Valve’s Steam Platform Hath Left Me A Woman Scorn’d

Today is a bad day. It didn’t start out that way. Actually, I had a very good night of sleep and a lovely breakfast chat with Berglaug via Skype. But then the day went on, and it all went south from there. This was in part due to the trained monkeys over at Valve customer service who neither provided service nor made me feel like a customer. Rather, I feel used, like the poor high school junior who gets deflowered in the back of her boyfriend’s mom’s minivan after promises of roses and picket fences and family vacations to his grandpa’s farm, only to find him bragging about it in a thoroughly douchey manner to the entire football team the day after. And then everyone laughs, and she gets addicted to caffeine pills and finds out he gave her an STD and all other manner of injustices before she finds the courage to believe in herself and decides to take that art scholarship in New York after all. Next Monday at 7 pm on ABC.

Seriously. Valve made me feel like a Kleenex. A cheated, angry Kleenex.

See, Sunday before last, I was over playing some post-Easter-dinner video games with the Brothers Quattrin. Cian the Younger placed the controller in my hands and told me to play Portal. It was lovely. My god, I thought, a puzzle game! A game where I have to think and strategize and say “hmm” a lot while enjoying shiny shiny graphics and promises of cake. I wish to buy this game, I told him, but I am not a console gamer. Then download Steam, he said, and purchase it for your PC. So yesterday, I did just that. I downloaded Steam, their online digital distribution platform. Huzzah!, I thought. Digital distribution! I love this digital distribution! I looked at the prices for the game and checked my bank account, which was feeling a bit pinched after celebrating a friend’s birthday this weekend. After I hemmed and hawed, I decided to go for it. If I’m good with brown bagging it instead of buying lunch this week, I’ll be fine, I thought. I got out my credit card. I bought the game.

Mistake.

About Damn Time

As I finish off my chamomile tea and get ready to hit the hay, I thought I’d end this fine weekend by sharing with you a bit of great news. Yes, rejoice, for a US court of law has ruled that, in the case of Superman, creators own their characters. At least a little bit.

From the article:
A federal judge here on Wednesday ruled that the heirs of Jerome Siegel — who 70 years ago sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130 — were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character. The ruling left intact Time Warner’s international rights to the character, which it has long owned through its DC Comics unit.

In other words, woot and huzzah. I can’t speak for the families of the creators in question, but to me, this ruling has nothing to do with money. As a someone who is taking their first baby steps into the world of writing and publishing, the idea of The Man owning my ideas and doing whatever the hell they feel like with them is worrisome. I’m all for growth and collaboration and change within the creative community. I love that. Ideas and stories are fluid, and they should be built on and changed as time allows. That’s what makes them great. But if you’re taking my world, telling people it’s my world, and then doing something I don’t like with it, then no. I’m not cool with that, and especially not if you’re making Scrooge McDuck-sized piles of money with it. However, that’s the reality of going corporate, and it sucks.

I have a feeling that this judge might have given writers and artists alike the hope for something different. But since I’m a level one super-noob when it comes to talking about ownership rights, here’s two well-known gents who thought this was good news as well. I found their reactions quite in character.

Warren Ellis: “fucking immense”
Neil Gaiman: “oh good”

Indeed, sirs.

My life is an RPG.

Yesterday, my quest giver friend gave me a call, declaring that our Chariot had been stolen.

First off, this does not happen in real life.  How many times do you get a phone call regarding your chariot, much less its having been stolen?  Approximately zero.

As some of you know, I teach Latin in a private high school.  As a teacher of such, I am taking a contingency of students down to Irvine, CA, this weekend for the annual California Junior Classical League State Convention.  This involves Roman games and competitions, one of which is a Chariot race.

So, our chariot was stolen.  Pain in the ass.  The head of the club (who happens to be the younger brother of a friend of mine and the aforementioned quest giver friend) arrived at my house this afternoon at about 4pm, bearing plywood and 24 feet of 2×2.

After a bit of running running to Home Depot and retrieving an axle from the Scene Shop at school, we set to building.

Suffice it to say that 2 hours of work and $30 worth of materials ended rather well, all things considered.  (I’ll post photos once we get back.)

Honestly, though.  Only in Roleplaying Games do you get bizarre orders such as “Build a chariot on short notice.”

7 Reasons Why We Are Totally Screwed

I am admittedly something of a news junkie, although in recent months, I’ve slacked off a bit. Recently I found myself jonesing once again for some good ol’ fashioned keeping up with world affairs. What a stupid idea that was. After about a week of delving into news blogs and watching nothing but PBS, I am so ready to stop evolving and let the Golden Age of Dolphins begin.

So what are these seven things that I’m talking about? If you’re reading this and aren’t an extraterrestrial, you live on one of them. I’m talking about the seven geopolitical continents of the Planet Earth.

Bunnies Are For Shagging, Eggs Are For Fertility

Dovetailing off Rud’s festivaly wishes, here’s my man Eddie Izzard to make your Eastinoxover celebrations complete.

Happy Spring Feast!

Now Transform and Roll Out.

Rules for a New World

Things we are not allowed to do for the first 5 years of the inevitable Zombocalypse:

1. Breed.  We need to establish a fucking new way of life, and you have no business slowing us down with your pregnant ass.  All hands need to work, whether that be establishing our walls and fences, growing our crops, or killing our zombies.  Even if we have someone who spent 2 years as a med student, you shouldn’t try to have a kid in the woods, anyway.  Wait until we get our feet under us, and stop thinking with your cock.

2. Anything by yourself.  No leaving, no eating, no staying, no crying, no jerking off.  Nothing.  I can’t trust you not to leave a fucking door open and kill us all.  It’s not the being undead that frightens me here: it’s the being torn limb from limb.  If I get infected because of you, I swear to all that is unholy that there won’t be enough of you left to reanimate by the time I’m done.  You’re not that smart and you’re not fucking Rambo.  Get used to life, and let us establish a safe zone.  You can be alone in the safe zone or you can be alone with a bullet between your eyes.

3. Go out searching for survivors.  If they last 5 years on their own, they’re worth keeping.  If they need to be rescued, they’re worthless.  This includes your niece/mother/son/friend/bunkmate who “must have survived because God wouldn’t be that cruel.”  Guess what.  There is no God, and the existence of Zombies is proof of that.

4. Make radio contact with anyone or anything.  You’ll just give us away.  Wait until we have the means to defend ourselves against more than a bunch of slow-moving, unarmed ghouls.  The first fucking moment you let someone know we have a wall and food, they’re going to come in with a truck and about a million dudes with kalashnikovs and hand grenades, while we sit here with like six bullets and a sharpened stick.

5. Try to capture a zombie.  What the hell are you thinking anyway?  It isn’t a person anymore.  It isn’t an animal.  It’s a walking cold sore.  It just wants to infect you.  Even after 5 years, I’m not for this plan.  The only way this could possibly work out is if you trick one into a hermetically sealed room just to see how long it takes to break down and stop moving, which will probably be way too long anyway, so just focus on your goddamned work.

Weekly Comic Review ~ Rud Edition

Sorry, I got caught up in what I thought was going to be a quick review of the latest Captain America. You know how it goes, though.

One of the things I love most about Marvel Comics right now is their ability to evoke a feeling of impending doom and futility that you might mistake it for an Irish love song. With Richard Ryder searching for a cure to the transmode virus, Phyla-Vell and Ronan the Accuser attempting to save the Kree from the Phalanx, or even such mundane trials as Jaime Madrox trying to keep his team from scattering to the winds, this tragic beauty abounds.

Worry not, though, fair reader, for the end is not nigh. There is always hope. Just as the fall of Troy did not mean the end of Priam’s people, but rather the genesis of the Romans, all this sorrow does not preclude happy endings. In fact, they may lead to a promise of something immeasurably better.

Symbols

When Steve Rogers was murdered, I thought that this was the end of all credibility for the Captain. Marvel has briefly attempted to replace Rogers a few times, but none of those attempts stuck. Steve truly was a symbol of the Good Old Days, when America most definitely stood for something, even if that something was only a dream. His primary armament was a shield, indicating that America should not be a country of Attack or Offense. Instead, we should be a country that defends and preserves the rights and freedoms of the world. This was a very important piece of propaganda and the American Dream when Steve Rogers was first injected with Dr. Erskine’s Super Soldier Serum. We needed to be the good guys, the City on a Hill that John Winthrop promised.

Tuesday Newsdays!

I don’t much like Tuesdays. I have to get up extra early for work on Tuesdays, I’ve usually run out of clean laundry by Tuesday, and Tuesday means that the week isn’t even half over yet. The saving grace of Tuesdays was the fact that Tuesday night was comic creating night, but as of tonight, we’re meeting on Sundays from now on, so Tuesdays are just kind of lame again.

So to save us all from the dreariness of the third day of the week, I am henceforth going to share with you a handful of the past week’s internet treasures, lovingly dug up late at night by yours truly. Let’s get started!

- A fun little article on how your favorite sci-fi shows correspond to your outlook on the future of humanity (by this author’s reasoning, I’m very much a Robert Heinlein gal, though I do hope for the Star Trek future that will never ever happen).
- In further evidence that bacteria totally rocks, scientists have discovered that bacteria are necessary in making rain.
- A chart comparing the Body Mass Index of male superheroes and that of female superheroes. Take notes, Billy Tan.
- This clever gent has given the three top presidential candidates the Monster Manual treatment.
- And a clever lady has made devilishly gorgeous steampunk animal skulls.
- Finally, though usually celebrity gossip isn’t even a blip on my radar, apparently Eliza Dushku and Seth McFarlane are dating. Words cannot express the pure geek perfection of this. In related news, omg Eliza Dushku omg.