Geekdom

Recent Media Round-Up

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Hey Folks! I have been more or less taking the last several days off because I am technically on vacation. Due to the less-than-opportune placement of July 4th, I took off today and also largely checked out of doing blog posts late last week giving myself a bit of a vacation. This morning however I had to do some work really quickly and make sure that timecards were approved. So I thought that I might as well bang out a blog post because I have some things to talk about. More specifically I have watched quite a bit of movies and series of late, and thought I would give a bit of a round-up of some of my thoughts regarding them.

Nimona

I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona. It is available on Netflix, and if you don’t have access to Netflix… then pirate the fuck out of it because it is very good. If you are/were a fan of Lumberjanes or the most modern incarnation of She-Ra or pretty much anything else from ND Stevenson, then you are probably going to love this. If not… then you will probably still love this because it is exceptionally well-written. It is a story about trying to find your place in the world when that world often is diametrically opposed to your existence. It has a lot of things to say, but also… I want Nimona to be my sidekick. I had not been following the production mess that surrounded this property, but it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all.

Very much a good film for the entire family as well. I highly suggest you check it out.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

First I feel like I have to say that I don’t hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie had problems and I feel like the whole aliens thing was pretty divisive, but for me most of the problems with that movie came from the fact that it looked wrong. We were still in the era of CGI “all the things”, and it looked it… and now I feel like we realize what we lost during the CGI boom years… and folks go out of their way to make things feel like practical effects even when they may not be. Dial of Destiny harkens back to the era of Last Crusade, and while it is still maybe a bit busy and a little bit less about bringing the audience along for the hunt, it feels more grounded in at least imagined reality.

I think what I like the most about this movie is that it serves as a nice bookend for the entire series. Indy is still punching Nazis and still chasing objects of tremendous power but is very much a man out of time. He doesn’t really fit into the world of the moon landing, but no longer has the vim and vigor to really keep chasing forbidden treasure. Dial of Destiny serves as a great last hurrah for Indiana Jones and hopefully can put the character to bed on a good note. If this series continues, it needs to continue in the hands of someone other than Indy, and at most him serving as a supporting character. He has had his curtain call, and I feel satisfied with this movie being the last stanza.

The Flash

I am not going to spend much time talking about what a seeming shithole of a human being Ezra Miller has turned out to be. I don’t really care much about the current state of the DC Universe. I’ve watched the various movies, and enjoyed them enough to keep watching them… but also never really felt the love for them that I have in the MCU. I was mostly interested in this film as it serves to give a last hurrah to “my Batman” aka Michael Keaton. What I was not expecting was to enjoy the film as a whole anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve always sort of hated Ezra Miller’s version of Barry Allen. I found the character annoying as shit and extremely abrasive… and this movie goes a long way to resolving that problem and shows reach growth of the character.

Michael Keaton as Batman and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El were both phenomenal. The two different Barry Allens though… felt almost like watching two different actors in the same way as you do when Tatiana Maslany plays dozens of unique characters in Orphan Black. The only disappointment in the movie though is the fact that I expected something that just simply was not there. Knowing that the DCU is being rebooted… I expected this movie to play more into that fact. There were a lot of deep cuts showing alternate timelines like the Nick Cage Superman… but the entire thing wraps up in a very weird note that makes me question what this means for everything that comes forward. It doesn’t so much give the current DCU one last send-off as much as it just deeply muddies the waters. It is still a good film but I would probably suggest waiting for it to release on streaming before you watch it.

The Witcher Season 3 Part 1

Unfortunately, Netflix has realized the error of its ways when it comes to releasing episodes… and has begun awkwardly cleaving a series in half so that they can have two different epic premiere dates. This weekend the first part of The Witcher Season 3 dropped, and with it comes the first five episodes that end on a bit of a cliffhanger. I have a lot of issues with this show… not the least of which is the fact that Henry Cavil will be moving on from the series after this season. I get WHY he would want to leave however because the showrunners and writers are needlessly fucking with details constantly. The Witcher is one of those shows that is good… so long as you know nothing about the supporting material. It reminds me of my early experience with the Harry Dresden series prior to reading the novels. I thought it was pretty good… until I actually read the books and then suddenly got annoyed at the weird inconsistencies.

I think what bothers me the most about The Witcher series, is the fact that entire scenes have been lifted from whole cloth from either the books or the games… but little details have been fucked with for no apparent reason. The worst of this is the way that they are suddenly changing the entire personality and motivation of different characters. I am sorry folks… but they did Eskel dirty last season… and this season they are making some truly bizarre fucking choices with Radovid. The series version of Djikstra is fucking heinous as well and is nowhere near as compelling of a character. Basically, the show feels sloppy, and that is maybe the worst thing a show based off course material can be. The only reason why I kept watching is that they’ve at least nailed the pivotal characters of Geralt, Ciri, Yennifer, and Dandelion/Jaskier. The source material is so fucking strong… that it just infuriates me that the folks writing this show seem determined to sloppily copy the original homework.

Final Thoughts

I cannot understate how much I enjoyed seeing the Keaton Batman ride again. Have you seen any of the media that I talked about? What were your thoughts? What things did I completely miss? I’ve tried to keep everything spoiler free because I do think that everything was worth watching at least once. Again I highly suggest that everyone stream Nimona because it was so freaking good.

Twelve Bleaks out of Ten

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Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.

I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.

I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.

That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.

Rediscovering Playlists

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Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.

This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.

I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.

One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.

One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.

Ma Ma Ma Mask

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I am still not feeling amazing, so once again I am going to lean upon the nostalgia that has been feeding me currently. One of the things that I mourn a little bit in this age of cable television, is the absence of specific dense blocks of cartoons. Saturday mornings for example started some time around 7 am and ended around 11 am with a solid block of new and exciting cartoons swapping every thirty minutes. Something similar occurred before and after school, and one of these blocks will have a special place in my heart.

Growing up we had three UHF channels, 23 which would eventually become a Fox Affiliate, 41 which eventually became a UPN Affiliate and 47 which was a weird religious channel. 41 especially was a magical place that tended to play the sorts of cartoons that I was really into at the time. I remember a very specific line up that included both Robotech and M.A.S.K. back to back… then if I kept watching got progressively stranger with Beverly Hills Teens and then for some reason Jim Baker’s PTL Club show.

I have a deep love of Robotech, but at the very least the Macross portion of that is a very well acknowledged and respected fandom. What effectively was one cohesive show to us kids as actually an edited and dubbed amalgam of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. We instead understood them as three time periods of the same battle in Macross Saga, The Masters and The New Generation. Of the three the third part was my favorite because of Cyclone armor.

However if I am being completely truthful my favorite of these cartoons was M.A.S.K. and sadly it is a really hard thing to track down. For starters M.A.S.K. has one of the best theme songs of any of the 80s cartoons. I’ve linked it above for your own benefit, because I still get all sorts of happy tingles when I hear it today. The toys were also freaking amazing, and in truth were sort of a weird spin off of transformers. Instead of vehicles that transform into robots… they are vehicles that change up in some way to enter a sort of battle mode with weapons that pop out. In the cartoon the Masks themselves played a role granting the wearer a special power that was never really explained how any of that worked.

There is also something weird going on with the logo that never really made sense. I think the “Mask” shown is supposed to be that of Matt Trakker, because the color scheme fits. However it obviously looks nothing like either the mask from the animation or the mask from the toy. I think instead it was likely supposed to make us THINK of Optimus Prime, and maybe confuse kids who were already into Transformers into maybe buying this other toy line of vehicles that transformed. I mean to be truthful being a fan of both… I was probably way more into M.A.S.K. than I was the Transformers.

I’ve talked about my “cool aunt” before that somehow managed to figure out the toy trends long before we even knew the toys exist. She was the one who got my Optimus Prime for Christmas the year before the cartoon really took off at least on our affiliate stations. The same was true with M.A.S.K. because if my fuzzy memory is correct I believe I got it as a birthday gift and was completely blown away by how cool the toy was. I’ve always been partial to the color green, and given my love of Cyclone Armor from Robotech, I was super on board with this motorcycle that transformed into a helicopter.

Around this same time there was a building toy by Fisher Price called Construx that was, while not hte same scale in the general range of the Mask Figures. I remember as I got more of the toys I built these elaborate bases for the figures and garages for their vehicles. There were many a “defend the base” scenario as Venom attacked, and later when StarCom was a thing… everything got sorta mixed together given they were both around the same scale.

I loved the cartoon for Mask so much, and I was super into the central conceit that they were this group of secret agents and anytime there was a mission they would call upon the specific team members that had the powers needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately that was never really how it worked, because recently I have been watching the show again and I am noticing that for the most part Matt Trakker the leader and Bruce Sato and Alex Sector the team that drives the vehicle Rhino are pretty much on every single mission.

I think looking back, why the cartoon felt so good to watch and why it hooked me in such a significant way is that it had a self insert character in the form of Scott Trakker. So often in the cartoons of the 80s… if there are kids involved they are the ones that are constantly getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. If that is not the case then they serve as the comic relief character, which also feels odd at times. Sure Scott got into plenty of trouble, but they gave him T-Bob a robotic companion that serves as this the Orko or Snarf of this series, allowing Scott to be the brave one that often times saves the day through his misadventures. It was super easy to transplant yourself in the role of this character while still being able to play along as the various team members.

Lately I have really been wanting to watch the cartoon, but the problem is… there are seemingly issues with the distribution. It has been released in two forms so far, a 12 disc dvd set and a “volume one” DVD release that never got any follow up releases. In both cases there are issues, the 12 Disc set claims to be the complete series but includes only 65 episodes and is missing the 10 episode short run season 2. This has also been out of print for some time and I have seen it going on ebay for upwards of $250. The “volume one” is available but only includes 11 episodes, and without any subsequent releases it kinda makes it a useless product.

In my travels however I came across someone who has ripped all 75 of the episodes and uploaded them to YouTube. The quality is not great, and I hope at some point we get a proper release of this series, but for now I am happy enough. I may or may not have downloaded all of the episodes so I have a local copy, and was able to pull them in 480p. Honestly I spent the other night watching several of these and they mostly still hold up. It is absolutely peak 1980s, but so am I at times. Needless to say it is still very watchable and I legitimately think modern kids would probably even be into it.

In my recent tripping down memory lane, I uncovered that apparently there was an unofficial follow up to mask that took place in 1996 called Vor-Tech. The vehicles even looked like maybe they recycled some pieces from the later Mask toys, specially the Desert Striker looks quite similar to one of the later generation Mask releases. While looking functionally different, the Rattler effectively does the same thing that Gator does so there was at a minimum a recycling of ideas. I was in college during this time and completely missed the existence of this thing, which is sort of a bummer. I was collecting the new releases of Star Wars figures at this time, so I probably would have tried to pick some of these up for sheer nostalgia if for no other reason.

Another thing that I have noticed going back and watching these… I am absolutely certain that Bruce Sato and Alex Sector were a couple. Sure Hondy Maclean and Buddie Hawks were paired up in the Firecracker but that made sense given that there was the Truck and attached Motorcycle, and later in the series/toy line they both got their own unique vehicle in the form of the Hurricane and the Wildcat. Bruce and Alex were always paired up in the Rhino and were never dispatched separately, in a vehicle that in theory only ever needed a single pilot. Alex as the bald bear and Bruce his little twink boy toy, and no one is going to change my mind about that.

Mask toys have always been somewhat of a rarity, and as a result command a premium in the aftermarket. However recently there has been an interesting find. Someone was opening up an old warehouse and stumbled upon a bunch of new in box Kenner merchandise from the 80s including case after case of Mask toys. I remember after the second series it became exceptionally hard to find Mask stuff, and if my memory serves me Walmart and K-Mart stopped carrying it entirely. It makes me wonder if this hoard of product form Chile was just stuff that never made it into the distribution system because a bunch of the vendors backed out on the line. Whatever the case, it is really interesting to see this sort of thing pop up. I doubt I will buy any of it, but still very cool nonetheless.