Battle of the Bazaar in Bento Miso’s Winter Market

December 30, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

About three weeks ago, I went to Bento Miso’s Bit Bazaar Winter Market and since then I’ve been trying to focus on what struck me the most. I was made aware of the first Bit Bazaar, the Spring Fair, through the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and its second Comics Vs. Games creative jam and exhibit. It is an opportunity for video game creators, art-makers, and food distributors to sell their wares and have some face-to-face relation with their current and potential fans.

Bento Miso itself is a collaborative work space for independent video game developers, graphic artists, game journalists, start-up businesses, and other individuals and groups. It is also inclusive and it attempts to make itself into a minority, women, and LGBTQ-friendly safe environment. It also functions as a community space and, this year; it was really in full swing. The Bit Bazaar Winter Market covered two floors this time around: with food and drink vendors upstairs with a wide variety of games, and Torontrons and various comics artists, designers, and other exhibitor tables selling various products and awesome samples on the main floor.

What stands out for me is what the organizers and planners of the Winter Market did this year. Henry Faber, the co-founder of Bento Miso, the game designer Damian Sommer and others created a card game called Battle of the Bazaar. Essentially, what they did was they made forty-five cards (with a forty-sixth one being a rule card) that represented a majority of the exhibitor tables, specifically the main games, comics, creations and foods of the exhibitors and gave them numbers of power and special abilities. The particulars of the rules can be found on Bento Miso’s site, just as Daniel Kaszor of the Financial Post‘s “Post Arcade” goes into more detail on its creation in an interview with Henry Faber himself but what I would like to note is that each of these vendors and exhibitors possessed their cards. In order to get all of them for yourself, you had to go to each of their tables and either get one from them, or trade cards.

It was potentially a very useful tactic when you think about it. In addition to creating cards that embody the works of their exhibitors, as well as displaying the website information of all those involved (kind of like creative contact cards), the cards make up an interesting game, and the collecting of them made for a potential ice-breaker. It is true that you could go to a table near the entrance that sold the entire decks but part of the fun is collecting the cards and interacting with the exhibitors that had them. It definitely made for some interesting conversations of my own. When I wandered upstairs I began playing Apotheon, in a player verses player death-match with ancient Greek black-figure graphics (the kind you would find on pottery) in which you have to throw weapons at your opponent. After my opponent killed me brutally with a pleasant and friendly smile on his face as I barely figured out how to use the controls, I got this awesome looking “Thetis” card from the exhibitor table and it was how I became aware of the cards and eventually figured out what they were about.

I spent a lot of time at the Golden Gear Games table where I played Fate Tectonics: a game where a pretty 16-bit goddess sprite hovers over you as you attempt to build a world out of land pieces and you hope that she won’t strike you down with lightning if you get the puzzle sequences wrong. I actually bought the game in the form of hollowed out Gameboy cartridge USB port, along with some pins, a poster and a delicious brownie. I also went back and forth from that table to trade some cards with them (once I got their “Worldbuilding” card of course). Towards the end of my time there, I saw the software and game developer Alex Bethke who not only helped make Fate Tectonics but also collaborated with Dames Making Games in creating three interactive animated short stories in the form of comics. I even had the opportunity, after briefly speaking with Cecily Carver of Dames Making Games, to converse with Katie Foster on her multimedia game The Disappearance of Emily Butler. It is about a girl that returns to Newfoundland and discovers parts about her past that are more than she bargained for. What is really interesting about this game in development is that it is a point and click adventure that has an interactive comics element, with Foster being one of the Dames in Games that Alex Bethke and Golden Gear Games has created an electronic comic for. All of these interactive comics can be downloaded as the Swipe Comics Anthology Vol. I app for the IOS: which Katie Foster had on display at her table. It is truly remarkable and as someone who is fascinated in the comics medium and its interaction with video games, it is definitely something I’m going to keep an eye on for the near future.

I traded cards between these the DMG table and Golden Gear Games, making my rounds and finally making it to Christine Love and Nadine Lessio’s Interstellar Selfie Station where I got and traded some cards with her. I’ve written on Christine Love’s games at Mythic Bios and even mentioned her Twine Workshop at the WordPlay Festival that helped me in my own creative endeavors and I was definitely going to meet up with her. Her card is “*Old Mute” and after you use its power, it makes all of your subsequent, future cards have a minus one to their score. If you have played her Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus, you will realize just how appropriate this power truly is.

After passing by many other tables towards the end of the evening, I finally caved in and came to the Pianocade Table to find out what was being soldered and put together there. Basically, I got to play with a Wii Remote that created various sound effects depending on what buttons I pushed and how I swung it. Eventually, I came across Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and Asteroid Base‘s table. I’d seen this game in passing at my first CanZine Festival and I actually had a twitter conversation with Jeannie Faber, another co-founder of Bento Miso and the Event Director of the Bit Bazaar. I was actually looking forward to meeting Jeannie Faber but we never had the opportunity to run into each other and as that table was very busy, I ended up just taking a card.

As the night drew to a close, I’d managed to accumulate forty-one of the forty-five Battle of the Bazaar cards. I didn’t get to converse with everyone, but I now have leisure to look at their information and get a better sense of what their products and wares were about along with what they as individuals or teams actually do.

On the Battle of the Bazaar card “Bento Miso” card, there is this specific description. It states, “At the end of the game, if you haven’t won a round, you win the game.” Three weeks ago now I didn’t get all the cards, do everything I wanted, or even knew what to do but I think as I walked out that night, watching my fellow geeks, couples, groups of friends, and families interact I felt as though I won the Battle of the Bazaar anyway: just by simply being there.

If you are interested, Bento Miso is selling packs of its Battle of the Bazaar cards, but there are only eight decks left for $26 plus $3 dollar shipping so you’d best hurry now. They are definitely cool to have.

The Dark Crystal Director’s Cut

December 9, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

For those of you that have watched Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, consider this premise: Think about a world with three suns, strange hybrid creatures, the last of the mouse-eared diminutive Gelfling, the gentle urRu (or the Mystics) and the cruel and twisted Skeksis actually being two parts of the same race, and the heart of that whole world being a crystal with a chip that has turned it dark. Now picture this entire story being told with very little explanation and, in one species’ case, very little speech in the way that approximates English.

This is what “The Dark Crystal Director’s Cut” is supposed to be. Apparently Christopher Orgeron, a long-time Jim Henson enthusiast, experimental film-lover, and a fan of the film, tracked down a copy of the workprint (the rough version of a motion picture created during the process of editing) on a torrent and proceeded to edit, splice together, and painstakingly restore scenes from the workprint and The Dark Crystal into an approximation of the original director’s cut that was rejected by its test audiences so many years ago. Think about it, the result of those rejections and subsequent editing to clarify the film’s story line made all the difference between The Dark Crystal being an obscure experimental film, and becoming a cult-classic for a broader theatre going audience. It is a fine line indeed.

It is almost as much of a fine line to state that Orgeron’s work is actually The Dark Crystal Director’s Cut. He apparently based it off of the workprint as much as possible, but even he seems to admit that there are places that he needs to smooth over and things were lost in the translation, as it were, from the rough black and white production quality film of the workprint itself. I’ve watched the film that was released on DVD and this cut and there are very few differences between them, but the ones that exist are very clear. Aside from the fact that there is more footage of certain events, there is a lot less silliness as well. The narration of the released film version at the beginning doesn’t exist and the Skeksis are not speaking English but, rather, their own language of Skexish. The fact that the Skeksis are only speaking their language makes them a lot creepier, though their general mannerisms show through all too well.

The black and white workprint scenes inserted into the cut are a little confusing in and of themselves and sometimes the sound quality wavers. Still, as Orgeron states in his interview with Mental Floss, this version or interpretation of the film throws you right into the “extraterrestrial” quality of Thra and the story and there is something very elemental about finding yourself as an audience and with little warning being in a whole other world.

It is uncertain how long “The Dark Crystal Director’s Cut” will be available on YouTube or anywhere else for that matter before the Henson Company weighs in on its existence, but it is intriguing to look at and it definitely gives you a look into the processes that shaped this film. It’s ironic. The original cut was said to have been rejected because of its lack of appeal to a broader audience and yet the cut that did make it, the film many of us all know and love, has become obscure on its own way over time compared to the rest of Henson’s Muppets work and even Labyrinth. Yet it is an interesting time. The Dark Crystal Author Quest is quickly drawing to a close, still looking for a new writer to add more to Thra’s universe, and then this fan’s work comes up to give us even more insight: especially when you consider that there seems to have been more footage and fewer transitions in the dreamfasting sequence between Jen and Kira … letting you see a lot more about their lives before what will become their quest.

It would seem that the film’s adage still holds true when you come to it. Everything is connected.

Everybody Lives: A Review of The Day of The Doctor

November 25, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I am going to quote River Song again when I say, “Spoilers.”

So for those of you who haven’t put on your Tenth Doctor’s 3D glasses this weekend or this coming week please don’t read any further.

Before The Day, there was The Night, and then Last Day. I am time-stamped on G33kpr0n in What Will Happen on The Day of The Doctor? as stating that it is quite impossible to predict a Doctor Who episode, never mind the 50th Anniversary Special. But I did make a few theories, just as I did in What Is a Doctor and When Does He Stop Running? in my Mythic Bios Blog.

I am not upset that my possible theories were wrong, not really. I went into watching “The Day of The Doctor,” on Space at 2:50 pm with no other expectations save for the fact that we were going to see how Gallifrey died. I mean, this is what we’ve been told since 2005. Gallifrey is no more. Gallifrey falls. The Doctor is the last of his kind and he keeps losing his Companions over and again. As the last of the Time Lords, The Doctor is alone. From 2005 to the present, this is the story that we have been told and that we have seen play out time and again. But just as we all had our theories about how this would all go down, there was what we thought and then there was what happened, what will happen, or what is happening right now to those of you watching this for the first time.

The episode begins with the original 1963 Doctor Who introduction sequence, complete in black and white, and so close to the junkyard owned by one I.M. Foreman where the adventures of The Doctor began. After Clara leaves from her new work at a school, where The Doctor’s first Companions may have once taught his granddaughter, to go see him and U.N.I.T. is in so much of a rush to get The Doctor to help him that they basically tow away him and his TARDIS by helicopter, The Doctor finds his past catching up with him.

U.N.I.T., led by the Brigadier’s daughter Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, brings The Doctor to their Under-Gallery, where Queen Elizabeth the First placed all paintings deemed “not fit for public consumption” to see a sample of Time Lord-painting. This painting is a depiction of the last day of The Last Great Time War and the fall of Gallifrey’s second city Arcadia. Suddenly, The Doctor remembers that incarnation of himself that he doesn’t like to think about, the one he and Clara saw again in “The Name of The Doctor” when he crossed into his own time stream. We are treated to a look at the three-dimensional painting, which is bigger on the inside, of a golden, blood-red ravaged Gallifrey…

And then we are right in the War.

Murray Gold’s “The Dark and Endless Dalek Night” plays grandiose and horrifying in the background as Dalek saucers and Time Lord defences battle it out. But we see something new on Gallifrey’s surface. In “The End of Time,” all we saw was the Time Lord High Council in fascist red and gold proclaiming what would be the Ultimate Sanction, or the obliteration of the universe to assure their ascension as beings of pure consciousness. The Doctor made it clear that the Time Lords had been completely corrupted and irredeemable by battle lust and war. I mean, think about for a few moments. Imagine a whole people that can Regenerate and manipulate the laws of Time itself. Now think about Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society and the inventor of much of their technology, removing the thirteen Regeneration limit and with modified Battle TARDISes dying over and over again. The Time Lords and, by extension, Gallifrey were basically deemed as bad as the Daleks and this was the reason for The Doctor’s terrible decision. This was the reason he used The Moment to destroy all of them.

In my own Mythic Bios article, I saw it as an act of euthanasia, of basically putting an entire people that had gone rabid with a hunger for power to sleep out of mercy for them and the Universe. I saw it as a hard, but necessary thing. But we had hints that just as the Time Lords had done terrible things, they also weren’t all monsters even at this point in this game. Look at the mini-episode “The Last Day” for instance. Those soldiers were just people. They were just trying to defend their home. You see from the perspective of a Gallifreyan or Time Lord soldier another giving you a helmet and he has this look of empathy and shared suffering on his face. This is not a madman or a monster. They are the front-line that has to defend their home and their families.

Yes, Time Lord society has families. Despite earlier versions of the Doctor Who mythos where Time Lords were Loomed or artificially woven and grown into existence, Time Lords and Gallifreyans have parents … and children. And this is where the episode punches you in the stomach. You assume that all the Time Lords were engineered adults, even if they were once children. I even had the belief that an elder race like the Time Lords would have few, if any children at this stage in their evolution. But you see them. You see the Gallifreyan children cowering with their protective and very terrified parents. All of that over-exaggerated Gallifreyan fashion that we have seen over the years is tattered and clothing essentially war refugees that die by Dalek and friendly-fire. It is truly awful and perhaps that is the reason why Moffat does not show gratuitous Regeneration scenes. First of all, I am pretty sure that the Daleks could have replicated something like staser fire, one of the few weapons that can kill Time Lords instantly, and second of all it illustrates that there are no take backs in war where innocents die.

Then we see The Doctor, The War Doctor, who has frankly become my favourite. He is a worn, haunted, sad old man who has seen and dealt more death than any self-conscious being ever need to. Even as he rescues some refugees by having the TARDIS smash into some Daleks, he uses a gun to carve the words “No more” into a wall. It is as though he is writing his own name as the artist of the Time Lord painting we see from Doctor Eleven’s perspective. He might as well be.

After some very concerned Time Lord soldiers, who are fed up with the High Council for doing essentially nothing (which is another indication that not all Time Lords were aware of, or even agreed with the Ultimate Sanction) realize that The Doctor has stolen the most powerful super weapon in existence we think we know where this is going. It is The Moment.

We find The Doctor in an isolated spot, having left his TARDIS miles away, either because she won’t have to see him detonate the device or watch him die. Despite the lack of hope in his eyes and his weathered, unkempt face he is still The Doctor. He is tinkering with The Moment and trying to puzzle it out like he does any other toy he comes across.

And then we see Rose.

No. We actually see The Moment, as the device’s sentient program, taking on Rose’s Bad Wolf incarnation and deciding to make The Doctor fully aware of the consequences of what he intends to do. She is beautiful and golden in the feral way that her moniker suggests. The Moment has taken the image of someone from The Doctor’s past, or future, to attempt to relate to him. It is her that confronts him about the children. And you can see in his eyes even before he says anything that he intends to die with The War. It makes too much sense. After all the horror and the loss even later in his life, it is a miracle that The Doctor has never committed suicide. But The Moment, Bad Wolf, or Rose will not make it that easy for him. For some reason, The Moment has decided to make him face his decisions and his future by opening warps through the War’s time lock. Talk about an excellent piece of Ancient Time Lord technology huh?

These warps are how Doctor Eleven, Ten, and The War Doctor end up meeting in 1562 England. Despite the grimness of everything I’ve described so far, there is your typical Doctor Who silliness. Doctor Ten continuously mistakes Elizabeth the First as being a shape-shifting Zygon imposter (I’m thinking his shape shifter device kept getting confused by his own energy), while Doctor Eleven threw a fez through two of the warps that brought them all together. Even The War Doctor is exasperated by these younger, future versions of himself. In the scene where he meets them for the first time, convinced by The Moment to talk with his future selves, he actually mistakes them for The Doctor’s Companions. At first, I thought he was totally messing around with them, asking for The Doctor and calling them Companions until I began to realize that he genuinely didn’t know.

I will say that at this point in the venture, I thought Eleven would react much more angrily to The War Doctor given his denunciation of him in “The Name of The Doctor.” But he and Doctor Ten just seemed shocked. And after they are captured by Elizabeth’s guards, seemingly under the Zygon imposter’s command we see them pretty much face each other down. The War Doctor asks them if they ever thought about how many children there were on Gallifrey. There is another punch in the stomach for everyone in the audience. But whereas Doctor Ten does, in fact remember, Doctor Eleven claims not to and there is this very real, very angry moment between him and Ten about how he could “move past” something of that kind. Basically, even in a jail cell The Doctor is still running from his past and what he did that one time during The Time War. Meanwhile The Moment, who is still Rose and can only be seen by The War Doctor, is feeding him lines and asking him to consider matters. I was thinking about all those Doctor/Rose fan-shippers that were crying inside about how close this approximation of Rose was to Doctor Ten and Eleven, and yet so far away.

Then each of them is led by The Moment, through The War Doctor, to realize that despite the different appearances of their sonic screwdrivers they all still have the same software. They are about to use them to break out when Clara, who the Zygons underestimated rather stupidly, just opens the unlocked door. Yes, all three Doctors are that absent-minded: constantly searching for complex solutions, when the answer is right in front of them. It happens to us all. But then what seems to be the Elizabeth imposter leads them out to show them how the Zygons are planning to conquer Earth. With their homeworld having been destroyed in the beginnings of the Time War, the Zygons somehow reverse-engineered Time Lord art technology (perhaps through the presence of the Time War painting that is somehow at some point in Elizabethan England) send themselves into other paintings to release themselves in Earth’s future. All of these events are components to another, greater Moment that comes up very soon.

So after realizing that Elizabeth I is the real one pretending to be her imposter (that she stabbed to death in the forest) and her impromptu wedding with Doctor Ten, all three Doctors come into the TARDIS and find a way to go back to 2013 into a “TARDIS-proofed” U.N.I.T. Black Tower and stop the mutually-assured destruction of London situation happening between the Zygon infiltrators and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It is here that we see Doctors Ten and Eleven taking their regret over what happened in The Time War and using it and craftiness to get both sides to agree to peace-talks. Clara then has some alone time with The War Doctor, a far cry from the young energetic man she has been travelling with and says that his eyes “look young” while those of his counterparts look so terribly old.

It is here that The War Doctor comes to his decision. He realizes that his “necessary mistake” in destroying Gallifrey is the only way to get his future incarnations to “grow-up” into the people that they have become. He plans to be the force that they learn from. And I know that I, as part of the audience watching this commercial-less simulcast, braced for what was going to come.

But even though this was not a Christmas Special, a 50th Anniversary counts for something. Even as The Moment makes him pause again, the other two Doctors with Clara in tow come to where he is now. It is heartbreaking to see The War Doctor want them to leave him so that he can do what he, albeit doubtfully now, still believes is necessary and Regenerate alone. But they accept that he is a part of them, after denying his memory for so long and they are all about to activate The Moment’s Big Red Button when…

Clara comes in and reminds The Doctor why he named himself The Doctor. The Moment too takes the opportunity to show all of them Gallifrey’s families and children. There have so far been two reoccurring themes in this episode. The first part of the episode starts at a school house with children in an English public school with its old private-school trappings. It is not unlike the Time Lord Academy in which The Doctor and so many others grew up. We see the children in the War. We see them at play in the sunlight of The War Doctor’s dusty memories. And then we see them hanging up colourful ribbons and streamers despite the destruction around them. We see something that we have not seen so far in this whole episode.

We see hope.

We also see women. It is no original idea or trope for a female archetype to be the helper or saviour of a male character. The Moment does everything she can to lead The Doctor to an informed decision not determined by despair. Clara reminds The Doctor of his purpose and is always his Companion. Elizabeth the First flat out states that arrogance typifies all men. Even the TARDIS, Sexy, won’t leave The Doctor in any incarnation. She even smashed down some Daleks like a Battle TARDIS. Where The Doctors act, these characters ask and question. And yes, they help save The Doctor from the spiritual damnation we’ve seen him struggle with since 2005.

In them, we see life.

And then a potential catastrophe becomes a eucastrophe: a happy-ending.

Between the three Doctors and all of their other incarnations–including the Thirteenth Doctor–they use the time-freezing technology used by the Zygons–the “cup of soups”–to capture Gallifrey and deposit it into another pocket universe.

In this way, it looks like Gallifrey is destroyed along with the Daleks. But Gallifrey is not destroyed. Through loops and contradictions and layers of Space and Time Gallifrey doesn’t rise, or fall, or die. It lives.

In the words of the Ninth Doctor, “everybody lives.”

The ages-old and weary War Doctor leaves, finally at peace and although his later incarnations lose all memory of this crossover event, he Regenerates. We don’t see Doctor Nine, which is a little disappointing, but this is not unexpected. Ten also leaves knowing that he will not remember, but stating that they need a new destination aside from the doom of Trenzalore. But Doctor Eleven remembers.

I am almost finished. Like a TARDIS, this 50th Anniversary Special is “bigger on the inside.” As Doctor Eleven wonders if they succeeded in saving Gallifrey, and ponders embracing Elizabeth’s role to him as the curator of the Under-Gallery he … meets or reacquaints himself with someone. At first, I wondered how this was possible and who the elderly Curator could possibly be. But after re-watching the episode to write this review, I realized that The Doctor can actually decide what face he takes on in his Regenerations. He can even take on old faces.

So when an elderly Tom Baker all but confirms that Gallifrey is saved and that the painting in front of them is called Gallifrey Falls No More. It is left ambiguous as to whether or not The Curator is a future version of The Doctor, or a possibility, or someone else entirely. Ending the episode with that gentle, wise lighthearted moment, with a potential Doctor without bitterness and regret and filled only with a kindly acceptance, changed the whole tone of the series in that one moment. And Doctor Eleven taking his place alongside his other incarnations with the First Doctor standing in back of them with his arms crossed is positively inspiring.

There is so much I know I’ve missed in this review and I have tried to capture all of it in something like a Time Lord-painting. There are those who would say that this whole Special was a cop-out: that it negated all of The Doctor’s experiences and that it leaves plot holes and weaves itself with clichés. But I think that now, this Special leaves a whole other level of possibility and paths yet to travel. I asked a question in the title of my Mythic Bios post. I asked “When does The Doctor stop running?”

The answer is that he doesn’t. The Doctor will never stop running. It is his nature to run. But he has changed. Because now, for the first time in ages The Doctor won’t be running from something. Rather, The Doctor will be running to his destination, to his end and Gallifrey and all the possibilities beyond it. Everybody lives, gentlebeings and now perhaps we can see The Doctor do that as well. Perhaps we can now see him truly live.

What Will Happen on The Day of The Doctor?

November 22, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This article and its contents will be time-stamped, but they certainly won’t be time locked … whatever that means anymore.

So in the immortal words of River Song, “Spoilers.”

After May 18, 2013 there was, if you will pardon the pun, a large moment of silence. Then, on September 28 after “The Name,” there was a name. For a while, after that, there were murmurs until, on October 19 Time itself became suspended as though holding its breath in a debris of lives and, from a mountaintop a green-hued sonic screwdriver is pointed at the skies. And like a released elastic band, Time speeds up on November 9 and war and chaos come spiraling towards us with the “premonitions” that a soldier claims do not exist. But I am getting ahead of myself because, before that on the same day, there is one more moment of silence before a plunge into the epic music and story of a man known to his foes as the Oncoming Storm.

And then we go back. Yes, we shall go back. We go back to November 14 from a countdown of Eleven, Ten, Nine until Eight on The Night of The Doctor when we see the fateful decision that forever shapes the numbers that come after. And just when we think it’s over, just when we think that perhaps we will only see fragments of a war and nothing beyond what will be seen, on November 20th we witnessed The Last Day of the Time Lords.

These are the main trailers and mini-episodes leading up to the 50th Anniversary Doctor Who episode “The Day of The Doctor.” So as “The Day of The Doctor” awaits us tomorrow on cable, in movie theatres and even on its own global simulcast, what do we already know about this episode?

Well, trying to predict Doctor Who is a lot like attempting to predict God in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, because like The Doctor “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

The above pretty much sums up my feelings on trying to forecast the Oncoming Storm’s episodes, never mind the 50th Anniversary Special. However, based on various clips, trailers, and the two web mini-episodes here is what we can put together so far in something like the strange Doctor Who puts, well, anything plot-wise together. First, let’s look at what BBC released with their hashtag:

“The Doctors embark on their greatest adventure in this 50th Anniversary Special: In 2013, something terrible is awakening in London’s National Gallery; in 1562, a murderous plot is afoot in Elizabethan England; and somewhere in space an ancient battle reaches its devastating conclusion.

All of reality is at stake as the Doctor’s own dangerous past comes back to haunt him.
World, are you ready? #SaveTheDay”

Now, it seems likely that Doctor Eleven and Clara got out of his own time-stream and based on the small clips, such as their time at the museum, they are the ones in 2013. We also know, based on past episodes, that Doctor Ten was once romantically involved with Queen Elizabeth I (apparently married to her) and something happened between them that made her so angry she ordered his death. Finally the ancient battle coming to its conclusion, based on what little we know of temporal war and the fact that The War Doctor, played by John Hurt and identified as such in the credits of “The Night of The Doctor,” aged from a young man to a very old one seems to be evident, or at least to me. What is also interesting is that the Zygons, classic shape-shifting Doctor Who monsters, are also making their appearance in the 50th Anniversary Special along with the Daleks.

Whether or not they are a part of the Time War or they are after it is unknown. The fact that the TARDIS is being lifted however seems to indicate that Earth is aware of The Doctor again, or that U.N.I.T. is getting involved in what will most likely be a potentially cataclysmic event. Rose Tyler is also going to be with The Doctor, at least the Tenth one as his Companion before she is taken to an alternate reality, and she seems to be present with The War Doctor at The Moment where he destroys both Time Lords and Daleks in her manifestation as Bad Wolf.

And now we go further into conjecture, if we aren’t there already. I certainly know I am. For me, the fact that the white rift opens in the museum in front of Clara and The Doctor reminds me of “the cracks in time” that occurred with the TARDIS’ destruction back in “The Eleventh Hour.” At the same time, this is not the first instance in which Time has conspired to place The Doctor with his past incarnations when the need arises.

But I think what disturbs me the most is that, on Trenzalore The Doctor jumped into his own time stream. This is apparently something that no one should do, and most people do not survive it. For me, I suspect that there are consequences for The Doctor entering his own time-stream at the point after his own death and I think that the presence of The War Doctor is indicative of this. He is an incarnation that The Doctor does not like to acknowledge based on his actions during The Last Great Time War.

Yet I wonder if perhaps The War Doctor is in some ways a gate onto himself due to his psychic trauma and influence over Time past the apparent time lock around the events of the War and if by entering his own time-stream, in a similar way to how the Time Lords used The Master to bring Gallifrey and the War to 2010 in “The End of Time,” he has unlocked something incredibly terrifying. It would not be the first time that The Doctor has inadvertently unleashed a horror on the universe out of curiosity or a sense of compassion. After all, the Daleks were once trapped in their own City on Skaro and weren’t even aware of life on other worlds before The First Doctor decided to pay them a visit.

Aside from all this speculation as to how we can even see The Time War with the time lock (without going insane like Dalek Caan) and what is going to happen is beyond me and, frankly, I am overjoyed to see how this will all fit haphazardly and gloriously together. But there is one thing I would definitely like to see in this 50th Anniversary Special. I would love to see the Tenth Doctor’s response to seeing The War Doctor which will hopefully be different than Eleven’s response. Yet more than that, I want to see Bad Wolf Rose interact with Doctor Eleven and see her show The War Doctor a little more compassion because, if anyone deserves it, it would be him for doing what none of his other incarnations could ever do.

I am fascinated by one rumour however. We have already seen Paul McGann’s return in “The Night of The Doctor,” but apparently Tom Baker, who once played the jelly-baby eating Fourth Doctor, is going to make his own appearance as well. Whether he is coming back as the Fourth Doctor or in another role is a different story entirely.

Time always brings with it surprises … and this is especially true for Time Lords. And please, post your speculations and comments down below so we can predict how The Doctor’s day will go. We’ll see you in Utopia.

WordPlay in Toronto

November 22, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So last week Jim Munroe, the comics writer of Therefore Repent!, novelist, and the co-producer of the controversial Pipe Trouble game, invited me to the first-ever Toronto WordPlay Festival of Writerly Games on November the 16th. The WordPlay Festival is an event that the video game arts Hand Eye Society, of which Jim Munroe is also the executive director, in cooperation with the Toronto Public Library and with support from the Toronto Arts Council, celebrates and examines “the use of words and writing in contemporary games.”

This is not the first time that the Toronto Public Library has cooperated with either Hand Eye or the Torontonian video game scene. Not only did Jim Munroe create an interactive alternate reality game in the Library back in March of this year (in which you are part of the Literary Resistance attempting to prevent the book-burning culture from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 from ever happening) but last year the North York Central Library hosted both a Gaming Journalism Workshop for Gamercamp and a Writing for Videogames Workshop by Kan Gao: the creator of the beautiful independent Adventure RPG game To the Moon.

In fact the introduction to the Festival in the Atrium was made by Ab Velasco, a Communications Officer for the Toronto Public Library who, among things, helps facilitate special events at the Library including the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, and workshops such as Kan Gao’s and Gamercamp’s (where I first saw him). In fact, he mentioned that there is even an initiative in the Toronto Public Library system to make game-making technology free and available to library patrons as well providing eventual access to a 3D printer. This is pretty amazing news and you can tell that Ab Veslasco is having a major hand in these developments.

The Festival took place at the Toronto Reference Library and it was divided into two segments. There was a panel and a discussion that took place in the Atrium, while the WordPlay Showcase opened up its terminals with over-twenty text and story-based games to the public in Learning Centre I.

The panel was called “Where Prose Meets Play.” It was moderated by Jim Munroe, and its other panelists were composed of freelancing conceptual artist and illustrator Rachel Kahn, game designer and animator Matt Hammill, Canadian writer, computer programmer and creator of Dinosaur Comics Ryan North, and Canadian science-fiction writer Peter Watts. Essentially, the entire first Panel looked at a wide-range of topics including the differences between storytelling for prose, comics, and writing for video games. It was some really interesting stuff: from Peter Watts stating that he had to write some very obvious descriptive passages for games that wouldn’t have worked in prose, to Rachel Kahn talking about how architecture and environment can tell a story. What I really found interesting was the discussion that examined the line between allowing a player too much freedom or giving the player too much structure and how it would be utterly fascinating to make a game, be it electronic or in book form, that allowed a player to choose the ending to their story.

After a half-an-hour intermission there was a discussion with the Chicago-based group Cardboard Computer who created the magical realist point-and-click game Kentucky Route Zero. It was basically an interview facilitated by Miguel Sternberg, the founder of Spooky Squid Games and the creator of They Bleed Pixels, with Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt.

Unfortunately, I was not able to fully get into the discussion due to two factors. First of all, I had never heard of, nor played the game though there were some interesting thoughts that the creators were spinning around such as making a game about a character whose choices are limited by debt (a fact of life that many of us are all too familiar with nowadays), and a game level that takes place in a museum or archive filled with old video games. Unfortunately, it is entirely possible that I am combining two different ideas mentioned in this discussion into one.

The other reason I had difficulty getting into the Kentucky Route Zero Discussion is due to the fact that the acoustics in the Atrium, even with microphones, were not that effective and announcements from the Library would drown out the speakers at key points. This also affected my following of the panel before it, and it is my only complaint about the Festival’s arrangement.

But since then I have done a little bit of research on Kentucky Route Zero. It is a game in five acts that, according to the WordPlay Festival bookmark, has literary influences from a writer named Flannery O’Connor. Once I looked up who this writer actually was, I saw that she utilized what is called the Southern Gothic Style: writing that relies a lot on heavy regional influences and grotesque characters. The game itself is apparently about a mysterious highway underneath the caves of Kentucky and the strange people that travel it.

I want to make a point of mentioning that not only did WordPlay occur one day after the release of the PlayStation 4, but it also featured a premier of its own. Off to the side of the audience were two desks with half-empty glasses and brick sandwiches (yes, you read and saw that right, they were actually brick sandwiches) and two Oculus Rift headsets lent to the event by the Toronto independent game designer and community work space Bento Miso.

Now, I’d heard of this next stage in virtual reality gaming but I didn’t really think much of it. I mean, I’d heard that these systems can cause dizziness and nausea, and I still have memories of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and so many other virtual reality promises and hopes throughout the years that eventually rendered me to the point of apathy. But I knew that since I was covering this event, I felt compelled to try it out. I didn’t actually get to checking out the Oculus Rift until much later. In fact, I only came to them as the Festival ended and the Reference Library was closing for the night. I thought I was too late.

However, a very helpful volunteer or Cardboard Computer staff member got me an Oculus Rift and I got to play, for a while, a Kentucky Route Zero intermission level or chapter entitled “The Entertainment.” It was strange because by the time I got to it the table and items on it, including the brick sandwich, were being packed up and I had nothing to touch, but I was … impressed. Unlike the rest of Kentucky Route Zero with its pixilated 2D graphics and third-person perspective, this was first-person and it was pretty cool. Cardboard Computer made a three-dimensional room which, like its original game looked like it was made from angles of paper or “cardboard,” but it also attempted to play with light and shadow and the distance of sound when you move your head. But I think what I found the most intriguing is the fact that there are dialogue boxes containing narration that give you physical cues as to when you should look up and listen in on a conversation. It is like being able to explore but there is also a story that subtly acts like a script when “your part” comes up. That line between free choice and structure is a theme that comes up again as it gets explored and played on in this game. I just want to add that playing an Oculus Rift for the first time with a Wii remote was an interesting experience for me as well.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I got to check out the WordPlay Showcase with that whole collection of story-based games featured on each terminal in Learning Centre I. During the Discussion with Cardboard Computer I ran into Ian Daffern again, a fellow writer and creator whom I actually collaborated with in the 2013 Toronto Global Game Jam–my first–and he told me that he created a Twine game called TRUNKED.

Now, I have really wanted to talk about Twine on G33kPr0n for a very long time and I always take time to mention them elsewhere. Twine is software that allows writers that may not necessarily have much programming knowledge, to make interactive text-based games or stories. So I only managed to play his excellent game twice (where I died once and then actually realized that my gut instinct about a certain item could help me) before the next and final part of the Festival began.

I am referring to Christine Love’s Hands-on Workshop: Make Interactive Fiction Workshop.

For me, this was the highlight of the WordPlay Festival. In addition to the fact that Christine Love is the creator of many intensely story-based games such as Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, and Hate Plus that I truly respect and adore, I was also getting the excuse to use Twine for myself and make something. After Christine Love took about fifteen minutes to run through the basics with us, she then gave us five minutes to come up with an idea, and gave us the rest of the hour before closing time to implement it. I managed to make a template to follow for what will hopefully be a series of future Twine stories to come.

You can even see me in this photo if you look closely. I’m asking someone for help.

But just as there is a fine line between freedom of choice and plot for a player to navigate there, this article has also been a fine line between coverage of an important event and my own personal experience.

Anna Anthropy in her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters talks about the importance of developing game-creation software and technology that is available and easy public use. She has often advocated and created many games using Twine software. It is an idea that can go beyond, or change video game industry culture and allow people who ordinarily don’t have voices in video games to express themselves and let people interact from their perspectives. It is something can change games as a medium and also the very nature of what they are. For me personally, I always felt sad because I always felt limited in what I could with games due to a lack of visual artistic ability and programming knowledge.

But what Twine allows me to do is use my own skill with words to make the games I always wanted. And having an interactive teacher, as opposed to some tutorial videos, gave me some of the basic keys to the kingdom of making interactive worlds and that, for me, is golden.

Finally I just want to also ask you, the readers of G33kPr0n, to please check out all the hyperlinks provided above, look at the rest of Hand Eye’s Fest Pics and Showcase Links and even consider making some Twine stories of your own. If I can do it, so can you. I learned a lot from this event and I can best summarize that feeling in the title of my own very short Twine game.

Level Up

Photo Credits: Stephen Reese

The Last Day: Another Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Mini-Episode

November 21, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This is now my thirteenth post and I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned into The Valeyard at this point. All right, before I go on just watch this video. Please watch it.

Are you done?

All right. I came across this today from Jenna-Louise Coleman’s Facebook profile. At first, it was a broken link until she linked to it from another Doctor Who Profile. Now, we have seen a lot of trailers and one other mini-episode “The Night of The Doctor.” So when I came across this, I felt like the soldier from whose perspective we are viewing the situation.

I will admit, I didn’t know who these soldiers were, or even what episode this was even going to be. It was like seeing that small little speck, you know? You are that soldier and you are looking for a bird or some kind of avian in the sky.

But then you realize This. Is. Gallifrey.

And then you look at the title to this mini-episode, Steven Moffat’s “The Last Day,” you as the viewer already know where this is going.

That’s not a bird.

At first, in a manner not unlike the soldier and his, or her, fellows I wondered if this was real: if Coleman wasn’t linking us to an especially zealous fan-made video about The Last Great Time War. But as I went online, I saw a whole slew of links to this one video and, by the time I got to Doctor Who TV I knew that this was legitimate. There were some other indications too for more nuanced viewers of the series. For instance, G33kpr0n’s editor Rob pointed out that the soldiers of Gallifrey are all wearing The Seal of Rassilon on their armour. It goes to show you that even now I still have a lot to learn as a geek which, frankly, is a whole load of awesomesauce.

Now I am just going to go into some conjecture of my own. I’m guessing that the helmets the soldiers (who may have been recruited from the Chancellery Guard or the non-Time Lord Gallifreyan citizenry) are wearing to access the memories of dead soldiers are extensions or an adaptation of The Matrix (which is a super-computer that, among other things, contains the memories of deceased Time Lords and stores information to predict the future, hence the soldier’s insistence that what “you” are seeing is “not a premonition”). It would be useful to store all of this information to transfer to the next mind of the newest soldier, you, for your very first day guarding the planet of Gallifrey.

Unfortunately, as you see through this unique second-person perspective of the War that also manages to humanize the Time Lords and their army while showing just how Frontline Combat they have become, you realize that you are not viewing a bird or even a flock of birds.

It’s a murder of Daleks.

And while there is “The Night of The Doctor,” “The Day of The Doctor,” and what should have been your first day on the job guarding your home world ultimately becomes your “Last Day”: The Last Day of Gallifrey.

Sexy and Clara: A Doctor Who Mini-Episode

November 19, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I seem to be reaching my twelfth regeneration, or twelfth post, on G33kpr0n and I find it really interesting how even though I am a Star Wars fanatic I’ve really been focusing on Doctor Who lately. I suppose it can’t be helped. After all, we have the Adventures in Space and Time documentary drama and Neil Gaiman’s Nothing O’Clock both happening on November 21, and that isn’t even mentioning the 50th Anniversary episode “The Day of The Doctor” happening on November 23. There is all this gravitas and doom and glory that is about to hit a whole ton of of Whovians, and sometimes it can just seem like too much.

So now, for the moment, we turn away from The Doctor and what will probably be another potential universal apocalypse to the two current women in his life right now. “Clara and the TARDIS” is actually a mini-episode made exclusively for the Series 7 DVD and Blue-Ray box sets. It apparently takes place before “The Rings of Akhaten” and “Hide,” and therefore long before “The Name of The Doctor.” It’s been long known by most Doctor Who fans that the TARDIS is a sentient being (who has, relatively recently, chosen a name for herself) with her own sensibilities and feelings on certain matters, especially with regards to her beloved Doctor. And Clara herself, at this point in the game, seems to be new enough a Companion to be unaware of the others that came before her, but old enough to have her own room on board … for all the good that does her at this point.

I won’t say anymore than that except to add that, aside from the obvious fan-service that Steve Moffat produces between Sexy and Clara with this mini-episode, there is some actual foreshadowing with regards to Clara’s character arc in this confrontation. But all that really being said, Sexy either really doesn’t like Clara Oswin Oswald at this stage, or she really enjoys messing with her.

The Moment is Arriving: The New 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Trailer

November 11, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

For seven months, many Doctor Who Fans, including myself, have been waiting impatiently for “The Day of the Doctor.” We had a grandiose hint of a trailer earlier, but not much else. But while today is not “The Day of the Doctor,” it is most certainly the day of the New 50th Anniversary Doctor Who Trailer. It’s in this trailer that we find out a little more about what is about to go down.

Warning, SPOILERS ahead! If you’re not caught up on season seven of Doctor Who, you may want to skip this next bit.

When last we last saw the Doctor back in “The Name of the Doctor” many truths were revealed. We see Clara Oswin Oswald choose to save The Doctor by jumping into his time-stream in the ruined future version of the TARDIS (his tomb on Trenzalore) and manifest herself into different times of his life. Then we watched The Doctor say goodbye to the virtual psychic image of his wife River Song as he goes to rescue the Clara that he knows, his Clara, that has not yet split off into many lives in different places and different times. The Doctor even manages to finds her. And then … we see him. We find out that The Doctor’s secret isn’t his original name. It isn’t what he was known by before making a promise to himself and the universe by choosing his moniker. Instead, we are introduced to his real secret, to the person that supposedly broke the promise.

Achievement unlocked. Hidden player-character: The Unknown Doctor.

Now take a look at the actual YouTube page and its about page, you will find this blurb waiting for you:

All of reality is at stake as the Doctor’s own dangerous past comes back to haunt him.
World, are you ready? #SaveTheDay”

Now look at the trailer itself. We already knew that Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor was going to be meeting the epic vainglorious David Tennant’s 10th Doctor for this venture. And we knew that John Hurt’s Unknown Doctor would be working with them: or involved with them as well. But remember this promotional image?

When you see the shattered Dalek carapaces and the march-like stride of The Unknown Doctor, there is already an indication that he was The Doctor that fought in–and ended–the Last Great Time War. We also got a hint from Steve Moffat that the Last Great Time War would play a role in this season with Clara’s discovery of The History of the Last Great Time War book in “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.” But that aside, look back at the above image. You can also see the golden light behind The Doctor that, while part of the fire, can symbolize two things: Regeneration energy, and the Heart of the TARDIS. And on that note, take a look at the broken wall with the graffiti on at the bottom half of the image’s left side.

I bet many people thought that we were all done with that trans-temporal and spatial psychic meme known fondly as “Bad Wolf.” And just as Bad Wolf is alive and well, so is the other Companion who created, and embodied it, to begin with. It’s no surprise that Rose Tyler is going to be in “The Day of the Doctor.” Rose, who in case you were wondering is my favourite Companion before Martha and Clara, seems to feature relatively prominently in the trailer, especially in one particular scene.

Do you remember The Moment? If you click on that link to the TARDIS Data Core, you will see that it was more than just an event, but a weapon assembled from Doctor Who continuity. We know the Time Lord that assembled and used it, and why. Originally, I know I thought he was alone, that the time lock either kept out any other version of Clara or bound her memories of any possible Time War version into the lock. I also wondered, since The Doctor very clearly suffers from something along the lines of post-traumatic stress syndrome due to the War, if his memories of that time were entirely that clear.

But, as you can see, while Clara may not have been there during The War and the Moment … Rose as Bad Wolf was, and is.

After looking at the new 50th Anniversary Doctor Who trailer, I can honestly say that “The Day of the Doctor” has so many other meanings behind it and that the Moment of November 23 cannot come too soon.

Geronimo.

Why Do You Write These Strong Women Characters?

November 1, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It’s amazing how one person can answer the same question more than once. It’s even more amazing how many times someone has to repeat themselves before they get to the point where they reply to the same question with multiple choice answers. Joss Whedon–the creator of Buffy, Angel, and the Avengers film– is always asked, time and again, “Why do you write these strong women characters?” I’m not going to recap everything that he has already said. Whedon has more than done his part in answering this question and if you would like to see his responses, please watch the video linked above. Instead, I’m going to do something else.

I am going to answer this question.

Why do you write these strong women characters? This question can be modified further. For instance, the question could also be “Why do you write about strong women characters?” or “Why do you like writing about strong women characters?” or better yet, “Why do you like writing these strong women characters and why is this so important?” But now I am just being annoying in the gadfly Socratic way: answering a question with other questions. So let me give you an answer without a question mark punctuating it for a while. Women are a part of our world. They are half of the global human population. They are a part of us. They are us.

At the same time, women have different experiences. And for the longest time, even to this day and probably beyond it, the default setting in many cultures has always focused on men: on male desire, conflict, and experience: which is very one-sided. Frankly, there is a whole other segment of the global population that is also born with self-awareness, desire, wants, dreams, fears, flaws, thoughts, feelings, and something to say: and there is a lot that can be written, created, made, and said about that. And then you add the rest of it: the discrimination, the stereotyping, the impossible and contradictory cultural and societal standards, the hurting, and the imposed silences–the ones that people impose from the outside and the one that people create inside themselves out of genuine mortal and spiritual fear–where every day is more often than not an unwanted comment, a gesture, a touch, a violation, and ridicule that eats up your metaphorical life-bar faster than if you were Samus Aran in lava or acid baths, and then ask a different question.

Where do you see the inspiration for these strong women characters?

My own answer is that I see and hear about them everywhere and more is never too many.

So why am I talking about all of this? Why am I rehashing what should be old ground and said much better than me by people better than me? I am a writer. I write fiction and non-fiction. I am also male. So is Joss Whedon, but I am not Joss Whedon. I am nowhere near as established or even as cognizant. When this video was first linked to me, I hesitated. Who am I to talk about writing strong women characters? I have tried. Sometimes, I even think I succeeded, while other times I’ve realized I still need to improve to that regard: both as a creator and as a human being. Whedon says something in his speech about how a strong female protagonist can help a man express a part of himself that he might not be comfortable looking at from any other perspective. And I have to admit: I am not entirely sure what he means by that and yet it’s definitely something that can be explored further and it should be. I want to write strong women characters. I want to identify and acknowledge and put into words the strong female personalities from my own life and do them justice: to show that they have power, courage and humanity, and that, as Whedon put it, there are men who respect, acknowledge, and love those elements.

If someone asked me, again, why I like to write strong women characters I would say that I would like to write weak female characters, angry female characters, sad female characters, intelligent female characters and the whole wide gamut of female characters because, in the end, the ultimate secret here is that female characters are people: and people are interesting to write about and explore.

This all being said and hopefully done, and even more hopefully made into a redundant discussion one day that will continue to go on regardless, if someone kept badgering me about why (if and when I get to this point in the future) I write strong women characters, I would just stare them in the face and ask them the following question.

Why not?

Feel free to click on the following link to the entirety of Joss Whedon’s Equality Now Speech. Also, if you do, notice how they are talking about the “upcoming Wonder Woman movie.” This video was uploaded in 2006 and this film has still not been made. That is definitely one strong female character that I want to see.

Fleet-Foot Tales and Hero-Glyphs Part II: The Celestial Voyages Fragment

October 29, 2013 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

In our last piece on artist-archaeologist Josh Ln’s hero-glyphs discovery–or “Fleet-Foot Tales”–we discussed the possible interpretations and meanings behind the artifact entitled Conflict Amongst a League of Marvels. However, our work is not finished. In fact, just as we promised, we at G33kPron’s Art Historian branch are going to transliterate and analyze the next in a series of Ln’s discoveries: specifically Exhibit B or The Celestial Voyages Fragment. This was no mean accomplishment. In addition to utilizing the Mind Gem in order to understand the mental processes behind its creation as well as bolstering our own understandings of this matter, our Chief Information Officer G33kBot had to authorize the retrieval and usage of the Space Gem and the Time Gem as well. It should be also noted as with Exhibit A, we had to actually undertake the laborious tasks of repairing and restoring these Gems to fulfill their original functions.

In addition, unlike the Mind Gem and its greater … affinity with Exhibit A, Exhibit B’s unusual temporal and spatial structure–though hypothetically found in an unknown period of Earth’s history–necessitated the use of these three tools (and the Space Gem in particular) to … travel to various places and times in order to place matters in their proper context. So now that you know of some of our struggles with these “hero-glyphs,” dear readers, let us examine what we have learned about Exhibit B.

As you can see, there are three central figures in this sequential narrative. On the left is what appears to be a member of a mythological Elder Race: the Sidhe or the Elves. Certainly, the very bright colours that Fae beings are told to favour seems very much a characteristic of this being: whose actual name we have not been able to pronounce as it utilizes syllables and intonations unfamiliar to human vocal cords, mouth structures, or–even with Mind Gem augmentation– our current mental capacity. However, note his very direct–almost linear–bearing and the hand-gesture that he is creating with his left hand: the left hand in some cultures signifying a receptive element. At first, we thought that perhaps he is attempting to cast some kind of incantation or spell on the right-hand figure. However, the gesture itself–while seemingly questioning–can also be interpreted as either a greeting or a farewell. It can actually be seen as both of these elements simultaneously.

Yet there is that questioning aspect to consider as well. The Elf-Lord, if his pointed ears, gaudily-coloured uniform, the half-obscured celestial arch on the right side of his chest and his straight-forward gesture–with what seems to be indicative of a culture or mentality of highly structured oaths and promises that is incapable of lies (at least upon pain of death or the unravelling of the structure that keeps them from devolving into the chaos of star-stuff from whence they came), much in the way of the ancient Fae of Celtic and Nordic folklore and fantastic literature, there is the artifact on his hip to consider. It resembles a recording device–or a weapon of some kind–or perhaps something that has different phases of usage. He seems to be both questioning and asking something of the figure on the right-hand side.

And what a strange figure the latter truly is. After some translation of the hero-glyph, we have determined that he is a human figure called something along the lines of Tiberius. It is particularly odd given that Tiberius is an ancient Latin name and though the latter have obviously had contact with Celtic culture and even Germanics, there are other details to consider here. Tiberius is a hero and has the rank of something equivalent to a Praetor: a commander or a captain acting on behalf of another force. What is even more puzzling is that he is dressing in the same Fae-like uniform–of a golden hue–and he seems to be sitting on a throne: as perhaps a representative of an empire. Perhaps he is symbolic of a changeling that the Elf-Lord has trained, or raised to influence humankind from the inside and the deference that the latter shows Tiberius is merely a formality: one that belies his true power. Yet this is ignoring the fact that despite the throne, both figures are at the same height: indicative of some kind of–dare we say–equality. And then there are the other images in this narrative to consider.

Even though Tiberius sits on his throne, behind the Elf-Lord is a strange glyph of concentric circles and cylinders that appears to be some kind of vessel. Thus both sides have a power behind them: though the Elf-Lord does appear to be reporting to Tiberius. This vessel–which appears to be hovering in mid-air as something akin to a spiritual genius or something that happened, is happening, or will happen seems to be seeking something that is beyond the edge of the narrative. It is literally floating in space. However, both the Elf-Lord and Tiberius seem more focused–at this moment–on a bronze-gold predatory bird between them. Whether this is some kind of cursed artifact, or a symbol indicative of war is unknown. Certainly, the distance between them and every other symbol in the space seems to indicative a great peace or stillness, but a distant threat of war.

On the upper-hand corner of Exhibit B are three emblems arranged horizontally next to one another. The red symbol with its curved edges seems indicative of some kind of war-like passionate Meritocracy, the blue mirrors the emblems on the two figures as something more peaceful and distant–perhaps an open-ended Union encompassing whatever it comes across–whereas the last may well be indicative of a rising Star Empire. Whether these are other governments that the Elf-Lord and Tiberius are negotiating with, or the possible parallel pasts, futures and aspects of humankind is unknown at this time.

Yet what is really striking is the third central symbol on the upper right hand side of the narrative: the depiction of what appears to be a humanoid saurian ascendant over Tiberius. There are a few elements to consider with regards to the Saurian. He is facing the exact opposite way from Tiberius and carries the weight of a rock or another entire world in one bulky arm. It could be that the Saurian with its seeming brutishness represents the countless horrors and barbarism that Tiberius and the Elf-Lord’s Union faces in the stars. On the other hand, it could also be a threat that was already faced by Tiberius himself and conquered: but never forgotten. The fact that it is a Saurian being may also represent the reptilian Id of the human psyche that Tiberius–as representative of humans that are still evolving–are attempting to control, but unlike the Elf-Lord with the lack of such an apparent symbol above him, still utilizes as some kind of grounding or tie to the Earth and where they came from. Tiberius seems to remember his terrestrial roots amid his celestial voyages. Then again, the Saurian may just symbolize its traditional fertility roots in Earth mythology: or at least with regards to Tiberius.

The linear structure of this narrative is deceptive with all of these possibilities and the story continuing over the edges of the overall image. At the same time, while many of these symbols are in doubt and it’s unknown whether the Elf-Lord or the hero Tiberius are rivals, superior and subordinate, or heroic comrades, it is clear that they symbolize a kind of hope or redemptive narrative: as possibilities that have not happened yet. Certainly it is no coincidence that the three possible images of empires–perhaps reminiscent of Heraclitus’ archetypal symbols of humanity’s hydra of eros (desire), the more orderly shape of logos (reason), or the rising lion form of thumos (courage or duty)–is right above the Elf-Lord’s head. He is always cognizant of what Tiberius is capable of: and, perhaps, what he and his own kind are capable of doing as well even as they continue to voyage further past vistas of sentient understanding.

And though this story, like Exhibit A, seems to have no end in sight thus ends this segment of Fleet-Foot Tales and Hero-Glyphs. Stay tuned next time for our next segment: in which we will discuss the third narrative found by Josh Ln known as The Beatific Agony and the Secret College of Marvels and Daimons.

Josh Ln’s original excavated work and restorations of the rest of the “Fleet-Foot Tales” can be found, without translation, in Hero-Glyphics, Proof All Those Time Travel Story Events Were Real for the curious at your perusal and at your leisure. And, as we end this segment, we would like to leave you with these words we transliterated as best we could from the hand-gesture of our Elf-Lord friend, “Live long, and prosper.”