Better to Light a Candle - Orson Scott Card and DC Entertainment

Arright.  So.  DC hired Orson Scott Card to write "Adventures of Superman", a weekly digital series.

Mr. Card sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an advocacy group that seeks to prevent marriage equality from ever becoming a reality in the United States.  He also has a history of writing homophobic screeds of various flavours.

Inspired by John Scalzi's recent initiative, I've made a decision:

For every issue of this series that comes out, I'm sticking $5 in a pot.  Every few weeks (or when the series ends), I'm going to empty the pot out, and donate half to Human Rights Campaign, and half to the Lambda Foundation.

Human Rights Campaign donation page

Lambda Foundation donation page

Now, Scalzi has the attention of the slug he's trying to counteract, so there's at least a nominal chance that this measure will actually curtail said slug's behaviour.  That's not the case here - Card has no idea who I am.

This does, however, channel my rage in a constructive direction.

Who's with me?

Data and Branagh

This is the kind of little thing that delights me.

In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Defector", Data rehearses Shakespeare's Henry V, in the title role.  Data mentions he has studied the performances of numerous past actors in the role, including "Branagh" - presumably Kenneth Branagh.

Now, given that Branagh was born in the 20th century, Data can't have seen him live on stage - he can only have seen his film work.  (Unless there's a time-travel plot in play that I'm unaware of.)  Branagh did, in real life, star in a movie adaptation of Henry V, which, according to Wikipedia, was released on October 6, 1989.

Here's the rub: the TNG episode in question aired on New Year's Day, 1990, a mere three months after the movie was released.  It's my understanding - and I'm willing to be corrected - that Trek episodes, like most TV shows, were filmed months before they aired.  Which means that when the cast and crew were filming this scene, Branagh's movie wasn't even out yet.

Mobile Frame Zero - A First Look

This is damned interesting.

Mobile Frame Zero came to my attention earlier this week, thanks to a post on Penny Arcade.  It's a tabletop wargame, a la Warhammer 40,000 or Heavy Gear or Warmachine.  The difference here is that MFZ's rules are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and the game uses "Lego or other building toys" for its models and terrain.

Creative Commons.

Lego.

Which is to say: if you already have some Lego, you could play this game for free.

Me and Wargames

I don't have a lot of background with wargames.  I've been playing WH40K for about a year and a half, and I've played a few rounds of Warhammer Fantasy.

I haven't played MFZ yet.  I read the rulebook over the weekend, and I've dug out the box of Lego at the bottom of my closet.  We'll see how this goes.

The Mobile Frame Zero Setting

There's a setting for the game.  It has a strong "real robot" mecha feel, along the lines of "Mobile Suit Gundam" and "Patlabor", though it's interstellar in scope.  It doesn't have the rich texture of the WH40K setting, but few games do, tabletop or otherwise, and WH40K has been around for 25 years.

Its other disadvantage versus WH40K, though, is it doesn't provide the same easy, automatic justification for forces who're nominally on the same side to face each other.  In WH40K, you have 20-odd mechanically defined factions, but within that division you've got room for countless subdivisions, each with their own agendae, each ready to go to war with each other at the drop of a hat.

That said, there's infinite room for invention.  It's set in the future, but deliberately vague on how far in the future - the people of the future measure time by the Solar Calendar, and the game's "present day" is SC 0245.  The factions aren't mechanically defined, so you can concoct whatever fluff you want for your force - I might create a pirate or rebel force, who do have excuses to attack anyone.  Likewise, because the factions aren't mechanically defined, you can simply ignore the fluff outright if so inclined.

Army Building

Each player fields a force (called a "company") of 3 to 8 "frames" - the game's term for mecha - with each frame carrying up to four combat systems of various kinds (weapons, surveillance, defense, etc.).  If my math's not off, there are 672 possible combinations of upgrades - 672 mechanically distinct frames.

Every battle size sets a range of  company sizes; within that range, you get to decide how many frames to deploy - the largest force starts with a significant point disadvantage, and the smallest with a significant point advantage.

And, of course, you build your company out of Lego.

Flickr is already full of people's Mobile Frame Zero handiwork.

Game Mechanics

These rules look damned elegant, and, in sharp contrast to WH40K, they're completely memorizable.  No shelf full of codices full of stats to memorize - just a simple upgrade system.  Frames can carry up to four systems - chosen from defense, weapons, surveillance, and movement - each of which provides dice that can be allocated to various actions.

When frames take damage, you remove systems from them, reducing their abilities - until you ultimately blow them to smithereens.

The mechanics call for a fairly large number of dice - potentially forty-ish, in five different colours.

Conclusions So Far

This game looks like a lot of fun.   I'm deeply enamoured of what looks to be a flexible and elegant unit-construction system, and it's a chance to wargame without breaking the bank.

The next step is to build some frames and try this thing out.

Cooke Kerfuffle

The kerfuffle is here.

Someone asked Darwyn Cooke what would have to change before he would be willing to go back to doing superhero work for Marvel and/or DC.

He was not shy in his response:

"I want them to stop catering to the perverted needs of 45-year-old men. I want to stop seeing Batman f***ing Black Canary. I don't want to hear Batman swearing. I don't want to see him feeding a boy rats. I don't want to see characters getting raped in the a**. I don't want to see characters who've been straight for 60 years become lesbians overnight because the writer's too stupid or uncreative to come up with something decent. I want to see new characters for a new time. And when the industry of superhero comics realigns its sights to the young people it was meant for, I'll be there with both, uh, both arms and feet."

In reading the comments on the post at iFanboy, it sounds like most of Cooke's comments refer to Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin, whence we get the famous "goddamn Batman" panel, and which Linkara has reviewed on his show.

What people latched onto, though, were (1) the "lesbians overnight" comment, and (2) its potential relationship to his line about superhero comics' "sights" needing to be "realigned" for kids.

Point #1 has caused some bafflement - people aren't sure if it refers to Greg Rucka's recreated Batwoman (who has 60 years of name-continuity, though her current incarnation is essentially a new character), or the Question (whose mantle was recently passed to a new character), or the Rawhide Kid (who is a touch too male to be a lesbian), or someone else entirely. Point #1 also causes concern in that Cooke seems to be saying that a character turning out to be gay isn't "decent"; me, I suspect he's complaining more about the essential gimmickiness (ha!) of such a move than any hypothetical "indecency" in having a character be gay.

Likewise, I don't think points #1 and #2 are supposed to be specifically connected. It was an off-the-cuff answer with all the dangers thereof.

Among other trains of discussion within the comments, people complain that if the comment is indeed about Batwoman, then Cooke's clearly not read anything with her, as she's awesome with awesomesauce on top (an assessment with which I heartily concur). She is essentially a new character unrelated to the original (indeed, one commenter claims the original is still around as a separate character).

The exegesis in the iFanboy comments is pretty complete, so I'm not going to add much here. My main reason for making this post is to quote this comment, from someone who clearly has read the recent Batwoman stories:

"All the 45-year-old-men I know totally get off on nuanced stories critiquing the effects of Don't Ask Don't Tell at the United States Service Academies. Hot! Hot! Hot! They say. Give me some more of that social commentary action!"

Win.

DC Universe Online Trailer

IGN has a trailer up for DC Universe Online. My initial reaction? "Screw the game; I kinda want to see this movie!"

Liberty Ale

Tonight*, Wheels is serving me Liberty Ale, by the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco. The label claims it's a "strong ale".

It's pleasant on balance. The first few sips had sort of a bitter "core" to them, but it's settled down. The further down I get into the beer, the less unpleasantly strong it gets, though it doesn't get bland by any means. Not a flavour I'm going to seek out, but it's pleasant enough now that I have it.

I was drinking half a beer - the bottle was huge, so Wheels and I split it. The glass I had had no noticeable dregs, except for the last sip, which was a last, diabolical grasp of bitterness.

(* I'm typing on Saturday evening. This should go online in the wee hours of Sunday morning.)

Media Smash-And-Grab

On this episode of Diggnation, Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose discussed file-sharing and theft, and how significant (if at all) the distinction between them was. This discussion was spurred by US government's recent call for a crack-down on media piracy.

There's a quote of US VP Joe Biden at the top of the story:

"It's smash and grab, no different than a guy walking down Fifth Avenue and smashing the window at Tiffany's and reaching in and grabbing what's in the window."

I am not here to argue that file sharing is okay. I am, however, here to stomp all over its equation with the theft of physical merchandise.

Seriously.

A Basic Business Model

Let's start with a hypothetical store: Skippy's Wonderful Widgets, owned by Skippy. Skippy's Wonderful Widgets sells, surprise surprise, wonderful widgets. Skippy's cost, when he orders widgets from his supplier, is $18 apiece. He sells these widgets for $20 apiece.

Before Skippy orders a widget to sell, his assets are, effectively: {$0}. That is, he has neither profits nor losses, and he has no inventory. (I could start him with some capital, but $0 makes the math a little easier. It means the same thing.)

After Skippy orders a widget, his assets are: {-$18, 1 widget}. That is, he has two items - a widget, and a debt for $18.

Now, when Skippy sells this widget - for $20 - his assets look like this: {$2}. The widget's gone, but he got some money for it, and now he has more money than he started with. That is, he's turned a profit. Skippy's profit on each sale is $2. Yes, I've left out labour costs and overhead. I may get to that in a later post.

Forgive me if I sound like I'm talking to a five-year-old, but some of the people in this discussion talk like five-year-olds, complete with the childish name-calling.

A Precarious Position: Holding Merchandise

So, back to Skippy. When Skippy's holding merchandise - when he's got {-$18, 1 widget} - he's in a slightly precarious position. He owes money, and he doesn't really have much use for widgets except as merchandise to sell.

But! Skippy just needs to make one sale to move from having {-$18, 1 widget} to having {$2}, which is better than his original {$0}. Just one sale to recoup his investment and turn a $2 profit.

Smash and Grab

Now, lets look at theft - real good-old-fashioned smash-and-grab theft. A nondescript-looking customer wanders into Skippy's Wonderful Widgets, then pockets a widget and bolts!

Okay, so "smash and grab" isn't entirely accurate. Nothing was smashed. But Biden used the term, and it's nicely evocative, so I'll run with it.

Now Skippy's in a real pickle. He started out with {$0}. Then he bought a widget, bringing him to {-$18, 1 widget}. Then that awful, awful person stole his widget, leaving him with just {-$18}. Well crap.

What's Skippy to do now? He goes out and buys another widget, which brings him to {-$36, 1 widget}, then sells it, bringing him to {-$16}. Due to that $2 profit per sale, which we saw earlier, Skippy recovers $2 per sale. He needs to make $18 to get back to where he was before he bought that stolen widget, and $18 / $2 = 9. Thus, Skippy needs to make nine sales to recoup his loss.

Now, in the earlier case - where he moved from {-$18, 1 widget} to {$2} - his one sale didn't just recoup his investment, it turned a $2 profit. Thus, to make this case the same as that one - to compare apples to apples - we need to move Skippy from his {-$18} post-theft black hole to {$2}. That's a $20 difference. $20 / $2 = 10, so to move from the {-$18} calamity to the earlier, utopic {$2}, Skippy needs to make ten sales.

Let me say that again: to recoup from one theft of merchandise, Skippy has to sell ten more.

And even after he makes those sales, Skippy's still behind. He's $20 down from where he'd have been if he'd sold that stolen widget.

A Magic Trick

Now, that shoplifter. What that shoplifter did was... basic. Old fashioned. But understandable. It seems to be the only sort of theft Joe Biden and Nicolas Chartier understand.

But what if we had a more... well, a more magical shoplifter. What if the shoplifter could walk into the store, wave a magic wand, and duplicate the widget that's sitting on Skippy's shelf? Before the shoplifter walks in, Skippy has {-$18, 1 widget}. The shoplifter would walk out with a widget in his pocket, and Skippy would still have {-$18, 1 widget}.

We've seen this position before. We know that to move from "precarious" at {-$18, 1 widget} to "successful" {$2}, Skippy needs to make one sale.

Let's dig a little deeper into this case. There are two slightly subtle sub-cases here, and they stem from what the thief would have done if theft (by magic or by sleight of hand) hadn't been an option. There are two possibilities: he would have bought the widget, or he wouldn't have.

If he would have bought the widget, then his duplication-theft of the widget robs Skippy of a sale. Where he should have had {$2}, Skippy instead has {-$18, 1 widget}. To get from one to the other, Skippy needs to make one sale. If he wouldn't have bought the widget anyway, then Skippy both should have and does have {-$18, 1 widget}. To get from where he is to where he should be, he needs to make zero sales.

A Comparison: Holding, Smashing, and Magic

When all goes well, to turn a $2 profit, Skippy needs to make one sale.

When a widget is stolen, to turn a $2 profit, Skippy needs to make ten sales.

When Skippy's merchandise is stolen by means of duplication, to turn a $2 profit, Skippy needs to make zero sales or one sale.

10 is not "no different" from 1. 10 is not "no different" from 0.

10 > 1.

10 > 0.

Conclusion

There is absolutely a discussion to be had about file-sharing and piracy. Of those who pirate stuff - music, movies, software, whatever - some would have bought it if piracy hadn't been an option, and some wouldn't have. That is, some represent lost sales, and some don't.

What's more, piracy can also lead to gaining sales. A person might discover a musician through piracy, then go out and buy that musician's work. Some creators depend on this exact principle, freely distributing large portions of their catalog for free, hoping that increased recognition and goodwill will earn them sales.

On the other hand, there's the simple permission issue. This was one of Metallica's (many) positions on the subject, back in the Napster days - that, regardless of profit and loss, their stuff was taken without permission. And that's a fair argument. But it's not the argument being made.

My point is that there is a worthwhile discussion to be had here, and glibly equating piracy with physical theft completely short-circuits that discussion.