Through a series of snafus we ended up looking at a place we had no intention of renting. For a variety reasons, one of which is size. See, in New York, a lot of the time you end up with matchboxes if you don't look hard enough. Matchboxes.
Essays, Not Rants! 266: Star Wars’ Newfound Dearth Of White Guys The Star Wars video game Battlefront 2, the follow-up to 2015’s Battlefront, was revealed a couple weeks ago, and the sequel seems to be righting a lot of the mistakes of the first game. It boasts more interesting combat, the return of classes, multiple eras in which you can play, and Jedi Rey as a playable character (which, right there makes me wanna preorder it). Unlike the first, which was basically online multiplayer only, th
My lease ends at the end of May and I'm moving. It's part price, part the mouse hunt of the past couple months, part the six floor walkup, part the uneven floors, part the lack of a sick in the kitchen, part the price, part the fact that my bedroom door doesn't really close properly anymore, and part the price. I'm gonna miss the fire escape and the roof and the location and the apartment, though. But Mata freaking Nui apartment hunting in New York is rough. I mean, probably not if you have a
Essays, Not Rants! 264: Page Feel I read a lot. This is partly a byproduct of having grown up a bookworm and partly having taken a course of studied that meant a lot of reading. Like a lot a lot. Since graduating, I’ve kept it up best I can and I’m sitting at fifteen-odd books in the past eleven months. Like I said, reading a lot. A side effect of this is that I have a wonderful bookshelf. You’ve got Ulysses there and the first volume of Saga there with CS Lewis’ Of Other Worlds. I like it
So remember that movie I was making last year? We mixed on Wednesday and I've uploaded it now. Time to submit to festivals and stuff. It's DONE. DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE. I feel like a new mother except I don't want to see my newborn right now because the thing's been gestating for the last eighteen months and geez.
So I've spent more time since Mass Effect Andromeda came out playing the game than at work. Or sleeping. Or working on scripts and schtuff. How's your week been?
Essays, Not Rants! 261: On Visibility and Character Creators I spent well over an hour creating my character in Mass Effect: Andromeda. Not stats and stuff, no, just the aesthetics of his/my face. I love character creators. Maybe it’s an early exposure to The Sims, maybe it’s the simple joy of getting to play god and make people who look like whatever you want. In a game like Mass Effect where half the fun is making choices and carving your own narrative through the galaxy, I find that chara
Essays, Not Rants! 259: Okay, Seriously, What Is A Superhero Movie? A couple weeks ago I was at The Strand looking for a copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Because it’s on my personal reading list and I figured it’s as good a book as any to pick up at The Strand. Anyway, after scouring the A’s in the science fiction section, I was directed to check in general fiction. And there it was. Which, alright, fine. I mean, it’s vaguely science fiction – though Atwood prefers describing i
Essays, Not Rants! 258: Spoiled Endings I really liked Rise of The Tomb Raider up until the last thirty-odd minutes. Everything’s coming to a head, set ups are paying off, there’s a boss fight against a principal antagonist. You go to the next area and… There’s a cutscene, and in that cutscene the game ends, wrapping up most of the plot points with a tidy bow but still leaving a bunch frustratingly hanging for the inevitable sequel. You get another nice little plot button if you continue the g
Essays, Not Rants! 257: Stuff From 2016 I Wanna Talk About Every year I do a thing on this blog where I list my top nine movies. Thing is, movies aren’t the only things that come out in a year. So here’s a list of a bunch of stuff in a bunch of different mediums that came out last year that I really liked that I wanna talk about. They may not be the best thing to come out of the year, but it’s stuff I want to talk about. Book: Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi I talked about this book when I first fin
Essays, Not Rants! 256: Pushing Plausibility Comic books are weird. Especially superhero comics, what with alternate realities, time travel, dying but not really dying, planet-eating-monsters-turned-life-bringers, and telepathic cosmonaut dogs. Like I said, weird. Comic book movies, however, are typically more tame. Let’s go back a decade or so; the major blockbusters based on properties from the big two, Marvel and The House That Batman Built (DC), had been, mostly, normal-ish. We had Batma
Essays, Not Rants! 256: No One Does Latitude Like Batman What comes to mind when you think ‘Batman?’ Is it the one from Bruce Timm in the 90s? Or is it Michael Keaton’s in Tim Burton’s movie? Chris Nolan’s gritty reconstruction of the mythos? The Arkham games’ sinister representation of the Joke and Batman conflict? Adam West’s campy take? Whatever it was Snyder was doing in Dawn of Justice? Or the brooding jerk voiced by Will Arnett in The LEGO Movie? Might it even be one from the comics? I
Essays, Not Rants! 255: Experiencing Life I really really liked 2013’s Tomb Raider. I wasn’t much of a Tomb Raider fan prior; Lara tended to be a little too sexualized for my tastes. Too much like if Indiana Jones had T&A than, well, an adventure story. The reboot, though, was more interested in Lara as a character than her figure. Plus, y’know, I’m a sucker for survivalist story on an island with crazy fanatics. Gameplay was a lotta fun too. So yeah, I really liked the game. Hence my di
So the girlfriend and I recently started watching Star Wars Rebels. And holy cyprinidae it is so good. We're only five-or-so episodes into Season Two (she's studying for Major Graduate Physics Exams), but dang. I'm surprised by how much I unapologetically enjoy this show. Also: Chopper is wonderful.
Essays, Not Rants! 252: Gaming Morality So here's the basic concept of Dishonored 2: the empress has been deposed. You play as either said deposed empress (Emily) or her royal protector (Corvo) and carve a path of revenge against the usurper and her cabal of those who dishonored you (hence the title). Along the way you meet the Outsider who gives you a bunch of magical powers, ranging from teleporting and stopping time to linking enemies together (so if you kill one you kill 'em all!) to strai
So I'm mixed. Dad's Singaporean Chinese, Mom's Norwegian America, I put Sino-Nordic on forms. Growing up, there weren't many stories about what that's like (getting teased/bullied for being white/foreign in Singapore, then being teased/bullied for being Asian/foreign in the US) and the weird navigation of identity that comes with it that I'm only now really starting to explore. Now, I'm curious, what stories are out there that deal with this? I'm interested in compiling a list (a cursory goo
Essays, Not Rants! 249: In Which Josh Rambles Aimlessly About Science Fiction on Christmas Eve I liked the idea of Passengers when I first heard about it: On an extra-solar space mission Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence wake up from cryogenic sleep and have to deal with being alone together. It’s like Lost In Translation… in space! And I’m a sucker for a riff on Lost In Translation (Monsters: Lost In Translation… with aliens!). But then I saw the trailer. And look! Explosions! Peril! It’s not
Essays, Not Rants! 248: Prequels Can Work Prequels, by their nature, face an uphill battle in that we know how they are going to end. We know that Logan is gonna lose his memories in X-Men: Origins, we know that Sully and Mike are gonna be best friends (but only one of them a scarer) in Monsters University, and we know that Anakin is gonna become Darth Vader. By explicitly being movies of the stories that came before, we enter into them knowing where they end up, and, well, already being spoil
Essays, Not Rants! 247: Thoughts on the Prequel Trilogy Last year I watched all three of the original Star Wars movies and commented on them in the lead to The Force Awakens. Since we’ve got another prequel coming out, I figured I’d do the same thing for the prequels before Rogue One (which I’m seeing on Thursday [!!!] on the biggest freaking screen in New York City[!!!]). Now, I have a soft spot for the prequels, so this isn’t going to be the angry nerd ranting you may expect. In fact, I
Essays, Not Rants! 246: But For Different Reasons I first saw (500) Days of Summer when I was eighteen. Fresh outta high school, I was one of five people in the theater. I loved it, and would go on to watch it in theaters two more times when I moved to Singapore a month later, and then again when I bought it on BluRay. I loved it for its emotional honesty, for the way the film depicted Tom’s thought process on screen. But like Tom’s own relationship with The Graduate, my own love of (500) Days
