Roger Zelazny Casting Call: Dalt

It's been a while since I've posted my casting choice for a character in the Merlin books, so to keep that interval from growing any longer; he's my choice for Merlin's uncle Dalt, whom Merlin describes thusly:

His hair looked golden, or even coppery,  by what light there was upon it, but I remembered it as a kind of dirty blond by natural light. His eyes, I recalled, were green, though there was no way I could see that now. I did begin to realize for the first time, however,  that  he  was pretty big-either that or he had chosen fairly short torchbearers. He had been alone that one time I'd seen him, and I had had no standard for comparison. As the light from our torches reached him I saw that he had on a heavy, green sleeveless doublet without a collar, over something black and also heavy, with sleeves that extended down his arms to vanish within green gauntlets. His trousers were black, as were the high boots they entered; his cloak was black and lined with an emerald green that caught our light as the cloak furled about him in shifting, oily landscapes of yellow and red. He wore a heavy circular medallion, which looked to be gold, on a chain about his neck; and though I could not make out the details of its device, I was certain that it bore a Lion rending a Unicorn.

That's probably as long a description as we get of any character in either series. I like Dalt. Green and Black happen to be my favorite colors, so I even like his outfit on an aesthetic level. He's the son of Deela the Desecratrix, who was raped by Oberon when she was his prisoner. Thus his hated of Amber is somewhat justifiable. His device is a lion rending a unicorn, and that's the kind of memorable detail I've come to love from Zelazny.

Dalt comes to terms with Amber, and again, there's that pragmatism I love from Zelazny's characters. He goes toe to toe with a Pattern Ghost of Eric, and though he loses, he makes a respectable showing.

And for the Amber series in my mind (One season per book, a la the Game of Thrones. We'll even show it on HBO so they can film Corwin's deleted sex scene with Dara) I think I'd like to see a young Dolph Lundgren in the role. 

He was a big, blond-haired son of a bitch, and he had on a yellow shirt and black trousers, black boots, lots of cutlery. The medallion of the Lion rending the Unicorn bounced upon his broad chest. Every time I'd seen or heard of the man, he'd been about something nasty, damn near killing Luke on one occasion. He was a mercenary, a Robin Hood figure out of Eregnor, and a sworn enemy of Amber-illegitimate son of her late liege Oberon. I believed there was a price on his head within the Golden Circle. On the other hand, he and Luke had been buddies for years, and Luke swore he wasn't all that bad. He was my uncle Dalt, and I'd a feeling that if he moved too quickly the flexing of his muscles would shred his shirt.

He's big (about 6'5" and 250 pounds at his peak), he's athletic (European champion in Kyokushin Karate in 1980 and 1981), he's smart (speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, and Italian, was a Fulbright Scholar and holds a master's degree in chemical engineering). I hate to say, but of the accomplishments for which he's known, the thing he probably does least well is acting.

Watching Cartoons with Lily: Liberty's Kids

Jen and I differ on what constitutes age-appropriate material for our five year old daughter. That's not unusual. You'll probably find a similar dynamic at play in any relationship with kids.

I'm working from a home office now, so I pick up Lily at the bus stop in the afternoon and we'll sometimes watch some cartoons when she's done with her homework. I tend to be a bit more liberal with letting her watch shows for older kids. Sometimes that works out and other times it doesn't.

One time we were watching an episode of the Justice League where a parallel universe version of Superman shows up and deals with a supervillain by blasting him with his heat vision right through his forehead.

Lois Lane realizes what he did and calls him out on this ("You...lobotomized him.") and then when Jen gets home and we're all sitting down to a pleasant dinner, Lily pipes up with "What's 'lobotomize' mean?"AWKWARD!

Domo arigato, Mister Loboto

And then I tried my hand at something that was definitely age appropriate, with a Superfriends comic book. I read it to Lily and she listened attentively, and then when I was done, she said "Daddy, that was really, really boring."

She's right. This was crap.

So it's a bit of a balancing act, finding something she likes, that isn't too inappropriate, and which we can at least tolerate, since we try to be in the room with her when she's watching TV.

That's why I'm happy that she likes Liberty's Kids. I had seen it once before she was born, and it just fascinated me. It's a fictionalized account of the Revolutionary War era (from the Boston Tea Party in to the ratification of the Constitution), with a couple of kids as viewpoint characters.  It also has the craziest stable of celebrity voice actors this side of the Simpsons. Walter Cronkite is Ben Franklin and we have Arnold Schwarzenegger as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Billy Crystal, Maria Shriver, Michael Douglas, Warren Buffet (!), Norman Schwarzkopf, Liam Neeson, It's really impressive. Here's the link to Wikipedia's list of all the Historical figures in the show.

I think the most interesting part is the treatment of Benedict Arnold. Dustin Hoffman voices him, and we get his whole character arc over the length of the show, from his military career, to his plan to surrender West Point to the British. We've watched about twenty episodes so far, and right now we're seeing him as a man passed over time and again for the promotions he believes he deserves and slowly consumed by bitterness. The one kid in the show, Sarah Phillips, is very close to him, and it will be interesting to see how she reacts to his treason.

 In the internet era, everyone knows that Darth Vader is Luke's father, and that Schwarzenegger is the good Terminator in the second movie and that Gandalf comes back in the Two Towers. When I was growing up, Benedict Arnold was a byword for traitor. But Lily doesn't know this. It will be interesting in seeing how Lily reacts to this too.

(Assuming we ever get beyond the 20th episode. Lily is always asking for "The one with Doctor Franklin in the bathtub." She's a weird kid.)

It's surprisingly nuanced for a kid's show.  One of the viewpoint characters starts as a loyalist to the crown and her arguments actually have some validity. Slavery comes up very often. The brother of one of the fictional characters, (Moses, a former slave who had bought his freedom) joins the British army because they have promised to free the slaves once they put down the rebellion. And the fact that the Constitution does not abolish slavery is not glossed over.

We're going to take her to the Constitution Center in Philly when she's old enough to appreciate it, and it's starting to look like that day's not far off. 

The Replacement JLA: Late for a very important date

My friend Tim asked why I had stopped writing our campaign log. I stopped writing it because we had stopped having games. Not because we weren’t interested, but because it’s hard to coordinate the same night off between five adults who have families and jobs.

We finally had our fifth session on Saturday after a long hiatus. It was pretty great. Dave had to miss this session, but the rest of us were there. You can read more detailed write-ups of the characters in the earlier entries, but here's a quick summary.

• I was Dawnfire, a formerly terminally ill teenage girl cured and given Superman’s powers through an experimental procedure.
• Frederick was Rächen Bloodson, half-demon offspring of Etrigan and Morgan Le Fey.
• His stepson Danny played Plastic Man.
• And Casey was Blink, the sidekick.

We opened with a communique from the JLA Watchtower, telling us that the weekly meeting was beginning soon and we should wrap up what we doing and beam up so we could participate. What we were doing was busting up a drug manufacturing operation. We occasionally open in media res like this, and I’ve sometimes wondered how we track down these operations, because we have fuck all investigation skills between us, and we act like a bunch of muppets whenever we need to do anything more complicated than tying our shoes. Presumably “Batman” feeds us the answers and we do the fieldwork.

We totally outmatched the bad guys and Eric said this was pretty much an opportunity to show off and be awesome. I said “Winners don’t do drugs,” Plastic Man turned into a giant Robin Williams a vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the cocaine, and we kicked all kinds of ass. That’s what we did, until we were interrupted by a massive EM Pulse that wiped out non-hardened electronics for miles around. Eric is a really good GM, and it’s in no small part due to the small details he includes. My character’s regeneration is solar-powered and only works in sunlight and he said that the pulse was so bright that for a half-second my regeneration worked.

I flew up in the sky to see if I could determine the center of the blackout and it was dark as far as even my super vision could see.

We performed disaster relief, and though we couldn’t reach the Watchtower, initially I wasn’t too worried, because I just assumed that the EMP had disrupted communication. We still had Rächen’s mental network coordinating us. (I imagined his voice in the network sounding like Casey Kasem’s “This is KDMN and there’s something strange going on in the skies over Metropolis.”.)

Blink was unable to teleport up to the satellite when it would have come around to our location, and it soon became clear that they weren’t just out of touch. Either they were cloaked, or they were gone.

We received a cryptic message from a group calling itself the “Percentage Five T”. “Metahumans will be purged, normals will be preserved. We are already here.”

We decided to go to the Pentagon and walk in like we owned the place. That was received about like you’d expect. (It’s was Blink’s plan and I don’t know why we listened to the sidekick.) Rick Flag met us in a room full of power nullifiers.

Flag: “The Pentagon is on high alert.”

Blink: “Why?”

Flag: (acidly) “Oh, I don’t know.”

We eventually make It clear that we’re here to help, and they put us up in a hotel for the night and help us locate the source of the disturbance.

Blink and I do some disaster relief. His mom was on the satellite and he’s trying to tire himself out so he can sleep. As morning comes around, I get zapped by eyebeams from a bystander.

When I originally designed Dawnfire, I envisioned her as a grappler. She has a very high strength for her PL, and an array of advantages to allow her to be very good up close. I particularly like “Fast Grab” which allows me to start a grapple if I succeed in an unarmed attack. I’m pretty sure I never used it up until now. I wasn't particularly sandbagging her grappling prowess, but I never had the opportunity to use it. Either the people I hit went down with one punch, in which case Fast Grab was irrelevant, or they were clearly much stronger than I was, in which case starting a grapple would have been suicidal. I was starting to think that I wasted the points building her like I did when this fight happened. I kicked the shit out of her. The fight would have been over in the first round had Eric not used GM Fiat and given me a Hero point to draw it out. (The same thing happened in the second round too. Dawnfire is hell in the clinch.) Frederick commented that the art- robbing pervert from the first session gave us a harder time.

The camera crews are filming us, and the woman, who turns out to be Supergirl says that “You’ve disgraced his legacy.” She’s talking about Superman, who served as the template to give Dawnfire her powers. I say, “I’m not trying to take anyone’s place, I’m just trying to fill in until he comes back”, and Blink teleports the group of us to someplace more private.

Supergirl: Perky boobs, but a glass jaw

Supergirl doesn’t want to talk, though, and flies off. We actually handled that very well. Dawnfire was trying to talk her down the whole fight, and we avoid the kind of egregious blunders that were becoming our trademark. We looked pretty good. We quickly confer and then teleport into a TV station, where we hold an impromptu press conference. Plastic Man has his mouth literally zipped shut. We briefly say that we regret the misunderstanding, we’re on the same side as Supergirl and we welcome the opportunity to clear the air.

Reporter (to Ray): Is that a mask?

Ray: *Silence*

Me: (Waving) Hi Dad! I’m on TV!

Reporter: Who’s your father?

Me: Um, he’s Canadian. You’ve probably never heard of him.

Reporter: Are you Canadian?

Blink: *Teleports everyone out of the studio*

The Pentagon has located the source of the disturbance, and they fly us out to Europe to deal with it. We scout out the giant spaceship, then Blink teleports us inside and we smack the shit out of the purple aliens. Eric pulled a switcheroo, with the two characters he described in detail being minions and the other five being guys close to our PL. It reminded me of something one of the factions in the Feng Shui/Shadowfist RPG did. They dressed up the most expendable mook in each squad in the most ostentatious insignia, making him the target and drawing fire away from the real field commanders. It worked, and we wasted our surprise round against two guys that would have gone down to Blink’s area attacks.

One of the badguys tries to fry my brain with a perception-ranged mental blast, and it would have been successful, because my Will save is garbage, but I was sitting on a pile of Hero Points from the fight with Supergirl and I just rerolled if I thought I was going to fail. Between the lot of us, we make short work of the aliens. They teleport away and their ship goes up.

It was a pretty eventful session. All the evidence suggests that the satellite has really been destroyed with all hands lost. At the very least, we’ve at least temporarily lost the resources we’d come to depend on. (We were talking advancement and Casey mentioned that the group didn’t really have anyone with any kind of interaction skills, and that he was thinking of putting some points into that area and I almost said, “Meh, just let the NPCs do it.”)

Eric mentioned later on that he had this planned from the beginning, and it’s pretty cool the way he pulled the rug out from beneath us. I kind of like this, because we’ve got the opportunity to move from a reactive to a proactive format. We’ve got no allies, a lot of enemies; we’re trying to find the missing Justice League and hold the world together in the process. It’s going to be the best campaign…EVER!

Story Review: Lovestruck

Zach was kind enough to post a link to his story "Lovestruck" in the comments section. I enjoyed the story tremendously. I think it compares favorably to The Great Slow Kings and my assessment of Lovestruck is similar to what I said about Slow Kings. It's a clever concept, executed well, and concluded before the reader gets tired of it.

Brevity is a virtue I appreciate more and more, particularly with humor stories. Nothing kills a potentially funny story faster than going on too long, but Lovestruck expertly avoids that pitfall. It's an account of the contest between Houyi, Cupid and Robin Hood to settle once and for all the question who is the greatest archer in the land.

I liked it a lot. It appealed to my sense of humor, the dialogue was punchy, the pacing was great, the descriptions were clever and the ending was very funny.

I don't know Flash Fiction's policy on direct linking, so I'll just post a link to the front page and you can find Lovestruck from there.

http://www.flashfictiononline.com/

I Don't Like Stuff that sucks: Fright Night

I mentioned that I didn't enjoy the 2011 remake of Fright Night. Going in, I was anticipating it being pretty decent. The trailers I had seen made it look good and it had David Tennant, who is always entertaining.

Unfortunately, and not to put too fine a point on it, it's a piece of shit. Marti Noxon wrote the screenplay. You may know her as the person who oversaw the collapse of Buffy the Vampire Slayer during its fifth and sixth season. I don't know why anyone would let her have anything to do with vampires, but if you want someone to destroy a previously beloved vampire property, Marti Noxon is your woman. We wind up with a movie that's a disjointed collection of set pieces that might be interesting given a more competent cast and directors, but which are flat, artificial and lifeless when presented by the ones we have.

Let's start with the brief montage that plays on the menu screen. It's not bad in itself. It has the one scene I like from the movie, where Colin Farrell grabs the cross from the kid, then blows out the flames when it flares up.

This is the last positive thing I'm going to say about the movie

Unfortunately it shows a vamped out McLovin, spoiling the tiny bit of suspense for any incredibly dumb people in the audience. Since the incredibly dumb represent a sizable portion of those who would otherwise enjoy this movie, I imagine they were outraged.

Anton Yelchin is an utter cipher, combining Michael Cera's versatility with Tobey Maguire's smoldering charisma.

Anton Yelchin, human chameleon.

Imogen Poots, who has an awesome name, plays his improbably hot girlfriend

but is completely incapable of sustaining an American accent for more than three lines in a row. Fuck, I mean Kevin Costner was more consistent with his accent in Robin Hood. The film had a thirty million dollar budget, and she had about thirty lines. Far be it for me to suggest how the director of Lars and the Real Girl should direct his movies but maybe it would have been worth it to reshoot a scene when she forgot how we pronounce our r's, so we didn't wind up comparing her performance unfavorably to Christopher Lambert's in Highlander?

While we're on the subject of attractive women,  I thought, "Wow, Toni Collete looks like someone's hot mom!" and then I looked her up and saw that she's only two years older than I am! I was too reminded of my own mortality to be able to enjoy ogling her.

We had a throwaway character who looked like he could be James Franco's brother. Oh, he was.

David Tennant...was actually pretty good. He did the best with what Craig Gillespie gave him and he was the only entertaining part of the movie.

Colin Farrell might be an asshole in really life, but he's certainly is a good looking guy (my friend Kate loved him) and occasionally a decent actor but not here.There were several scenes where he ate apples, but I have no idea where they were going with that.

Vampires have to get their fiber somewhere

Farrell's character's cover story is that he works night construction. It's a picayune complaint, and I only happen to know this because I used to research the US Construction market, but commercial construction in Las Vegas is the lowest it has ever been.  There were thirteen commercial construction permits issued in Clark County in December 2011. Thirteen. Yes, it's a seasonal business, but the fact remains that the industry is in the toilet. I would assume that the script was written a couple years ago in the middle of the housing boom when construction was soaring and a newly arrived night construction worker would be believable. In fact, there is nothing to suggest that the movie is set in 2011 rather than 2007, but I'm not inclined to be generous, because, fuck this movie.