As a New Yorker, seeing the smoking towers brought a mix of reactions. First was the image I remember seeing of the burning Kuwait Ministry of Electricity and Water building from the Iraqi invasion. The apartment complex my family resided in early 80’s Kuwait included that ministry. I woke up to the sight of those buildings for years; footage of them burning had a simultaneous disconnect and bring-it-home feel. So did the burning Twin Towers.Second, how was my aunt? She had lived in Manhattan her whole life. I started the day’s series of futile calls, as overworked lines were jammed for hours. She told us later she had been out when the first plane hit. Deciding to go home, she changed buses, only to leave the bus and walk when traffic got bad. Things took long enough that she saw the first collapse before she got home. She had nightmares for months after that.

I called work to tell them I would be late while my family tried to get in touch with my aunt.

My mother always hated the Towers. She felt they were monstrosities of steel and glass. When she took me to the City (as we called New York) we’d visit the Empire State Building. As a result, I have never been to the Twin Towers. Heresy, I know. The closest I’d ever come was the De Laurentis’ King Kong movie starring Jeff Bridges and some unknown actress named Jessica Lange.

I heard my mother waking up and went to her and told her what happened. She thought I was joking. In those days talking about terrorists flying planes into landmarks could actually be a joke, and not even in particular bad taste. Not so any more. My mother was a native Floridian, adopted New Yorker. She loved the City, even if not the Towers. She turned on CNN too.

My father called from work to say he would keep trying to get my aunt, and I should get to work myself. Work first, that’s my dad.

Star Trek: The Experience’s two highest ranked managers were not American; one favored being open, the other didn’t. The Experience opened. It was naturally our worst day ever to that point. Vegas had been trending down for that year, we had already made cut backs, so strangely enough we were ready for the financial hit. Further, we had a windfall with a convention weeks before. Huge business. All of that was wiped out. But we wouldn’t face closing like so many businesses later that year.

I got to work late, but was not penalized for it. I got into costume as quickly as possible and made my way upstairs to the subdued decks of the Enterprise-D. Groups of guests were small and infrequent. I went through the Starfleet rotation without much thought, somewhat numb. Until I got to the Simulator Loader position.

The Sim Loader was an operations heavy position. So much so that when Landmark Entertainment and Paramount delivered the script to us in the attraction’s testing phase, the show hiccupped around that portion. April Hebert, one of the smartest and most reliable performers The Experience ever had, was tasked with integrating the operational aspects of modern day simulator safety protocols with a Star Trek script. Years of theatre and teaching experience made her a natural. In all ten years of the show’s existence, if you’ve been through the show, as you board the shuttle Goddard you’ve seen some version of her work.

My first sim show of the day was surreal. I had a small group of fifteen or so. Playing the safety video, discussing safe and proper loading, I was walking through the routine barely thinking about it, until the guests stepped onto the shuttle. They sat. I directed them to buckle their safety restraints. I watched a ten year old boy fasten himself in. And all the thoughts, all the jokes over the years, of being a glorified flight attendant came to me. I stared at the boy, wondering if hours before one just like him had dutifully buckled himself in, not knowing what was to come.

Now beyond somewhat-numb, I closed the simulator and launched it. While the shuttle “flew” I turned the show over to the performer playing the Janitor, who would then monitor the shuttle and passengers until it “landed” and then unload it. Today my Janitor was Mike McCorkle, another very reliable crewmember, who came to work, did his job, and worked with everyone to make it an always pleasant day.

I went back to the Transit corridor where the crew gathered to await the next show. We discussed the day, speculating on who was responsible, reflecting on what would happen next. Then Mike appeared, his show done. He asked our opinion on calling management to discuss the final moment of the show. The shuttle crash lands into the Las Vegas Hilton and a janitor discovers the guests in the basement, amazed at how they got there. The janitor then leads them out, past a television that plays a newscast of a strange UFO incident over the strip. The Air Force claims it’s weather balloons. Then the guests are placed on the exit elevator.

Strange how something becomes so common, so banal, you don’t even think about it, having thoroughly lost sight of what it is. When all was said and done, we were a show about a crash landing . A crash landing into a building. We poked fun at the mystery of it. We entertained with it. Mike was really uncomfortable playing that faux newscast after the show. That was the closest thing to a complaint I had ever heard Mike McCorkle make in all the years I worked with him.

We talked to management and turned off the newscast.

Everyone was closed. Across the country, businesses, schools, offices saw fit to remain home while we didn’t. Broadway. Disney, Universal Studios, attractions all around stayed closed. At first we thought we were showing strength opening as usual, but with so many other entertainments closed our strength veered dangerously close to callousness. What were we saying about those who were suffering while we played make believe?

Fate took a strange hand. We eventually developed a technical problem that closed the show for a few hours. We went to the break room and watched CNN footage of the attacks. The smoke. The fire. The fear. The attraction was up again as our shift ended. Time to go home.

We eventually heard from my aunt. She was safe and ok. The nightmares hadn’t started yet.

My best friend from college lived in New York. She had close ties to the community of first responders and worked in a law office that was connected to the financial community. She lost many, many friends that day. September 10th is her birthday. A New Jersey native, her brother lived in Hoboken for years before he decided to “take the plunge” and move into the City. A week before 9/11.

A few years ago, my high school class talked about a reunion. It was the first time in decades I had spoken to so many. Old connections were remade. All who had gone so far, done so much. It was then I found out Waleed Iskandar, our high school class salutatorian and a friend, was aboard Flight 11 when it was crashed into the North Tower. A Lebanese Christian who lived in London, he had been in the States on business when hijacked. I hadn’t spoken to him since graduation.

Ten years, two wars and an economic collapse later, I wonder at what has been lost by so many. To say what I have experienced as suffering would be an insult to those whose pain has not yet ended.

But I have learned. Keep in touch.

Kerstan Szczepanski

Fill in the blanks, you creative type you. What is happening in this exchange?
Afan seeking an autograph? Some young hopeful artist submitting his work for review? A BBQ cook off? Who knows? It is up to you to fill in the blanks!

Add to the image as much as you like and then scan that bad boy on your computer and send it to comments@uglycouchshow.com to win a mystery prize and be featured on the homepage of the Ugly Couch Show! Grab those crayons, wattercolors and markers and get crackin.

-Torgo

Star Wars Galaxies is shutting down. Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts are sunsetting the long-suffering game on December 15th, 2011. There are more details, but you can find them all over the net. I just want to point a few things we should learn from its existence before it vanishes into the ether as another of a long line of “remember that one janky MMO?” geek conversations.

As anyone who listens to the podcast knows, I used to play Star Wars Galaxies during the first couple years of its run. I even beta tested it for like a minute. It wasn’t launch-ready one day one. It wasn’t ready 6 months after. If you take a hard look at it now, 8 years later, it still isn’t considered launch-ready. After 3 major overhauls of the game, the major player base had all but abandoned this turkey. Many systems never worked right (combat, questing), and some were tossed aside altogether (battlegrounds). The path to becoming a Jedi was opened to everyone, brutally axe-murdering any sense of accomplishment or uniqueness.

If there was one thing SWG did right, it was the sandbox element that let creative players craft the story. No game since has ever gotten anywhere close to the level that SWG did it. No game since has even bothered to try, and I don’t see one in sight. As mayor of Valshara (a player-created city on the long-defunct Valcyn server), I got to experience the very best the game had to offer. I was bored with the combat system, disgusted with the CURB (Combat Upgrade/Revamp/Balance) and revolted by the NGE (New Game Enhancements). Don’t even get me started on the Hologrind. (The Hologrind was the old ways of unlocking the Force Sensitive Character Slot which involved grinding several professions. The first fourcharacter professions were revealed via a Holocron and the rest were determined through trial and error, which led to many people dancing for hours on end in bars. This method of reaching Jedi was replaced with a quest-based system with Publish 10. And, as of the NGE, Jedi is now a starting career/profession.)

We built a great city by the lake, each street and neighborhood planned out meticulously. We had a guild that was 200 strong. We built an imperial Guild Network and held regular meetings. We had a large and active role-playing community, with fun player-driven events. We had the SWG player events team running named characters for our events before anyone else. We had a real community, despite the broken nature of the combat game.

If you can make a living, breathing community of players despite a failed game system, that tells me that the sandbox aspect of the game was amazing, and made up for the game’s shortfalls. Almost.

See, they kept screwing with the established game in an effort to dumb it down for the unwashed masses. In doing so they drove the hardcores away, and what they were left with was empty servers and a smoking ruin of a game. Even the designers and producers that are no longer with SWG have said how badly run it was. The mistakes made in the management of SWG were colossal and spread across every department.

And now John Smedley has the unmitigated gall to say in an interview with massively.com (read it here) that they’re not shutting down because of dwindling player population. If the player population was what it was before the disastrous NGE, there’s no way it would shut down now.

He goes on to say, “There are going to be a lot of fans that are going to say, hey can’t you give us the source code, or can’t we run a server, and the answer is going to be, I’m sorry — we have to decline that. It’s just not possible.” As evidenced by other people running private (albeit unauthorized) MMO servers, this is proven to be a lie. There are already plenty of private, SWG pre-NGE servers out there. It IS possible; it’s just not allowed by the legion of blood-sucking entertainment lawyers that suckle at George Lucas’ flanneled teat.

Well fuck you, Sony, for taking what could have been a great thing and shitting all over it. I’ve never forgiven this slight to the gamer community and I won’t forget it. If it happened once under the current leadership, it can happen again VERY easily. I was never so glad as the day I heard the new Star Wars MMO was not in their hands.

So what can take away from this chapter in MMO gaming? The people need sandboxes. Building cities is cool. Give people the tools and they’ll make good stories. The community can, upon occasion, brew up good stuff. Oh, and SOE = Fail.

———————————————
Barry Robb is the webmaster/producer/co-co-host of a certain pop culture webshow. He used to play Pash Aylor, Prefect of the Imperial Guild Network, Guild Leader of the VE/VH and Veltares-Aylor Heavy Industries, all-around Imperial tyrant and mayor of Valshara, Naboo on the Valcyn server. Now he complains and sighs loudly when he reminisces.

Listening to the podcasts over the past few months you may have heard me joke about my “educating” mastertorgo on Robert E. Howard and Conan. As a long time Conan fan and Howard purist, I hoped to give at least one fantasy fan a better understanding of one of fantasy’s founding fathers. Howard and Conan have gotten a bad rap, and there is a dedicated group that works to do something about that.

Conan and Howard were popular back in the days of the pulps. “Two Gun Bob” was one of the Big Three authors of the magazine Weird Tales, one of the greatest pulps of the 30s. The other two authors, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, were long distance friends of Howard and all three kept a voluminous correspondence over many years. Lovecraft was a literary influence for Howard; indeed it was Howard’s melding of Lovecraftian existential horror with historical adventures ala Harold Lamb that created Sword and Sorcery, a sub-genre distinct from but akin to the epic fantasy created by Tolkien.

In the late 60s an effort to capitalize on the popularity of Tolkien led to a resurgence of the popularity of Howard. L. Sprague de Camp, a science-fiction writer in his own right, recognized the potential of Conan and edited the notorious Conan reprints. And that’s where, in the eyes of purists like me, things started to go wrong. De Camp seemed to have a – well, love/hate may be to strong – let us say respect/disrespect for Howard and his writing. On the one hand he admired Howard’s pacing and the vitality of his characters. But on the other hand de Camp seemed almost embarrassed by Sword and Sorcery and pulp adventure in general. He derided Howard’s characters and prose. He heavily edited Howard’s originals, and even wrote what are referred to as pastiches, original works that are intended to honestly imitate the pastiched author’s style and substance. Unfortunately pastiches, much like Hollywood movie sequels, tend to celebrate the wrong things from the source material. In my opinion de Camp (and others) propagated the harebrained idea that Conan was all about physical solutions to problems, rescuing maidens, killing bad guys and taking their stuff. Also, by printing the stories chronologically instead of as written, any sense of Howard’s development of Conan or the setting he lived in was lost.

De Camp also wrote a biography of Howard that popularized many fallacies about the author; from an excessive focus on Howard’s suicide to cheap arm chair psychology regarding his mental stability. The book so upset Novalyne Price, a woman who dated Howard when he was alive, she was moved to write her own book One Who Walked Alone. But the damage was done; I recall just a few years ago a friend of mine recounting the “fact” that Howard was so crazy, he actually thought that as he typed Conan was standing behind him with an axe, waiting to kill him if he didn’t tell the Cimmerian’s story. Horseshit.

So when mastertorgo told me he had purchased one of the Conan paperbacks (edited by de Camp), I knew I had to move quickly to keep his mind pure, as it were. A body of scholarship on Robert E. Howard has grown in the past few decades. Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder is a wonderful biography and analysis of Howard’s works. Del Rey’s Robert E. Howard series, including the three Conan books edited by Patrice Louinet and Rusty Burke, not only reprint the stories as originally published, but also offer insight and analysis to Howard’s writing and characters as they have not had before. Remember that voluminous correspondence with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith? Many letters are quoted and cited therein. Howard and Conan get a fair shake.

So there is hope. No new pastiches are being published, and the Del Rey compilations are always in stock. Jason Momoa stars in the new movie and has said good things about Howard and Conan early on; if the flick blows it won’t be his fault. While the movie itself sounds like more Conan the Misunderstood, I can only hope that it is good enough to stir some interest and get people to buy the books. And maybe a new generation of readers will give props to one of America’s very greatest. I hope that pleases you as much as it does me, and if not, why the fuck are you reading this blog?