Toluu

Websnark

Protected Gnomish Habitat since 2008

Eric Burns-White: We call it Veteran's Day in this country, but around the world it is Remembrance Day.November 11 2008

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we will remember.

We will remember rows and rows of brave men and boys who charged into a new kind of war, over trenches, facing machine guns that spat out lead faster and with less discrimination than ever before. War was thought of as a noble pastime before they began this fight. Its nobility died on French fields with so many others.

We will remember armies that hated one another by tradition and temperament coming together and forming alliances. The French and the English. The Democratic and the Communist. Always the human.

We will remember the men and women, girls and boys who took up arms when their country called, in every country around the world. Who went and fought and died for causes they could believe in and for no reason at all except that their leaders told them to go. We will remember their courage. We will remember their loyalty.

One day a year, let us take one moment of one day and just remember them.

Whether we name it for those we remember and call it Veterans or commemorate the act itself and call it Remembrance, this is the day we stop and remember.

It is eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November.

We remember.

Eric Burns-White: A moment of reality.November 5 2008

In 1992, I watched the election returns at my Parents', as I almost always do. I stayed up late, long after they went to bed. I watch George Herbert Walker Bush concede. And I watched William Jefferson Clinton, after twelve years of Reagan, of Bush, of Republican rule, of jingoism and centralism and scandal and Iran-Contra and any number of things that were of vital importance to my twentysomething self that I can't really remember now, make his acceptance speech.

And it inspired me. My heart soared with his words. Clinton and Gore, the dream team, the redeemers, the bringers of light and life and rationality and whatever else. I clearly remember the two of them and their wives standing on stage afterward, ubiquitous campaign theme "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" playing in the background. I remember Tipper and Hillary doing a little song-dance thing, the kind of thing college kids do when they hear that bit of a song they really like, and I just felt good. I knew, I knew it was all going to get better now.

And here's the thing. It did get better. But it also got worse. Good things happened. Bad things happened. There were outrages and triumphs for Clinton, for Gore and for the nation. But the overpowering sense that we had won, that Yesterday Was Gone and Tomorrow Was Here, that this was the theme music for happily ever after? That didn't last.

Because you know something? Yesterday was gone. But tomorrow is still tomorrow. It's today. It's al

Eric Burns-White: Also on the list of real life mad scientists I know: the coworker who once rebuilt his laptop into a destructive heat ray.September 5 2008

We're getting ready to launch a brand new school year! So I've been, y'know, extra busy this week. Not that anyone's terribly surprised when I disappear for a little while here on the blog. At least this time it wasn't six weeks.

One thing I did take the time to do -- said time taking, oh, nine seconds -- was buy the just released Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog Soundtrack off of iTunes. I haven't felt any huge need to talk up the good Doctor -- most of you should already know about the internet sensation that swept geekdom like a giant... sweeping... thing over the course of the summer. (If you're totally clueless, be enlightened.) I really loved the videos, and it was a fait accompli that I'd get the album when it came out.

I won't promise there won't be minor spoilers below, for the record.

While listening to the studio recordings, I found my mind wandering to mad science. More to the point, I found my mind wandering to writing mad science. I have a project or two under the cone of silence that touch on the few, the proud, the psychotically curious, and like a lot of writers i sometimes use the power of music to get my brain in the right state of mind for whatever I'm working on. We are programmed by television and movies to respond to musical cues, almost subconsciously -- the right music can underscore pai

Eric Burns-White: I promise you, we don't get up that early on a Sunday.September 1 2008

(From Least I Could Do! Click on the thumbnail for full sized homily!)

It's been demonstrated in the last that Lar deSouza likes to throw in stealth cameos into the strip. (I assume it's deSouza who does it, since he does the drawings and all.) My favorite to date has been when Rayne hit on Jamie and Hazel in a supermarket, trying to talk them into a threesome.

Now, it's well known that Wednesday and I can appreciate... well, what we term "recreational Christianity." We enjoy watching Christian entertainment on an MST3K level -- and sometimes on its own merits. Since becoming involved with Weds, I've seen most of Bibleman, a fair number of the Charlton Heston introduced Greatest Heroes And Legends Of The Bible, the horrifically cheesy and generally (though not exclusively) bad Left Behind movies, a metric ton of Davey and Goliath, and most recently I've been infected with The Flying House, which is a frighteningly well made cartoon regardless of its subject matter. Oh, and lots of Jack Chick tracts, as long time readers well know

Eric Burns-White: Man, I hope that if you log your character out on City Hall's steps or in front of the doors to the tram, your day job is "panhandler."August 31 2008

Sometimes, one eats crow.

When Issue #12 of the various free content upgrades NCSoft NorCal puts out for City of Heroes was announced, I was guardedly excited but somewhat dubious. "Midnight Hour" featured a new organization called the Midnight Club (well, new in terms of being an active part of the universe -- it had been part of the backstory from the beginning), some new cross-faction content related both to that organization and the origins of superhumanity, a new zone of content back in pseudoRome, some new costumes most characters couldn't use, and new Villain Epic Archetypes to finally balance the scales between the bad guys and the good guys, with their alien Kheldans. And some other stuff.

And I had something to say about all of it -- well, here, let me paste in the specific comments I made about the Villain Epic Archetypes back in March:

Villain Epic Archetypes: As I said above, Villains have been waiting since the introduction of Grandville and L40-50 content for an Epic Archetype to counterbalance the heroes' Kheldans (the aforementioned Peacebringers and Warshades). Now, "Epic" in the City of