Ben Paddon

Blog

  • PortsCenter’s Back, Kicking Bottom or What?

    I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog for the last couple of weeks, mostly because I’ve been gearing towards re-launching the Kickstarter fundraising efforts for PortsCenter, which we’ve now done. Less than 24 hours in, we’ve received almost $700 in pledges, taking us that bit closer to our $4,200 goal.

    I’m really excited about this project, as I’ve been since we first tried to raise money last October. This is something I’d love to be able to make more of (if you haven’t watched the pilot yet, head over to the Kickstarter to check it out). I’m fascinated by the way so many people remember playing so many games, seemingly unaware of the minor (or, in some cases, major) differences between the same game on multiple platform. All of those memories coalesce into a collective stored databank of what made a game what it was. That stuff fascinates me.

    But anyway. Do check out the Kickstarter, and if you’re in a position to pledge a few dollars please consider doing so. At the very least, spread the link around. Let other people know this is going on. I’d love, love to be able to get this project going.

  • Money Where My Mouth Is

    I’m experiencing something of a tight cash flow situation at the moment. Hopefully it’s only temporary and I’ll be back on my feet soon, but at the moment I’m decidedly short-wadded. I’m not sure if I’m going to make rent. I definitely won’t be going grocery shopping any time soon, a sad fact that led me to – I shit you not – eat a large chunk of cheddar cheese earlier today like t’were an apple. Money doesn’t live here anymore.

    It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation and it likely won’t be the last. It’s easy to look at the comparative emptiness of one’s wallet and conclude that, yeah, money is bullshit, but the more I think about it the more I’m glad money exists, as a premise. If we had an old-fashioned bartering system, such as might have been employed in medieval England, I’d be fucked. I have no skills to offer, no trade to ply. I’d end up giving out blowjobs.

    You might imagine that, were we to return to a simpler means of keeping a roof over one’s head and food in one’s belly, I might actually do well. I’m a writer, after all. Well, guess again – in this day and age, everybody can write. It’s not like ancient Egypt where you had to walk to the local writing pyramid and ask a guy to write your shopping list for you. People can get that shit done themselves these days. What’s more, people are talented liars. They don’t need the likes of me to make shit up and write it down for them.

    So, regrettably, I’d have to make my way through life by sucking cock. I acknowledge this, and I’ve made peace with it. Fortunately we haven’t arrived at that point as a society, and we’re unlikely to reinstate such a barter system unless something catastrophic were to happen, such as a Fallout-style nuclear apocalypse. But I know my value as a person. I know how much I contribute to society.

    You always hear about people “failing upwards” – people who are woefully inept at their jobs, but who inexplicably get promoted into executive-level jobs. I always wanted to be one of those people. I worked tirelessly to become the sort of person who does just enough to keep him from getting fired, but not enough to actively contribute to a work environment. When I was made Project Coordinator at Disney I thought, “Yes, Ben. This is where the dream will come true.” It was fitting, in a way. Then the 2008 market crash happened, and suddenly I’m out on the street again. Back to square one, where I’ve been ever since.

    I still believe people can fail upwards. Mitt Romney is living proof of that – a man with the business sense of a meringue, who is now a Presidential nominee. If he can become a viable candidate for the most powerful position in the world, then surely I can become an ineffectual executive for a large multi-national corporation. Surely I can hold the sort of job with an important-sounding title, but in which nobody actually knows what, if anything, I actually do (which is nothing).

    That is the American dream. It’s what brought me to this country. It’s what’s kept me afloat during these rocky times. Some day, I will make my dream come true.

  • Comic-Con Round-Up Exclamation Mark

    I almost never take photos these days. I don’t photograph my friends, because, y’know, they’re my friends. If I find myself wondering what my friends look like I can pick up a phone and say, “Hey, are you busy today?” If the answer is no, it’s usually less than an hour before we’re in each other’s company getting ready to go bowling or some shit. As the door opens and I see their grim visage, my concerns are abated. Yes, my mind says. He does still look like that.

    Most notably, taking photos cheapens a moment for me. It impinges on the memory of an event to have to stop, and pose, and contort my face into some grim position so as to make sure that my photo, or indeed someone else’s photo, doesn’t look like photographic evidence of some harrowing tea party populated by the damned.

    So it’s a little odd that I woke up this morning at just after 10am, having arrived back in Los Angeles from my single day in San Diego for their annual comic’d con, saddened by my lack of photographic evidence of the event. No photos of myself and Lar, talking and laughing about some manner of bullshit for upwards of thirty solid minutes. No pictures of my casually implying to the wonderful, wonderful people at the Blank Label Comics booth that Kris Straub may (or may not!) be offering blowjobs. No pictures of Kris Straub, for obvious reasons.

    I have no photos. Instead, all I have is memories. For the first time, that doesn’t quite feel like enough.

    I was only able to attend Comic-Con for one day this year, but I had the greatest convention experience of my life. Actually it may more accurately be described as the greatest convention experiences, being as it was made up of small (but important!) experiences that all add up to one whole.

    My personal favourite, though? My good friend Ray, who will be marrying his equally good girlfriend Michelle next year, asked me to be his Best Man. I have crippling self-esteem issues, and consider myself to be the worst man pretty much all year ’round, but I can tolerate being the best for a single day. My body can take it.

    What follows is five paragraphs about Penny Arcade. You may not like them. Or maybe you will! That’s not really my call.

    I spent rather a lot of time talking to the P’Arc’s Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (mostly to Jerry) about a number of subjects, to the extent that casual observers might have thought us close acquaintances. I spoke to Jerry about how his writing, both in the comic and elsewhere, fires me up. It does. It inspires me. Over the last thirteen-or-so years he’s found his voice, and it is enchanting. I hope some day to find mine, and I hope it’s even half as brilliant as his.

    Jerry and Mike get a second bullet-point, because we spoke briefly about the Discovery. I raised a question at their Q&A (which I did not attend on purpose, but whatevs) about how the gaming press and PR machines, which are often one in the same, bombard us with pre-release information, generating false hype for games that, really, don’t deserve them. It is the job of PR people to get us excited for the shit their clients excrete, and game journalists appear to have taken part of that responsibility on themselves. Consequently, as people constantly buy into the hype, that sense of Discovery that we have playing new games as kids – coming home to find our parents have bought us some new thing to try on our computer boxes – is gone. Even in my teens I bought games I thought looked cool, ignoring magazines entirely.

    I wondered if the Discovery had died, and I was very happy to learn that not only did Jerry and Mike share my thoughts on the Discovery, but that Mike has been actively trying to restore (or rediscover) it by ignoring pre-release materials and promotional bullshit. It was nice having my opinions vindicated and even shared by the guys who last year employed a man who disagrees with my stance on literally every goddamn thing relating to the gaming press to run their gaming news operation.

    On the subject of their Kickstarter… look, I was pissed off on Day One. I tweeted about it a lot from my GameJournos account. Day two, which I think was Thursday, I woke up and realized I didn’t actually give anything even vaguely resembling a shit. I’m excited about the new content that Jerry and Mike want to get (as a huge, huge fan of their prohibition-era scifi setting Automata, the idea of getting more of that is positively appetite-whetting) and their Strip Search webseries looks like it may not be terrible either.

    Some seem to believe that replacing a serviceable revenue stream that has a noted, diminished impact on their personal creative output with another that lets them run riot is, in some way, counter to the very purpose for which Kickstarter was intended. I propose that Kickstarter could not have been designed for anything else.

    A few other Comic-Con points of interest:

    • MC Frontalot is earnest, approachable, and will listen to his fans ramblings. Specifically my ramblings. He was very polite.
    • My friend Heather’s Post-Apocalyptic Snow White costume looked incredible. I’d seen it when she was working on it, but that’s rather like looking at a souffle before it’s had a chance to rise. It looked incredible. I realize I have already typed those exact words, but they remain relevant.
    • I bumped into a short, round Asian man dressed as Catwoman. I was dressed as a Gotham City Impostors Batman. We had an awkward moment, then spent two minutes talking about our secret love for each other. That, too, was awkward, but fun. So that’s something.
    • My dad charged me with a sacred purpose – procure one of the Comic-Con exclusive The Hobbit posters. I failed, mostly because The Hobbit had, I don’t know, sixteen bloody booths at the con. That’s an exaggeration obviously (even a blind moron with severe developmental issues could see that!!), but finding the location to procure such a poster, if they were even still available, was not a task I was able to complete. Sorry, dad.
    • QMx have some incredible stuff on display, and I feel very privileged to have been working in the office as much of this stuff was in development. Two of the things they have that I didn’t get to see before the show, though, are the 1:6 scale TARDIS replica, and the model of the Enterprise-D from TNG, which looked positively lickable. (Andy, if you’re reading this, I did not lick the Enterprise-D.)
    • I regret every decision I’ve ever made in my life that led me to the purchase of a $5 convention center hot dog.

    Thus concludes this. I’ll be back to regular blogging next week, because that’s a thing I do now.

  • Mankind’s Greatest Advances

    Humanity, eh? The things we’ve accomplished! We’ve split the atom. We’ve discovered the God Particle. We’ve determined that light has an upper speed limit, and we’ve learnt that actually, no, it doesn’t. We’ve cured diseases, we’ve put a flag on the moon, and we’ve built computers capable of solving some of the most complex equations known to man.

    But all of this pales in comparison the innovation that the 21st century will most likely be remembered for – tee-shirts.

    Over the last two decades, the time from an idea being formed in someone’s head to the ability to get that idea onto a tee-shirt people can buy and wear has slowly narrowed, to the point now where someone can make a joke in the morning, and by the afternoon you can buy a tee-shirt based on that very same joke in your local shopping mall.

    Historians of the future will refer to the current era as the Tee-Shirt Age.

    And if you can’t? Well, you can make your own. This has revolutionized the way we think about the silkscreened bullshit we emblazon across our torso. We’re no longer confined to the designs offered to us by the likes of Target, Blue Navy or Hot Topic. There is a world of infinite possibilities out there. All we have to do is imagine it, pay $30 plus tax and shipping, then wait anywhere between two-to-five weeks depending on the print-on-demand store we’ve elected to use, then we can wear our dream shirt. The only one of its kind. With a single purchase we become the envy of all humanity, probably.

    I don’t want to succumb to hyperbole or anything, but that effectively makes us as Gods among men.

  • Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom

    America, yesterday. [Source: Wikipedia]
    Yesterday, the United States of America celebrated 236 years of independence. If you’re me, it’s a day marked by your friends cracking wise about how awkward it must be for me to be living in a country my people once ruled with an iron something-or-other. If you’re literally anybody else (except maybe a Native American) it’s celebrated with the mind-boggling combination of barbecue, alcohol, and explosives.

    The reasons this boggles one’s mind is obvious: I cannot imagine why anybody would want to set off fireworks in the height of summer when no bugger’ll see ’em.

    July 4th is seventeen days shy of July 21st, which, as any fule kno, is the longest day of the year. The days are longer, the nights are shorter, and even the night sky has a curious, ethereal glow to it. Not ideal conditions for fireworks.

    Fireworks, the way Guy Fawkes wanted them to be. Probably. [Source: Wikipedia]
    Back in Britain, we have the common sense to know when to put on a fireworks display: November 5th. It’s dark, it’s miserable, the days are short and the nights stretch out forever – the perfect setting for an explosives display. Even terrorist Guy Fawkes knew this as he prepared to destroy the Houses of Parliament in what could have been one of the most visually spellbinding terrorist displays in British history, had he succeeded. Of course, his failure is our win – we celebrate his inability to make a building explode by attempting to set the sky on fire, and every year it looks mesmerizing.

    If the Founding Fathers had any common sense, they’d have held off on finalizing the Declaration of Independence until October at the absolute earliest. Then, the following year, the night sky would have set the perfect scene for the fireworks displays that would ensue. But no – it was the summer, and they just wanted to get the damned thing wrapped up so they could go swimming and eat ice-cream sandwiches. Bastards.

    Did they not know they’d be depriving generations of spectacular visuals? Did they not consider for one minute that maybe the bright, orange summer sky would not make the best canvas? Or maybe they did know, but they didn’t care about their country enough to take action.

    One thing is for certain, though: Every Fourth of July America has ever celebrated has been sullied by their failure to take this one small detail into consideration, and this country is all the weaker because of it.

    Now obviously we can’t move Independence Day. If nothing else, it’s ruin the shorthand name for the movie of the same name. Instead, I propose a global calendar shift.

    By rolling the calendar back three or so months, we would shift July 4th to the a period in the year when the days are significantly shorter. Americans would still get to celebrate July 4th, but they’d be doing so with optimum lighting conditions. What’s more, this wouldn’t have too much of an impact on Guy Fawkes’ Night, which would still take place under fairly optimal lighting conditions in what used to be February.

    Everybody wins! Except for farmers, obviously, but they’d hardly complain. They wouldn’t want to look unpatriotic.

  • Whovie

    An example of exactly the sort of thing that should never, ever happen.

    There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about a potential Doctor Who movie. Rather a lot of people seem to think this is an absolutely terrible idea, and given the track record I don’t particularly blame them.

    Perhaps even worse is that the potential for a Doctor Who movie to be an awful mess is not only a worst-case scenario for fans, but also a very real possibility: Last year Harry Potter director David Yates claimed he was actively working on a Doctor Who movie that would be starting “from scratch,” and the year before that Russell T Davies shot down a rumour that Johnny Depp would be starring in a movie as a version of the Doctor, travelling around the world, curing diseases and fighting Daleks.

    Adding insult to injury, I recall reading somewhere that Davies actually liked the idea proposed by the rumour, though I can’t find anything about that online. If the man responsible for Doctor Who‘s triumphant return truly believes that such an awful, awful idea is actually worthy of consideration, then the good Doctor’s cinematic future does not look especially bright.

    We all know what the fans want – they want something connected to the TV show. They want something that serves connects to the series in much the same way the X-Files movie was a part of the TV show continuity (though X-Files: Fight the Future might not be the best example). They want a movie featuring the current Doctor, whomever that may be at the time, ad his current companions.

    That’s a pretty good list – and we know it’s good, because current showrunner Steven Moffat wants exactly the same thing – but the fans probably wouldn’t stop there. They’d likely want to see some, or all, of the Doctor’s greatest foes – the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels, the Silurians, the Ice Warriors. They’d probably want to see multiple incarnations of the Doctor. They’d want something rife with canon ejaculate, a celebration of everything Doctor Who is.

    Which is entirely the wrong way to go with it.

    Too many cooks spoil the plot.

    Let’s face it, if fans got everything they wanted we’d probably end up with something not too dissimilar from “The Five Doctors”, which is a fun story but not especially well-written, or something along the lines of “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End,” which is a tangled mess of comic-book style crossover that lacks a good pay-off and isn’t able to properly accommodate all of the characters that have been shoehorned into the narrative.

    So, what’s the logical middle-ground? A Doctor Who movie would need to be big bold, brash and every bit the spectacle of the television series, existing within the continuity of the television series but not necessarily drawing heavily from it so as to serve as a jumping-on point for potential newcomers. It would need to stand alone as a story, basically, complete with a unique villain or threat that hadn’t been seen in the television series before.

    Basically, it would need the same approach that Moffat takes to writing his Christmas specials.

    Steven Moffat has commented on the structure of the Christmas stories; that you have to write for a different audience when writing for a show that’s going out on Christmas day – the core of the Doctor as a man who arrives in the TARDIS and fixes things must be preserved, but beyond that the story needs to work for people who have never seen the show before. Great Christmas television takes precedence over a great episode of Doctor Who, and while some of the best Doctor Who stories include episodes like “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Next Doctor”, one cannot argue that these do not make for especially good Christmas day viewing to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the series.

    This wouldn’t make for a good movie either, to be honest.

    Obviously I’m not suggesting that a Doctor Who movie be a Christmas affair or be devoid of scifi elements, and obviously Moffat’s Christmas offerings so far have been far from feature quality (the only Christmas special I think would make a halfway decent movie is probably “Voyage of the Damned”, which isn’t even the best Christmas special), but I feel Moffat’s approach to the Christmas episodes would be ideal for a feature film. Fuse that with the sort of storytelling we saw in “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang” or “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” and I think we’d have a pretty solid Doctor Who movie on our hands.

    Just don’t let David Yates anywhere near it. Please. For the love of Glod.

  • Tediculous

    Oh dear. It turns out Seth Macfarlane’s new movie, Ted, bears some similarity to a webcomic called “Imagine This“, leading cartoonist Lucas Turnbloom to believe he’s the victim of a rather unfortunate case of plagiarism. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Sam Logan of “Sam and Fuzzy” also believes Ted may be in part based on his comic. Oh no! That dastardly Seth Macfarlane. He thinks he can just take ideas he likes just because he’s preposterously rich, incredibly famous, and occasionally brilliant? The nerve of some people.

    My problem with all this, besides my unfortunate use of the word “bears” in the previous paragraph, is that I’m not terribly convinced that Ted is based on either of these comics in any way, shape or form. The “rude, crude, loudmouthed teddy bear” concept is far from new, as anybody who collects Bad Taste Bears or has played Naughty Bear will attest, and anybody whose ever sat and wondered what Calvin and Hobbes would be like if the eponymous child grew up will probably have gone down the “What if he’s a slacker and Hobbes is a jerk?” route.

    Even the Toy Story trilogy touched upon some of these ideas. These are not especially original or clever notions. If they were, I think Turnbloom and Logan would probably have to turn their weapons on each other – aren’t they both basically doing the same thing, after all?

    “A kid hugging a bear? I drew a kid hugging a bear! Get my lawyer on the phone!”

    What sets these ideas apart is execution, and as Ted hasn’t even opened in theaters yet we have zero basis for comparison other than a few trailers and some selectively chosen storyboard/screengrabs (a few of which are profoundly stupid). To point a finger and yell “Plagiarism!” before we even reach Zero Day, especially for such a general concept, strikes me as a kneejerk reaction to a potential non-problem. It feels very much like people are making a mountain out of flat terrain, here.

    Edit: As a testament to just how not-at-all-unique this idea is, my friend Jill just pointed me in the direction of another webcomic about a maladjusted teddy bear living with an adult male, called Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles, which started in 1999 – almost a full decade prior to Imagine This.

  • Arrested Development, Arrested

    Try not to dwell on the MSPaint-looking “Closed” sign.

    Next year, Arrested Development returns after having been mercilessly cancelled by Fox back in 2006. Ten brand spanking new episodes are being produced for distribution exclusively via Netflix, which is very exciting news for fans of great comedy.

    My worry, though, is that the new Arrested Development is going to make the same mistake that other similarly revived shows made upon their triumphant returns. Shows brought back from the brink of disaster have a worrying habit of wasting their second chance nodding at their past rather than looking optimistically towards their future.

    Two of my favourite shows, Futurama and Red Dwarf, were revived in recent years, and both fell prey to nostalgia. The first of the straight-to-DVD Futurama movies, “Bender’s Big Score”, seemed to hinge almost entirely on winks to the audience, nostalgic self-referential gags, and “Hey, remember this minor character and/or in-joke?” moments. “Into The Wild Green Yonder”, the fourth and final Futurama movie, also ended on a very forced note that tried to wrap up as many elements of the show as possible very quickly while also providing an opening should the show return for a full season (as it did last year, with somewhat disappointing results).

    Similarly, the 2009 Red Dwarf miniseries “Back to Earth” intentionally recycled and referenced elements of previous episodes rather than making the effort to stand out and be it’s own thing. While in Red Dwarf‘s case this can be forgiven to an extent – the miniseries was an anniversary event intended to celebrate the series – it does unfortunately mean that, as a story, “Back to Earth” struggles to stand on its own two feet.

    Other successful show revivals such as Doctor Who and Family Guy somehow found it within themselves to soldier onward almost as though they’d never been off the air (aside from the opening scene of Family Guy‘s fourth season, which pokes fun at the Fox Network’s predilection for greenlighting and cancelling shows almost in the same breath).

    With Doctor Who, then-showrunner Russell T Davies made a very deliberate choice not to refer heavily to the classic series, despite being a continuation. This made the first episode much more accessible and, more importantly, didn’t bog it down in self-reference and continuity. Anyone can watch “Rose” and enjoy it, but I have a hard time imagining non-Futurama fans getting much out of “Bender’s Big Score”.

    The new Arrested Development ultimately has to make good on the promise that “new” implies – new stories featuring the same characters. No wasting time paying lip-service to the past, just focusing on what’s to come. If they can check that box, if they can get through the ten episodes without relying too heavily on Remember-Whens and in-jokes, then they can’t go wrong.

    Y’know, unless it sucks.