Dog Ear

t work I sit next to a hypothetical guy – he loves asking off the wall, unexpected questions. And that’s fine – I enjoy finding myself thinking up answers (one was, “Which Greek hero represents you?” My answer, Achilles. You gotta love how he went on strike because of bad management practices). But this time he asked me, “What are your three favorite villains?” That’s a very interesting question, and I was amazed at how quickly it stumped me. Sure, I read a lot of novels, scifis and fantasies. But really, are there truly villains you’ve read that aren’t just […]

rostitutes have no substance-abuse issues, perfect hygiene, elegant poise and hearts of gold. Retiring cops have plans to fish. Their demise is certain. Hackers earbud heavy-metal music and spin in their seats, banging on their keyboards. Fighter pilots all hang around the bar and address each other by call-signs. Patriot-warriors (ex-seals) always live simple lives in book-lined cabins until a senseless killing rewinds their bloodletting clocksprings. Villians always kill off a mook, just to show how bad-ass they are. Robots rise against the slavery of their manual work. Mothers are always Buddha-wise, kids razor-clever in family matters, and fathers clueless. […]

      he above comes from a flashy new space opera on WebToons, a little tale that is still finding its legs. The reason I note it was the speedbump reaction I felt when I read it. It’s that rocky little literary trick when two characters who should know something overword it so that the reader can pick up a fact they need. While not quite as bad as the writer specifically conversing with the reader (“…for you see, Dear Reader, they had been searching the entire station…”), writers have been struggling since stories got complex and backstory important. […]

y dad passed away a number of years ago. Our relationship was okay; not the continuing nurturing warmth of the modern suburban buddy-dad, but the classic father/son bond. He wasn’t my everyday friend but we did have a number of special things we shared in our lives. And one of them occurred when I was a lad of twelve – we were stationed in the Philippines as the Vietnam war was winding down, with the body counts and all that stuff. And one day, he said he was going to watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on Armed […]

or reasons mentioned HERE, every year like clockwork I watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As a Western placed in the Civil War, it is as sprawling and vast as a huge budget can make it. But when I was watching the heroes get past their final object, two armies poised over an idiotic bridge, I began to wonder. In a nutshell, the Good and the Ugly (reunited after a series of parched misunderstandings) are bootstriding their way towards their final goal, a military graveyard (poetically named the Sad Hill Cemetery) and bumble into a Union Army. They […]

really wasn’t into the family gathering on the 4th – I’d have rather stayed home and done my own things. But family gatherings are like gravity wells; hard to escape. We drove out to the beach and went on in. My siblings were tech-talking, swapping aps and gesturing to tiny videos on tiny screens. As far is inclusiveness goes, it’s like those times I walk into a workplace galley and the Indians huddling there switch from English to Hindi. So I’m not sure what to say and I foolishly didn’t bring a book. But dad’s shelf is in the hall, […]

aw a curious thing yesterday. I was working on my StoreyMinus CYOA (choose your own adventure) text game. It takes place in the subterranean world beneath London and will be up for walkthroughs (so you can see what it’s like) in a week or two. I’ve talked about Squiffy before and even did a short game about it HERE. Now that I’ve been playing with this application as a hobbyist programmer/writing, I’m ready to go full out on my first full-scale game. Anyway, I realized as I played that with flashlights and torches and rooms that are lit and ones […]

unny think about work – my team has shifted from being a collection of Indian moms to being a team of millennial boys. And with that comes all sorts of problems. Normally I’d not concern myself with the tribulations of the trophy crowd but I’m a scrummaster – I have to run a team. And I’ve got one little tyke who is particularly troublesome. You’ll remember from an earlier Dog Ear how I mentioned pulling one of my dad’s old sea stories from his shelf while stuck in a family event with nobody to talk to? Well, I was just […]

am a failed author. I was commissioned for one book (Don’t Jettison Medicine) which made me a nice bit of money. Fire and Bronze, my masterpiece, fizzled when the publisher died and the company went bankrupt during its release. Early ReTyrement did okay at bookshows but I never got that traction that publicity-pumping, number-jumping authors who are more concerned at ranking inflation than actual writing have. But that’s fine. I still write a lot; these blogs, my interactive games, my various projects, and even a little commissioned erotic on the side. I write because I write. In a way, it’s […]

like the site Webtoons.com. There are thousands of strips and generally I can find a handful that I really enjoy. As long as the art is fairly decent and the story not too formulaic (how many zombie apocalypse toons can there be?), I’ll try it. Windbreaker, Space Boy, and My Giant Nerd Boyfriend are just a few of my favorites. One thing that bumps items off my watchlist is consistency. For example, Seed is a brilliantly illustrated story about a young troubled girl who is befriended (in an ominous way) by a rogue AI. I really like it. It’s sharp […]