Way back on July 4th, 2005, I launched the Alexandrian with the cleverly titled post “Welcome to the Alexandrian“. In that post, I talked about how I had become a freelance writer. The 100+ reviews I wrote for RPGNet played a major role in that story, but I wrapped up my post by saying: “But if you go to RPGNet today, you won’t find any of my reviews there. What happened? Well, that’s another story for another day.”

Then I didn’t really follow-up on that, largely because there were more interesting things to talk about.

But I’ve had people pinging me for awhile now wanting access to some of the content from my older reviews. And the original (and continuing) purpose of the Alexandrian is to archive my creative work. To that end, I’m going to start posting those old reviews in order to properly archive them away. Which means that “another day” has finally arrived.

THE REVIEWS

I posted my first review to RPGNet in the spring of 1998.

It was a review of The Paxton Gambit, a campaign supplement for the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, and it had originally been written for and posted to the Heavy Gear Mailing List. RPGNet had been around for a couple of years at that point, but the site was just beginning to get noticed by the larger RPG community. One of the people who noticed was Phillippe Boulle, who — at the time — was an editor at Dream Pod 9. He, in turn, posted a message to the Heavy Gear Mailing List asking that fans of the game go to RPGNet and post reviews of their favorite Dream Pod 9 products. When I saw Phillippe’s message, I took the review I had already written, popped over to RPGNet, and posted it.

That was a lot of fun and, to make a long story short, I kept doing it. In fact, over the next four years I would do it 165 times.

In those early days, the RPGNet community was heavily focused on the reviews: There was no general forum, but there was a discussion thread associated with each review. That meant that all of the discussion on the site was focused through whatever reviews had been posted in the last couple of weeks. It meant that the community was radically neophilic and intensely focused on RPGs.

It also meant that, if you were a successful reviewer, you were the genesis point for sprawling discussions that could go on for dozens or even hundreds of posts.

In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to recognize that RPGNet was actually serving as one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging blogosphere: Each review was effectively a blog post and the emergent community was blog-focused. At the time, it was just exciting. I’d been participating in online discussion groups since 1988 or ’89; but here I was actually finding an audience.

From ’98 through ’02, I was one of the top three or four reviewers on RPGNet. During this time period, the site went through several changes of ownership, one of which nearly destroyed the site before it was returned to Sandy Antunes (the founder). In 2001, it was then sold to Skotos Tech.

Throughout this time period I continued writing reviews. In May 2001, in fact, the site ran a “Justin Bacon Review Week” in which all of the reviews posted that week (20+ total) were written by me. That was pretty awesome and I felt very honored. Around this same time, I was asked by Sandy Antunes to help develop content for a D20 Nation website that he wanted to launch as a partner-site with RPGNet. (Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition.)

The site was also changing, however.

Forum software had been installed at some point. This was almost certainly a good thing (the site would have probably died completely during the period when its owners weren’t updating the content if it hadn’t been for the forum), but it also meant that the character of the site was changing: The community was becoming forum-oriented instead of review-oriented.

(One memory from this time period in particular: The early forum software didn’t have any accounts. You just typed in your name and left your message. There was a period of a couple weeks where somebody was deliberately trolling the forums by posting incendiary posts under my name. It took me awhile to figure out what the heck was going on, and eventually the guy responsible confessed. I suspect this incident contributed significantly to the site updating to new forum software with registered accounts shortly thereafter.)

In mid-2002, I posted what was essentially my last review at RPGNet. (In mid-2004, I posted a review of A Game of Thrones. But it was a fluke.) Partly this was because professional work was chewing up more and more of my time. Partly it was because the RPG review community had completely fetishized the reviewing of typography and binding quality instead of actual content and gameplay. But largely it was because the audience for reviews at RPGNet had severely atrophied.

PARTING OF THE WAYS

I remained an active member of the RPGNet community, however, until 2004.

In October 2003, I was participating in a thread where somebody was voicing incredulity at the idea of someone owning more than a hundred RPGs, claiming that a hundred RPGs didn’t even exist. I pointed out that hundreds of free RPGs were available on the web; so you could own hundreds of RPGs without even spending a dollar. After a couple rounds of this, I compiled and typed up a very lengthy list of the free RPGs I owned and posted it. This took about 2-3 hours worth of effort.

This list prompted several pages worth of interesting discussion. Several days later, however, one of the forum moderators did a drive-by on the thread and deleted the entire post as “threadcrapping”. I was irate at having 2-3 hours of work eradicated and responded with, “Fuck You.”

In retrospect, I probably should have saved a local copy of the post. And I probably could have been more politic in my response to the atrociously poor moderation. But I wasn’t and I got hit with a 90-day ban for mouthing off to the incompetent moderator.

Several months later, after the ban had expired, I came back and found that I couldn’t log into my account. Reconstructing events after the fact, it appears that one of the moderators (probably a fellow operating under the name “Kuma”) had decided to change the password and e-mail address on my account in an effort to secretly turn a temporary ban into a permanent one. E-mails to RPGNet went unanswered, so I created a new account under the name “Justin A. Bacon” and continued posting.

In August or September of 2004, Kuma started trying to IP ban me from the forum. Since I was posting from a dynamic IP, this completely failed. (I wasn’t even aware he was doing it, since he’d posted his intentions in a thread I was no longer reading.) After several weeks of this, another moderator apparently got around to banning the “Justin A. Bacon” account for “avoiding a ban”. (This was, of course, completely untrue. For several years after this it was quite hilarious because the “Justin Bacon” account had still never been banned, although it looks like they finally got around to “fixing” that recently.)

I sent an e-mail to the site and was told to wait a couple of days for the issue to be resolved. After a week or so, it hadn’t been.

At this point I posted to Trouble Tickets asking for an explanation. None was forthcoming. It took several days and many other people posting to both the forum thread and e-mailing RPGNet before they finally got around to posting their explanation: They believed that I had posted at some point during my 90-day ban and were, therefore, permabanning me.

Did they have a link to that post? No.

Could they find a link to that post? No.

Was there any way to fix this issue? Yes. Within 1-2 days, they would confirm the existence or nonexistence of the post Kuma claimed it existed.

… only they didn’t do that. Instead they closed the thread so that no one could post to it.

A month and a half later, somebody else posted a thread asking: “Hey. What’s going on here?” The moderators still had no explanation.

During this time period, I was being contacted by others. Something was deeply, deeply rotten in the moderation team at RPGNet and I wasn’t the only one having problems.

I decided to raise the stakes: I publicly announced that if RPGNet didn’t want me as a member of the community, then I would pull my reviews.

The point was to raise the profile not only of my issues with the moderation team, but the general issues the community was having with the moderation team. I was hoping that it would force the new owners of the site to put their cards of the table and make it clear what sort of site RPGNet was going to be. In this I was successful, although not in the way that I had hoped: Still unable to produce the posts demonstrating that there was any justification whatsoever for my permabanning, the owners of the site instead permabanned me for daring to exercise my IP rights.

I shrugged and walked away. The RPGNet I had once fervently supported was obviously dead and gone.

POSTSCRIPT

I do remember quite vividly, though, my final e-mail exchange with the ownership. They wanted to give me “one last chance” to let them keep my reviews on the site. They wrote: “By removing them from RPGNet, you’re destroying the value of your reviews.”

This taught me an important lesson: When an organization believes that your work has value because they allow it to appear in their venue (rather than the reality, which is that the content is what gives a venue value) then you’re probably better off getting away from that organization as quickly as possible.

In the years since then, the situation at RPGNet has only worsened. The Tangency forums have become the tail wagging the dog. There are members of the moderation team who take great pride in the fact that they’ve never played an RPG. (This fact boggles my mind every time somebody mentions it.)

The site, which once made its name on the participation of major RPG professionals (priding itself as the “Inside Scoop on Gaming”), has become increasingly hostile to them. It’s becomes a popular past time for posters to bait professionals posting to the boards so that the professionals will get banned. At one point, this was coupled with a ludicrous policy of banning discussions of games written by people who had been banned.

A couple years ago a friend of mine told me he was being accused by RPGNet’s mods of being my sock-puppet because he included links to products I had written (and he had helped edit) in his .sig. Last year I had a complete stranger send me an e-mail saying that RPGNet’s mods were making the same accusations towards him.

I’m not sure what to tell either of them. I enjoy discussing and debating RPGs. It improves my games. It improves my writing.

But RPGNet? It’s a cesspool. And, sadly, it’s a cesspool that’s been created by the very mechanism which is supposed to be keeping the water clean.

In any case, that’s the nutshell version of my rollercoaster ride with RPGNet. Hopefully you found it at least mildly entertaining. But mostly it’s my way of introducing the reposting and archiving of the reviews I wrote for RPGNet “back in the day”. I’ll be starting later today and posting them semi-regularly until I’m done.

Babylon 5 is one of my favorite TV series. In the late-’90s, when the series was being rerun daily on TNT, I would set my VCR to record each new episode before leaving for my nightly shift at Hollywood Video. When I would get home, I would immediately head to the TV, rewind the tape, and watch the next episode. It was absolutely compelling television.

With that being said, I’ve found it very difficult to convince people to try to the show. The difficulty is that the first season is fairly dreadful. Unfortunately, the first season also establishes a lot of stuff that gets huge payoffs later on. B5’s ability to manage its meta-arc — setting up material that gets paid off years later — is one of the things that makes the show great. And so I’m always loathe to tell people to just “skip the 1st season”, because I think that actually does degrade the rest of the experience.

So what I used to tell people was, “Just try the first season. Its got some rough patches, but it’s worth it for the payoff. If you just can’t stomach it, then skip to the second season.”

But most of those people would hit the first season wall, bounce off, and not bother trying the second season. The result was like being stuck in the Kobyashi Maru when trying to get people to give this amazing show enough of a fair shake for it to blow them away.

To that end, I prepared a viewing guide for the first season. It worked for my wife, so I’m declaring it a complete and utter success.

• WATCH – Must watch to get essential arc developments. Some of these are mediocre, but it’ll be worth it for the pay-off. Trust me.
• SKIP – These are the episodes which will probably make your eyes bleed. For the love of god, don’t watch them.
• OPTIONAL – These episodes are decent or better. Some of them are very good.
• OPTIONAL (CLASS 1) – These episodes are recommended for arc reasons, but not required. Basically, there’s nothing essential here, but there may be a few minor developments that will heighten your appreciation of later material.

Some of the Optional and Skip episodes on the list below include some key exposition. This has been indicated with a note where appropriate.

So if you’ve bounced off Babylon 5 in the past — or know someone who has — give it another shot and let me know how it goes. (And, seriously, if the first season is completely intolerable give the second season a shot.)

EPISODE LIST

• The Gathering – WATCH
  
• Midnight on the Firing Line – WATCH
• Soul Hunter – Optional (Class 1)
• Born to the Purple – WATCH
• Infection – SKIP (1)
• The Parliament of Dreams – WATCH
• Mind War – WATCH
• The War Prayer – Optional (2)
• And the Sky Full of Stars – WATCH
• Deathwalker – Optional (Class 1)
• Believers – Optional
• Survivors – Optional (Class 1)
• By Any Means Necessary – Optional
• Signs and Portents – WATCH
• TKO – SKIP (3)
• Grail – Optional (4)
• Eyes – WATCH
• Legacies – WATCH
• A Voice in the Wilderness – WATCH
• A Voice in the Wilderness, Part 2 – WATCH
• Babylon Squared – WATCH
• The Quality of Mercy – WATCH
• Chrysalis – WATCH

NOTES

(1) – There is an organization known as Interplanetary Expeditions. They are reputedly a front organization for a bioweapons corporation.

(2) – Anti-alien sentiments on Earth are turning violent.

(3) The B-plot of this episode is good. If you’re feeling adventurous, skip any scene that doesn’t have Ivanova in it.

(4) There’s a ghetto called Down Below populated by Lurkers who came to the station looking for a better life and have fallen through the cracks.

I saw Conan the Barbarian a couple nights ago. Quick thoughts:

1. It’s a much better movie than its box office.
2. In fact, I’m comfortable saying that I think it’s a better movie than the Schwarznegger version from ’82.
3. It is not, however, a great movie. It may not even be a good one. But it’s not a bad one, either. It’s a fun flick: It doesn’t insult your intelligence. The plot makes sense. The action sequences are dynamic. The script doesn’t carry much of the load, but it gets out of the way and lets the actors carry the load for making us care about the characters and the SFX guys carry the load for getting us immersed into the world.
4. The biggest failing of the movie is the conclusion. It falls very flat and concentrates a lot of problems that were scattered throughout the rest of the film.
5. It’s literally wall-to-wall action. It’s pretty much ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION-breath-ACTION for the duration. I’d like to say that the movie would be better if it was 10 minutes longer and took a minute or two to catch its breath, but that would really only be true if they brought somebody in to punch up the dialogue.
6. Momoa is a fantastic Conan.

The film has also forced me to revise my understanding of effective fight choreography. I used to break it down into basically two parts:

First, the choreography itself. Is it exciting? Clever? Compelling? Well-paced? The whole nine yards. Plenty of films, of course, don’t clear this basic hurdle.

Second, how the choreography is filmed. Effective cinematography will focus your attention, showcasing and even improving the choreography. But this is where a lot of films have recently been falling down: They get too tight on the action. They cut too rapidly between shots. And the result is that, regardless of how effective the choreography is, you cant see it. It’s as if someone filmed a drama by pumping up the soundtrack so that you can’t hear large chunks of the dialogue while panning away from the actor’s faces. Or like watching ballet in a strobe light performed behind a wall with some random holes punched in it.

Conan the Barbarian, however, manages to achieve both of these elements and yet still frequently fail. It’s forced me to add:

Three, conveying the geography of the scene.

This may really be just a subset of how the choreography is filmed. But I was really struck in Conan by how often I was completely enthralled by the actual, specific choreography of a given fight… only to be confused by how two simultaneous fights were relating to each other; or where the fight was in relationship to the person Conan was trying to save; and so forth.

A couple years ago, I reviewed the disastrously bad X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I concluded by saying that, unless they got Bryan Singer back, I wouldn’t be fooled into seeing another of these movies.

Executive Producer Bryan Singer

Story by Bryan Singer

… well played 20th Century Fox.

The previews also looked good, but I still waited for the reviews. And when the reviews came back positive (the film is currently reviewing better than Thor on Metacritic, and I thought Thor was a pretty good flick) I decided to take the risk.

And I’m really glad that I did.

Not only is X-Men: First Class better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a very low hurdle to clear), I think it may be the best X-Men movie they’ve made. It’s not perfect. But it is very, very good and I recommend checking it out. (Particularly if the only reason you’ve been holding back is because, like me, you were so bitterly disappointed by X3 and Wolverine.)

So, in my opinion, that’s two good comic book movies out of two so far this year. And I’ve got my fingers crossed for both Captain America (which looks great in the trailers) and Green Lantern (which will either be amazing or painful).

(Tangentially, I’ve seen a lot of industry “experts” claiming that X-Men: First Class is having a poor box office turn-out because Wolverine isn’t in it. Well… no. It’s having a poor box office turn-out because the last two movies in the franchise sucked and sucked hard. You can’t just bounce back from that. I think the only way they could have avoided a poor opening weekend for this movie would have been to get Bryan Singer back in the director’s chair and prominently advertise that fact. Frankly, I’m surprised they weren’t plastering Singer’s name all over the previews. I had to go digging to find out he was re-involved in the franchise. It would have sent a very clear “sorry about the last two films, please give us another chance” message to the audience.)

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of “decompressed storytelling” in comic books, here’s the short version: It’s a combination of reducing the number of words per panel, increasing the number of panels per moment, and (consequently) stretching a given amount of plot over a larger number of pages/issues. Its proponents describe it as “cinematic” and highlight the ability to savor particular moments and tweak comedic timing. Its detractors say that it’s just a way for writers to stretch out their plots and milk ’em for all they’re worth (to the point of not making them worth much of anything).

My personal opinion has generally been of the, “If it’s done well, it’s great. If it’s done poorly, it’s crap. Just like everything else.” school.

But what I’ve recently realized is that this trend toward decompressed storytelling at the micro-level in comic books has been accompanied by a trend towards drastic compression of storytelling at the macro-level of mainstream superhero comics.

What I mean is the pace at which HUGE and DRAMATIC changes are brought down the pipeline. You can see this most dramatically in the milieu-shattering crossover events which are now essentially annual events at Marvel and DC, but you can find plenty of examples in individual titles, too. For example, when Geoff Johns rebooted the Green Lantern Corps he created a scenario which could have comfortably been used to tell dozens or hundreds of stories. Instead they told roughly 6 before launching into the next sequence of WE’RE CHANGING EVERYTHING.

The combination of (a) taking more time to tell a story while (b) having less time to tell a story is, in my opinion, increasingly disastrous.

Where this is perhaps most deeply felt is the relationship between characters. Bruce Wayne starts dating Jezebel Jet and the relationship is supposed to be completely changing his life before it turns out that she’s secretly betraying him… but since she appears in maybe a hundred panels between the time she’s introduced and the time she’s revealed to be a traitor, it’s really hard to take any of it seriously. Hal Jordan is in a new relationship with a lady call-signed Cowgirl, but there’s a publishing deadline so there’s no time to actually show us that relationship. Dick Grayson and Damien are supposed to be forging a deep and meaningful bond in their new working relationship as Batman and Robin… but the status quo necessary for us to invest into that relationship never actually exists.

“Status quo.” A potentially deadly phrase. Am I saying I just want comics to enter into a form of stasis? Not at all. I want to see Bruce Wayne fall for Jezebel Jet. I want to see Hal Jordan try to rediscover what it means to be human with Jillian “Cowgirl” Pearlman. I want to watch the comradeship between Dick Grayson and Damien grow into a rich and rewarding partnership.

But that’s not what I’m getting right now. What I’m getting right now is a sort of “highlight reel” of the actual story, followed abruptly by SOMETHING EPIC that CHANGES EVERYTHING.

The shallowness of what I’m experiencing in these (de)compressed books can be contrasted to three other recent comic-reading experiences I’ve had:

First, looking back at 52 I think one of the reasons I really enjoyed it was that the main characters seemed to get more time to just naturally reveal themselves over the course of the series than characters limited to monthly books do. Effectively, it was as if I was reading a comic from an alternate reality where the DC Universe had gone unplagued by a THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING event for more than four years. (Since the DC Universe has effectively been in a perpetual state of THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING for the better part of a decade, the contrast is huge.)

Second, I’ve been reading Walter Simonson’s mid-1980’s run on Thor. I’ve actually only gotten about six issues into it, but this is back in the “compressed” era of comic book storytelling and more shit can happen in 3 panels of this book than in entire issues of “decompressed” stories. The book is not entirely immune from character developments lacking justification (Sif falls for Beta Ray Bill without much in the way of narrative support to back it up), but I do note that the faster pace of events allows certain storytelling beats to be achieved effectively with fewer issues. (For example, Odin’s curse-gift to Beta Ray Bill comes after only knowing the character for a few issues… but you’ve spent so much narrative space with him that you’ve really come to know the character well and the curse-gift resonates beautifully as a result.)

Third, Paul Tobin’s work on Spider-Man Adventures as collected in Thwip!, Peter Parker vs. the X-Men, Amazing, and Sensational. These stories conveniently exist in the “Tobin-verse” and are completely separate from mainstream Marvel continuity… which means they’re immune to the macro-compression of the mega-events. Although Tobin uses a more relaxed, decompressed pacing within each issue he’s never forced to wrap things up in time for the next corporate-enforced game-changer. The result is that characters are given the room to breathe and develop; relationships become invested with the sorts of detailed storytelling that make them come alive; and the whole series is simply a delight. They’re also the best Spider-Man stories I’ve read in years.

So what I’m saying here is not “decompression is bad”. I’m not even saying that massive continuity shifts and cross-title mega-events are bad. But I am saying that the two of them together — the (de)compressed pace of modern superhero comics — does not seem to be a healthy combination.