Essays, Not Rants! 159: Sorry Nate, There’s No Princess In This Castle Let’s talk about damsels, because the idea of the damsel in distress goes way back and ‘cuz damseling female characters (especially in video games) kinda has to stop. So what is a damsel in distress? Anita Sarkeesian succinctly describes it as This has been a staple of video games since very early on. In Super Mario Bros, Mario quests to save Princess Peach. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but it becomes a problem when the
Essays, Not Rants! 212: Something Something Diversity Something Star Wars There’s a new Star Wars trailer out, this time for Rogue One! Now, when they announced it to be about a ragtag band of Rebels stealing the Death Star plans; that got me excited. I’m all about ragtag teams pulling off heists. But then they announced the cast. We’ve got Felicity Jones starring and, in addition to Forest Whitaker, people with last names like Luna, Yen, Wen, and Ahmed. If there’s one thing I like as much as
Essays, Not Rants! 327: Some Stuff From 2017 I Wanna Talk About I did this last year, mostly as an excuse to enthuse about things I really like. I’m gonna do it again, listing some things from last year that I really liked. They mayn’t be the best thing in their category, but they’re really cool and I wanna pay attention to it! The three things here are all terrific. Book: From A Certain Point of View, a collection Star Wars will forever be my first love. A short story collection by a host
Essays, Not Rants! 326: Social Experience This week, Pokémon Go finally added a friends system. You can now add people as friends and there are fun little bonuses for working together. You can also trade Pokémon back and forth, assuming you both are in close proximity. It’s a wonderful addition and I look forward to checking it out in depth. But it also raises a big question: Where was this when the game debuted two years ago? (Also: It’s been two years since Pokémon Go came out?) Think
So Monday and Tuesday night I took part in a study wherein I was put in an MRI and sometimes given mild shocks while watching a screen. For money. Woo science! I have no clue what they were studying and may have dozed off once or twice (staying up till 4 writing an essay on Ulysses will do that to ya), but hey! Science! And money! Not the first time I've done this. Well, the MRI is new (least for sciencing), but the shocks and studies aren't. Hey, gotta pay for them Legos somehow. And booze.
Essays, Not Rants! 270: So My Apartment Building Caught Fire My apartment building caught fire yesterday. Which is heckuva way to start a morning. I'm fine and, by virtue of being in the back on the sixth floor, my unit was somehow untouched. But it did mean I was outside on the New York sidewalk at 5:30 in the morning watching firemen fight a fire from the pizza place I live over under control. Then it started to rain. A cold, early morning rain. The sort that makes you wish you'd grabb
Essays, Not Rants! 310: Simple Pleasure I saw Game Night last night and it’s a delight of a movie. It takes a clever conceit (an immersive game night goes a step too far) and builds on it to great affect. There are some really clever turns that mix with a movie full of a surprising amount of heart and some great laughs. It’s a lot of fun and I really liked it. I mean, it’s not, y’know, an important movie by any stretch. Like it’s not one that’s gonna go down in the annals of comedy, probably
Essays, Not Rants! 190: Signs of the Times The Uncharted games are what got me really into gaming as an adult (well, them and Metal Gear Solid). With the release and my subsequent acquisition of the Nathan Drake Collection, I’ve spent the past couple days replaying Drake’s Fortune, the first game in the series, for the first time in a few years. And the game still holds up, because of course it does. Drake’s Fortune still looks great eight years after it came out (due in some part to the Rem
Essays, Not Rants! 361: Showing, Not Telling There’s this saying in writing that you should show, not tell; that is instead of telling the audience about how John is smart, write a scene where we get to see that John is smart. That way the audience can see how smart John is and think to themselves "Wow, John is smart." Idea is because the audience drew their own conclusion (rather than being told such) it’ll resonate more. A similar rule of thumb applies to video games, except instead of jus
Essays, Not Rants! 377: Shoes My favorite part of Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe might just be a tiny beat that happens part way through the movie. It’s hardly a big moment, just a bit of table setting that, for someone like me, holds all the more import. There’s a party, and a couple kids are chasing each other. They run up the steps to the house and, without pausing to think, slip off their shoes before entering. The camera follows them as they run through the house and to the back door wher
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! 064: Shakespearean Gateway Drug Like most everyone who’s taken an English class, I’ve had my share of Shakespeare. I’ve read a handful of his plays, know the plots to a few more, and think I mostly understand what’s kinda going on (but clearly still miss a lot of it). That said, I’ve also seen Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet, and enjoyed both, so hey: Shakespeare. Thanks to Branagh’s films, though, I’ve had this appreciation for those long monologues and weird words wit
Done with the Fall of my Junior year! Yes, this is late, but that's because I've been busy with people who are leaving for winter break (though why they'd wanna leave the city is beyond me). In any case, this means time to relax and work and make money. Celebratory fistbump with celebratory-purchase-Iron-Man-in-Space-Armor! (Celebratory mixing-alcohol-with-video-games comes after I clean my room)
If you've been reading Essays, Not Rants! you'll have realized that I was a huge fan of the movie Chef, in no small part to the food. I love cooking (and eating), so a movie about it was a pleasure. Having recently coming across the recipe for the Pasta That Seduced Scarlett Johansson, the girlfriend and I decided to make it for dinner. Dang. It was good.
Essays, Not Rants! 082: Science Fiction, Parables, and Gravity Originally published October 11th 2013 Yes, I’m still on my science fiction apologetics kick. As I’ve established over and over again, as a genre, science fiction can say a lot that normal fiction can’t, or say it in ways it can’t. Gravity is a fine example of this. Because like it or not, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece is science fiction. If Super 8 and Moon are science fiction, then so is Gravity. Super 8, like E.T. before it, is
Essays, Not Rants! 182: Same Story But Different Pacific Rim is predictable; you’re not gonna win any prizes for pointing that out. It’s not like The Last of Us or District 9, which subvert the expectations of the audience. When you watch Pacific Rim you know what’s gonna happen; Raleigh and Mako will team up, something will happen that lets them prove themselves, and there has to be some last minute complication. Yet it’s an absolutely fantastic movie, and one of my own favorites. No, it’s
Essays, Not Rants! 019: Sacrifice There’s this trope in fiction called the Heroic Sacrifice. The idea is that a character gives himself up so another can live or succeed. When done right it can be an incredibly powerful writing tool. Doesn’t have to be sacrificing your own life, though. At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman has just saved Commissioner Gordon’s son and the fallen Harvey Dent has tumbled to his death. There is blood on Dent’s hands; the man who came close to saving Gotham has
So I didn't really sketch out much for the adventure, opting more to go with however the players went. It meant the break was a little too easy. I was also a bit under-nourished as a GM, having only had cereal for breakfast before arriving and having a couple beers. Soooo... But yeah. Was fun. PC's spent more time at the cantina than I expected. Leesi pickpocketed everyone. Fran found the most emotionally vulnerable person there and charmed him into buying drinks and offering Imperial codes th
Laptop is out of comission due to being unable to find its own harddrive (did you know that that's a thing that can happen?), but I'm logging on to BZP on a school computer because this is important. Rogue One. It's like a check boxes of things I'm into: Star Wars Women who kick butt Diversity AT-ATs Star Wars Ragtag Teams doing Cool Stuff I'm psyched, dude.
So I saw The Dark Knight Rises at the midnight showing last night (er, this morning?). Went with some friends and though we weren't quite as elaborate as The Avengers, we just dressed to the nines like rich Gothamites. Though that would probably make me the guy that Batman forcibly extradited from Hong Kong in The Dark Knight...and then gets burnt alive on a pile of money... Ah well. How was it? Dude. Just dude. This is how you end a trilogy. Not really gonna say much else about it, haha
