I Am Groot

I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot

I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot!

(repeat first verse and chorus)

I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot, I am Groot
I am Groot!

(repeat first verse twice)

Today's Irregular Webcomic has a long discussion of tabletop role-playing games, their rules, and the different approaches to creating them that Morgan-Mar has encountered throughout the years. One part of this essay goes into the differences between computer "role-playing games" and their tabletop namesakes. In my opinion, Mr. Morgan-Mar's analysis is spot-on:

The essential component of [tabletop roleplaying games] that distinguishes them from board games, and even from modern computer "roleplaying games" (which have borrowed the terminology), is that in a roleplaying game you take on the role of a character and you can choose to do anything that character could do in their world. A computer roleplaying game, even one styled as a "wide open" sandbox is still a very tightly restricted sandbox. You might be able to travel anywhere on the game map and talk with or fight any creature you come across, but you can't climb a tree, hack off a branch, and carve it into a set of dominoes. You can't sit in a pub nursing a beer and pondering wistfully over a lost love while flicking peanuts at the bard attempting to perform in the corner. In a traditional tabletop roleplaying game, you can.

It's the flexibility of having a human game moderator that allows your character to do, or at least try to do, anything you can imagine that gives roleplaying games their intense fascination, at least for me. I love the freedom of roleplaying games, played face to face with other people. But I've played a few computer "roleplaying games" and very quickly gave them up because of how uninteresting and uninteractive I found them, though I recognise that many other people enjoy them immensely for other good qualities that they possess. It's a totally different experience, and I think that co-opting the name "roleplaying games" for computer games does a disservice both to them and to the traditional face-to-face games.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel about tabletop role-playing games versus their computer analogues. I've long been of the opinion that "role-playing game" when applied to a computer game is a major misnomer, especially when referring to the earlier attempts at such, like Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, or Final Fantasy. Even more recent incarnations of the computer "role-playing game"—such as the Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, or Fallout series—are really just storytelling games that give you some options as to a) how your character looks, b) what your character does, and c) how your character responds to dialogue or situations. In the best of these, the story can be told in several ways that are sufficiently different from each other that it continues to be fun (just look at how long I've been playing Skyrim for an example), but it's still fundamentally the same story. Even a game that can be heavily modded, like Skyrim, can only be pushed so far before the technical limitations of the engine are reached.

But a tabletop role-playing game is truly limitless. No two games, even played by the same people with the same characters using the same rules and the same setting, are ever the same. The story arbiter (usually called a Game Master) is in control of the setting—which includes the game world, the people and creatures in it, and the situations that the player characters find themselves in. But the players themselves are in control of their characters, and characters can (and often do) completely derail the intended story and take the game in a completely unexpected direction. And this is what I love about them. As a player in a tabletop role-playing game, I am a co-author of the story along with the GM and the other players, whereas in Skyrim or Dragon Age, I'm always playing someone else's story. It may be a good story, a fun story, a very engaging story—but it's never mine.

So thank you, David Morgan-Mar, for putting into words something I've felt for a very long time but hadn't been able to adequately express.

I've been catching up on some TV shows lately. Here are my opinions of them, in no particular order:

Marvel's Luke Cage, Season 1 (Netflix): Rating: ✭✭✭✭✩ — There's a lot of opinion about this show being slung back and forth on the internet right now, and I don't want to add to any of the ill-feeling going around. I'll just say that I loved this show . . . except for the main villain, Diamondback, whom I thought was just fucking ridiculous. I seriously could not help rolling my eyes every single time he was on screen. It's like they were trying to make him the Joker, just without the clown makeup.

All of the other characters in the show, even the villains, are awesome! All are well-rounded characters with complex motivations. All have sympathetic qualities (no matter how vile they are) and serious flaws (no matter how virtuous they are). Each of the heroes has strong convictions, and there are times when you think one or more of them might start doing the wrong thing for the right reason. And each of the villains has at least one moment where you think, hey, maybe this guy/gal isn't so bad after all.

Except Diamondback. He's just a caricature of the bat-shit insane villain all the way through, and that really diminishes the show in my opinion. I hope they don't bring him back in season 2.

The Flash, Season 2 (CW): Rating ✭✭✩✩✩ — The sweetie and I were watching this as it came out via iTunes for a while, but we only got up to Episode 9 (the Christmas episode, with the Trickster guest-starring for the second time) before she said, "This is getting too silly. I'm done." It was getting pretty silly for me, too, so I just waited for it to become available on Netflix's streaming service. Then I binge-watched the rest of the season.

My review in a nutshell: Enh.

I mean, it's fun, yeah. But it's also just . . . really, really stupid in places. And the major storytelling device seems to be "stretch out the pathos for as long as we can so we can avoid resolving anything and keep viewers watching." I mean, I understand that some tension drives the show, but if you can't keep it going organically, it's just bloody obvious when you try to extend it artificially.

Season 3 just started on CW, but I have no desire to continue watching.

Preacher, Season 1 (AMC): Rating ✭✭✭✭✭ — Wow. Seriously, just wow! I'm on tenterhooks waiting for season 2. This show is truly amazing. No, it's not the same story as the comic book, aside from the very basic overall premise and the fact that it starts in Annville, Texas. But it is just as compelling, maybe even more so. All of the characters from the comic are there, but all of them are different—some only slightly, some more so. However, all of them are recognizably the same people. Jesse Custer is Jesse Custer. Maybe not as badass as in the comic, but still Jesse Custer. Tulip O'Hare is also still Tulip O'Hare . . . and if it's possible she's even more badass than in the comic!

But my favorite is Cassidy. I mean, Cassidy was bloody awesome in the comic, but he's super bloody awesome in this show. More complex, more badass, more likable, but also more despicable in some ways . . . and somehow that just makes him all the more compelling.

According to AMC, season 2 starts in March of 2017. Those five months can't go by fast enough.

Supergirl, Season 1 (CW): Rating ✭✩✩✩✩ — I hear that season 2, with the debut of Superman as an on-screen presence, gets better. It has to, because it can't get any worse. I watched the first episode when it first became available on Netflix, and I could barely get to the end of the thing. It was truly awful. Then I heard about season 2 and Superman and watched the 3-minute preview clip (which was quite good), so I thought I'd give season 1 a second chance. But no, episode 2 was just as bad.

Maybe I'll just skip over season 1 entirely and start watching with season 2 . . . but only if the rest of the episode is as good as the 3-minute preview clip. Otherwise, forget it.

This is just a bit of amusing dialog I thought of in a "what if" scenario: what if Fantastic Four was a title under Marvel's MAX* imprint (and thus not sanctioned by the Comics Code Authority):

Assistant: But Your Majesty, Doctor Richards says that these calculations are off by three decimal places. This whole experiment could--

Dr. Doom: DOOM DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK WHAT DOCTOR RICHARDS SAYS! WE CONTINUE AS PLANNED!

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*MARVEL MAX is the imprint that Marvel uses for their mature-themed titles. The debut title was AKA Jessica Jones.

My friend Ed Verso has been working on a comic book for the last couple of years, and the other day the first issue went on sale.



I've read it and liked it very much. It's definitely worth two bucks. Go take a look.

Saw a couple of movies recently that I thought were worth mentioning:

Star Trek Beyond: Easily the best of the series so far. Don't get me wrong: I like the 2009 Star Trek*—it has its flaws, but overall it is a good, fun movie. Beyond, however, is where the series has hit its stride. It is the closest in feel, in character, in story, and in theme to the Star Trek that I grew up with. The main actors' portrayals of their characters have matured, with all of them getting a good amount of screen time and all of them fully inhabiting their roles. For the first time, I felt like I was watching Kirk, not Chris Pine playing Kirk; Spock, not Zachary Quinto playing Spock; McCoy, not Karl Urban playing McCoy; etc. Their portrayals are still different from those of their predecessors, but I don't get the sense that they're trying to be "as good as" anymore—they just let themselves be their characters, and it works!

Story-wise, it also feels very right. It's a Star Trek story, not an origin story (like the first movie) or a twisted, corrupted retelling (like Into Darkness). Simon Pegg and Doug Jung did a fantastic job with the script, and the director (Justin Lin), cinematographer (Stephen F. Windon), and editors (D'Auria, Highsmith, Matsumoto, and Sprung) did a fantastic job of bringing the script to life.

My Score: ****1/2 (out of 5 stars) — Dinged a half-star because I saw one of the major plot points coming long before it arrived, but then that happens sometimes.

Suicide Squad: Rotten Tomatoes can blow me. So can Rolling Stone, Metacritic, The Altantic, and The Hollywood Reporter. Suicide Squad is a fun movie! No, it's not a cinematic masterpiece. Yeah, it's slow in spots. Yes, it tries to milk pathos from a couple of characters who don't really have any. But despite all of that, it is a totally fun movie to watch. And sorry Rolling Stone, but Suicide Squad does NOT "mess up Harley Quinn". Okay, she's a little darker in places, and a little sillier in others, than the source material is. But to my mind, it's still Harley, and a damn fine Harley at that. (Also, what the movie adds to her origin story is both chilling and perfect.) Jared Leto's Joker is also very much the Joker, despite the visual differences. Of all the live-action Jokers there have been so far**, I actually like him best***.

But the absolute best performance in the entire movie is Will Smith's Deadshot. I can't comment on the performance without giving stuff away about the plot, but trust me: Will Smith nails it!

My Score: *** (out of 5 stars) — because the plot is kinda thin, some of the characters aren't sufficiently developed, and other minor flaws.

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*Star Trek Into Darkness, on the other hand, I do not like very much at all—it's too dark for Star Trek, ignoring the message of hope that Trek had always embodied.

**But none of the live-action Jokers can compare to Mark Hamill's animated Joker. Seriously, movie guys, just cast Hamill as the Joker already!

**For those who are interested, my ranking of the four live-action Jokers in major media are 1) Jared Leto, 2) Cesar Romero, 3) Heath Ledger, and 4) Jack Nicholson. The gaps between 2, 3, and 4 are much smaller than the gap between 1 and 2.

Went and saw X-Men: Apocalypse last night with my sweetie. With its RT rating of 48%, I wasn't expecting much. However, I'm pleased to say that it exceeded my expectations, and I enjoyed it.

I, personally, have always hated the character of Apocalypse in the comics. In my mind, he was one of the worst examples of the "villain bloat"* that characterized Marvel in the 80's (the worst example being, of course, the utterly insipid Mister Sinister), and he was one of the reasons that I started to read fewer Marvel titles in the 90's. So I really didn't have a whole lot of hope that X-Men: Apocalypse was going to be a shining star in the cinematic X-Men chronology.

Fortunately, the movie handled the character well, emphasizing his interesting qualities and downplaying or ignoring most of the really annoying shit. Of course, a lot of what happens in X-Men: Apocalypse (which takes place in 1983) contradicts things that happen in X-Men, X2, The Wolverine, etc.—but, well, time travel happened in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and that screws lot of shit up. I'm willing to give it a pass by saying to myself "This is an alternate timeline."

Anyway, I enjoyed it, and I think other fans would, too. Three-and-a-half stars out of five.

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*I am quite amused to read in the Wikipedia article on Apocalypse that he was a last-minute substitution dreamed up by Louise Simonson when she took over X-Factor from Bob Layton starting with issue #6. Layton had been building up to the villain of that arc being the Owl, an old adversary of Daredevil.

From Kickstarter:

The first print collection of Irregular Webcomic!, with the first 500 Fantasy theme strips. Elves, swords, wizardry, dragons, puns!

I've been making Irregular Webcomic! since 2002. Finally, after 13 years, it's time for the first print collection! This book collects the first 500 strips of the Fantasy theme (up to the hiatus period beginning in 2013).

Join Lambert the merchant, Alvissa the elf, Mordekai the loveable rogue, Kyros the fire wizard, Draak the lizard man, and Dwalin the dwarf, as they travel across the land, destroying taverns, telling awful puns, and—eventually—completing their first epic quest.

Okay, this is a big thing! I'm very excited about this Kickstarter for two reasons:

1. As you know, I've been a fan of Irregular Webcomic! for over a decade, and the Fantasy theme was always my favorite. In fact, I love the Fantasy story so much that I wrote a song about it: "It's Quite Irregular" , which is track #12 on my new album, Doctor, Captain, Dovahkiin, Chief. So I REALLY want this campaign to succeed!

2. Oh, by the way . . . that song I wrote? It's a PLEDGE REWARD! For every pledge level that includes the book, either electronic or physical, a DRM-free MP3 of "It's Quite Irregular" is also included! This makes me SO HAPPY!

So if you love Irregular Webcomic, go pledge! And spread the word! There are 19 days left to go and a little over half of the goal amount yet to be raised!

I know I mentioned this last week, but my newest CD, Doctor, Captain, Dovahkiin, Chief, is finished, mastered, uploaded, and released on CDBaby, Amazon, and iTunes!

• To buy from CDBaby, click HERE!
• To buy from Amazon, click HERE!
• To buy from iTunes, go to the iTunes Store in your iTunes app and search "Eben Brooks"

The track list is as follows:

1. The Ballad of Barry Allen
2. Spoilers
3. The Hard Way
4. Nightlife in Santa Clara
5. Three Drunken Klingons
6. The Man Dressed in Brown
7. O'Brian's Mongolian Barbecue
8. Lex
9. Geeky Girls
10. The Too Much Skyrim Blues
11. Deadly Ever After
12. It's Quite Irregular
13. Smells Like Beam Rifle
14. Getting Geeky

So go listen! And tell your friends!

And now a comic for aging pop music fans... by kevinbolk on DeviantArt