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Media Consumption 10/17/2015

October 17, 2015 by Belghast

Television Lite Week

This week has been one that has seen me absolutely consumed with Destiny on the PlayStation 4, and as such I have simply not spent much time watching television. I have however watched quite an excessive amount of YouTube videos, namely as I try to find information about Destiny. There is this shift that is happening where certain games with certain audiences… simply do not have information blog posts about them. I’ve gotten spoiled in a world with Dulfy.net and WoWHead.com in that I expect pretty much every game I have to have this quality of resources. Instead for many games lately all I am ever able to find is YouTube videos on a given subject. I am sorry to all the YouTubers out there… but I am of a generation where I feel like a video is the least useful way to disseminate information. I will take a written explanation and some good screenshots any day over a lengthy video walk through. At some point in the near future I hope to take some of these things that I found frustrating and attempt to write some blog posts outlining how to do this thing or that thing in Destiny. Granted that is not to say there are not a lot of really good Destiny YouTube channels… but I would still rather have an informational post.

Destiny Lore

The first time around when the AggroChat crew played Destiny… we joked that it was a game almost entirely devoid of story. That apparently is not the case… they just go to strange lengths to hide it from you. The story of the game is told through a series of grimoire cards, item descriptions, quest text, and hinted at in cinematic scenes. In fact there is actually apparently a TON of information about the characters in the game, their background, how they arrived at the tower… and all sorts of legends from the golden age, the city age, and the now tower age. In my search for information about Destiny I happened to stumble across a really awesome YouTube channel called Myelin Game… which is not to be confused with long time friend Mylin1. The channel is chock full of videos where Myelin digs into the lore of Destiny and connects the dots, weaving all of the known information… and speculated information into a narrative around a certain subject. I linked the Black Garden video since the game does a pretty poor job to explain what the hell it actually is… but I also highly suggest the trilogy of videos talking about thorn, last word, and first curse. I have always guessed there was this rich story somewhere behind Destiny… because the dots connected too neatly at times not to be well planned, but now that I am starting to learn some of the actual story I am loving it. I still feel it is a strange choice to make players dig for this knowledge, rather than letting you experience chunks of it through the story. The Fallen King expansion does a much better job of being more forthcoming with information… and it gives characters that previously did not have much of a personality… plenty of chance to show it off. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these lore videos while doing other things and I highly recommend them.

Star Wars Minute

Another thing that I stumbled across this week is Star Wars Minute, which is a great YouTube channel that takes segments of the Star Wars universe and condenses them into roughly one minute long narrative explanations. Much like the Destiny Lore, this feels as much podcast as it does YouTube video because the narrative explanation is the important part… and the images going along with it are nice to have but not 100% necessary. I ended up finding this as I started doing some googling related to the Star Wars universe, namely for the upcoming pen and paper game that should have its first session tomorrow. The funny thing about this is how much of the universe I already had a full grasp on but have no clue why. I guess even though I have been a sleeper Star Wars fanboy since the prequels… I was still subconsciously hungry for knowledge about this favorite of universes. Star Wars Minute is great to play in the background as you do something else and they release three new episodes a week, so there is a silly amount of content available already.

Arrow Season 3

Be warned I am going to go into some serious spoilers here, so if you have not watched Arrow Season 3 or if you intend to at a later date… you might want to skip this section. Here is the point at which I get really frustrated with this show. Generally speaking I am all for a television show deviating from the source material to make the universe work better for the TV audience. For example most of the Batman movies have worked really well… and they are essentially a condensed soup version of the batman universe… gathering up all the good bits and trying to weave a story out of them. You have a very limited amount of time on television, and what might work fine to slowly build over the course of several years of a comic run… needs to happen in an under two hour long movie. Television shows have a bit more leverage when it comes to pacing something out, and this is also cool. The thing that apparently pisses me off though… is when you take actions attributed to one character and apply them to a completely different character.

What I mean is that this story line that has played out throughout the season around R’as al Ghul didn’t happen to Green Arrow… ever. Essentially this is a Batman storyline, and all of the events that are playing out happened at one time or another to Batman. This caused me to think about Arrow the television show in a different light and realize that essentially… they have been turning Arrow into Batman this entire time. Maybe it is because Batman has been tagged as a “film” universe and is not available to be done in a Television version that they feel the need to create someone that is Batman-like. Green Arrow was admittedly a comic that I did not really follow. I mean I knew that him calling his sister Speedy when that was the character that would ultimately become Arsenal was wrong… and I knew a few other points seemed less than correct. However I lived in this world of relatively little knowledge about the show so I was able to pretty much ignore any differences… until they started stepping foot into the Batman universe. THAT is a universe I know considerably more about, and after a whole lot of research and the council of Thalen… I pretty much determined that nope… Green Arrow has never really interacted much with R’as al Ghul at all. So I am sitting here two episodes away from the end of the season… questioning if I care to finish watching it.

Walking Dead Season 6 Premiere

Thank god Walking Dead is back. “Fear The” was such a pale imitation of Walking Dead, and I am exceptionally happy that they chose to back up the start of Season Six to the end of the first season of Fear. I do have to say though that it makes me extremely happy that Talking Dead has been pulled in officially for Fear as well, because for me at least that has become so much of that experience. This is one hell of a first episode, and I really liked the way they handled Flashbacks in this episode by making them Black and White. That is always the challenge with a show, how to visually tell the watcher that the events they are seeing are not happening in real time but instead an imagined replay. When you are dealing with older characters and younger characters, it works naturally… but when you are dealing with only a few hours or days passing… it becomes much more challenging. So the choice of black and white gave a nice clear demarcation point between the two time-frames. As to the rest of the episode… Rae sent me a text as the show as going on that simply said “Nosh Pit”.

The premise of the show has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg style plot devices I have seen in awhile. To figure out a way to draw the walkers out of the pit and along a fixed path to get them away from Alexandria. The parallels to herding cattle… was extremely strong in this episode. They even managed to draw them down a chute just like you do cattle for a period of time… and then cleared out the farm supply store just to make sure nothing would spook them and draw their attention away… kinda like you do cattle. The slightest noise can distract cattle and get them to move in a different direction, and that apparently is the case with walkers. The thing is… going into this episode… you knew something was going to go wrong. There were scenes in the Season 6 preview show of Walkers in Alexandria or at least the hint of that happening. This show is really good about misleading us, for example the above poster would seem like we are heading towards some central conflict between Morgan and Rick… and in truth… it seems like Morgan instead manages to back Rick down from the ledge a bit.

As far as the walkers… when they are nearing the clear zone… someone sets off a horn in Alexandria, causing the mega horde to turn that direction. So the question is… who did it. At work the popular theory for awhile has been that Enid is a spy from the Wolves, and that the scenes of her in the car with the walker outside… hint that she set off the horn. My personal theory is it is Father Gabriel once again trying to destroy everything around him. He wanted to go out on the mission to herd the walkers, but Rick shut him down immediately. My theory is he is vindictive, and after being shut down by Andrea as well… he is still on some mission to destroy this community and in the process allow himself to be kill in some sort of twisted act of contrition for letting his parishioners die. In truth it could be the wolves themselves, who have been watching everything happening and see this as their opportunity to let the zombies batter down the defense of Alexandria and allow them to come in after they are done… and loot the resources. If nothing else this episode explained why Alexandria had been left fairly unscathed… because the giant pit of zombies had been drawing in more zombies and keeping them away from the town. It is going to be interesting to see how the next few episodes play out, and who we lose in the process.

Media Consumption 9/19/2015

September 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Thing

One of the things I have found myself doing a lot lately is hanging out downstairs on my laptop and watching a fairly steady feed of television and movies. Now some of this I am consuming from the On Demand service from cable and others from Netflix or Hulu. Over the last few years there is a ton of television content that I have wished I had seen, but never actually got around to seeing. With fall coming on, I tend to spend a lot more time snuggled on the couch, and as such I think I am going to start another weekly feature similar to my Sunday “what I have been playing” column to watch about the media content I have been consuming. One of the big things that has changed over the years is I tend to watch an entire television series over the course of a couple days, instead of letting it drag out over the course of a season. In fact I prefer this method of consumption so much that I will let an entire season of a show record on my DVR before starting in on watching it. I blame Netflix squarely for this tendency and right now quite literally the only shows I watch as they are airing are the Walking Dead series simply because most of my development group is hooked on the show and we discuss it Monday mornings. Hopefully folks will dig me going back and talking about what I have been up to.

iZombie

I started this show on my own a few days ago, but quickly realized that this would actually be something that my wife would enjoy. As a result last night we started in and managed to get about three episodes into the series. Essentially you take the smart and quirky writing of Veronica Mars, mix in a dash or True Calling and Crossing Jordan, and add a dash of Being Human and maybe a sprinkle of a show like Drop Dead Diva… and you end up with the weird mix that is iZombie. The premise is simple… she was a promising surgical resident until she went to a party on a boat… where a designer drug turned people into zombies. She got scratched and wound up as a member of the unliving… completely uprooting her promising career, her engagement and most of the relationships in her life. Instead she now works in the Morgue where she has a ready supply of brains, and a series of misadventures that spring around her ability to see flashes of memory from the brains she consumed. Flat out if you loved Veronia Mars as much as I did… you will love this show. It is more of the same sort of intelligent writing and snarky commentary mixed with crime solving… just of a different sort. I look forward to picking up and continuing watching this show over the weekend.

Black Mirror

This one is available on Netflix, and is a British show which means… short seasons. There are two seasons available currently, which only actually mean six total shows to watch. I tweeted that this show was weird, but there is something infectious about it. I like to think of it as Tales from the Crypt for Futurism and Technology. Essentially they take ideas that folks have always thought might be cool… and take them to really dark extremes. One of the episodes featured a device that you stuck behind your ear, that recorded every single moment in your life allowing you to review them later. But what happens when no one ever forgets anything… and can scrutinize every moment and everything you have ever said in full high definition color? The show makes up a series of disturbing what if’s that bring cautionary tales about our own lust for technology and innovation. I managed to make it through four episodes of the series before finally falling asleep the other night, so at some point I will pick up and finish it. The six episodes make it a quick watch and if you are into dark futurism…. it might be down your alley.

Chappie

This movie combines a bunch of weak spots for me… Artificial Intelligence, Die Antwoord, and Neill Blomkamp. I loved the movie District 9, so when I saw the trailer for Chappie I thought I would probably like it as well. The problem is it just took me a really long time to get around to watching it. The movie is really odd at times… because for most of it, it really just feels like a really long Die Antwoord video. Pretty much every piece of music found in the video is theirs, and it features all of the same odd visuals that you find in their videos. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it just makes the movie feel less “movie-like”. I am imagining there will be a Chappie 2, because they left a lot of things unresolved at the end of the movie. As far as Chappie itself… the robot was kinda adorable… and he is voiced by the same actor that played Wikus from District 9. The robot is vulnerable and childlike and extremely impressionable… but at the same time very loyal to its humans. The movie as a whole asks a bunch of trans-humanist questions about what exactly consciousness and sentience is. It will be interesting to see where this goes if there is a sequel.

Star Wars Prequels

Something that I did last weekend and over the course of this week was watch the Star Wars movies. I’ve talked a bit about how Phantom Menace was a massive let down for me… and how I have been afraid to get excited about Force Awakens because of it. In spite of all of my better judgement however… I am infected with full on hype mode when it comes to Force Awakens and Star Wars in general. I grew up loving this series… and in spite of the prequels I am once again in love with anything and everything Star Wars. As a result I thought to myself… maybe I was too hard on the Prequels, so in my rewatch of the movies attempted to go into them with an open mind. The end result is that I don’t necessarily “hate” them, but objectively they are really bad movies. The pacing feels off, and the characters feel forced to act out awkward dialog at every single turn. There is something however that bugs me even more about them. There are times in movies and television shows when the viewers know more about the movie than the characters on screen… and this can be interesting.

The problem with Phantom Menace is that it somehow pretends that we don’t know that Senator/Chancellor Palpatine is Darth Sidious. Like when we finally find out that he is the Dark Lord of the Sith… the movies act like we should be shocked. Additionally making these movies about Anakin Skywalker just feels wrong. We know from the moment this series starts that he is ultimately going to end up in a fight with Obi Wan and be damaged to the point of needing to go into the suit to survive and become the Darth Vadar we all know. The prequels should have focused on Obi Wan, and told his story… with his failure to steer Anakin away from the Dark Side as being a part of that story. Obi Wan is the interesting character here, not the whiny bullshit of Darth Teen Angst. There are awesome moments scattered among the three films, but I feel like you could make one really awesome movie if you just edited out the bad bits. In fact there is a fan edit that does just this and trims the movie into a 2 hour long epic. The only part of the first film that is shown is the “Duel of the Fates” sequence. I think this would be a much better way to jump start the awesome movies that follow… and really the original movies are awesome. I found myself thinking just how great they were as I watched “A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back”. I can still however take or leave “Return of the Jedi”, because I feel like it starts some of the bullshit that George Lucas tried to continue throughout the Prequels.

Fear the Walking Dead

Finally I wanted to talk a bit about Fear the Walking Dead, which this Sunday will show its fourth episode. Last week the shit finally started hitting the fan, as the Zombie infection began to finally get noticed. My wife happened to catch the first two episodes before watching the new episode last week because she happened to be downstairs grading. She made the same sort of comments that I had been making internally about how stupid the characters were acting. At one point she made the comment “Have none of these people ever seen Scream?” as another character put themselves in a really dumb position. Over the first two episodes the series played on the fact that we know how the Walking Dead unvierse works, and placed the characters in compromising positions…. only to have the Zombie NOT jump out of the shadows to get them. That however I think is changing, and this week I expect things to start to get really crazy. I love the way the series is playing on the modern riots as the way the public at large is dealing with the zombie epidemic. When the police put down a zombie, it is seen as police brutality and a huge riot breaks out downtown. The show keeps giving us little clues that things are heating up… like the first few zombies took awhile to turn, but now the virus is mutating and speeding up. In one sequence there is a cop being munched on by a zombie… and then a few scenes later that same police officer is munching on a protester. The only thing that really frustrates me is the fact that at no point do people seem to recognize what is happening. I mean are zombie films not a thing in this universe?

Hibernation Season

September 8, 2015 by Belghast

Hiding Out

Every now and then I go through these periods where I run away from the groups and games that require me to interact with other people and for lack of a better term “hide out”. They are usually paired with a period of high stress in my life, and I guess the current work stress mixed with the life stress of a bunch of big things looming on the horizon… could count as that. I also just went to the doctor and found out that I am dangerously low on Vitamin D. Generally speaking a healthy range is between 30 and 70 and on the test I came back with a score of like 10. Vitamin D effects all sorts of things… not the least of which is mental health and mood, so I would not be surprised if all of the bouts of depression were related to that chemical deficiency in particular. I am taking some insane 50,000 unit Vitamin D supplements once a week to help balance me out again, but I am still in the thrall of that desire to hide away from the rest of the world.

I think in part this is why I have not really been around in Final Fantasy XIV much because I have helped to build this wonderful and interactive world… that likes me being around. So when I am around I feel obligated to interact and be friendly…. and right now that is just too much of a drain on me. Similarly I have an issue with Wildstar because the Black Dagger Society is so damned friendly that I feel like an asshole if I am not also friendly back. As a result I end up playing a lot of Diablo III because I can get lost in a private game without the feeling of needing to reciprocate too many social graces. This is definitely a me thing and not due to any of the amazing people in my life. I am broken, and every now and then I just need to retreat inside myself until I am “less broken”. What I do when I am like this is hang out downstairs and binge television shows. I don’t really watch TV on a regular basis apart from Walking Dead/Fear the Walking Dead which becomes Monday morning water cooler discussion at work. I am what is wrong with broadcast television… I either record a show or watch it from a combination of hulu/netflix/amazon prime. The concept of watching a television show as it airs just seems so damned strange to me now. The problem being… I am the reason why good shows get seen as failures… because they are designed for people like me… not the nightly television viewing public.

The Strain

Awhile back one of my coworkers told me about the show The Strain. The problem with not watching television is that you also don’t really find out when a show is on the air. I love movies and television shows about things that go bump in the night, and as such I have a deep respect for the director Guillermo Del Torro. This show is apparently an adaptation of a graphic novel by the same title from 2009. There is really no disguising the fact that this is a vampire show… but not one in the Ventrue/Toreador tradition that we have seen Hollywood obsessed with lately. These are the Malkavians and Nosferatu that hide in the shadows. This show brings back a return to “vampires as monsters” instead of “vampires and glittery swoony boyfriend material”. The problem is I am not sure how much more of the plot that I want to give away other than that. Suffice to say you end up with a badass team of Vampire Hunters, lead by a grizzled old Van Helsing type that is played by none other than “Argus Filtch” aka David Bradley. The show has a very “zombie apocalypse” feel to it, but with smarter hunters stalking their prey rather than the mindless oppression of a world constantly looking for food. If you like the monster genre, I highly suggest you check it out. Even if you don’t normally like monster movies… it might be worth your time because the characters are really excellent and with their own interesting flaws. The first season is available on Hulu, and the show has been picked up for a second season.

Constantine

Constatine might be the “least NBC” television show I have ever watched. I am not really sure what the network executives were thinking when they greenlit this show…. but honestly it was not destined for broadcast television. The show developed a very small but fanatically devoted following… and honestly after finishing the first season I can see why. Sadly watching this show I felt pangs of regret… because I am part of the reason why the show never got a second season. I recorded it on my DVR and then binge watched it months after the show was cancelled. This is going to be another Firefly/Space Above and Beyond regret for me… because really the show is quite amazing. It does an excellent job of presenting the character of John Constantine with all of his flaws… and virtues. They did a much better job with the casting this time around than the Keanu Reeves movie…. which while they failed miserably at Constantine did a pretty damned good job of capturing the setting. I am still holding out hope that someone might pick this up as a Netflix, Hulu or Amazon exclusive. They have already announced that the character of John Constantine would be appearing regularly on Arrow, so there is at least hope keeping this franchise alive. Placing this show on NBC however…. was just destined to fail. I think had it even appeared on the NBC Universal owned USA network… it might have found a home.

Killjoys

This show… took me a few episodes before I got into it… but now I am currently watching my way through it and I love it. What it reminds me of is Firefly… but a show set in a different corner of that universe. In Firefly you were out on the outer rim of society… in a lawless wild west simulacrum. This show instead is about the bounty hunters operating in and out of the core worlds, the Killjoys. So far the show has spent equal time on and off of civilized worlds, and as it progresses there is an interesting world emerging. The bulk of the show is set in an area of space known as the Quad… which is a planet orbited by three dwarf planets. Qresh being the central planet ruled by the nine families, and between them is an unsteady peace… along with comes a very brutally cold war. Westerly gives you a big barren wasteland world, that was exploited by the “The Company” for natural resources and then sometimes nuked from orbit when the worker class rebelled. Lieth is the farmland world, filled with “indentured servant” farms and their own share of illegal farming going on. Finally you have Arkyn that so far in the series we have not heard much about… other than the fact that something went really wrong there… and folks tend to call it a “dead world”. I am only about halfway through the first season and I have to say I am loving it. The first episode does not do a great job of really showcasing the feel of the show so I would say give it at least three before you decide if you like it or not. As soon as I wrap this up I plan on returning to watching the show… which is available through Hulu… but you have to connect to your cable provider to grant access to it… and have to play it through a web browser. Both of these things I find annoying but I am dealing with it. What are some of your most recent favorite shows?

Daredevil is Awesome

April 17, 2015 by Belghast

Broadcast Television is Strange

For this mornings post I am going to diverge a bit from my normal gaming topics and talk about some television that I have been watching. Now there are often times I say that I don’t watch much television, and this is both true and not true at the same time. I have not regularly watched television on a schedule for years. For the last few years there have been two shows that I actually tuned in on purpose to watch and that is The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. That said I never “only” watch television. I have gotten to a point where I have be fiddling with something else because the act of watching television feels too passive to me. So Sunday nights it has become almost ritual for me to sit downstairs with my laptop straddling my lap as I watch these shows that all not so coincidentally occur on the same evening.

It just feels strange to me, to have television occur on a schedule. Everything else in my life is on demand and waiting for me when I feel like consuming it. This concept of letting someone else control the pace and timing for my actions just feels deeply foreign, so I greatly appreciate the new paradigms of Netflix and Amazon shows being released one entire season at a time. I am hoping that broadcast networks follow suit at some point, or they simply die out from neglect. I don’t think that I am at all alone in my television consumption habits. It all started with the DVR and my ability to delay content to a time when it was convenient to me. Now I just let entire seasons stack up before bothering to actually watch them. In our household we get more use out of the “on demand” section of cable television than anything else. Now my wife and I both have a default channel that we watch when we want the television on as background noise. For me it is Cartoon Network, and for her it is HGTV… but in both cases we no longer passively watch the television.

Daredevil Is Awesome

Over the last two weeks I have watched my way through the latest of the Netflix original series, and I have to say I am damned happy to have done so. Daredevil was never really “the guy” for me, but for one of my friends growing up he was. As a result I read more than my fair share of Daredevil comics, especially in part because of the constant cross over with the Punisher who absolutely was one of my favorites. Daredevil and Punisher both always seemed to have this characteristic that the more spandex and super powers comics never had. They were gritty and rough around the edges… and gave us a window into a darker side of the marvel universe. Hells Kitchen was a horrible place, but at the same time there was a resilience there and a determination to keep moving forward. The Netflix Daredevil series captures this spirit perfectly, in a simple unassuming way. The character of Matt Murdock is portrayed perfectly in all of the nuance of the character. Daredevil has always been this split character, part hero, part victim of his own fatalism… and this is played out on the screen amazingly well.

The real triumph is the fact that this is a show that does not idealize violence. While Matt makes a difference, we get to see the high personal toll that is taken on his body. He does not make it out of these fights unscathed like we normally see from a Batman movie, but instead has a constantly bloodied body to show at the end of the night. What made Daredevil great was the constant sense that he was in over his head, but that he kept fighting the noble fight because no one else would. The best performance in the show however has to come from Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin. He makes this character into someone you almost want to root for during the course of the show. You are both sympathetic to the character and repulsed by it at the same time, which is a rare trait. You want the Kingpin to win… if for no other reason than to set up the ultimate triumphant fight between he and the Daredevil. I feel like this first season has created fertile ground for this show to grow and change, and ultimately serves as quite possibly the greatest comic book origin story I have seen in a long while. The only sad part is that I want another thirteen episodes to watch, because this first batch was simply not enough.

Unbreakable Kimmy

The other show that I have been watching lately is also a Netflix original, this time by Tiny Fey of 30 Rock and SNL fame. The premise of the show is that Kimmy Schmidt was captured when she was in 8th grade by the leader of a doomsday cult. Now freed she is taking on the world with her middle school understanding of it. Kimmy Schmidt the show feels very much like 30 Rock meets Sister Wives turned Doomsday cult, but for the most part it works. The character of Kimmy is essentially the same character as Kenneth played by Jack McBrayer. I have to assume that a lot of the writers from 30 Rock are now doing this show, because the comedic timing is almost exactly the same. I’ve only made it five episodes into the show so far but at this point the cast of characters seems to be set. On the home front you have the crazy landlord played by the always amazing Carol Kane, and the gay failed actor roommate played by Tituss Burgess. Both serve to balance and unbalance the character in various ways, and the interactions by Kane and Burgess are amazing… there is an almost loving parental thing going on.

As far as work goes Kimmy finds her way into the employ of Jane Krakowski’s character Jacqueline Vorhees, as assistant, nanny, life coach, best friend, and whatever else she needs. The problem here is that Krakowski is essentially playing the same character as she did on 30 Rock, which makes me wonder if this show was originally designed as a spin off vehicle for the Kenneth character after the ending of that series? You could seriously plug the characters in from 30 Rock and the show would still work, which I find bizarre. Sure in this case Krakowski is a wealthy Manhattanite with no grasp on reality, instead of a falling Hollywood star with no grasp on reality… but they feel exactly the same in practice. There are definitely some laugh out loud moments but these all come from the fact that Kimmy is still for the most part stuck with an eighth graders understanding of the world. All of this said, if you loved 30 Rock… and I did… this will provide the same sort of awkward humor fix that you might be left craving. I plan on watching the rest of the series, and I am hoping it gets picked up for another run. I can’t necessarily give it the rave review that I gave Daredevil, but it is most definitely a fun show to watch.