Essays, Not Rants! 330: Tasty Words If you’ve ever played the Pokémon Trading Card Game or Magic: The Gathering or really any trading card game, you’ll have read the little bit of text on the bottom. Not the copyright information, but rather the flavor text that tells you a little about what the card is and how it fits into the bigger world. Stuff about where that character might come from or what the geopolitical situation in the world’s like. These are usually really small blurbs, probably n
Essays, Not Rants! 350: Ten Movie Challenge Thing There's a lotta images in this one, so rather than working to embed them all here, just click over to the website to read this week's.
Essays, Not Rants! 382: Zero Two When I got my Game Boy Advance SP many years ago as a wee tween I was very excited about some of the games I could play. Obviously, there was Pokémon Ruby because, c’mon, you gotta catch ‘em all. Then there were the new slew of Mega Man games, like the Battle Network series, an RPG where you bounced between Lan in the real world and Mega Man in the digital, fighting viruses and the such in an adorably nascent look at cyberwarfare. More importantly, however, the
Essays, Not Rants! 150: The New Western The superhero genre – since it’s become a genre unto itself and not a subset of science-fiction or action – is really taking off, in case you haven’t noticed. Between Marvel Studios putting out two movies a year, DC’s big plans to do big things, and the companies Marvel sold characters to over the years trying to make good on their investments. It’s big. Some articles I’ve read online have likened the superhero genre to the western. It sounds a touch f
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
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
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Still wondering about the Kickstarter? This is the shots we've been getting. Now, keep in mind, this is all before color correction, vfx, or anything done in post. Heck, we've still three more days of shooting.
Essays, Not Rants! 072: Humanity, Hubris, and Canceling The Apocalypse Did you ever read The Day of the Triffids? It’s by John Wyndam and was probably the first piece of proper post-apocalyptic fiction I read ten years ago. It’s typical of the genre. We’ve got the world impairing event, the monsters that begin wiping out humanity, and of course the few survivors who band together to try and find a way to continue civilization. It’s a classic. Now, like I’ve said before, science fiction provi
Essays, Not Rants! 277: Haven’t We Heard This Before? Spider-Man’s a superhero whose central theme is conveniently spelled out for us: with great power comes great responsibility. And it’s a great one too. A nobody gets given amazing powers and has to learn what to do with them. It's a pretty essential part of most incarnations of Spider-Man, be it Miles Morales or even more recently when it's Gwen Stacy that gets bitten by the radioactive spider and becomes Spider-Woman. It's always that bala
Essays, Not Rants! 308: Wakanda Forever So. Black Panther. Right now, I want nothing more than to geek the crud out about this movie. It’s, wow. Ryan Coogler’s quickly become one of my favorite directors (courtesy of Creed and Fruitvale Station), and this movie is the icing on the cake. There’s so much to love about it. The plot moves along at a clip pace, so much so that I found myself wanting more when it ended. Its supporting cast is as interesting as its leads, with everyone getting th
Essays, Not Rants! 312: Of Men Mega and Mighty Mega Man was the video game I cut my teeth on. Well, more accurately, Mega Man X4. It was a tough game that I worked my way through as a kid. Didn’t beat it until at least three years after I got it, but still picked up Mega Man X5 and Mega Man X6 (and Mega Man 8) in the meantime to fight the new bosses, master the new levels, and get my butt kicked time and time again. I got better, beat them, got into the harder Mega Man Z games (look, the namin
Essays, Not Rants! 109: For Want of a Glass of Water Kurt Vonnegut once said, “every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” This piece of advice functions as a very simple and straightforward way to ensure a character has some semblance of depth. What's important about a goal? A goal gives a character purpose and gives an audience a reason to invest. In Star Wars, Luke wants to leave Tatooine. In How I Met Your Mother, Ted wanted to meet the mother (or at leas
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! 237: The Give And Take of Books When I was 13 I visited a slave castle in Takoradi, Ghana. Which is a weird sentence to type, but kinda standard given the whole grew-up-on-a-ship-thing. It was sobering, seeing something you’d read about in history in person. But at the same time, for me, something firmly in the past. What had happened there was firmly in the was. Now, I recently finished Yaa Gyasi’s exceptional Homegoing. Early on, a slave castle on Africa’s coast plays a
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! 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! 290: The Illusion of Choice When not raiding Soviet bases to 80s hits in Metal Gear Solid V, I've been playing Until Dawn with my roommate. Now, I don't really do horror, like, at all. But Until Dawn features a supposedly robust choices and consequences system, which I am, of course, a sucker for. We’ve finished the game and there's been a good deal of payoff to some of the choices we've made. The big thing we're looking forward to, though, is playing it again and making
Essays, Not Rants! 316: Star Wars As An Anti-Capitalist Discourse Oh you thought I was kidding? Here we go. Star Wars takes a lot of cues from Westerns. Characters like Han Solo and places like Mos Eisley’s cantina make it pretty obvious. But it’s also apparent in where it takes place: the fringes of society. Be they remote planets desert or frozen, these stories take place away from economic and cultural hubs. Which, given that we follow the good guys, makes sense: implicit in the Star Wars
Essays, Not Rants! 162: How Do You Make An Avengers? Avengers: Age of Ultron comes out here in the States in a few days, which makes me realize that we now live in a time where time can be measured in Avengers movies. Which makes me think about three years ago when I was eagerly waiting for the first one to come out. It’s important to look at just how sharply The Avengers affected the current blockbuster landscape. The idea of a bunch of characters from separate films coming together in one
