It started off okay, although there are some great moments in the film where Robert Downy Jr.’s dad is explaining that technology will solve all our problems. I was the lone madman in a theatre full of normal people, so I did my best not to cackle maniacally when he says that. Then, like magic, RDJ builds a particle accelerator (sort of) thingy in his garage, and uses it to pull a completely new and conspicuously unnamed chemical element out of his arse, that, among other things, holds the entire second half of the movie together. It used to be, writers would think up actual words for this stuff. It would add, you know, verisimilitude… or something.

I mean, really, it offends me as a potential writer and all-around geek that there was no name for the inevitable Wikipedia article on this fantastical element. Which is odd, being offended, because I did enjoy the movie. Great special FX, plus, y’know, Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit, kicking ass and not even bothering to take names… and that’s my point: chucking some names in there is just common courtesy. If you make up some sort of bullshit technology that your whole plot-arc is based around, at least spot-weld some techno-babble to it so people can pretend like they know what you’re talking about.

They did it (or rather didn’t do it) in Avatar, too. The eee-vile corporate cliche (don’t get me wrong—actual corporations are cliches too, but I digress) was on Pandora to mine a super-valuable element that, yadda yadda, makes some kind of supertech possible (I dunno, fusion, FTL, anti-grav, gimmick-free cinema, or whatever; doesn’t matter)… and oh yeah, the native Na’vi’s humungoid treehouse sits right on top of the largest deposit of the stuff, making the attempted genocide / big explodey fight scene / special effects extravaganza of the decade at the climax of the movie gratuitously necessary, and the best name Cameron could come up with for this giant steaming pile of McGuffin was: “unobtainium”… cause it’s so, like, hard to _get_… get it? Me am clever, yes?

Okay, anyone out there writing a sci-fi-action screenplay… pencils down, listen up: We all know your amazing and heretofore unknown super-substance is some sort of hand-wavium, but you DON’T ACTUALLY CALL IT “HANDWAVIUM,” or better yet, just hand-wave the problem of a name entirely. Not if you want to avoid insulting your audience.

Damn. There was a time when writers actually gave a shit what things were called. You’d never catch Tolkien phoning it in on the main event. There’s a man who understood the value of naming things. I mean, in the Lord of the Rings, shit had like six names in four different languages. And all those words had their own bloody histories. “Hobbit”… now there’s a word you can hang your plot on. AND HE DID! So what if it took him like 12+ years to write that story? The guy understood craftsmanship! And in his defense, there was that whole apocalyptic war-to-end-all-wars thing happening while he was trying to write it. YOU try pounding out over half a million words of brilliantly poetic, flowing prose, on deadline, while fricken’ Nazis are bombing the shit out of your country!

I tells ya, these folks in Hollywood have it too easy. People will sit through anything nowadays, long as it’s shiny & splodey enough. And dammitall, I ain’t gonna stand fer it no more… Just you wait, I’ma gonna…. jus’ a sec…

HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY GULDERN LAWN, AFORE-AH-HAV-TUH-WHUP-YUZ!!!

Where was I? Anyway… enjoyable flick. Not real deep. But still, ScarJo in tight clothes, so…

I mean, if a movie can’t stimulate my imagination, it better freaking have some hot babe in black latex tearing up a room full of mooks, ya dig?

Well, I know it’s been a while but Metapunk is back up and running, after a few hurdles. First I decided to move the blog, then the site was hacked and I lost all my comments (not that there were all that many, but…) and had to repost everything from backups. But we’re back, baby and better than ever! Also, I’m going to make ever so much more effort to post on a regular basis, even if it’s only a paragraph or two.

A lot has happened on the game front—there have been some radical changes to the design. I mean, I’ll be able to make ten games with all the failed attempts I have.

I’ve also actually been writing some prose—a short story I plan to enter in a literary contest. It’s kind of on the experimental side. Anyway, after it’s been through the judging process and so on, I’ll probably post it here so you can read it, if you’re interested.

And the holodoxy, while it has not advanced particularly, has been sort of fleshed out a little bit… More on that coming soon.

So if you’re one of the few people besides my mother who has been waiting for the site to come back online, well, you’re in luck. Cue AC/DC’s Back in Black…

]]> http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/09/were-back/feed/ 2 http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/04/the-fantasy-of-writing-fiction/ http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/04/the-fantasy-of-writing-fiction/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:23:11 +0000 Andre http://www.metapunk.org/blog/?p=52

I’ve added a Stories category, which is where prose fiction, poetry, or other random lexical smatterings will be found.  Of course, this is a shameless challenge to myself, because it means I’ll have to produce some on a regular basis.  We’ll just see how well that works…