Essays, Not Rants! 283: Characters Like Poetry I talk about characters a lot on this blog. Okay, this blog’s been around long enough that you could say I talk about anything a lot. But that’s not the point. The point is characters. Like how in Crazy Rich Asians there aren’t really characters so much as vague ciphers used to progress a not-really-there plot, or how The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet and Mass Effect created such realized characters that you could easily imagine spending ti
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! 225: Catching ‘em All Like many people my age, I grew up playing Pokémon. And man, I caught ‘em all. Literally all of ‘em. At least in Yellow and Gold; I got close in Ruby and that’s where I stopped. So when Pokémon Go was first announced last year I thought it seemed really cool. Like worth upgrading my four-year-old phone for. In case you haven’t heard, here’s the skinny on Go: It’s Pokémon in real life. You go places, your phone tells you there’s a Pokémon there, you
Essays, Not Rants! 339: Captain Marvel Trailer It’s happening. It’s finally freaking happening. On Tuesday we finally got a
for Captain Marvel, a movie I’ve been looking forwards to quite incessantly since it was announced way back in 2014. And now, at long last, we’re getting a glimpse of the movie itself and what all it’s gonna be. Needless to say, I’m somehow even more excited. Trailers are tricky beasts. Sometimes they give away the entire darn plot. Sometimes they misdirect you
CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! CAPTAIN MARVEL MOVIE! I DO NOT HAVE A GIF FOR HOW EXCITED THIS MAKES ME
Essays, Not Rants! 363: Captain Marvel Captain Marvel’s my favorite superhero. Well, most of the time; every now and then Iron Man noses his back to first place. But that’s beside the point. Carol Danvers first showed up on my radar in 2013’s Infinity event where she was one of the Avengers fighting bad guys in space. It all culminates with, of course, the Avengers back on Earth fighting Thanos. Captain Marvel’s one of the hardest hitters, and it’s positively epic to see her, Thor, and Hulk
Practicing tossing a(n American) football around with Zarai a while ago I realized something, I can't throw one properly to save my life...
TMD stared down the rows of armed executionors. Here he was destined to be executed for reasons that he himself did not know. He had been told that his sole bid for freedom would be based on his failure. The minutes tick by. A sole bead of pespiration slips slowly down his neck. On the far side of the chamber a door slides open - slowly TMD notes. Out wal
Essays, Not Rants! 180: Can Art Be Fun? I’m still reading a bunch and my current book, Extra Lives, is essentially critical theory on video games as literature. This divide between what makes something ‘art’ is something I’m kinda big on, so it’s a fascinating read. There’s one thing that Tom Bissell says which struck me: that because video games must be, by nature, fun, they’re seen as being less artistic or literary than other mediums. Which, well, kinda has a point. When was the last time
What's that you say? You have $2.99 lying around an a device capable of running the Kindle app (that is, any pc, mac, smart phone, iPod touch)? Why not help two aspiring writers pay for college, food, and other such necessities? You, yes, you can help! And not only will you get the satisfaction of doing something good, but you'll get a collection of no less than SIX short stories! They're stores about being in airports, about that weird feeling of in between you get when traveling. Some du
Essays, Not Rants! 149: But What Is A Strong Female Protagonist? I write a lot about strong female characters here, heck, it was my first post. It’s still something I really care about, seeing how often it pops up in my blog posts here. I’ve got a small list of characters I bring up often: Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Chloe Frazer, Katniss Everdeen, Zoë Washburne, etc. Thing is, it’s easy to conflate the idea of a strong female characters with that of a woman who kicks butt. When we compare
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
Essays, Not Rants! 272: But What About The Men??? 2: Sexy Lamps Back at a con panel in 2013, Kelly Sue DeConnick (writer of Captain Marvel, etc) coined the Sexy Lamp Test. Its rubric is that if you can take a female character out of a story and replace her with a sexy lamp and your plot still works, then "you’re a [beeping] hack." Like all tests used to judge stories (ie: Bechdel), it’s not perfect – mostly because it’s a little too vague. But it still provides a good starting point to examine
Essays, Not Rants! 245: But What About The Men??? I write a lot about women in fiction on this blog, to the point where I’ve had friends term it a feminist blog. But if you’ve ever wondered “jeez, Josh, you keep talking about women this and feminism that, what about the men!?”, well, this rant essay is for you. One of the many things I like about (500) Days of Summer, is Tom. Not that he’s a particularly great guy or anything like that, but that with Tom we have a male protagonist who is all
Essays, Not Rants! 034: But Strong In Will An argument presented by a sorta-antagonist in Skyfall is that espionage and spying is a relic of the Cold War, of a time when thinking on one’s feet was the most valuable skill. Now, in the world of computers and the Internet where one can shut down an economy without leaving their bedroom, there is no use for agents on the field. In response, M gives a speech about the relevance of MI6, about how even though technology may march on there will always
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
Essays, Not Rants! 305: But For Adults Dennis Villeneuve is currently attached to the latest adaption of Dune. It's an exciting prospect: Dune is a rich novel and Villeneuve has shown himself to be both a skilled director and excellent at adaptations. Arrival was an excellent adaption of a terrific short story, one that managed to make the feeling of the ephemeral come as much to life on the screen as the page. Blade Runner 2049 somehow captured the moodiness of the original while injecting i
Warning: Grown Up Rant/Tirade/Ramble Approaching I've been keeping a budget via spreadsheet for the last couple years. A basic one where I've money set aside for various categories (food, transport, entertainment, misc, alcohol, bills), note down how much I get in paychecks and put in savings (then categorize what I'm saving up for). Now, I'm in the market for a good app to do it for me, because I can be lazy with this budget thing. And there are a lot of great budget apps out there, but the
Essays, Not Rants! 045: Broken Pieces I saw Silver Linings Playbook the other day and loved it (it is currently my favorite of this year’s Oscar nominations). For many reasons, really. Like the brilliantly intelligent script that doesn’t talk down to its audience, some great cinematography, stellar acting and so on. But what really got me was how the protagonists were just so broken. No, not their lives; they were broken. There’s a difference. Let’s take Uncharted. Nathan Drake is not a brok
Because once upon a time the kid visited a ship when it was berthed in Ireland. And that ship, though it was not my ship, was the successor to my ship. By the transitive property of ships, that makes him cool. Real cool. He's also a neat guy who does a good job of living life and not dying. Which, really, is harder than it sounds. Take it from me. And because he posts entries like this. *raises glass*
Essays, Not Rants! 061: Breaking Point Let’s talk about Into Darkness. It’s a sequel to a reboot and also has some shades of a remake. Those are all things that seldom bode well for a movie, but, Into Darkness pulls it off magnificently. It simply does everything right. The main thing I want to address is Into Darkness’ existence as a sequel. There’s no getting around that. Amusingly, the main criticism I see in reviews is just that: Into Darkness doesn’t feel as fresh or new as 2009’s Star Tr
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:
