a young woman who went west "Boy howdy" is a Texan exclamation of disbelief, enthusiasm, or wonder. boyhowdy.org is the blog of Anne E. Moloney, a Texas expat presently installed in Portland, Oregon. By day she sells lighting; by night she gets very enthusiastic about things of no particular importance. |
According to Anne E. on March 7th, 2010
My true intent with this blog is to have a space Foley and I can share, so we don’t each singularly feel the pressure of updating all the time. From me, expect pifflin’; from Fo, expect art.
 We’ve finally set up our office space here at the new house, and Foley’s been drawing again, which makes me nothing but happy. These two are from a comic / novel that she’s been poking at for a couple of months now.
“I wanted something intense to happen,” she said of her drawing, “so I added some booty-slappin’.”
According to Anne E. on December 17th, 2009
 Nothing a little October ale can't fix. Universal released the Robin Hood trailer the other day, and — I say this as someone who has thought about this movie more than you have — it was a bit unexpected.
Most of the blogs I read were quick to sass its choice of music and write it off as trying too hard to convey A Different Sort Of Robin Hood Movie — but a) it’s an important point to make to shake off the grim specter of Kevin Costner’s mullet, and b) it is a total success at conveying A Different Sort Of Robin Hood Movie. It starts with a slasher flick feel that dead-ends in Normandy-with-Normans. I have no idea what the hell it is about, but regardless of its relevance to my interests, I’m curious to see where the thing is going.
And I am most curious about what is implied by the brief glimpse we get of King Richard.
 Soon to be more perforated than not. King Richard is the deus ex machina of most every excercise in Hoodery. Robin can pants as many nobles as he wants, but the fact of the matter is any moment now Richard is going to drop on by and bring him in from the woods.
How a man living la vida Robin can suddenly become a noble and rub elbows with those he so recently pantsed is a theme glossed over in the stories, but just as glossed over is what happens when Richard eats it. The Lionheart gets a crossbow bolt to the neck and all-to-recently poxed Phoney King of England gets to go legit.
A handful of plots have focused Robin’s antics in this sort of context, and it’s a guarenteed tone-changer. There is no happy ending when you have effed with the king of your country. The only film to tread this ground was Robin and Marian, and while I really appreciated it following the logic of an outlaw growing too old for this shit to its inevitable conclusion, I can’t see Russell Crowe charging into a dick-measuring contest to the death.
This movie’s synopsis hints at something a touch more crowd-pleasing:
With their country weakened from decades of war, embattled from the ineffective rule of the new king and vulnerable to insurgencies from within and threats from afar, Robin and his men heed a call to ever greater adventure. This unlikeliest of heroes and his allies set off to protect their country from slipping into bloody civil war and return glory to England once more.
With Richard and his get-out-of-execution-free card out of the picture, there’s only one happy ending for Robin that has anything to do with the glory of England. And it’s another thing that very few Robin Hood stories bother to touch on.
King John signed the Magna Carta, a stepping stone to all sorts of wacky personal rights and freedoms. A subject very much so relevant to Robin’s interests.
 Initial here, asshole. Granted, I am absolutely prepared to be talking out of my hat here. Only one book I can think of ties Robin to the Magna Carta, and I imagine more folks haven’t bothered to explore it because it’s unspeakably boring to have Robin hang up his bow and go a-lawyering. I doubt the trailer is depicting Robin arguing with not-Stanley-Tucci about Habeas Corpus while he punches him in the mug.
But those are the two endings I see to this story — unceremonious death, or the Magna Carta — and I’m pumped to see what Ridley Scott has wound up going with.
What I am trying to say here is that Death and the Magna Carta may be my new band name.
According to Anne E. on May 3rd, 2009
Why can’t people just let things be adorably ugly any more?
Take Broken Sword as a for example. In 1997, I rented it for the PS1 from Blockbuster (simpler times, yo) and was absolutely charmed as I spent hours and hours using the phone (a LAND LINE! Simpler times!) to make Frank Sinatra talk to Miss Piggy.
But now it’s 2009, and some dude’s gotta call Dave Gibbon in from a Watchmen presser to make them look all rugged and fancy.
I like Dave Gibbons, don’t get me wrong — he drew arguably my favorite raft of rotting corpses ever — but man that is wicked boring. The original designs were all crazy expressive and cartoonish, and really popped considering the limitations of graphics at the time. Look, someone made a livejournal icon of original formula George Stobbart emoting. Ain’t no one posting fanvids set to “Rehab” using your designs, Gibbons.
If only the art had been spruced, I could live my life with peace and nary a kvetch. But the game opens with not an idyllic scene being exploded by a clown leading to arbitrary and thrilling adventure (spoiler), but with an extended sequence expanding upon the character of Nico Collard, our protagonists’s expository sounding board slash makeouts partner. It’s an entire subplot shoehorned in without the slightest trace of artistry. You just sort of play it, and then it is never referred to again. It bears no relation to the game beyond Nico going NO NEED TO TELL GEORGE ABOUT HOW I AM ACTUALLY ENGAGED IN THIS NARRATIVE, KNOWING WINK. And what’s more, dialogue from the original game that feels awkward considering the new context is left as-is. There’s a strange feeling of amnesia that drops on you — didn’t I do something once that seemed important?
In addition to this superfluous new content, puzzles have been removed wholesale, but strangely, their vestigial remains are left flopping half-heartedly. There’s an entire region accessible to me for no apparent reason. I vaguely remember the puzzle I had to solve, but am not required to do so. And the character development removed in that scene makes reveals later in the game fall flat on their face.
But the fact remains that you could take the weak-ass plot right out of this game and it’d still be charming as hell. The dialogue and characters remain appealing and funny in a way dissimilar to any other adventure game before or since. The tone is playful without being goofy, and while the solutions are as obtuse as the most random Sierra puzzler, at least I get a laugh out of fumbling there.
Any game where you have to befriend not one, but two good-humored elderly heiresses gets my vote, no matter if the plot devolves into some ridiculousness about harnessing the power of nature to channel the mysterious power of awesomeness. The plotline of nearly every adventure game falls apart with the slightest scrutiny, but that’s not what you remember. You remember a good line, a clever puzzle, an awesome character. And Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars: The Director’s Cut: A New Hope has all of those in spades.
 I, like Jacques de Molay, am aflame with hard-to-articulate feelings.
According to Anne E. on April 13th, 2009
How does this look with no title and a picture?
I dunno.
How can we find out?
According to Anne E. on April 5th, 2009
There comes a time when a person must use their own domain name, and grow beyond the shackles of LiveJournal. Might as well combine the two impulses.
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