy, even when it's hardly great. It's magic, heroes with swords, and escapist. I've been telling bad fantasy stories with my buddies since I was a kid, and some part of me loves even the really cheeseball stuff like this. To paraphrase what Brian Posehn says in his video about "Metal By Numbers," compared with sitcoms or reality TV, even shitty fantasy rules!

Toshiro Mifune Kills Indians

Let's just get this out of the way: the most obvious drawback of the movie Red Sun is that Toshiro Mifune's voice is dubbed when he speaks English. I've heard it was one of his greatest regrets that he was never allowed to use his voice for his English lines in his movies, and that makes me doubly sad. Mifune's voice is inimitable, resonating and powerful, and any voice they choose for him doesn't do the great actor justice. I really wish there was a version with his original voice, but I'm afraid I'm not so lucky.

That being said, Red Sun is a Western with Toshiro Mifune in it. In one movie, he adds Indians, banditos, and cowboys to The List of Things Killed by Toshiro Mifune. While his voice might not be his own (save when he speaks Japanese), his powerful screen presence commands this movie, and that alone is worth the almost two hours of runtime.

It's by no means a perfect movie, and so I'll anticipate some of the complaints you might have, and answer them all accordingly.

You: It's a hackneyed Western plot with stock characters and situations.
Me: It's Toshiro Mifune in a Western.

You: The writers clearly had only a cursory knowledge of Japanese culture.
Me: Toshiro Mifune plays a samurai badass.

You: Although the plot initially balances Charles Bronson's character with Toshiro Mifune's, the middle of the movie is heavily geared toward Bronson's character, and Mifune becomes something of a sidekick.
Me: Toshiro Mifune is no man's sidekick, least of all Charles Bronson's. He badasses his way right into the spotlight, whether the director wanted him to or not. Even when he's not speaking or doing much of anything, he's BEING TOSHIRO MIFUNE.

You: The supporting cast, particularly Ursula Andres as a whore who can't keep her shirt on, is disappointing.
Me: You'd be disappointing, too, if you were standing next to Toshiro Mifune.

You: The plots and conflicts are so contrived they practically groan for you.
Me: HAVE YOU HEARD NOTHING I'VE SAID? IT'S TOSHIRO M.F.ING MIFUNE IN A WESTERN!!!

Also, Charles Bronson's character is actually pretty likeable.

The Story of a Soldier

I love the song "The Story of a Soldier" from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I regularly cite that movie as one of the three best ever made (that I've seen, of course), and this sublime song is beautiful outside the song as well. I listen to it especially when I'm in a mood for Westerns. For those of you familiar with the film, (SPOILERS->) it's the song the Confederate prisoners are made to sing in the prison camp as the guard beats Tuco.

The extended version of the DVD has a longer version of the song on it, and the soundtrack CD has the full thing. I love that the song was written for the movie, but it sounds almost like an authentic Civil War era folk song. Here are the lyrics to the full version:

Bugles are calling from prairie to shore,
Sign up and fall in and march off to war;
Drums beating loudly, hearts beating proudly,
March blue and gray and smile as you go.

Smoke hides the valleys and fire paints the plains,
Loud roar the cannons till ruin remains;
Blue grass and cotton burnt and forgotten,
All hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price?

There in the distance, a flag I can see,
Scorched and in ribbons but whose can it be?
How ends the story? Whose is the glory?
Ask if we dare our comrades out there who sleep.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price we pay?

To me, the song speaks beautifully of the loss and devastation of war, and also of the way men who live in difficult times struggle on while longing for a better life. I think it's wonderful the way a song from a movie or TV show can become so important to me even away from its original context. Are there any songs like that for you?

Random Writing Thought

I'm currently writing a story with the working title "The Month of Two Suns." I can't help but think that "The Day of Two Suns" sounds much more dramatic, not to mention much more like a good fantasy story. A month is just too much time. It's hard to remain excited/scared about anything for a whole month, even if you're living in a fantasy world that has no TVs or Internet. The first few days you might run around and bump into things, but sooner or later, you have to eat something.

"Month" is, naturally, the amount of time the two suns appear in the story (which is to say, the sun and a comet), but I can't help but want to change it to "Day". If I see anything titled "Month" in a journal, I might just skip it, thinking it's just too long to bother with. I don't have the imagination at the moment to follow a whole month's itinerary, even if it's stuffed full of swashbuckling action and rip-roaring adventure (what exactly is the origin of that expression?). And the story isn't about the whole month anyway, just the end of it.

Do you think this hard about the titles for things? I know it really doesn't matter, since it's just a working title anyway. So, what did YOU spend your free time today doing?

The Web Ebb

I'm coining that, by the way. If this becomes a real thing, then I'm the first one who came up with it. Even if someone else has used it, I testify that I haven't heard of it, so I came up with it independently. Anyway, on with the show.

Lately, I've noticed that some of my friends are either thinking of leaving Facebook or outright leaving it. Most of my friends have either closed down their MySpace or at least stopped using it. Five years ago, I would have seen five to ten of my friends on instant messenger at any given time, and now I see maybe two or three.

I don't know whether this is a real trend or just something in my demographic. I know that my generation, the ones in their mid to late twenties, was the first to be immersed completely in the digital age. I was around eleven or twelve when I first really started getting into computers: the internet, email, that sort of thing. I remember when I fell for one of the first "Bill Gates will send you money if you forward this to all your friends" ploys. I remember the days I would type in a topic, add .com, and see what came up. Those were the days before Google, when WebCrawler, Lycos, and Excite were my main search engines. Within a few years, everyone I knew had instant messenging and email. And a few years after that, we started hearing about just how plugged in we are. I've heard it said that the computers have gone from another activity you do to the way we live.

But these days, it seems like that mad rush into the digital frontier, the topic of so many TV specials and documentary films, is slowing down. Maybe it's across the board and maybe it's just those of us who have been immersed in it for more than a decade, but it feels like people are starting to come up for a breath. I've heard it said many times that the internet age sneaked up on us, and we found ourselves plugged in without realizing how far in we'd gone, but I think that awareness is becoming more common. We've been jacked in for so long that we're starting to see the effects it's really had on our lives--and we're starting to pull back.

I won't claim that I'm starting to use the computer less, just that my desire to do so has waned. I still get anxious if I go more than a couple of hours without checking my email. I still check Facebook at least three times a day. But when I do so, I spend much less time on it. I visit my favorite sites out of habit, but I don't stay long. I've stopped playing massively multiplayer online games and online RPGs. I'm no longer really interested in having conversations with people I've never met. That novelty has long since worn off.

I noticed a smaller web ebb a few years ago when people stopped using MySpace and blogs quite as much. For a while out of high school and into college, it felt like a half dozen of my friends had regular blogs. These days, no one I know posts more than once a week. Sure, there are sites like Twitter, but I don't know anyone in my age range who's really jumped into that. In particular, I feel like we are less and less likely to all get excited about something new, getting on some new service or program.

It's possible the web has become just so integrated into our lives that it's no longer exciting, but I don't think that's it. I think we're genuinely starting to drift away from our computers. In some small way, I think the real world is starting to have that novelty effect that the digital world had for us fifteen years ago. We've gone so long plugged in that unplugging has become the new frontier.

Freedom and love

(I apologize that much of this isn't gender-neutral, but I am a man, and I'm putting these questions primarily to myself. I look forward to hearing your comments, though!)

I am fascinated by difficult choices, the moral quandaries in which the choice isn't good and evil, but two nearly equal qualities.

One of the first of these I thought excessively about is mercy and justice. This became particularly important to me when I started teaching college a few years ago. While judging student performance fairly is vital (after all, we wouldn't have grades without it), it's also difficult to look at a student who's genuinely struggling and say there is no room for circumstances. I'm still a sucker for the sob story. As much as it's important to be just (for the sake of the respect of my students, if not for Crom's sake!), I can't ignore that there is a personal relationship in all things, and people are not robots who exist to write papers and take classes mechanically. Life is a complex, varied mix, and it's impossible to foresee every eventuality that might net a student some leniency. Not only that, but I also have to keep in mind what the just grade would do to the squishy things like a student's self esteem and enthusiasm for a subject, which in many cases is on shaky ground as it is.

I have been pondering another question these days: freedom and love. Our modern society is fortunate--and spoiled--by having more freedom than almost any other people in history. Naturally, true freedom is largely rhetorical, since it's impossible to be absolutely free outside an anarchy. As opposed to Mad Max, a modern human is always immediately beholden to someone, whether a corporation, a government, or a religion. When we speak of freedom, then, we speak of degrees of freedom, of the difference between being free to light someone on fire and being free to express my own opinions or pursue a life that makes me happy. It's the freedom of women to live without fear or shame, as equals to men, and the freedom of all people to embrace their identities without prejudice.

It's difficult for me, I think, to imagine a world without freedom. I see it on the news, and I recognize the threat when the government steps up surveillance and detention, but I don't know the feeling of another man's boot on my neck.

Often I see the sentiment repeated that love is the greatest thing a man can aspire to, that life isn't worth living without it, and that it is man's greatest happiness. I believe true happiness can be found in love, and that humanity is by nature lonely without the embrace of a kindred spirit, the union between two souls, and the building of a family.

But the two may conflict. Perhaps the clearest conflict is the choice than comes with oppression and injustice. Does one stay home and safe, or leave everything he loves to fight? Does he risk losing all those things to go far away, fighting for something much less tangible than what he has? Is it worth dying for, leaving a family fatherless and hearts broken, for a cause like that? It is much easier, after all, to make do with the sacrifices oppression demands. It is safer to say "we cannot change these things, and it is foolish to try." We more readily bow our heads before the great inevitability of forces beyond our own strength.

This is a question I can't answer now. Is it a noble, good death to die for freedom? Is it just a word, an amorphous concept that never really exists? Is it all rhetoric to send men to their deaths, a bourgeois tool of control? Or is there true freedom, and is it really worth dying for? After all, it's not just the one life at stake, but the life and happiness of many that depend on that one.

I can only be glad that I do not yet have to answer these questions, and hope that, if the choice is put to me, I will choose well. Now, because I am young and idealistic, I believe I would choose one way, but I can just as well see the other side. After all, I have no love, and so it feels easier to give up the idea of it.



The poem that springs to mind when I think about this topic is one by the legendary Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi:

Szabadság, szerelem!
E kettő kell nekem.
Szerelmemért föláldozom
Az életet,
Szabadságért föláldozom
Szerelmemet.

(My translation:)
Freedom, love!
I need these two things.
For my love I sacrifice
My life,
For freedom I sacrifice
My love.



And he did.

Why I Love Star Wars

It's difficult to explain why we love anything because love is a pure emotion. Never ask your significant other, "Why do you love me?" We can no more explain the reasons we love than we can explain the feeling of love itself. Poets have been trying since the dawn of language, and we are no closer, not for lack of flower and moon imagery.

But I can get into some of the memories I have with Star Wars, and the joy it has brought me. I can still remember when I was a boy and I watched Star Wars for the first time with my parents. My dad tried to convince me that the lightsaber was really called a "life-saver." He also tried to say that Obi-Wan was Luke's uncle. I'm still not sure to this day whether he was serious or just screwing with me. I do remember he had pictures of himself with some original AT-AT models, since he told stories about how he had met some of the guys who worked on them.

Most of all, it's the moments from the movies that stand out to me the most. I remember the thrill that went through me the first time Luke turns on the lightsaber in Ben's hut. A simple piece of metal turned into a glowing blade in an instant! After seeing that, everything vaguely stick-shaped for me became a lightsaber. I remember playing Darth Vader and lightsaber fighting my brothers when my bed still had bars on the side and legs. I was convinced for a while that Darth Vader was a robot.

I particularly remember that my parents were scared that the rancor would freak me out, so they told me not to look. Naturally, nothing terrifies a kid as much as his imagination when he hears something scary and is told not to look at it. What our mind paints for us is far more terrifying than anything a creature shop can whip up. I still can't watch the rancor scene without flinching a little inside.

I remember watching the Ewok movies on cable. I remember it as something of a dream: I knew Ewoks and Endor from Star Wars, yet they were set apart from the characters and stories I knew and loved. It is still bizarre to me to watch them, like discovering after all these years that The Bible has a Part 2 starring only the apostles.

Years later, when I was perhaps 7 or 8, my mom read my brothers and me the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn. I remember running to our bedroom every night, singing the Star Wars theme song over and over until she got out the big hardcover from the library with the glossy cover and started to read. She read to us on the bumpy roads through the desert, and when she took breaks when the road got too bad to see the pages, I would look out the window and imagine the rolling sagebrush scenery filled with blaster fire, whirling starships, and the glow of lightsabers.

A few years after that, I owned just about every Star Wars action figure you could imagine. I would play with them constantly, inventing new stories, based on the movies and the books I was reading. For a while, I had every published novel read (except Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which I would only read many years later, to my horror). I owned dozens of the books and made my way through them without much awareness if they were good or not. I remember being vaguely disappointed with Darksaber, which I see now is one of the worst books I've read.

I got into the Star Wars video games. As a teenager, I owned Shadows of the Empire, but I never played it all that much. Later, I bought Jedi Academy, which is one of the better games I've played, and I particularly enjoyed playing it multiplayer. Every game eventually descended into flailing with lightsabers. I played a few hours of Battlefront and Battlefront 2, playing through the campaigns of each several times. I especially enjoyed the galactic battle modes. I played through The Force Unleashed and enjoyed it, but never played it again.

I've read and enjoyed much of the comics, especially Republic, which I hold to be head and shoulders above all other Star Wars comics I've read.

Perhaps my most striking memory is watching the Star Wars Holiday special with my brothers. For a while, we tried to make fun of it, but our quips and snarky comments became fewer and more hushed. Finally, we sat in stunned, awkward silence. It was like walking in on a woman you love hooking up with a drunk bald fat dude. It seemed like Star Wars, but the similarity only made it all the more awful.

Now, I enjoy (more or less) the Star Wars cartoon, and I eagerly anticipate the live-action TV show. I have a feeling that, despite everything that has happened, my love for Star Wars will stay strong. Those early memories full of lasers and lightsabers won't easily fade, no matter how many times I see Darth Vader say, "NOOOOOOOOO!" at the end of the Revenge of the Sith.