I expect that there is a discussion mechanism of some sort in the actual IC StarkWire environment - comments on Ben Stark's blog posts and some kind of subsidiary forum for the Printed Circuits news area.

The problem is that allowing comments on the promotional LJ would probably just lead to a lot of fourth-wall problems, so, I turned it off.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Makes sense to me. I'm sure somebody will throw a fit over it, but then... well, that's LiveJournal. It wouldn't be the same if people weren't throwing fits over something. ;)

--
Mr. Fnord, drama llama.

I'm only using LJ because it was marginally more convenient to set up a paid LJ with domain forwarding than it was to build a StarkWire page from scratch here at EPU - and since I was unable to get the banner graphic I wanted onto the LJ version without a lot of unsavory screwing around with S2 layers and crap, I might take the local-development route anyway one of these days.

It's not really supposed to BE an LJ, if you get my meaning.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

I will endeavor to put together a quick-and-dirty guide to the character designs as they'll appear in The Iron Age tomorrow. For now, I can tell you it's going to end up, as I suspected a few days ago, being a hybrid series, source-material-wise. But I'm OK with that. It evolved that way as the scenes unfolded in my head rather than being arbitrarily imposed at the beginning of the development process, so, hey, what can you do.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Sounds good. Better to let the muse go to work, after all, and I'm definitely looking forward to the character guide.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard

!

That makes me sad.

But I can kinda see where you're coming from. The series has changed a lot, and not always in ways that were wise of me to get involved with.

>I imagine Benjamin Stark will be channeling the good Dr. Thompson,
>albeit with much less recreational chemistry, and maybe a
>little bit less gunplay.

Wait. He's in a cyberpunk future story that revolves around armed conflict between rogue robots and people in powered armor, and you're thinking less gunplay? :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Well, after all, I don't think Boomers/BUMA come equipped with bowels... Or am I thinking of the wrong reporter?

Sort of. Spider is pretty obviously inspired by the late Hunter S. Thompson, but - frightening as this idea is to those of us who started with HST and found Transmet later - he's much angrier than the real guy.

Dr. Thompson had a habit of blowing stuff up on his Colorado ranch just for the fun of it. In the special issue of Rolling Stone that came out after his death last year, his friend Johnny Depp (who played him in the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas movie) noted that he kept a keg of gunpowder in his basement guest room, which Depp, living with him for several months before F&L filming, had been using as a nightstand/ashtray until he realized what it was and nearly shat himself in terror. :)

--G.
"Few people understand the psychology of dealing with an AD Police K-suit cop. Your typical armored vigilante will immediately panic and shut down. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow."
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Fair enough. It's just that from the Starkwire posts, he seems mellower, more reasonable than Thompson was. I just figured he might be more inclined to talk things out than just start blasting.

Of course, another spiritual descendant of HST, Spider Jerusalem once said (more or less): "Journalism is about criminal enterprise."

>That makes me sad.
>
>But I can kinda see where you're coming from. The series has changed
>a lot, and not always in ways that were wise of me to get involved
>with.
>

This isn't the thread to discuss it, but I'll just say that their came a point where it became too far-fetched, and leave it at that.

I dunno, by all accounts Thompson was really a pretty reasonable guy, his "gonzo" persona notwithstanding. He was prickly and hard to get along with, but most of his gunplay was as recreational as his drug use. He liked to blow stuff up and shoot at old car bodies and stuff, but reports of his having engaged in interpersonal violence as a conflict resolution tactic are pretty rare.

Then again, he didn't live in a world controlled by lawless megacorporations with absolutely no regard for the value of human life...

... did he?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Very true. I suppose the force of his alter-ego's personality overshadows his own in other people's mind (like mine). But your right, the incidents I've read about where guns and/or violence were involved seldom stemmed from a conflict, though I seem to remember him bringing along a can of Mace to the Kentucky Derby, and he seemed like he had no compunctions against using on whoever gave him static (though in that piece, the only person he claimed to have maced was a waiter at a restaurant).

>Then again, he didn't live in a world controlled by lawless
>megacorporations with absolutely no regard for the value of human
>life...
>
>... did he?
>
>--G.

Just from the Starkwire posts, call me crazy, but Stark is beginning to have this Kolchak the Nightstalker* flavor to him, except instead of pursuing the supernatural, he's trying to expose GENOM for the threat it is...and everybody thinks he's nuts.

*All my knowledge of Kolchak is at best second hand, having not watched either the original series, or ABC's failed revamp.

Indeed, breaking out the Mace in the restaurant is described in "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent & Depraved", but there again - as with most everything in Dr. Thompson's overtly gonzo pieces, whether that actually happened is debatable.

For that matter, Thompson said himself on several occasions that I know of (including in a BBC documentary he is visibly just barely tolerating the makers of) that he got very tired of people expecting him to be as crazy as Raoul Duke.

(Which doesn't stop the UF version of Raoul Duke from being as crazy as Raoul Duke, so I suppose if HST were still alive and knew about that he'd probably kick my ass, but oh well. I don't expect many of my idols would actually like me if we met. Theodore Roosevelt certainly wouldn't. :)

>Just from the Starkwire posts, call me crazy, but Stark is beginning
>to have this Kolchak the Nightstalker* flavor to him, except
>instead of pursuing the supernatural, he's trying to expose GENOM for
>the threat it is...and everybody thinks he's nuts.

Well, sort of. There is a certain thematic similarity there, yeah - Stark's a bit of a crusader in a world where the power structure doesn't have much use for crusaders - but a pretty broad stripe of the general public is perfectly willing to accept that GENOM isn't all its management claims it is, that corporate shenanigans are going on in orbit, and so forth. And he's certainly got a lot of support for his insistence that the Knight Sabers, contrary to the Mega Tokyo city government's official stance on the subject, do exist.

Also, it's not like the only thing he does is sit and spew forth screeds against GENOM. He does well-regarded "event-driven" reportage (covering wars, natural disasters, and so forth) as well as his long-term investigative stuff, which does tend to focus on the dark side of the Boomer Revolution and related topics.

So yeah - he's Kolchak-like (and that's a comparison I don't mind, since I'm a big Darren McGavin fan), but is held in somewhat higher esteem by the world at large.

(Trivia: Kolchak: The Night Stalker wasn't called that because Kolchak was supposed to be a "night stalker"; it was called that because it was a followup to a TV movie, The Night Stalker, in which Carl Kolchak first appeared. In it, he was after a vampire. The vampire was the night stalker. So the TV show's title actually has jack to do with anything actually going on in the show. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

As long as it's Raoul Duke that's being the crazy one, I imagine that HST wouldn't be bothered. His problem was when people confused his author-avatar with the author.

Hmm...

Peter Eng
--
I'm only a Charter Member because of the DCForum upgrade, and because there's no rank below "Clueless F!wit."