Avatar photoSteven Savage

Geek Catalog Update 8/2/2014

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Open Book

What have we got added to the Geek Catalog Today?  A few specific fandoms, more science, free audio books, and more!

As always, don’t forget to check the catalog, using your Geek Focus or your Community Focus to find ways to get socially engaged as a geek!

 

Fans-Firefly

  • Charity
    • Austin Browncoats – An Austin-based group of Firefly fans deeply engaged in chairtable work, especially on women and children’s issues.

Fans-Star Wars

  • Charity
    • Cloud City Garrison – Part of the 501st Legion, a Star Wars costuming club, the Garrison is famous for their charity events. Worth inviting, being part of, and supporting!

General

  • Knowledge

STEM

  • Citizen Involvement

    • Science Cheerleader – A site focusing on Cheerleaders who chose science careers, promoting science awareness, and where the former can promote the latter, all with good humor and a serious mission.
  • Knowledge
    • Public Library of Science – An organization dedicated to making scientific work available via Open Access, and has a variety of initiatives.

Video Games

  • Persons With Disabilities
    • Able Gamers – A charity that works to improve the lives of people with disabilities through video games, including charity work, consultation with gaming companies, and more.

Writing

  • General
    • Librivox – Librivox makes free audiobooks of public domain works – using volunteers.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Hercules: Less Than The Sum Of Some Good Parts

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I just saw Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules film.  It’s actually an interesting, if flawed movie, and I wanted to give my analysis, which is rather spoiler-filled.  Frankly, if you’re planning to see it, you don’t want to read further, as I will spoil some of the fun in what is a fun, if flawed, movie.

The major themes of the film are twofold:

  • First that the legend of Hercules is actually due to good PR as much as a man of strength.
  • The role of faith, belief, and image – good and bad.

So the core theme is mostly non-magical.  Hercules is a smart soldier turned mercenary, with a band of talented friends, an excellent sense of tactics, a few clever weapons and gadgets, and a publicity-savvy nephew, Iolaus.  He’s a smart man, a loyal man, and even as a mercenary a decent person for what he does, but also he and his team know the legend is one of the biggest weapons in their arsenal and they’re glad to wield it.

Though they could be fleshed out far more, Hercules team of friends and soldiers is one of the high points of the movie – an archer, a drugged-out mystic, a clever assassin, a troubled soldier who saw too much as a child, and bullshit artist Iolaus.  Combined with a very grounded Dwayne Johnson, they’re both a near-standard fantasy adventure party, a sniping family, and oddly understated.  There’s an almost toned-down-Britcom level to their repartee that’s quite enjoyable.

And, yes, I said toned-down.  This film, despite some crazy action scenes and dreams, is a lot more restrained than I expected.  Which admittedly is a matter of opinion, but still.  I appreciate the movie was far less insane than it could be, it added something by not adding too much.

So Hercules and team get a chance to make their last big score so they can retire by helping a kingdom under assault by an infamous wizard-bandit.  Not actually believing said bandit is magical, they rally a group of farmers and refugees into a semi-functional, then functional army.  Of course this involves a lot of action and death, but rather appealingly the army does not come together magically – it takes time and their first battle is only barely successful.  Fortuantely, the legend of Hercules inspires them, between Hercules’ savvy, Iolaus’ total BS, and his friends different skills victory is soon at hand.

Then we discover things aren’t quite as they seem.

Up to the point of “oh wait” this is a pretty good action film with comedy and fun characters.  Not great, but really quite good, with deconstructions and poking of tropes, plenty of nice moments, and solid if not perfect acting (the cast does vary in skills).  Johnson’s appealingly toned-down and human Hercules makes a great cornerstone to everything, and I really enjoy how he looks more like something out of a painting or a sculpture – he even has his Nemian Lion helmet.

However, when the plot kicks into the second act, it kind of falls apart.  None of the plot ideas are bad, in fact there’s some nice additions, but things move too quick or too slow, elements don’t hold together, things that should have been foreshadowed weren’t, and lots of opportunities are missed.  The film at first pokes all sorts of tropes, then slides into them too much.

The end result is the first part of the movie is better than the sum of its parts – and in the second half it is less.

What’s odd is a little editing, shortening some scenes and others, adding a few minutes of foreshadowing, could have really changed the second act effectively.  It’s the kind of thing a few reshoots and a little script doctoring could have solved.  It would also have brought out some of the actual interesting things not explored – that sometimes a greedy man is more trustworthy to another greedy man, use of some nice narrative elements, and when belief is useful and when it is dangerous.

So I really enjoyed the first half, and I liked the parts of the second half – in a way I enjoyed the film more for what it could have been than what it was.

What is was trying to be and partially was was a modern Sword and Sandal film that did a more realistic twist on the legend while poking some action tropes and exploring some human issues – all while having great actions scenes and plenty of humor.  Instead it meandered after awhile, missing opportunities.

Perhaps on the cutting room floor is a better film.

I wish I enjoyed the film more, because it sets out so many appealing elements that I like that I wanted to.  But I feel vaguely disappointed as well as entertained – there’s more to be had here.

 

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Way With Worlds – More On Main Characters

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Crowd

As a worldbuilder, your world is a vast, interlinked creation, it stands there whirling in your head or your codebase or your notes. However few people want to hear the story of your world, they want to hear the story of people in it. Indeed there’s a chance your world came about out of a desire to tell a character’s story.

Either way, at some point, you have to tell a tale about what’s going on. A tale requires someone or someones to tell the tale about. In short, no matter your goals in making the world, you have to settle down and tell the stories in it.

This means a main character or characters. It may seem odd to discuss this since so many of us have our main characters in mind, but it’s not as simple as it may seem. I wanted to return to some of my previous discussion and go over main characters.

What Is A Main Character or Characters?

As I’ve stated earlier, a main characters are like lenses on a world. It is through them that people experience your setting, including the characters themselves. The viewpoints of these characters are gateways to understanding what’s going on and experiencing it.

I find this perspective very helpful because:

  1. It makes you immediately think of a focus for your storytelling, gamebuilding, etc.
  2. It gives you someone you and your audience can relate to and helps you (and them) develop empathy and connection. This is necessary to experience the story and the world.
  3.  It helps you do even more worldbuilding by climbing inside someone’s head and seeing how things look. You don’t just walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you walk that mile in their mind.
  4. It helps you admit you can’t write or tell everything.

Now who is your main character?  Well, that may be more challenging than you think.

Zooming In

As noted, the truth of a lot of writing is that many games, tales, and so on are created with a given main character or characters in mind. People already have their characters chosen, and some fleshed out, and the world is created to let their stories come to life. The worldbuilding may go far beyond them and make their stories only one of many to be told (which I think should be the case), but it often starts with them.

Of course you may think you know your main characters since you started with them – but this isn’t always the case. As you build your setting, there may be better choices. Your hero’s tale may not be as interesting as her sidekick, the villain’s perspective turns out to be heroicc, and that throawaway character is actually more relatable. A good look at “Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” is a fine example of perspective switching – and one I agree with as the cast of ‘Hamlet’ is a bunch of basket cases.

The main character you started with may not be the one you need.

Or maybe you really build a world with so much going on and now you want to tell the tales and you aren’t sure where to start. You’ve got a potential cast of hundreds, or you have a world so detailed you could just whip up someone new to tell your stories. Where do you start?

If you have to evaluate a current main character for a demotion, a side character for a promotion, or figure where to start, I find these are good rules:

  1. A good main character or characters is in position for enough of the story to be told from their viewpoint (or viewpoints). They don’t have to see everything, but enough to tell the story you want to tell.
  2. A good main character knows enough for the audience to understand what’s going on via their perspective – of course it doesn’t have to be everything or even the majority of things. Jut enough.
  3. A good main character is relate-able for the audience. They don’t have to be like the audience, just someone the audience “gets”. A good writer/game designer/etc can make characters that are vastly different than the target audience but are still characters people understand.

Use this checklist to evaluate your main character or characters for the story you’re telling. You just might be surprised at who can tell your tale and how – and who can’t.

More Thoughts on Characters Before The World

If you’re the kind of person who created may characters before the setting (as happens the majority of the time in my opinion), then the checklist above is quite important. There’s good chance the world you made has gotten far more complex and populous and your story might not be best served by the perspective you wanted initially.

However, an additional danger you face is that our world may not be fleshed out enough in that you only created enough to tell the tale of your original chosen character or characters. You’ve got enough to tell their story, but their story is all that’s going on – the rest of the setting is just a cardboard cutout, a Potemkin universe.

Frankly, this happens a lot, as I’m sure we’re all aware. There’s a story, there’s a main character, but it’s happening a peculiarly dead setting, the story equivalent of on-rails video games. It may even be a decent or a good story – but it really doesn’t involve much worldbuilding.

I find a great way to avoid this is a simple rule – do you know your world well enough that, if all your main characters couldn’t be written for some reason, you have characters or potential characters that could tell interesting tales. They may not be the ones you wanted, but they could still be told. That’s always a good measure of the world’s completeness – especially if you started with specific main characters in mind.

We All Want To Be Someone

So when you tell your tales, sit down and make sure you’ve got the right perspective or perspectives. You build a huge world and you want to make it work, make people experience it.

If you can’t find the right characters, well, create some more! After all if you build a good setting, it can produce even more ways to tell the tale there . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.