Essays, Not Rants! 166: Obligatory Fury Road Entry I haven’t seen any of the old Mad Max trilogy, more for lack of bother than anything. Pop culture osmosis ensured I knew what it was about, though; post-apocalyptic wasteland, lots of leather, cars, machismo. So Fury Road flew below my radar during much of the lead up to its release. That is, until the press surrounding it started to discuss how it was surprisingly feminist and was [annoying] a lot of Men’s Rights Activists. That got my atte
Well. That was awesome. The Lego booth (floor area, more like it) was pretty cool. Saw the new Batman and Spiderman sets. Got a pretty neat Hobbit poster too. They were also building a mosaic of the turtles: Went to a couple panels about stories, that was cool. Saw some Assassin's Creed III gameplay, got an inflatable tomahawk and a pretty epic exclusive shirt. Played a bunch of Play Station All Stars (as Drake, duh). Game's fun. Very different from Smash Bros, I'll probably buy it, budge
I'm skipping class on Thursday. ...to go to New York Comic-Con, particularly the LEGO panel. I'm fairly excited, especially given that I didn't go last year (and wasn't this year until Good Stuff Happened), so, yay! Also there are a couple other interesting panels happening that day I wanna go to, so score. Of course, I'm missing out on Narrative Investigations and Militaries and Militarization, two classes that are absolutely fascinating. But hey, as a friend of mine told me; make New Yo
Essays, Not Rants! 228: Nothing’s In a Vacuum San Diego Comic-Con brought with it a new teaser for Netflix and Marvel’s upcoming Luke Cage, featuring said hero beating up bad guys. Ordinarily, this would be cool enough, because, duh. But, before this butt-kicking takes place, we get a shot of Luke putting up the hood of his jacket. It’s a precise shot that focuses a lot of attention into the act: Luke doesn’t just wear his hood up, he deliberately puts it on before heading in. Luke Cage is m
In the post right below this one I mentioned looking to shoot in a street where Jessica Jones shot (y'know, the street outside where they held Kilgrave). After much contact with the folks in charged, I could shut down stuff to work there... ...but it'd cost more than my entire budget for a single day. Man. Must be nice to have Marvel/Netflix money.
Essays, Not Rants! 152: Not Another Peter Parker I’ve had a relatively busy couple weeks, which means less time to see movies and play new games, so more yammering on about recent events (either that or wax on about Agent Carter again, but I’m waiting on that one. So let’s talk about new news, comic book news. Namely, Spider-Man’s going to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as opposed to standing alone. Which is cool, because we’ll finally get to see Spidey swinging on the big screen w
Essays, Not Rants! 267: Normalizing The Different It’s easy to dislike folks you don’t know. They’re different. They look weird. You have no horse in their race. They’re those people. The Unknowable Other. But it’s hard to keep up this mindset, that of the Them, the Other, after you’ve met said other. When you take the time to recognize them as a person, put a face to that Other, it’s much harder to not like them. Suddenly, they become an Us, rather than Them. Meeting people, however, is h
So there's a yearlong class at NYU Tisch where you make movies. But unlike other classes, only half the class's projects will be greenlit. You spend the Fall working on preproduction, refining your script, and preparing a pitch. I'm the first non-Film Major to be in this class with the chance to compete for the greenlight. I pitch today. Here we go.
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, 027: No Home From War I’m in college now, and one of the things you do in college is write essays. Every now and then one of these essays (which are certainly not rants) have a similar thread to the ones I post here. So I have an assignment to look at a contemporary depiction of a soldier’s return home in light of a classical work of literature. Said paper is underway. I’m taking Ulysses as my example, or Odysseus as he’s known in The Odyssey. But the man I want is Ulyss
Essays, Not Rants! 074: No Detail Wasted I’m reading the Harry Potter books again. What really strikes me, even more so than the last time I read them, is just how well planned the whole series is. I don’t just mean the incredibly well-developed characters here, I’m talking about how J.K. Rowling clearly had the whole story prepared before she began writing. Sirius Black gets mentioned in the first chapter of The Philosopher’s Stone, but doesn’t come into play until The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Holy mess, I'm in love. I'm usually a fan of bands changing their sound (see Barcelona's three projects, or Relient K's Forget and Not Slow Down versus Mmhmm), and as much as a departure as Believe is from everything else Mumford's done before, holy crud I really like what they've done. I cannot wait for Wilder Mind.
Essays, Not Rants! 105: Nerd Culture, The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck I stopped watching The Big Bang Theory a couple years ago. Part of the reason was because I was growing tired of it, other part was I simply couldn’t be bothered to keep up with it. For a class, though, I have to write a scene for The Big Bang Theory. This means watching episodes of the show to get a hold of the rhythm and voices of the show. I started watching Big Bang during its second season and enjoyed it for what it wa
Essays, Not Rants! 169: Narrative Contracts Early on in Borderlands 2 the player encounters a fence of electricity in between them and their goal. Claptrap, the voice over the radio, tells you there’s a fusebox on the other side and that if you run fast enough, you won’t take damage from the fence. Your objective changes, now saying to run into the forcefield. So you do, and it deals damage to your shield and pushes you back. Claptrap suggests you do it again, he says you weren’t running fast
But it ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flying is? Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a Home.
So I moved. Was gonna move before the fire, but the fire kinda expedited the actual moving. Already had a place. Was mostly packed. So that went smooth. New place. Brother and I moved in with my drinking buddy – she and I get along grand even when we aren't drinking. We're in Queens now. New neighborhood, new haunts. Getting the lay of the land, changing my address. Got promoted to full-time at the LEGO Store. Pilot program we're a part of. I get benefits now – health insurance. Also got Emp
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 321: Motivated Acceleration I am endlessly fascinated by mediums. No, not people who claim to talk to ghosts; rather the forms that stories can take. Why does this story work better as a novel? Why this a video game? Why that a play? It’s usually adaptations where you can see the cracks that are the chasms between mediums. Consider the recent comic adaptation of The Last Jedi, which is essentially a beat-for-beat retelling, it doesn’t quite capture all the visual splendor o
Essays, Not Rants! 107: Mother Met I wasn’t a fan of the How I Met Your Mother finale that aired on Monday. Now, I usually like finales; I love the ending of Lost and I do like how Chuck ended. Though both are controversial in their own right, they felt emotionally honest and true to the show. The problem with How I Met Your Mother’s “Last Forever” was that for what it was trying to do, it felt unearned. And if you haven’t seen it yet: SPOILERS My main complaint is, of course, Ted and Robi
Essays, Not Rants! 186: More Thoughts on Destiny’s Story So with my Rationale out of the way, I picked up Destiny’s expansion-sequel The Taken King and put… many… hours into it. It’s a huge improvement on the base game and, for a change, feels like a complete game with stuff like story and what not. Which is great, because Destiny had world building in spades, and now The Taken King is building on it and giving characters actual personalities. These personalities are revealed through some ne
Essays, Not Rants! 287: More Thoughts On An Open World I am a big fan of linear, narrative gameplay. I love the Uncharted series for its tight and moving narrative that thrusts the gameplay along and I will critique the Assassin’s Creed games for their tendency to waylay their own plot with an overabundance of pointless side missions. I yearn for games that propel me along, marrying good gameplay with an strong narrative. Including so-called ‘walking sims’ like Journey or Gone Home that may no
Spoilers, obviously, for last night's episode. It's more of me thinking about this tv show! The overall pacing of the show isn't slow, it's just off. Almost like it's meant to be bingewatched.
As promised, here are a few more shots from the midnight showing. Looking important Pepper helping adjust the repulsor arm Just plain cool So hard to resist
