Doing it Wrighte: Zombies

The walking dead have made entirely too many appearances in popular culture over the years, and through it all the initial creativity involved with the concept seems to have stagnated in recent years. Zombies have a giant variety of interpretations and concepts to work with, but the single most common modern interpretation is the logic-defying plague-spawned swarm of mindless flesh eaters.  Given the shear amount of options that comes in this vaguely defined modern horror concept, a story teller could do a lot of good and interesting things with zombies if they were more willing to step away from the norm. To start with, I'll break the elements of the living impaired up into creation and characteristics for purposes of this article and picture making.

The basic anti-physics of no longer dead creation, seems like a good place to start:

That Other Category: Comics Code Circa 1954 and Today

Censorship in any media is never a good thing when done on a broad scale, partially because putting any legal restrictions on speech is bad, but mostly because the people who write the rules often go way beyond anything remotely sane as far as what actually needs to be censored.  An amusing example of such ridiculousness that I found lying around in a common web place (Wikipedia) is the Comic Magazine Association of America's original Comics Code of 1954 which I feel deserves modern commentary and criticism.

So first to explain this whole thing a bit:

Hidden at the Edge of the World: The Vagrant Soldier Ares

An action driven series in a printed graphical media of any sort rarely stays consistently good over the course of a long series, but Vagrant Soldier Ares by Ryu Keum Cheol (류금철) pretty much does exactly that.  Comics, manga, graphic novels, manwha (which I'll explain in the next paragraph) and printed media along those lines all are in the same unique situation when it comes to the portrayal of action; they can show still pictures and imply movement subtly, but can neither show movement like film can, nor can they leave everything up to the audience's imagination like a novel can.  Ideally, in still graphic style works the text and art work together in telling a story and portraying the scenes within and complement each other, rather than detracting attention one way or another.

Manga, manhua, and manwha are all east Asian words for comics in their own languages (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean respectively), which here in America is creatively borrowed for use when referring to comics which come from said countries because it's a hell of a lot quicker than saying ______ country's comics or sasparillalistictabulousnessosity.  Said fore-mentioned foreign worded drawing collections are generally stylistically similar to each other, especially in comparison to American comics, but, as with all things, author's perspective and culture of origin has an impact on how they present their work.  Manwha distinguishes itself from manga in two basic ways: Manwha is normally read from left to right (though sometimes the author decides to write backwards like the Japanese for some bloody reason...); and their is no major animation industry that constantly looks to it for material, so it's rarely adapted into anything else.

Getting back on topic, Ares itself is set in a Roman eraish style world with probably Greek gods and, well, this is a good place for this:

Building the Theoretical MMORPG: Crafting

Crafting systems in games started back in ancient times when pixels roamed the earth, but have now not only become an automatic include into every RPG, and often appears in other genres as well.  Crafting in each game varies greatly in both purpose and outcome, but in the genre of MMORPG the purpose is to be an economic factor and time sink, and the outcome is boredom and tedium that few people would do if it wasn't for their Skinner box style rewards schedules.  To explain Skinner box from the last section, go watch this video on Escapist's Magazine's website if you haven't already (go ahead, this article isn't going to go anywhere while you're gone; just remember to come back with some flowers and candy to make up for neglecting it's attention).

It's the opinion of this author, and S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. (Southern Quarter United Independent Reactionary Radicals Engaged with the Legion of S.N.A.P.P.L.E.), that MMORPG crafting would benefit from having several aspects of it redesigned to make it a more fun experience that players may actually enjoy, rather than a time sink done solely for the rewards.  In this article I've broken crafting down into three sections: ingredient gathering, item creation, and crafting economics.  Topically speaking with worded explanatory blocks and bold text:

Ingredient Gathering