Essays, Not Rants! 057: Change is Good The TV show Chuck begun with a really simple conceit: nerdy, intelligent twenty-something stuck in a lousy deadend job in a BestBuy BuyMore suddenly finds himself with a CIA computer (the Intersect) in his brain and involved with various spy activities with agents from the NSA and CIA. Simple. The show could have very easily fallen into step; keep the perpetual romantic tension between Chuck and Sarah (the CIA agent) with Casey (the NSA one) filling t
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! 375: Obsolescence I have a floppy disk lying around somewhere with stuff on it I must have written when I was around eight or ten years old. I don’t know exactly what’s on it and I’m not sure where it is at any given moment; it’s one of those things that I’ll happen on occasion and think to myself “hey, I should get the files off of this some time.” Of course, there is the whole issue of finding a floppy disk reader. My laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive anymore and what
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! 329: Where Do We Go From Here? (Or Infinity War Part Two) This post is going to be about what just might happen in the next Avengers movie. And about what happened in Infinity War too, so if you’re not a fan of spoilers, this is your warning. I lost my voice when I saw the Infinity War’s stinger the first time. Seeing Captain Marvel’s symbol appear on Nick Fury’s space pager elicited quite the roar/scream from me for quite the obvious reason; she’s long been my favorite su
Essays, Not Rants! 087: Good Female Protagonists Revisited This blog's inception came about a year-and-a-half ago due to an essay (not a rant) about Katniss of The Hunger Games and other strong female characters. In light of the fact that we're once again a week away from the release of a movie about Katniss Everdeen, I figure, hey, let's look at this subject yet again. And again. Strong female characters are strong characters. Period. There's no special checklist that needs to be applied to
Y'know how when you're younger you figure when you're an adult you can buy all the LEGO you want? And then when you're an adult you realize you gotta budget for it? And then you do budget for it (by rearranging some priorities [movies and alcohol took a hit])? And then you get an employee discount? And then you save your money until double VIP points roll around and then you buy a bunch? And then you get a backlog? Yeah.
Essays, Not Rants! 319: Top Nine Movies of 2017 So it’s almost halfway through the year and I’m finally putting together my year end list. For 2017. Yeah. Kinda forgot about it. And by forgot about I mean procrastinated. Anyway! Here we go! Top Nine; leaving a space just in case there was something amazing I missed. And it was really hard to sort these! 9. Logan This one edges out Thor Ragnarok just by virtue of how singular it is (though Ragnarok is also quite singular in a different way)
Essays, Not Rants! 173: But What Does It All Mean? When The Lord of The Rings was first published, there was a lot of talk about its relation to the second World War. It got to the point that in the foreword to a later edition, Tolkien explicitly said that no, it was not in any way an allegory of World War Two. Tolkien wasn’t a huge fan of allegories, to the point where he usually considered them detrimental to the story (and also the biggest flaw of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and The Wa
After a busy summer doing almost anything but (and a madly busy second-half of a spring semester), I've picture locked on The Conduits. Now it's off to music and sound and color correction and vfx for all that fun stuff. Can't wait until it's done.
Essays, Not Rants! 218: Superhero Stardom (A Response) There’s a recent New York Times article I came across that laments how the rise of the superhero genre has conflated actor-stardom with character-stardom. The article itself doesn’t really chase down the points too well, but the central gist (as far as I can see) is that in the recent slate of films, characters have come to trump actors. As Wesley Morris suggests in the article, when you watch Oceans Eleven, it’s George Clooney doing all t
Caught a 7pm IMAX showing (for the poster!) It's, it's good. Makes a lot of really bold choices. Choices that I like for the most part. Lots of fun character beats. And dude, it feels like a comic book. There are a lot of those really cool HOLY SNAP moments, which, y'know, is fun. 'cuz that's what you want in a comic book movie. Also it's interesting to watch it as someone who now reads comics. Characterization works and there are some cool set ups too. Man. Now to see it again sometime so
Essays, Not Rants! 091: Defying Conventions I’m still not done spitballing this essay (which is problematic, seeing as it’s due on Monday) but I’ve narrowed in my focus to make it more relevant to the class. Rather than comparing Mass Effect 3 and The Last of Us, I’m going to look at the latter game and how it does away with many of the accepted conventions of narrative video games. Academically. Because I can. See, for the most part narrative video games have taken on three very common tr
Essays, Not Rants 023: In Between Most stories are about going somewhere. The quest in The Lord Of The Rings is to get to Mordor and destroy the ring. In any Indiana Jones movie he’s trying to get whichever artifact it is he’s after this time. A New Hope is about getting the princess and defeating the Empire. But sometimes a story’s point isn’t actually the destination or the goal or whatever. The MacGuffin is negligible to the point of being unimportant. The characters’ goal is either arbit
Essays, Not Rants! 199: 2015 In Review Well. It’s 2016. Since it’s tradition, let’s take a look at my rants essays from this past year. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Let’s Talk About That Whole Black Widow Thing Hoo boy, yeah, that’s one way to start off this year-in-review. I stand by this post (that there’s nothing inherently problematic with Black Widow’s characterization in Age of Ultron, rather the real issue is that we have one female character to tell every female narrative)
Essays, Not Rants! 114: It’s Topical! Let’s talk about science fiction. Again. One of the things I’ve said I love about good science fiction is its way to address things without overtly addressing them. That is, science fiction can often be seen as a sort of allegory, or even to write out things that wouldn’t work otherwise. You can read the short stories in Olivia Butler’s Bloodchild and get a very real sense of alienation and the idea of The Other. Which makes sense, given that she was essen
So yesterday, well, Wednesday, I was at Yankee Stadium for the all NYU graduation where the entire NYU class of 2016 commenced. Or did commencement. Whatever. Was cool. Today (Thursday), though, was the Gallatin graduation, the one specific for my school. Gotta walk across the stage and all that. Did the thing. Got a degree in Narrative (Re)Construction; now to find a job. But first, wooo!
Essays, Not Rants! 238: Language and Story Language is weird. Conveying language is even harder. How do you make a story where the main characters are all speaking a different language, but gear it to an English-speaking audience? Do you give them vague accents or pull a Sean Connery and let Russian-in-English sound suspiciously like a Scottish brogue? Then what if the they interact with English speakers? How do you flip that sense of the other, where the person speaking the language you unde
Three years ago to the day I was hospitalized for the first time on account of my heart trying to kill me. What's happened in the last three years? Here's the quick timeline: July 13 2010, Josh goes for a cardiac stress test, his heart goes into Ventricular Tachycardia and hits 255 BPM. Is subsequently hospitalized and diagnosed with ARVC: his heart is turning to fat. Plans emerge to implant an ICD (defibrillator), however an MRI discovers water near his heart and the surgery is postponed and
Essays, Not Rants! 381: Cinnamon Tography We live in a time that I’ve seen described as Peak TV, where there are these major shows that edge into cultural phenomena. Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Black Mirror. Those shows that you’ve definitely watched or you certainly know people who have watched. There’s an almost cultish fanaticism to the whole thing; half the fun of following Game of Thrones was being up in the discussion around it, whether at work, at the bar, or in line at the grocery s
029: Go For The Heart Does anyone remember the movie Eragon? That horrible movie based on an alright book? It was a movie so poorly made and objectively bad we could ignore how lousy an adaption it was. But what about when it’s a lousy adaption too? M. Night Shyamalan cost himself his credibility when he put out The Last Airbender. Let’s ignore the lousy script, acting, and direction for a second. The movie was pretty. The tidal wave at the end going towards the ship was absolutely gorgeou
Essays, Not Rants! 142: Of Belchers I hadn’t seen an episode of I Love Lucy until last year when I had to binge-watch it for a Writing for TV class. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect and at the end my overall feeling is one of ‘meh.’ I mean, it’s notable for what it pioneered, but I guess it’s not so much up my alley. One of the things that I noticed about I Love Lucy, especially in comparison to The Honeymooners, a contemporary show I also had to watch, was how the conflict among the coupl
Essays, Not Rants! 033: And I Feel Fine I live in New York City. Also, last week New York City and much of the US’ East Coast was hit by a hurricane. Power went out, plumbing failed in the higher floors of NYU’s dorms (that is: mine), and classes were cancelled. Of course, I find this all terribly exciting: this sort of event is what pop-culture has been training me for for years! See, we love post-apocalyptic scenarios. What could be cooler than banding together with a group of friends an
