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Streaming Goodness

February 4, 2016 by Belghast

RWBY

Rooster Teeth is one of those groups that I have known has existed forever… but never really watched much of. I was not a Halo player, but I do admit to watching quite a bit of the first few seasons of Red vs Blue. Similarly RWBY is one of those products that I have known was available, but for whatever reason never actually watched. There was a certain bit of fitting tribute the other day that I started watching the show, on the Anniversary of its creator Monty Oum’s death. Over the course of several hours of watching I went from knowing absolutely nothing about this show, to becoming a huge fan. I had always heard it described as “An American Anime” but didn’t really know what to expect from that. I mean Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra are pretty much what I think of when I think of American Anime. I love both of those shows and a lot of other continuous narrative cartoons like Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and Bravest Warriors. So as to why I never started this one in particular, is as big of a guess as any.

I guess what I like about it so much right now is that it has pretty much everything I loved about Bleach, without all of the stuff I didn’t love about it. What attracted me to Bleach was this premise that created a universe full of really interesting characters. Sure while Ichigo is the “main character” there are a bunch of other extremely interesting good guys and bad guys that make up the tapestry. RWBY does this through the creation of teams that fight together, and can either be positive or negative influences on the story setting. Also there are shades of post apocalyptic, in that the characters exist in this world that is being plagued by a bunch of supernatural creatures known as the Grimm. The only way mankind has managed to survive is by harnessing the power of dust, refined elemental essence to power up their abilities and be able to fight back. The show itself takes place in a sort of Hogwarts for demon hunters, a school known as Beacon that trains individuals to become either Huntsmen or Huntresses. So all of those elements like Bleach and Naruto are there, to keep churning out interesting people to encounter in the world.

What makes the show better for me… is the fact that thus far at least over the course of the three seasons I chain watched… there isn’t a lot of repetition. The frustration with Bleach is when you have the realization that every single season is the same. Ichigo gets his ass kicked by some new bad guy > Ichigo trains to unlock some previously undiscovered ability > Ichigo wins… but just barely… but still enough to save his friends. While RWBY borrows heavily from Anime tropes, the way it puts things together feels more fresh to me… because it is based in a culture I already understand. The problem with Anime in general is that there are so many cultural experiences that I lack, and I simply cannot understand without having to research why the hell “this thing” was funny or important. When I watch most Anime, there are certain points where I feel I need footnotes to understand the subtle nuance of what is happening. RWBY however makes sense out of the box, with nothing lost in translation… because it quite truly IS “American Anime”. So I have to say… I am now hooked and will join the folks waiting every week for the next show to release. I’ve even gone so far as to hook others on the show, which I guess is the truest sign of enjoyment.

Heroes Reborn

When I am sick I seem to ratchet down my game playing and increase my television watching. So over the last few days I have been hunting for things to watch, and over the last two nights have picked back up on Heroes Reborn. I started the first episode of the show some time ago, but it either failed to grab me… or I got distracted. I’ve now chain watched my way through the entire first season and I have to say… I really enjoyed it. Heroes is one of those shows that I have both extremely fond and extremely negative memories of. The first season was among the best single television seasons I have seen… and then that second season…. I would probably rank among the worst. The third season came along and fixed some of the problems with season two… but by that time the audience was gone and the show was doomed. I don’t think I actually watched any of that fourth season… which honestly after watching Heroes Reborn, makes me want to go back and chain through the originals again.

Reborn is the perfect example of a show that stands on the shoulders of the original, but doesn’t actually require you to have watched any of it. Sure there are plot points that you will get earlier if you know who certain characters are from the original, but you learn soon enough what powers they have. The entire show takes place in a very “Days of Future Past” storyline, where the heroes… now called Evos are being forced to register their powers. There is very much a “humans” vs “evos” undercurrent that runs through the show, along with the expected “no evos allowed” signs. What makes this season work however is the same thing that makes me question if they are setting themselves up for a crappy second season again. Much like the “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” plot of the first season of the original, there is a clear narrative path that ends up being concluded in a massive event. The problem is… I am not really sure how they top this. I mean you can only quite literally save all of humanity so many times during a television show. All of this said… I really enjoyed myself and I guess I am along for the ride when the second season releases.

Of Chicken Horse

February 7, 2017January 31, 2016 by Belghast

More Friends

After crashing extremely early last night, I ended up getting up fairly early. From about 5 pm onwards I didn’t really get proper sleep, and mostly just laid there quietly until shortly after 6 pm. The result was me getting to PAX and parked at around 8 am. The parking situation was much improved, and that at least took one worry off of my mind. By the time I got through the random bag fondling that they have been doing upon entering this year… Dallian was milling around in the Coffee Shop area. So we sat there for a good while fiddling with street passes while waiting on others to show up. I am not sure why I have been obsessing about street passes, but that has really felt like my overarching goal. I guess part of it is the fact that I realize I will not have access to this many in one place… until I end up going to PAX next year. So I spent pretty much any free time clearing out one batch of streetpasses and playing the picture puzzle and find mii game. I am up to 392 Mii characters on my 3DS which is a significant boost to the 90 or so I had before coming this year. Before coming this year I had completed zero of the slides… and after this year I have seven fully unlocked.

While hanging out there and chatting… and waiting on the rest of the folks to show up we had a random encounter with a couple of awesome folks. The two of us were sitting at a table for four, and a couple came up and asked if we minded them joining us. When you play board games there is a convention of playing with the box lid standing up, to signal you are open to letting other people join your game. I wish there was something like that for tables, because I felt bad commandeering a table…. but I also wanted a nice place to sit while we waited. What followed was an awesome conversation about Destiny and the Division, and a bunch of other console and PC games rolled together. The funny thing is… we had this lengthy conversation all without introducing ourselves, and it took a fifth person joining the conversation to actually make that happen. Now I hope to actually keep tabs on Hatti and Rabbit over twitter, and maybe even interact more between now and next year.

Everyone Must Play

As the day went on we managed to catch up with Tick, Damai, Thalen, Paragon, Ashgar, Rae and her brother John… and eventually Rowan, Sctrz, and Genda and his wife. I believe when we were playing several rousing games of Code Names, we had ten around a table in the gaming area. I believe the game was chosen in part because it scaled nicely regardless of how many people happened to be playing it. While playing a rapidly snuck a few blurry pictures which I am totally using on my blog without talking to the individuals first. However of the several photos I have… I picked the one with the people in it that I didn’t think would actually care. I am also not naming anyone by name…. so hopefully no one gets cross with me. Today was a lot of trying to sort out what to do, after we played a half dozen rounds we ended up breaking up into smaller groups and never quite joining back together. I spent a lot of time circling like a shark trying to decide what to do… and alternately spending time with Exale and Maovis, who were cosplaying Venom Snake and Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China. Lo Pan was an insane hit, and we ended up spending a lot of time stopping so folks could take photos.

I think the highlight of the day was dragging people to the Ultimate Chicken Horse booth just like I had done to me. I cannot adequately elaborate on just how fun that game really is to play. It takes a few rounds to get into it… but before long folks are cheering at the screen or groaning when they fail to complete a level. There is something so deceptively simple about the game… and the iterative gameplay of each person adding a piece to the greater level keeps it fun and engaging. I think the best feature is the fact that there is a fixed number of attempts that everyone can make, and regardless of the outcome someone will be crowned a winner. I am already extremely partial to the chameleon who does this silly rainbow dance when you manage to win with him. I also do not mind at all the Raccoon, and my lanyard now sports a button since they apparently ran out of Chameleons. This is definitely going to be one of those games that I pick up immediately, and probably start buying for all of my friends so that they can join in the multiplayer madness. I forsee us talking about this game a lot on the coming AggroChat.

Of Brain Weasels

January 27, 2016 by Belghast

Anxiety Sucks

Anxiety sucks… logical brain says "people will be happy to see you!" anxiety brain says "everyone hates you! you should just stay home"

— Belghast Fett (@belghast) January 26, 2016

Yesterday was a bad day when it came to Anxiety. There is always this little roller-coaster of emotions that I go through right before I am about to do anything. It is like those butterflies in your stomach… eventually grew up into a Cthulhu-esc abomination that now tries to suck the life out of everything you do. Right before a major event, be it a trip like in the case of Pax South or simply even just going out to dinner with friends… my anxiety brain runs rampant telling me all of the myriad of things that are going to go horribly wrong. The end result however is always the same, and the final chorus of the mental play always ends up singing… “everyone will hate you” over and over again to the point of absurdity. Part of my whole being honest with my readers means delving into these things when they are happening. My general theory is that there are a lot of people suffering, thinking that no one else feels these things. If by talking about it I help someone to realize that it is shockingly common, then I guess some good has come of the roller-coaster. The internet can be a carnival of horribles, but at the same time it can be this strangely successful support group. If others had not talked about their own anxieties… then chances are I wouldn’t be to the point where I can actually talk about and confront mine.

Yesterdays anxiety attack came from two distinct sources. The first is the fact that I am meeting a bunch of people that I have “internet known” for years, for the first time in person at Pax South. The logical brain tells me that these people love me, and will just be happy to see me. The anxiety brain tells me, that I am a fraud and that everyone will hate you…. so you probably better just stay home where it is safe. No amount of reassurance really stops the voices, because they are irrational fears… the primal stuff that never really goes away. They are the evolved version of that nightmare where you end up at school naked, or in my case… I signed up for a class I never attended and it is past the drop date… and somehow have to cram and entire semester into a single week to pass the final or end up failing. I know if I can get past this…. and get out the door on this journey, I will be perfectly fine. Once I get in the moment I feel safe and happy and can really enjoy my friends, but it sometimes takes all the power in my being to ignore the anxiety brain long enough to actually make that happen. Adulting sometimes requires mental hacks.

Appraisal Anxiety

The other big source of anxiety that happened to be looming at the exact same time was our home appraisal. Last week we went through the process and from that point onwards I have been stressed about whether or not we would get a decent enough price to be able to continue. We are currently going through a home refinance, and there are few things that stress me out in quite the way that money does. The thing is… most of my concerns are entirely in my head. Based on some quick comparisons we pulled together, it seemed like the number we were shooting for was very conservative. However until we got the physical piece of paper back, we had no clue. Also there was always the fear that the appraiser would find all of these faults that we had to cough up more money to fix… just to be able to go through with the “refi”. However about halfway through the afternoon we got back an email from the company with a lengthy form essentially saying that we were fine. The number he came back with was way more than we needed, and in truth more than even my wildest dreams would have expected. Essentially this good news was what I needed desperately to tell my anxiety brain to shut the hell up and let me go on with my life.

The interesting thing about this whole post is the fact that I was going to make it this morning regardless of anything else. There is a whole lot of “stuff” that we just simply don’t talk about. I was raised in a part of the country and a time period where this is not the sort of thing you discuss in polite society. Additionally the bullshit logic of the eighties could be summed up in the commercial slogans like “never let them see you sweat”, where showing any sign of weakness would ultimately lead to your downfall. However I tend to believe that if we were just more honest with each other about our own failings, that the world would be a much better place. I know that there will be nothing that I can do to really shed my fears, irrational as they might be. So instead I have learned to live with them, and learned ways to trick myself into doing the stuff that I need to do to be a “functioning member of society”. It turns out that today without me realizing it is the day that the whole #BellLetsTalk hashtag happens online, where folks share their own stories about mental health.

Beauty of Honesty

The thing is…. I don’t have answers to my problems, but I have things that work for me. The beauty of opening up about them… is the fact that chances are someone in your “monkeysphere” gets exactly how you are feelings. Just knowing that often times helps more than anything, to know that you are not quite as alone in your mental prison as you happen to think you are. I am lucky in that I have a lot of friends that just “grok” me in ways that I could never explain. When I go through my “turtle” periods where I pull my head inside my shell and hide from the world… they are the ones poking their head in to check on me and make sure I am doing okay. I am also lucky that I have a bunch of friends that understand that my withdrawing is not about them, but instead about me trying to give myself time to heal. So just talking about the various things that are going on in my world, has helped me immeasurably. If you find yourself in a situation where you just need another human being to listen to your problems and tell you that your brain is full of shit… then I am here. The truth is, for the most part our brains are constantly telling us lies, because they end up getting focused on incomplete data about every situation. We can never fully know what someone other than ourselves thinks, so we fill in the missing bits of data with speculation… which tends to be the worst possible view of a situation. Over the next few days of packing and travel I am going to be stressed beyond belief, but I know deep down inside if I can just trick myself into going through with everything… I will have a really fun time.

Embargo Over

January 19, 2016 by Belghast

Finally Time

On December 18th I walked into a theater, and had my faith in my favorite childhood memories restored. So powerful was this restoration that I had to talk about it immediately… so I went onto slack and joined a channel that we had created just for this purpose. Similarly powerful was my desire not to spoil the experience for anyone else. So after some thrashing about, I declared over twitter in the above tweet that I would give it a month…. that on January 18th I would feel able to finally talk about Star Wars Force Awakens in the open. Today is January 19th, the day after my self proposed embargo ended, and I am ready to talk. This however it is a bit of a lackluster statement, given that it seems like the global internet embargo was something along the lines of “any time after the first of the year”. While we recorded the AggroChat spoiler show a few weeks back, I kept to my original stated date. Now the floodgates can open and you can expect me to be less measured about information regarding the movie. Essentially my theory is that if you cared at all about this movie… you had a month to go see it relatively unscathed… any spoilers are now on your own damned head.

For starters…. I love this film. I love so much about it. Largely because it made me realize how much I really did love Star Wars after all. In the post Phantom Menace era I spent much of my time suppressing my joy about the franchise even though there were really awesome offshoots like Star Wars Rebels and the Clone Wars cartoons that absolutely redeemed just how frustratingly bad at times the prequels were. I guess part of me didn’t want to get hurt again, and while I started off trying to fight the hype… by the time Force Awakens launched…. I was a gibbering mess of fandom. The most awesome part of all of it, was sitting in the theater and listening to the entire place erupt in applause when the opening scroll came on screen. I did find it funny that in my theater a few people booed when they saw the Lucasfilm logo, but that quickly gave way to much cheering. Then at various moments, like BB8 flipping the thumbs up… made everyone laugh and cheer as well. I am so happy that I got to see it on opening night, because I feel like the energy was so amazing that it would have been painful to have missed that. Now to delve into some of my characters and thoughts about them.

Rey

Rey for me is the Star Wars equivalent of Amy Pond… the girl who waited. The question is who exactly was she waiting for. Right now there are two competing camps in fandom… that peg her at either being the daughter of Luke Skywalker or the grand daughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is another group of people who seem to think she is the lost child of Han and Leia… but I seriously think that someone might have known about this before now and maybe just maybe they would have recognized her. I mean this is the universe where a Senator can go from pregnancy through delivery without receiving any prenatal care and be completely baffled by the fact that there are twins. So maybe they lose babies all the time. Part of me wants it to be as simple as Luke’s kid, because Disney talked about how the “Saga” movies centered around the Skywalker legacy. If Rey is not a Skywalker… that means that the focus of the movie according to Disney has to be on a Skywalker… and the only one of those that we know is Kylo Ren. I want this movie to be about Rey, because she is hands down the best character we have seen. Part of me still hopes that Mara Jade gets brought back from the now destroyed Expanded Universe… and we end up seeing Rey as the child of Luke and Mara. I could see Mara having to hide her on a backwater planet. Going to go into more about the staff she carries around all the time…. but mostly I love Rey with all of my heart and she is the sort of character we need to carry forward the franchise for the next generation.

Finn

Finn is super awesome… and I think his story arc of how the reluctant Stormtrooper escaped to join the Rebellion is great. I fully expected him to be the new Han Solo in that he is the one that is super reluctant to “do the right thing”. This over reaching desire is to get as far as humanly possible away from the First Order, and rightly so… given that he was abducted as a child and placed into their creepy mind control scheme for breeding perfect warriors. I need to actually read the novel related to Finn, but enough of a summary was that basically the other Stormtroopers you see him interact with… were all in his four member pod that he trained with. He served as the captain.. and the guy who plants the bloody hand on his helmet is suggested to be the “screw up” of that team named Slip. When Finn is confronted by TR-8R the shock baton trooper… it seems super personal… which makes us think that maybe he was either Zero or Nines one of the other two members of that team. The Finn story arc is one of redemption, but he comes across as such a likable character from the moment we meet him. Like there was part of me that wanted Rey and Finn go to off into the sunset having amazing adventures together. As far as how he works into the trilogy… there are folks that seem to think he is going to be Lando’s kid but that would just cheapen the character of Finn. If anything I think Finn might somehow end up being related to Sana Starros, a character introduced in the “in canon” comic book series. I just keep thinking that the various characters that have been carefully introduced in those comics will eventually make their way into the movies in one form or another.

Poe Dameron

Poe is one of those characters that I thought I would end up being annoyed by. In every single pre-release shot had this strutting and preening nature to it… and I guess in theory he does do that. His character however is super likeable and ends up being this awesome character from the moment he hits the screen. Firstly he wins huge points with me by being devoted to his droid… since droids are in essence the pets of the Star Wars universe. The folks that care about them as more than just a walking toaster… always win huge points with me. On top of that he is like the best damned pilot legitimately. I don’t remember what Tam had his kill count at, but it was irrationally high. What makes it even better is the fact that Poe and Finn make such an amazing team. There is talk as to whether or not this is a “bromance” or a romance and I am honestly fine with whatever that ends up being. I don’t necessarily feel the need to ship these two together, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if that was the direction the movie was going. For me the interactions in the Tie Fighter mimic those of Han and Luke in the Millennium Falcon taking out Tie Fighters. I personally feel like Finn was so interested in seeing that he survived, because he is super loyal to his team members…. and from the moment they escaped together Finn I think considered Poe as part of his “new” team, just like he seemed to have the same instant loyalty to Rey. Supposedly there is a bunch of backstory about his parents in a comic series leading up to Force Awakens and I need to track it down… but the lineage ties back to the Rogue Squadron from what I am hearing. Which makes me wonder if Poe is going to be the star of the Rogue One movie.

BB-8

I had some serious reservations about this droid before the launch of the movie, because it seemed like Disney was setting this character up to be the new Jar Jar. Disney films all have quirky often annoying animal sidekicks… and I think that is precisely what Jar Jar was trying to be… and what BB-8 seemed to be based on the insane amount of merchandising. On top of everything else… the design seemed to make no sense. Like I could not sort out what the robots primary function was, and I guess in theory… they are designed to be small compact astromech droids. Seeing BB-8 on screen however melted all the ice, and made me just simply gush. The thing about BB-8 and its head tilt ability… is that it makes the droid far more emotive than any other to date. Sure R2-D2 could convey a bunch of emotion with his antsy little back and forth dance…. but BB-8 can simply tilt its head to the side or let it drop… to convey curiosity or sadness. From the moment the little guy flipped open the lighter to signal a Thumbs up…. I was completely sold. I think BB-8 is pretty much the best dog ever… and if they ever made an open world Force Awakens game… I would want to run around the wasteland with BB-8 in the same way as I do Dogmeat in Fallout 4.

Kylo Ren

Kylo Ren was exactly the type of bad guy we needed in this film. We had heard before the film released that he was a Vader groupy, and I was not really sure how that would play out on screen. However they made it work… because he is still very much a boy trying to play for the affection of his grandparent. He never fully grew up… and far as much as he wants to be like Vader… he ends up nothing at all like him other than the same taste in clothing. Vader was this stoic force that made you afraid to even be in the same room with him… in part because his emotions were unreadable. Kylo on the other hand lets the entire world know at all times what he is feeling, and throws these temper tantrums anytime something does not go his way. He is a brash child, demanding to be respected…. when in truth no one actually respects him. Any fear they have of him, is not because of his power, but instead because he serves as this loose canon that does more harm to the First Order that he actually seems to do to the Resistance. There was one plot point that I knew would happen somehow… and that was the death of Han Solo. Once we learned the parentage of Kylo it pretty much decided that by the end of the movie he would end up killing his father. While I saw that scene coming… I still thought it did an excellent job of showing just how NOT in control Kylo really was. How he was continuing to struggle with his light side up until the very moment he ignited his saber into his father. I have this feeling that by the time we see Ren in the next movie, he will be more like Vader and be significantly more machine than he is man.

Snoke

The last character that I am going to talk about specifically is Snoke, the enigmatic leader of the First Order. There is a lot of speculation as to who he really is… and I am absolutely putting my hopes in the Darth Plagueis basket. There are so many little things that are either purposefully trying to mislead us… or are there intentinally. Firstly the music that plays when they go talk to Snoke is apparently the same music that plays in Revenge of the Sith during the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise scene. Also Snoke is referred to as “wise” in the movie, which might also be a bit of foreshadowing. Similarly on the cover of the Darth Plagueis novel he is shown appearing to Palpatine in a hugely inflated hologram much the same way as Snoke does. When you look at his face… there is something going on… almost necrotic which would make you wonder if he is being kept alive through the sheer force of the Dark Side. Now on the other side of things… Plagueis was a Muun apparently at the request of Lucas. However since this series is departing from the Lucas approved universe… he could in theory be brought back and just about any damned thing they wanted to.

The other thing that I keep coming back to as well is Rey’s staff looks oddly like pretty much every single incarnation of Plagueis’s Staff Lightsaber we have seen in comics and the toys. I think there would be an interesting symmetry if she had this Sith artifact with her all along. Also given that Plagueis was essentially betrayed by the old Sith ways… he would be suspicious of the old “Rule of Two” thing and even the Sith lineage in general. So instead we have the Knights of Ren, which is a group of force users…. that he even talks about have not completed their training, in that he tells Hux to bring Kylo’s body so they can finish. Since he was thought destroyed by Palpatine his apprentice, it would absolutely make sense for him to create an order of a bunch of “less powerful” force users, instead of bestowing all of his knowledge onto a single apprentice that could easily depose him again. If we believe the whole “vergence in the force” stuff from the prequels… it would also mean that Plagueis either intentionally or not… created the Skywalker lineage. This loops back to the whole Saga movies being about the Legacy of Skywalker, which would be a pretty nice bookend especially if Plagueis ends up legitimately destroyed by the end. In any case… I need to wrap this post up because it has gotten pretty long. At another date I will talk about some of my disappointments in the movie, albeit super minor ones.

Have an awesome week.. and May the Force Be With You!