Essays, Not Rants! 126: Antisocial Gaming My brother recently got Titanfall which means that I got to go a few rounds at it. That game is fun. It’s also unique in that there’s no traditional single player mode; the only way to play is competitive online multiplayer. It makes sense. There are plenty of games out there where the single player campaign is often passed over in favor of the far more popular multiplayer. But here’s the thing aboutTitanfall: only one person can play per console. If y
Essays, Not Rants! 171: Another Life I’m me. That’s pretty obvious. I’m a biracial guy in my mid-twenties who lives in New York. I’ve had my own relatively interesting life, but at the end of the day it’s mine. Barring some crazy The Matrix or Total Recall-esque invention, I’m only ever going to live my life. It’s the only experience I’ll get. Well, outside of certain kinds of fiction. Fiction offers a window into someone else’s life. The thing is, it’s hard to really make someone experience
Essays, Not Rants! 158: Another Boyband Saving The World So Final Fantasy XV is finally coming out ‘soon,’ with the demo dropping recently. The game’s been on my radar since the debut trailer for Final Fantasy Versus XIII (as it was called then) was released almost nine years ago and as a fan of the Final Fantasy series — mostly because I plain love a good JRPG (there’s something fun about Japanese melodrama and saving the world) — I’m quite eager to see how this game works and if it’s any goo
Two years ago yesterday I was told I had a very potentially fatal heat condition. Several doctors later and here I am. I’ve got a bar in my chest and my heart seems to be fine. Yes, like Iron Man. So here's to two years of amazing grace. Your move, heart disease.
Essays, Not Rants! 274: Andromeda After The Fact I finally finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda and dutifully started my second (this time as Sara instead of Scott). Ramping up the difficulty to Insanity makes combat much more frantic (and thereby makes the brilliant combat systems that much more fun), but we’ll see how far I get through it before I decide to finally replay Uncharted 4 because a) it’s a better game, 2) I haven’t replayed it, and iii) my god I want to play a
Essays, Not Rants! 184: Now For Something Old I’m busy this weekend. I’m writing a rationale, essentially a jumbo-sized one of these blog posts about everything I’ve been studying since coming to college to prove that my studies have had a point (which is, currently, Narrative (Re)Construction). As I’m focusing an inane amount of brain power into writing this paper, I don’t have time for a proper post this week. So let’s go back to before Essays, Not Rants! and find something old. The year
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
Essays, Not Rants! 244: An Asian-American Superhero I wasn't sure how I felt about Silk when she first showed up in the Spider-Man comics, but it was when she got her own series – and a narrative no longer intrinsically tied to Peter Parker – that she really came into her own. But on the on the one hand, yeah, another webslinging spider-themed hero? We've already got a lot with Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and Miguel O'Hara in books of their own; do we need one more? The thing i
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! 253: AMERICA! If you follow this blog you’ve probably realized that my mostest favoritest trope is the rag-tag multicultural team. It’s why I’ll always hold Disney’s Atlantis in high esteem, it’s why I have such a huge soft spot for the Magnificent Seven remake and Rogue One. Pacific Rim, Halo: Reach, X-COM, you give me a multicultural/national team, you make me happy Really happy. So you can understand my hesitance when the follow-up to Al Ewing’s very enjoyable New Ave
Essays, Not Rants! 239: Am I Making Sense? Sometimes I wonder about the accessibility of this blog. Not literally, I mean “Essay Snot Rants dot net” is really easy to remember. I’m talking about the content here. Sure, I talk about movies a lot. And a lot of the times those movies are blockbusters. You’ve got your discussions on why Rey is the best in The Force Awakens, your discussions on how Age of Ultron portrayed masculinity, and the close reading of an epic monologue from Pacific Rim. P
Essays, Not Rants! 354: Ahistoricism I went into The Favourite like I do with many movies: knowing very little and having seen maybe a part of a trailer. I knew it was a period piece (duh) and there was a Queen in it (also: duh). Anyway, after watching the movie I read up on it on Wikipedia and found, to my immense surprise, that it was somewhat based on actual historical fact. It makes sense enough that I thought this movie was fabricated wholesale: there’s a Queen in power, nobles are vying
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! 380: Aegean Aexploration Somehow, I’ve managed to clock in upwards of ninety hours in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey since I started playing it a couple months ago. I’m nowhere near done with the story; heck, I’m not even too sure I’m that far into it. This isn’t so much a case of my having lost the thread as it is a merry exploration of Ancient Greece and all the fun it entails. The lengthy playtime is especially impressive when one takes into account the fact that I’d just ab
Essays, Not Rants! 365: Adaptational Change There’s a delightful twist late in Captain Marvel that adds a nice layer of added depth to the narrative. It’s one that I didn’t see coming, but a friend who’s less familiar with the comics thought it was well telegraphed. The reason I didn’t expect it is arguably because of how used I am to the way things are in the Marvel comics. Turning things on its head is a concept so wild as to be unthinkable, and it’s something that the movie can uniquely do
Essays, Not Rants! 325: Adaptation By Someone Else One game that got some press at last week’s E3, the game industry’s annual event where games are announced and/or demo’d, was the upcoming Total War: Three Kingdoms. Apparently it was announced back in January, but I hadn’t heard of it until now. And I am intrigued. The Total War series are strategy games that unlike, say, StarCraft or Red Alert, tend to focus on real wars, be they Roman, Napoleonic, or set in Feudal Japan. They’ve been on
Essays, Not Rants! 106: About That Noah Movie So. Noah. That new Darren Aronofsky movie. Let’s talk about it. It’s an adaption, obviously. And it hits all the main beats of the biblical narrative. Noah’s told to build an ark, he builds an ark, animals, dove with the olive branch, landfall, the wine incident we don’t talk about at church, and the rainbow. That’s all there. What Aronofsky and crew do is build on that, and for good reason. The account in the Bible is short and not terribly ci
Essays, Not Rants! 015: Abed, I Know What We're Gonna Do Today! My favorite show this past season aired on Thursdays at 8pm on NBC. This was, of course, Community. It also happens to be one of my favorite shows of all time (up there with Firefly, Lost, and Chuck). It’s smart, excellently written, and consistently hilarious. I’m not sure when my favorite cartoon airs. I know it’s on Disney Channel, but I just watch it on Netflix. Phineas and Ferb, my favorite cartoon, is smart, excellently writ
By virtue of being in NYU Gallatin, I read a lot in college, sometimes getting through a book every two weeks. Post-graduation I realized that that that was a habit I wanted to keep up. So I’ve made an effort to read more over the past year, and to read different things by different people (with the fun book mixed in there). With that, here’s the list of the books I’ve read over the past year: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri Ready Player One by Ernest Cline The Windup Girl by Paolo B
