Rob Osterman's Blog, page 11

FFV: Browncoated Avengers

I always love these spliced up remakes of intros and this one combines my two fav's: The Avengers and Firefly.

Congratulations Graduates: You are Not Special

Something that seems to have become very popular this graduation season is to lay into the new grads by telling them how "not special" they are.  Common themes include:

The real world does keep score.You will not have your dream job when you graduate.No one wants to hear the opinion of a twenty-year old with only a few days experienceYou are not nearly as smart as you think you are.You.  Are.  Not.  Special.These speeches, including one given by Aaron Sorkin, have created deal of reaction, good and bad.  Many of the older commenters seem to have the "tell those kids a thing or two".  On the other hand, some of the graduates are not taking well to be told that they're not everything and a side of bacon.  One even wrote a lengthy response, effectively blaming her parents, teachers, and everyone else  for the reason she grew up feeling special.
I've got my opinions on the whole "Kids think they're so special"/ "You're the ones who never made us keep score!" debate but I'd like to keep my own politics aside for a while.  
Instead let's look at the "specialness" of two characters that these current graduates grew up with:  Harry Potter and Bella Swan.
So let's take them in turn.
Harry, admittedly, is the ultimate little kid "some day I'll find out that I have super powers" fantasy.  His birth parents are dead, and he's raised by people who hate him.  He's socially awkward, has few friends, and very little going for him.  Then, practically overnight, he's rich, he's famous and he has everyone wanting to be close to him.  He goes from nothing to everything.
Now in some critiques, this was seen as a major detriment to Harry.  He did not do anything on his own, he just had victories handed to him by virtue of his celebrity status.  I'm fairly sure those comments came from people who had not read the books.  Harry absolutely had to learn, he had to grow, and he had to surround himself with good tallent.  It is true that some puzzles in the first book require Heromine's brains or Ron's knack for chess.  But they're still problems that Harry has to either solve or are solved because he was clever enough to choose friends to help him.  I'm quite sure that if he had elected to become friends with Malfoy and the "Right sort of people", he would not have been the hero that saved the day at the end of the novel.  Choosing a friend based on character is a very mature, and good choice.
Taken over all, the book is a fairly good story about choices.  We may not agree with all of Harry's (he does sneak out a lot) but there are positive and negative consequences to them, and he's ultimately judged on those choices.  And because of his character, his choices, and his wit, he prevails.
Now we contrast that with Ms. Swan.
She too had a rough childhood.  Her parents divorced, her mom remarries and becomes an even less attached parent and dad remains in the old town pining away for his lost love.  Bella becomes the "star" of the story because of her unique scent to the resident vampire who protects her, carries her around, tells her what's best and for the most part becomes a surrogate helicopter parent. 
All Bella needs to do to be happy is sit back and let her Edward take charge and see to her needs.
Recap:
Harry has to ~do~ stuff.
Bella has to ~let~ people do stuff.
We were afraid of what Harry would teach them, and we cheered at Bella's chaste entrance.  I think we were very very wrong.

KDP Free Promotion: What Worked and What Did Not

Today, FantastiCon is back to full price on Kindle, having spent the weekend of Comic Con as a free download.  I'm glad to have done the promotion but I did learn a few things that I wish I had known going in, and I question if I will do it again in the future.

Now, on the upside and before I get into the not-so-positive thoughts, I do have some points of high honor.  I was retweeted by Molly Quinn who is a wonderful actress and all around good person.  Ms. Quinn also has a significant number of followers and I'm quite sure that the tweet went relatively viral in a short period which helped a great deal with the promotion.  As of Monday morning, FantastiCon was in the top 50's for "purchases" as a Free Title in both the Humor and Romantic Suspense categories.  So on that metric, win.  But that came at a cost.


I was really hoping that a big bump in popularity during the free promotion would then keep the book "out there" as a best seller.  Once it goes back to having a price again as an eBook it will dive back down into the nowhere's-ville of popularity.

Lesson 2:  "Customers also bought" is not reciprocal.

I've noticed that FantasiCon now has a pretty good list of "Customers who bought this also bought" along its page.  However, when I click through to any of those books FantastiCon is not listed.  I've heard from a friend that you need 20 reviews before you begin to appear on other pages, but that may be only for "Customers also liked".  It is kind of reassuring to see that my book is not alone in the vacuum, that it does have, at least on its own page, that list.  I'm looking forward to having more connection within Amazon but I'm not sure when or if that will happen.

Lesson 3:  Stay in Genre

I've had a lot discussions this weekend about what kind of book FantastiCon is.  I posted an add on Goodreads in the Romantic Suspense forum (specifically in the self promotion area) but had it deleted by the moderator because she felt the book wasn't really RS enough to fit in there.  This put another light on one of the big problems I've had trying to sell the book.  It's a quirky, kind-of-Romance, kind-of-humor, kind-of-mystery.  And all those "Kind-of's" make it were it's not much of any of them.

A die hard mystery fan will see right through it.  A die hard humor fan won't have a joke every paragraph.  A die hard romance fan will want to see more bare chests and heaving bosoms.

I knew this before but I was reminded again of it this weekend trying to get the most bang for my buck.

Lesson 4:  Metrics matter

I have no idea what was successful and what was not.  This bugs me at levels I did not think possible.  It's likely I'm spoiled by the amount of feedback you get from Facebook.  I can see who saw my ads, what they did after seeing them, and so on.  I sent fliers to Comic Con with a friend advertising the free book.  I know that for humor it got up to #11 as a free sale.  But I have no idea how many "sales" this weekend were the result of anything I did.  I don't know how many fliers got taken, how many hits I got from Twitter, or how many were "bought" because it showed up on the free promotions page.

What this really means is that it is very hard to plan for the future.

Lesson 5:  Use your free days sparingly.

I will not do another long term free sale promotion.  Too many days and too much time for people to lose interest.  It's one thing to blitz to the top of the charts in a single day but then you kind of hover and fade and bounce.  It seems that having your free days spread out lets people try to catch it one day, and then if they miss, or are early, they might buy it having come to the site when it was not free.

For Dragon Con I'll likely send fliers and have a single free day such as Labor day.  If people check it out early (ie Friday through Sunday) then maybe I'll get some sales those days.  It's hard to watch the results of this weekend's free promotion because I still don't know if/how this will translate to real sales.

Lesson 6:  Patience.

This has been the hardest for me coming out of this all.  It's going to take time for things to build, for people to read it and leave reviews or recommendations, and for actual sales to pick up.  It's not going to happen today or tomorrow or maybe for weeks.  I just need to sit back and let it happen.

FFV: Cosplay Fun

In honor of Comic Con this weekend:

Free on Kindle

Just a quick heads up:  Fantasti*Con, my first novel, is free this weekend on Kindles.

Check it out on Amazon!

Fantasti*Con is the Midwest's largest convention of science fiction, fantasy and pop culture, and the highlight of Allison Cavanaugh's summer. Only this year she finds a dark cloud over her weekend of geeky fun: a stalker. What begins as enigmatic notes quickly escalates to threats upon her. Only how do you find a madman at a convention, and how do you still manage to not scare away that new guy in the next apartment while doing it?

The weekend should be about fan-girling out at celebrities, wearing fun costumes, getting the inside scoop on the latest games and introducing her best friend Tori to the world of geek culture. Instead they, along with a hyperactive undergraduate student Joanna, are trying to find out who wants to hurt Allison before it's too late.

Set against the back drop of a major convention, Fanasti*Con is a romantic thriller with scenes and vignettes familiar to any attendee. From the costumes to the celebs, this could be any con-goer's weekend of horror.

Google Docs how I love Thee

One of the biggest challenges I have with my writing is dealing with what happens between the end of Draft 1 and the declaration of Draft Last. For all Drafts known as Draft N where N is the set of all counting numbers greater than 1 I struggle to keep track of which N I'm looking at.

Is this the draft that I sent to Maggie for consideration? Is this the one with the revisions that Mrs. Osterman suggested? Did I already update this draft with the comments from my editor? Which draft has the new sex scene?
And where it gets worst is when you've got an email that has a list of concerns, denoted by page, that you then have to go through and item by item figure out where to put them.

Now, dear readers, let me be clear: I ~LOVE~ my Beta Readers. I don't care what formats you use to give me feed back. I will always and forever consider you the only way I have a prayer of getting anywhere as a writer.
So, that said, let us turn to singing the praises of a system I like to call: Google Documents.
Let's start with the catch:


When you work in Google Docs, Google has your files. All of them. Everything you wrote, how you wrote it, where you were when you wrote it, what time your wrote it. I'm willing to bet that if they could they'd turn on your laptop's webcam and take a shot of your room where you're writing. I've read in a few places some concerns with the Google privacy policy in that it allows them to "use" your uploaded files. That of course leads us to ask a simple question: What does Google care?
The answer is almost as simple as the question. They want to know as much as they can about you the user so that they have the best chance of putting the advertisement you're most likely to click right there for you to see. "The Algorithym" looks through all of your files, all of your word choices, all of your apparent interests, and comes up with what it thinks is the best match of product to consumer, and then serves that ad up to you.

Now, for everyone with a tinfoil hat on: They are not out to steal your manuscript. They don't care that you have, on their servers, the next Harry Potter, the next Twilight, or the next 50 Shades of "Dear God Does she Know a Single Thing about The Lifestyle?". What they care about is selling you ads. Can you imagine what would happen if it were ever found out that through this privacy policy Google did indeed steal the next great international best seller and then tried to make bank on it?
I'm wagering that an egg timer isn't calibrated well enough to measure how long Google would last before the FCC, the SEC, the DOJ, the CIA, the WGA, the FBI, and a few other SOB's shut them down into individual cubicles for sale on eBay.
So if you're okay with them targeting some ads at you while you work let's get on to what rocks about it.
First, it's in the cloud. Anywhere you can get to the internet you can get to your files. That means you'll never be at the coffee shop and unable to impress that girl behind the counter with that great story your wrote. Just whip out the tablet PC, hop on the wifi and hand it to her to read. Away on vacation? Hop down to the hotel lobby, fire up a connection and BANG you're working again.

And for me? No more worrying about versions. The version in the cloud is THE version. It is headed to become THE final draft. I can still download a PDF or Doc file to take with me but that's only if I know I'll be offline. If I'm going to have the internet then I'm working on the only draft.

There are, of course other options out there for online file hosting and accessing. But anther tool I like about Google Docs is their built in collaboration and communication tools. While I write, I can, in real time, see who else is looking at a file with me. I get a chat bar on the side to engage them in GChat, and I also get their comments popping up in real time while we look at the file. If my collaborator has edit privileged on the file I can see where their cursor is, and watch them type into the document in real time, while they, regardless, can watch me make changes with them. It's like having three keyboards all working at the same file.
And a final fun thing is that all comments have a "resolve" button. Once you've read a comment, you've made the change and you're all happy with it, you can resolve the issue and record of the concern vanishes. You've cleared the trouble ticket and moved on. There's something profoundly satisfying in reading a concern from a Beta reader, thinking on it, making a change and then clicking on the Resolve button to see the issue vanish.
It's still limited somewhat in what it can do compared to word. I know that for work I really do prefer Word for the layout (hello, columns?) and other tools in making nice readable and easily edited worksheets. But given how easy it is to share and collaborate, I'm very excited to use it this fall to create materials and overall the equation editor (gotta love being a math teacher) is pretty complete.
At the price, it is the single best way I've found to manage my writing.

Marvel Super Hero Squad Online Review

Let's be honest here. This is not a full review of the online game. It's a review of just the collectible card game portion. In a future installment I will review the game itself, the hub and the collectibles and the missions.

No one can work solid for 6 hours at a computer pounding away at the keys, be it writing code, computing expenses or writing a future best selling vampire novel. There is a need for a break and it's time to let you, dear readers, in on a guilty pleasure of mine:

I'm hooked on The Marvel Super Hero Squad Online Collectible Card Game.
For those not familiar, the Super Hero Squad is a repackaging of various Marvel characters targeted at the preschool and early elementary ages. The show focuses on Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Wolverine and Falcon as the core characters, with frequent appearances from Ms. Marvel, Reptil, Silver Surfer and other members of the larger franchise. The humor of the show is pretty cliched, with a few brainy jokes tossed in to appease the grownups in the room and lots of slapstick for the kids. All of the villains are toonified caricatures of their evil selves so as not to scare the younger ones. But most episodes focus on team work as the core value, usually with some other common themes tossed in for the kids.


The Online game is a free to play, pay for benefits, MMO designed for kids to explore and collect things in this world. The default chat is phrase based, allowing you to say things like "Hi" and "Wanna play tag" as prepackaged comments to other characters. You can turn on full text speech but few.

Within the game is a collectable card game and with its recent release as an actual hold in your hands card set I've truly sold my soul to Marvel and Mr. Lee.

The game is pretty simple. Each player starts with a 40 card deck. Each card as on it a level (or mana cost for the M:tG crew), a damage, an attack factor (or basically card color in M:tG terms) and a blocking factor (I'll explain that in a moment). There is no mana and there are no resources to manage. Every turn you flip a coin to see if the "power" goes up, and that's how you can tell what cards you can play. If the card has a power lower then the current power for the game, you can play it.

This simplifies one of the most complex aspects of CCG's: Resource management. Now, for the hard core among us, we know the hours spent finding just the right balance of mana to creatures to spells. Having all the mana taken out of the game just makes it that much less fun on that front. But it also makes the game play far easier to teach to kids and far simpler to dive in on.

Now as a quick "I need to eat 10 minutes" having more time to just get in and play a game myself is also a big perk.

Combat's also fairly straight forward. You play an attack card (since all cards are, effectively, attack cards) and then your opponent then has a chance to block it with a card of the corresponding block. So, say you attack with Wolverine who is an Animal factor. If I have, say, a Spiderman who is himself a speed factor, but has the Red block symbol, then I can block it. We both discard. If I don't then I take damage.

Damage is dealt by simply turning over the corresponding number of cards until either full damage is dealt, or the right blocking icon appears.


The game has other intricacies. Some cards are "Keepers" that hang around like enchantments and provide more power. Most of the cards have intense synergies. Many of the Spiderman and related cards allow you to play other cards immediately after them, chaining attacks together. Iron Man has a very large number of Keepers allowing you build a fire-and-forget army that beats down your opponent.

And also interesting is how you get the cards for the game. You can buy card boosters with in game money (earned by playing missions or completing card game quests) or you can, well, complete card game quests. These are games against the AI decks that have specific themes and predetermined rewards. Do you really want that one Spider Girl card with the tech block? Well all you need to do is beat this particular computer deck.

So why do I love it so much?

Simply I can log in, make a few deck tweeks, and then play a "Quest or two" and be done in about 20 minutes. Quick and dirty. Plus because half the cards come from quests and missions where I know what the prize is, I can actually "go after" a card or two I need to balance a deck out. For example, right now I'm building up a Spider themed deck, so I'm doing a lot of the Spiderman and Spidergirl quests to get those cards so I can have enough of the various blocks. AN equal balancing of blocks gives you the best probability of having the right block for the right moment in the game.

And it's observations like those that make any CCG, especially the kind you can play easily on the computer, great finds.

Oh and did I mention that Upper Deck now makes the game so you can have your own set of cards to play offline? Yep. They do.

FFV: Congrats Grads!

To honor all graduates still celebrating their matriculation I offer up, this week, one of the best collections of life advice I've ever found.

Does Merida being gay matter?

Some disclaimers:  First I'm going to spoil the end of the movie, just a little bit, but no more than I've been spoiled myself in reading reviews and commentary on the sexual preferences of Disney/Pixar's latest heroine. I also have to confess I've not seen the movie first hand.  My wife and son have (they both loved it) and I've read a pretty good number of reviews, and honestly what I have to say about this issue has very little to do with the movie's over all plot.

Which gets us to the question at hand:  Is Merida, Heroine of Brave, a lesbian?  And if she is, does that matter?

Frankly I think that's one of the dumbest questions raised about this movie.  It ignores what actually does matter:

That people are asking the question in the first place.


Okay, let's go over the evidence first:

Merida likes to do boyish things and rejects womanly things.  It follows that she is a standin, then, for butch gay women.  Of course, Mulan also did boyish things, while wearing boy's clothes and pretending, believe it or not, to be a boy, but her sexuality is above reproach because at the end of the story she ends up with her prince.  While we don't have a "Disney Kiss" between Prince and Princess, we do have some assurance that the two love birds will run off into the sunset.

But I'll come back to that in a second.  For now we're going to stick with the idea that being boyish means being gay.  Which, what does that make Jessie from Toy Story?  She's a cowgirl, sure but if the movie wasn't for kids, you know, dear reader, that she'd be swearing as much as the prospector.  Belle in Beauty and the Beast is more into her books than the "girly" thing of chasing boys, though I will grant that books can be seen as a different kind of girly.

Thing is, being into boy stuff doesn't make one gay.  I've had many students who excelled in athletics, liked cars, went bow hunting, and I'm quite confident more than a few of them were not gay.

Second major data point, as the critics show and I alluded to above, is that Merida is single at the end of the movie, with ne'er a prince in sight.  She even gives a moving speech (I told you'd spoil you, but no you had to read anyways) about marrying who she wants on her own terms, not who her parents (or society) tells her to.

Now, this would be a great beacon of her counter-culturalism except that being true to yourself is a hallmark of Disney and children's films.  In fact the closing titles of Mulan (back to her again) are indeed the song "True to Your Heart" performed by former Mousketeer Christina Aguilera.  Seeking to marry for love carries all through classic as well as modern Disney, from Aladdin to The Little Mermaid.  It's just that in those stories the perfect ending happens right now.  None of those princesses have to wait for their perfect prince.  So Merida has to wait a little.  Big deal.

And lastly the movie just happened to premire during Gay Pride Week.  So clearly it's all a conspiracy.  After all, there are Gay Days at the Disney theme parks, right?  Of course while those are not sanctioned officially by the parks, surely they're going to plot to release a movie with a tomboy of a heroine just in time to show their true colors, the whole rainbow if you will.

Or....... it could just be that time of year where you vie to release your summer blockbuster.  Tough call.

Now, dear readers, I promised you that I'd tackle the real question.

I believe, fundamentally and as a parent, that it should bother you that this question is being asked.

We have a girl who likes to play rough, prefers bows and arrows to bows and flowers, wants to pick her own partner for life (never saying either way which it is), and demands to live her life on her own terms.  And what does the "media" do with it?

They question her sexuality.

What kind of message does this conversation send to our daughters?  What are we telling them as they decide they want to ride racing bikes around the neighborhood rather than host a tea party?  What are we telling them when they don't want to play the "wife" in a game of house?  What are we telling them when they say they want Legos (and I mean real legos not those pink knock offs designed "For girls") instead of Barbie?

We're telling them that those choices will lead to questions about them.  Those choices will be examined for "deeper meaning."  We're telling them that they should prepare to defend their choices because anything "not normal" demands defense.

I'm not a paragon of this.  When my son started at day care, it was mostly boys and yes, he played with dolls.  I used to tell the woman, a lovely person who I love dearly as a member of our family, that my son did not "play with dolls"; he was a solider doing relief work and there was administrating humanitarian aid.  I always thought that I did so with a wink and a nod and that it was a little joke that I didn't really believe that boys couldn't play with dolls.

But, maybe I failed.  Maybe I failed to make it a joke enough.  Maybe I made a mistake in even joking about what boys and girls play with.

I don't think my daughter (or son) needs to grow up with people telling her (or him) at every turn what is expected of him because of the accident of his birth.  If it's not biologically related, then it's a societal construct and as much as we built up societial rules, we can tear them down.  And once in while we have to.

I have nothing but pride (yeah... pride) and support for what Pixar has made, even having yet to see it for myself.  I don't doubt at all that they continued to push the envelop for technological innovation and story telling.  And even if they simply put out a typical movie, that is still pretty good by most measures.

But what does concern me is the sheer number of bloggers, pundits, talking heads and otherwise Do-Nothings who are making a carreer not only out of fabricating controversy, but doing so in a way that puts the hearts and minds of our daughters at risk.

Grow up, people.

Today We Celebrate our Independence Day

For the 4th of July I'd like to leave you folks with some videos and transcripts to honor this great nation of ours.

The Gettysburg Address as read Gregory Peck




Chamberlain's Speech to the 20th Maine Volunteers as performed by Jeff Daniels





The President's Speech in Independence Day as performed by Bill Pullman




The Vote Scene in 1776 featuring William Daniels, Howard DaSilva, Ken Howard and John Collum


And lastly, for my fellow gaming nerds: