Essays, Not Rants! 346: Poking Around Games have rules and expectations. If you’re playing a first-person shooter, violence is the expected solution to most problems. A puzzle encountered in an RPG is going to have a solution, though it may be one you need to progress a little further in another direction to be able to solve. The rule of thumb in point-and-click adventures is that everything you can click on and inspect is gonna hold something of interest. Say you’re playing Monkey Island a
Essays, Not Rants! 163: Masculinity in Age of Ultron I saw Age of Ultron Thursday night and I have thoughts. There’s the obvious nerd-out factor of the film, and it’s really cool and does a lot of things right (and, arguably, does indeed go smaller than the first Avengers), but those are essays rants for another day. So let’s talk about how the movie portrays the idea of masculinity. Because it’s actually really interesting. Age of Ultron, like The Avengers before it and probably every Mar
Essays, Not Rants! 346: A Normal Teenager Name Lara Jean To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before really feels like a classic 80s teen romcom, except it was made much more recently. It’s delightfully sweet, and has that uncynical honesty that readily calls back to fare like Sixteen Candles or Can’t Buy Me Love. Honestly, this movie is almost an anachronism, but a delightfully refreshing one at that. Now here’s the thing, unlike all those 80s teen romcoms, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’s protago
Yesterday I posted the third chapter in my ongoing comedy Good Makuta, Bad Toa. Which is me revisiting a comedy I'd written way back in 2004, when BZP was new and I was... much younger. And I'm doing it for fun, and am having a lotta fun with it. And I'm also learning how to write again. See, over the years writing's gotten harder, even as I'm getting better at it and trying to get paid for it. Secret is, writers actually hate writing. And this is me forcing myself to write, and to write som
Essays, Not Rants 021: Shawarma So the other day I was looking for lunch and ended up ordering shawarma at a falafel joint. As such there is a picture of me taking a Thor-sized bite out of it on Twitter. To those curious, it tastes more like a doner kebab than a gyro, just different toppings and stuff. And more Middle-Easty. But why shawarma? I was hungry, but why'd I pick some middle-eastern delicacy over barbecue, burgers or brisket? It wasn't cheaper and I wasn't even sure if I liked it (
Essays, Not Rants! 347: Mary Jane Watson One thing I love so much about Spider-Man is how so much of the narrative can be stripped down to its archetypes. Peter Parker is an unlucky kid who’s suddenly had this great power thrust upon him. Otto Octavius is a genius scientist doomed for tragedy. And Mary Jane Watson is the girl next door. A lot of the fun of the various incarnations of Spidey, be it different adaptations or reimaginings across the multiverse (see: Spider-Punk or Spider-Ham), i
Essays, Not Rants! 232: Visible Diversity So I recently started Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Finally, I should say; you’d think with a Marc Webb directed pilot I’d have watched it sooner. Anyway, once you get past the somewhat off-putting title (which, as the theme song says, is a sexist term and the situation is a lot more nuanced than that), Crazy Ex is a lotta fun. It’s a musical equal parts cynical and idealistic set in a relatively mundane setting where no matter how outlandish it gets, the chara
Essays, Not Rants! 313: Lost The Heart Sometimes it’s hard to explain why something good is so good; why does this one movie work. Other times, you have an example of the same thing executed less well and you’re all “ah, that’s why that one was so good.” So let’s talk Pacific Rim Uprising, and by extension, the original too. Ostensibly, both Pacific Rim and its sequel are about giant robots fighting giant monsters. What made the first one great, though, was that it was about so much more, ab
It's been eleven years since I joined BZP. Woah. That's over a decade. I was in Peru, the day after Christmas — or was it late Christmas night? — looking for stuff on 2004 sets when I decided to go back to BZP and register. Actually, I registered Christmas night but decided I wanted a more contemporary username so, um, I registered again (this time not capitalizing what came after the Ta-, oops) on the 26th and now here I am. Did a lot those first couple years. Made Metru-Nui Adventures
Essays, Not Rants! 348: The Mythics of Mega Man I cut my teeth on the Mega Man series of video games. Legendary for their difficulty, mastery of the games comes from getting a handle on their mechanics and memorizing stage layouts and the patterns of boss fights. They’re tough, and oh I love them so. Getting through each stage is such a magnificent moment of catharsis; and the good entries in the series are so well designed that victory isn’t because of a lucky break but from actually skill.
Essays, Not Rants! 207: Living in Science Fiction Is the movie Gravity science fiction? This was the discussion a friend of mine and I were having while talking about science fiction and fantasy winning Oscars — Gravity got Best Director, but is it really science fiction? Wikipedia, IMDb, and such call it science fiction, given that it’s, well, in space. That’s usually the threshold for science fiction. But something in space is hardly imaginative anymore. An astronaut who just returned fr
Essays, Not Rants! 196: An Actual New Hope One of my earliest memories involves, unsurprisingly, Star Wars. I, and another kid, were talking about Empire and how Luke loses his hand and gets a robot one. I’m sure in there was talk of Darth Vader being Luke’s father and all that. Now, I couldn’t have been that old; based on where we were I doubt I was more than four. Which shows just how inborn my Star Wars nerd is, but also, wait, I was four and talking about Empire? The darkest of the origina
Essays, Not Rants! 349: Playing Together Easily the highlight of my time playing Destiny was Vault of Glass. It’s a raid, that is a really difficult mission that requires serious teamwork and a pretty major time investment. It took work to even find a group to play with: I play on the PS4 and didn’t know anyone else who played Destiny. So I had to the internet to find a group who wanted to run Vault of Glass and were okay with bringing someone along who hadn’t done it before (me). It took us
Essays, Not Rants! 151: Keeping Pace I rant write a lot about genres and mediums. Discussing what’s considered art, or why science fiction is important. As I’ve said, a lot stories get dismissed simply because they take place in space or in the pages of a comic book. Which is a bummer. Especially considering the novel used to be held up as a lesser form. See, poetry used to be seen as being superior to the novel. Allen Tate, critic and generally important writer, thought that it was until
So, as part of being at Gallatin, I've gotta put together a big list of books for my Senior year. Basically, these say what I've studied and all. I also have to write a 8ish page paper on what I've been doing my college career so I can have a two hour talk with three faculty members about it. Anyway, I finished the paper (my rationale) and finalized my booklist. This is that booklist in all its glory:
Essays, Not Rants! 191: Why Easy A Is An Excellent Example of Storytelling I saw Easy A when it first came out a few years ago. Wanted to because Emma Stone (of Zombieland fame), Will Gluck (who did Fired Up!), and The Scarlet Letter (which I, being a dutiful student in 11th grade English, read). I liked it a bunch and so when it was on sale recently I picked it up. And I finally re-watched it. And I think I like it even more. Because Easy-A is an excellent piece of storytelling. There’s a
Essays, Not Rants! 314: A Celebration I’m a nerd. That kinda really goes without saying. Spend five minutes on my blog and you’ll see me talking about Firefly, giant robots, The Lord of The Rings, comic books, Jacques the Fatalist, and looking at video games through a surprisingly feminist lens. I really enjoy this stuff. And over the years nerd culture has gotten more mainstream. Superhero shirts are in these days and Star Wars is cool again. It’s pretty neat to these things that used be ki
Essays, Not Rants! 058: With Regards To Motivation I have a research paper I should be writing. I also have a stack of books near me ranging from On Free Choice and The Will by Saint Augustine, Iron Man and Philosophy, Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Finding Serenity, The Existential Joss Whedon, my own annotated copy of Life of Pi, The Philosophy of Joss Whedon, and a few others too. These are what people in academia call ‘sources’. I think I know what I’ll be writing about, but I’
Essays, Not Rants 145: 2014 in Review 2014 is a few days from being over. So once again it’s time to go through my rants essays from this year and pick out the special ones. All statistics are based on essaysnotrants.net, since, y'know, I don't wanna count through the views on BZP. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Relationship Advice from Scott Pilgrim The thing about Edgar Wright movies is that they work on so many levels. I was… off put the first time I watched Scott Pilgrim vs The Wor
Essays, Not Rants! 351: Spiders Comics are weird. Especially superhero comics. There are people who come back to death, people with weird powers, people who lose those weird powers but then get them back when they come back to life. Also, y’know, aliens and monsters and crazy science ######. Like I said, weird. There are also multiple universes, and so multiple versions of characters. There’s a version of Captain America where she’s the biracial daughter of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and
Essays, Not Rants! 049: Quality and the Oscars So it’s Oscar time. Which means award times. And, well, I’m mildly disappointed with some of the nominations. I find that movies, video games, and so on can’t be judged subjectively or comparatively. Least not on a flat scale of quality+writing+cinematography+explosions. Here’s how I judge stuff: did it accomplish what it set out to do, and did it do it well? It’s an odd scale, yeah, but it’s one that works. Like Lincoln, the movie that snatched
