For the love of all you hold dear!

Make the bad man stop!

Not that a petition is likely to end a career... not this one at any rate, but I'd prefer to see someone honestly want to make a good movie and fail, than fight to create drek and succeed. For those that don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend you look at Howard Taylor's "Schlock Mercenary!" right now. His review of the movie Bloodrayne speaks volumes about why to loathe Uwe Bolles.

In other news, people asked what the heck was up with my last post... and I owe my public an answer to that one.

It was a gaming memory. I freely admit to having role-played most of my life, and I have many a fond memory surrounding the characters I've played.

Ogor Thunk married Meg of Ironspur in my Junior year of High School, just as it started. The year was a high point for me, and it was dramatically punctuated toward the end of the school year with Meg's death at the hands of an old PC that had returned as a... PC. The other members of my party had died, but one of them had made an awful pact and won back his life at the cost of dealing revenge against Ogor for having slain him in the first place (amongst other things he was bound to do).

He gleefully set about trying to make life miserable for Ogor, but the barbarian was one step ahead of everyone and simply retired to this biggest "hive of scum and villainy" he could locate, creating certainty that he would never care about anyone there.

Wiley bugger.

I withdrew every detail out of the story that wasn't imperative, making it fall like lead (although I hadn't considered it at the time) instead of flying about like some sort of cartoony woman in a big dress lifted by high winds.

And the ending wasn't satisfying... but it was a start.

My wife has often said that gaming yields poor texts. Fanboy articles and >shudder< books are sub-par. While I find the books of Michael Stackpole acceptable, I recognize that Nyx Smith probably could've put together better.

My idea is that the stories themselves aren't bad, but that the enthusiasm for the subject matter clouds judgement. Should I rip apart the setting and build it anew, I could yield (as could anyone) a higher grade of fiction than has been previously offered.

And all of this was triggered by laying out my map of the Bloodstone region of the Forgotten realms and telling SuperSon of my exploits (and, yes, I told him I did them... I defeated the White Worm of Bloodstone pass and, with the help of friends, slew the ice dragon in a mountain, the name of which I knew not, and later sought the aid of the monks in the Monastary of the Yellow Rose in a campaign to defend that same mountain from a host of humanoids whose only crime was lacking one of their ears).

Good times.