Category Archives: Crossposted

Crossposted, Essays, Journal

Check That Metaphor, Counselor

Context: I had Jury Duty on Wednesday. We’re done now. We reached our verdict at around 5 pm after deliberating for about an hour, and with that done, all the sequestering and no-talking stuff is done too. The judge gave us permission to speak freely about the case.

The defendant was charged with “possession with intent to distribute.” The defense claimed that he was going to use all 250 doses of meth himself. The prosecution claimed that this was actually unheard of. They also pointed out that, according to the law, even  if he only planned to share, not sell, and was going to share just one dose, that’s still intent to distribute.¹

When arrested, the defendant did not have all of the other paraphernalia of drug distribution in the car with him. Just 25.681 grams of chunky, uncut methamphetamine. Distribution would require baggies and a scale, and a full operation would be evidenced by cutting agents, a client list, and some wads of $20 bills.

I’m getting to the metaphor soon, I promise.

The prosecution suggested that these things would likely be left at a facility, where they could be used in secret on a large flat, stable surface, exactly like none of the surfaces found inside the car. The absence of the other stuff in the car simply meant they hadn’t found the facility yet. (They never found a facility, and whether or not they looked for one never came up from either team of attorneys, which seemed WEIRD to me, but maybe these things go missing all the time.)

The metaphor: In closing arguments the defense attorney said “if you’re going to bake a cake, you don’t leave all the ingredients at home, and then go shopping for an oven.”

It’s cute, but okay, stop.

If you’re going to bake a cake, some of the things you need are re-usable, but some are consumed with each cake. You go shopping for the stuff you run out of. A digital scale is the sort of thing that is very sensibly left at home when you go shopping for the key consumable ingredient in your business.

That was my exact thinking when she broke out the oven metaphor. Literally, the moment she said “oven” my brain said “your metaphor works better against you² than it does for you.” During jury deliberations I found that pretty much all of us had that same thought.

The point being, if you’re going to use a metaphor, you go shopping for the one that isn’t pointier on the end you’re going to hold it with. Same rule if you’re shopping for swords, probably.

 

¹  I see the logic in that law, but I can also see how it can easily be abused in its application. That said, I am not a lawyer, even if I am now a part of the system.

² I was pretty disappointed³ with the prosecuting attorney for not reversing the metaphor during his rebuttal. I’ll grant that it is possible that he trusted That One Juror Who Said He Is A Cartoonist to make the reversal during deliberation. Lawyers trusting juries to be clever seems like a stretch, but trusting me to fix a broken joke is a slam dunk. 

³ Technically, I did not go to court today to be entertained by the attorneys. I went to court FOR GREAT JUSTICE and that’s usually only entertaining on TV.

 

Crossposted, Funnies

Absurd and Nerdy

It started with a discussion of logic gates, and the futile attempt to map the seven gates onto the seven deadly sins. Sloth was invoked. At some point we (Otter, Ubersoft, and Will) began to wonder whether logic gates could be mapped onto animals.

The output of that was this picture of a baby hippoxnortamus.

Baby-HippoXNORtamus

“Hippoxnortamus” is fun to say.

Announcements, Crossposted, Reviews

Force Multiplication, and Death by Cliché

We just got word that our pallets of Force Multiplication: Schlock Mercenary Book 12 will be arriving sometime “in the next week or so.” If you want your copy shipped soon, now is the time to place your order.

A great many of you have already placed your orders, and are reading this and asking what OTHER book you can maybe order. Well, as it happens, my friend Bob has a book out! You may remember Bob from his guest-review of Hardcore Henry. That’s his blog style, and while it’s not the same as his literary voice, the snark does shine through.

DeathbyClicheDeath by Cliché is Bob Defendi unchained. It is the story of a game designer who attempts to sneak out of the worst role-playing session ever, and ends up in the game itself, starting with a room “lit by flaming brassieres.”

This may be misleading. Death by Cliché is not full of puns and dad jokes¹. It’s a funny, frightening, poignant, and exhilarating exploration of a world in which RPG clichés and sloppy game design are the governing principles, the unseen hands pulling the strings.

UPDATED TO ADD: My 21-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son both grabbed copies² from Bob last night. Five hours later—FIVE HOURS LATER—they both got grouchy when we insisted that it was time for lights to be out so the old people in the house could go to sleep.

Which is to say that my review may not have gushed to the level that this book deserves for some readers, including a junior majoring in illustration and a junior-high student majorly invested in Minecraft.

 

¹There are puns and dad jokes in the book. I won’t lie. They’re there. Not everywhere, but there. Usually as the set-up for something that is actually funny.

²He only meant to give us one copy of the book at Writing Group on Thursday, but he had a stack, and my children, even the adult ones, can be grabby.  

Crossposted, Reviews

Warcraft

WarcraftI have a lot to say about this film, in large measure because it did some surprising things, and it did some difficult things, and almost everything it did was done well. That stuff merits discussion.

It’s worth holding off on a lot of it, however, because there would be spoilers, and one of the things I loved most about this film was that it surprised me several times. There were a couple of plot points that I called well in advance—tropes that have too much narrative force to be denied, even in subversion—but that didn’t sully my satisfaction with the story.

Let’s start with this: Warcraft clears my Threshold of Awesome, and if I lose geek cred, or a measure of one of the other credibilities I enjoy, by having had more fun watching Warcraft than I had watching this year’s superhero films, so be it. You can read the rankings for yourself. As of this writing the furries are winning at movie (Kung Fu Panda 3, Zootopia), and video games are runnering up (Angry Birds, Warcraft, Ratchet & Clank.) Superheroes are making a good show of it, but through a combination of retreads, joyless slogs, and shaky-cam, they’re the ones losing geek cred.

My biggest concern with Warcraft, at least going in, was how the trailers suggested that female orcs would be depicted as green-skinned, sexy humans with cute, pouty tusks, while the males were big and scary. That attractive lady-orc in the trailers (played by Paula Patton) is not really an orc. The orcs consider her an abomination, and I’m not spoiling much, because we get that reveal the moment she shows up on screen. The actual female orcs are still kind of built like humans, of course, but those lady-orcs most resemble human males on a solid regimen of steroids and gym memberships. With not-as-cute-but-still-pouty tusks.

And my point here is that the creature design made sense, and kept me rooted in the story. On top of that, the orc characters were so very well rendered that I simply accepted them as people, rather than CG, was able to let them get on with their movie.

I very much liked how magic was used in the story. I have no idea what the current rule set is for magic use in the World of Warcraft game (I haven’t visited Azeroth since Warcraft II¹) so I can’t speak to whether the film was true to the game’s rules. It was, however, true to the rule set for good storytelling. There were limits to it, there was a cost, and as its secrets were peeled back there were story-critical reveals that were heaps of fun.

World of Warcraft players will probably catch dozens of nods, cameos, and Easter eggs. They might also rage-quit over the mistreatment of their favorite whatever. None of that had any bearing on my enjoyment of the films. I caught a couple references, and liked them a lot, but they worked fine without context, too.

And I guess that’s what amazed me the most about this film. It does not assume that we have any knowledge of the universe². Characters are introduced and developed from scratch, and there were a lot of them to keep track of.

 

¹Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, which was released in 1996, and which I may have noodled around in as recently³ as 2005. No, I have not played WoW. 

²Well, almost none. From the outset it looks like most other Tolkien-derived western fantasy settings: “monsters and magic in Medieval Europe.” There’s far more than just that going on in epic fantasy these days, which is part of why reading new books is so cool. 

³So, not very recently. Eleven years.