Saricks, Brendan J.

The Birthday Post - Welcome to 3.0

It is currently 1:30am here in middle America. It will be significantly later by the time I finish this post, and later still by the time you actually read it, but right now its 1:30am on July 13th, 2010; my 29th birthday.

When I decided to start blogging again I wanted to avoid posts that delved into my personal life. To most, my life is as uninteresting as the guy they sit next to on the bus, and is therefore not really for public consumption. It is my opinion (I hope) that will drive readership here, and that was my intended focus.

But man, you guys would not believe what has happened to me in the last few months.

It’s my birthday and even though I’m only 2 posts in to my original content-pact, I am going to go off the reservation a little bit and talk frankly with you. I don’t want to give you too many details, I fear some situations herein are still too delicate to even be approached, let alone touched, but I want to tell you about me before, me now, and where me is going. Grammar school is not on the docket (sorry Aaron.) This will probably be scatterbrained. But come on, it’s almost 2am at this point, you would be scatterbrained too.

It’s pretty wild how far a year can take you.

A year ago, I was in the middle of Four Player Coop’s 15 minutes of fame. I remember sitting on the couch at Joe’s place (a name that means nothing to you, but means the world to me) watching G4 and seeing “Four Player Coop” scroll across the bottom of the screen in relation to a news story we had broke.

That was it kids, we had made it.

Upon reflection, all the bullshit that happened before and has happened since was insignificant to that moment. But even that moment has been upstaged by Bullshot!’s marginal success. I cannot give you the emotion I feel when it comes to finding out someone makes time to listen to your inane bullshit. It is a feeling without words. It has happened a lot of the past year, and it never gets old. I will never be able to thank you guys for that, but I will do what I can.

I cannot tell you what lay in 4pc’s future, I can only tell you that its past was a lot of fun.

I haven’t played a video game in a month. Seriously, you can check that shit. What’s worse, I haven’t enjoyed a video game in 2 months (apologies to Alan Wake and Prince of Persia - although I was still fair to both of you.) Guys, maybe you don’t understand the weight of that statement. I have not, in my 29 years on this earth, ever experienced an apathy towards video games like the one I am experiencing right now. In any other similar episode (similar in terms of feeling - not in terms of duration) I would simply chalk it up to being burnt out.

But this time feels…different

Is is permanent? (God I hope not, StarCraft 2 and Dead Rising 2 are just around the corner!) I don’t know for sure because I don’t know anything for sure right now, but it feels like its on the backburner until some other things get sorted out.

Yes there is a girl, yes there is a idea…yes, I think everything will be ok. Three topics so unrelated that the dial spins all the way back ‘round to “related.”

The bottom line is this. The last 2 months of my life have been wonderful and terrifying. I don’t know if this is the start of a mid-life crisis or if I legitimately just starting life as I will know it, but it’s pretty incredible. I don’t know what is going to happen to 4pc, I don’t know what is going to happen to me, but I know I’m going to write. I am going to write a lot and see what comes of it. Hopefully, you will stick along for the ride.

Welcome to 3.0

The Horror of Horror

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Horror has ever been, and will continue to be, my favorite member of the genre pantheon, and I’m tired of seeing its definition and flavor watered down and applied to everything. Let me help you see the truth.

It seems to me that horror has been distilled to mean anything scary, from aliens to ax-murderers. This is incorrect. “Scary” is almost completely subjective. There are people out there terrified of cats (I know, weird right?), but I have a cat sitting right here next to me, and I do not live in a house of horrors.

Well, not for that reason anyway.

Horror does not equal scary. Horror IS scary, but it isn’t the embodiment of the word. Horror is bigger than scary. Horror is scary without explanation. But hold on, we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

The Ax-Murderer movie confuses me the most. I think this comes from the idea that an ax-murderer is horrible which, I admit, is awfully close to horror, but just because the root is the same doesn’t mean that the word means the same thing. Horticulture also shares the same root, but I don’t know how scary gardening is.

No wait, I take that back, I do.

Your ax-muderer isn’t a horror flick, it’s a thriller. The evil is a real, tangible thing and his motivations are real world motivations. A vengeful asshole with an ax isn’t horror, its just scary. Thrillers, however, are not the big villain here. There is a sub-genre that is mislabeled as horror more than any other.

Science-Fucking-Fiction

I love Sci-Fi, love it, but it causes me more horror-based heartbreak than any other genre (yes, I realize how ridiculous that statement is.) Without taking 20 minutes to show you every single wound this has caused me, let me save us some time and break it down quickly for you: If something that seems supernatural is then explained by science, even if its fake science, that makes it SCIENCE FICTION. I don’t care if your story has zombies, vampires, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, if you explain their existence through science, then its Science Fiction. Please, for the love of my sanity, stop fucking this up.

So what is Horror?

Horror is the super-natural. Horror is the unexplained. Horror is ghosts, monsters, and anything that we can’t say “this is logical” or “science made this” to rationalize. There may even be a religious quality to horror (ghosts being the physical manifestation of souls for example), but the bottom line is that you cannot explain away a horror element. It exists for no rational reason, and that is why it is scary.

But, then again, this cat exists for no rational reason and I’m not really afraid of it…

Should I be?

The Line Between Fan and Fiction

I don’t know if you have seen this or not, but Blizzard is running a creative writing contest. The long and short of it is that you submit a story based on one of their universes, they read it, and if they like it YOU WIN. What you win is largely unimportant (to me anyway) but the opportunity to flex the creative muscle muscle is always appealing to me.

There are, of course, problems with this.

I am not a Blizzard Loremaster. Diablo means little to me, World of Warcraft was more about the loot than the story (even though the story, from what I gleaned of it, can be described only as thorough), and Starcraft is a Real Time Strategy game; I hate Real Time Strategy…but I loved Starcraft.

You’re confused. Hold tight, I got this.

I don’t like RTS games, but man Starcraft, fucking StarCraft. That game possessed my being for 2 or 3 years. Make no mistake, I was not the next Korean Starcraft Super-star, but I was the master of the Marine rush. The straight up, no bullshit, mother-trucking MASTER of the Marine rush.

And lets be honest with ourselves for a moment here, that game had a pretty bad ass story (40k-ites need to settle down - I get it ok?). Maybe it’s because I love a good Sci-Fi yarn, or that I could blur my eyes and see the zergs as Giger’s Alien (I love me some Alien - Aliens is number 3 on my Top 5 movies of all time), but whatever the case was, I really dug that story. I was so enamored by the story that I read the goddamned manual. Yes, Starcraft’s manual served as a prequel piece to the game’s storyline, and I read the whole thing.

But I don’t really remember anything.

I mean, I remember Xel-Naga, the zerg, the overmind (spoilers: dead), Jim Raynor, and being called a Judicator…but nothing else really stuck. So here I am, wanting to enter this contest for shits and grins, but finding that I may not be equipped to give the universe the respect it deserves.

And this, friends, is the trouble with Fan-Fiction; a trouble I am no longer concerning myself with.

I find that, in most cases, when someone releases a fan-fiction story for a franchise, it is overly wordy. Fans, for the most part, are proud creatures, and want to demonstrate their intimate understanding of the ‘verse to you. Marines don’t shoot bullets from their guns. They fire Tungsten-Carbide encased rounds made of Depleted Uranium from their T-734i Standard Issue Pulse Rifle. I’m all for being wordy, but at some point your average reader doesn’t give a shit. Sure, you will impress other fans with your technical vernacular, but a great story is a great story, blue-print analysis or not.

My understanding of the StarCraft universe is pedestrian bordering on handi-capable, so I don’t concern myself with that bullshit. My weaker understanding runs me into another problem however.

The story I’m writing for it is good (I think anyway - thanks, jerks) but is it a StarCraft story, or am I just taking a claustrophobic Sci-Fi tale and coloring it in with StarCraft crayons? Am I just pasting StarCraft construction paper onto this story and declaring it part of the ‘verse? I guess we will find out.

One thing that has always stuck with me was my buddy Hodapp’s words about the Halo Novels. He said they felt like a fan-fiction circle jerk. I think he may be kind of right. I loved the Halo novels (you noticed the past-tense too? Weird) but they skated that line between story and fan-fiction, sometimes falling into the ladder. I’m hoping I don’t fall prey to that, but I am also hoping that I manage to make a good StarCraft story.

That being said however, I suppose I would be ok with just making a good story. Maybe I’ll focus on that and see if the Xel-Naga want to play along…