Reading Too Much Into Everything

  Turn ON Your Brain - I stand by this. If a piece of media is engaging my mind is working to maintain that engagement. If the media is bad my brain is working to examine why this isn't working for me. So either way my mind is working. This Movie is Rated F For Fun - I'm not sure I got my point across well. Yes, a piece of media should not be boring, but there are many ways to engage with media. If it's not boring to you, then it did it's job of providing something to enrich you. I'll probably expand on this later when the opportunity comes again. Not-So-Jolly Rancher - I still haven't run into a good explanation for why this scene is here few people even talk about this. Will probably have to revisit this after some research. Zack Snyder v Public Record - i was all over the place with this. Need to keep my points tightly focused. At least Ben Affleck turned out ok. Redemption - pretty proud of this one. I probably should have given more examples, but those...

Non-Transformative : Ohh a pretentious title. That will get people reading. And surprise, we’re getting another Transformers movie. Good news: the director is not Michael Bay. Bad news: One of the producers IS Michael Bay. Not gonna lie, the trailer looks pretty good.   DOOMSDAY!!! : Wait, I predicted that Doomsday was cloned from Zod’s body and I was (mostly) right about that? One internet cookie for me! I however didn’t mention that it would be Darkseid that would take Doomsday and I can’t prove that was my thinking, so minus one internet cookie. Oh well, I’ll do better next time.   Why Writing : I meant to convey that good writing is super-important, and I did not do that. I’ll try to do better in conveying my points better.   Best Comment Ever (this week) : I don’t think I’ll bring this back, even though I thought it was a cool concept at the time. These comment were fire though.   I Wonder : no more short lazy ones like this, though my point sti...

It is the year 2016...wait it's 2023? Where have I been all these years? Oh yeah, real life happened. I'm truly sorry about that. I fell off and only now am I coming back to try again. A lot of stuff happened in the interim, and boy do I wanna talk about that, but let's start off slow. We'll take a look at my old articles & see where I did well and where I made my mistakes. Maybe we can all learn some lessons along the way. An Open Letter to the Games Industry : What a waste of time that was.Even if the AAA game industry ever read it, they would never have followed any of my suggestions. Not because of the merits (or lack thereof) of the suggestions, but because there would be no money to be made in following those suggestions. In fact, they leaned even further into the bad business decisions that made them tons of money but alienated their customers even more. Not that their customers ever actually stopped buying their products, but that's a separate issue....

Ok, NOW I have something to talk about and sink my teeth into. You might want to grab a sandwich and settle in. This is gonna be a long one. So, ahem... James Gunn said some offensive tweets long ago, and CERTAIN people (more on that in a bit) dug them up and got all riled up about them. Because of this, Disney let him go from the making of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 . So, first, a few disclaimers so that they don't get lost in what I'm about to say. 1) I will not defend what he said long ago. They are indefensible. And if you are truly disturbed by what he said, then definitely do not like him as a person and as a content creator if you can't separate the art from the artist. I certainly don't like those tweets, and I'm not going to pretend those tweets aren't awful. 2) Disney ABSOLUTELY has a right to fire him if what he said long ago does not fit their brand image now. After all, Disney is REALLY hoping you don't remember they once put out Song of...

Well, the last post was a bummer, so let's focus on something a little more fun. SF Debris puts out enjoyable videos about (mostly) science fiction media. His best videos, in my opinion, deal with Star Trek. He's recently begun to take on Star Trek: Discovery, which is good since I still refuse to pay $6 a month to see that show. So, I'm looking at his video about The Vulcan Hello episode when I noticed something around the 6 minute 42 second mark. In a memory flashback Michael Burnham (the protagonist of the show) remembers being in a Vulcan learning bowl at the Vulcan Science Academy. Now you can eat cereal & learn quantum mechanics at the same time! I thought, where did I see this before? And then I remembered... Yes, the 2009 Star Trek movie. Which actually cleared up one of the most glaring problems I had with the Discovery series so far. The producers have sworn up & down that this series is set in the Star Trek Prime universe, 10 years before Th...

A particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from a number of negative and unpredictable factors. I know that starting out this article with the meaning of the title is pedantic and pretentious. But I also know that I don't particularly care. My reason is that this storm is a perfect counter to all the nonsense put out by trolls and idiots that say they don't want politics in the entertainment media they consume, whether it's video games, movies, music, books, etc. So, let's set the stage. Recently, Gal Gadot has stated that she would not play Wonder Woman again until Warner Bros. cancels all partnership with Brett Ratner. The link to the article is here .  Okay, for those who don't know who Brett Ratner is, he is the director of the Rush Hour films, X-Men 3:The Last Stand, and the Hercules film starring The Rock that nobody saw. He has also been the subject of sexual harassment allegations. My default state is to believe the victims for obvio...

A recent Jimquisition video talked about a company that uses customer data gathered from mobile games being played in real-time to offer different microtransaction prices to different gamers at the optimal time where their resistance to buying said microtransactions is at their weakest. Here's the link (and if you enjoy his video, consider kicking him a dollar or two to his Patreon, if you can).    But the pinned comment to this video is far more interesting to me, since Jim Sterling inevitably gets these kinds of comments whenever he brings up the subject of lootboxes and microtransactions. The relevant portion of the comment I want to talk about is provided here, courtesy of THePunisher Xxx: I'm so sick of your bitching and assumptions with no facts. "Only whales buy crates". You are basing that off of conversations and conjecture, you have no hard facts showing game sales and who buys crates. Oh, hard facts. That's for me. My brain always conjures red fl...

A very interesting thread popped up on Twitter. A game developer opined that the reason developers don't talk to gamers is that the gaming culture is so toxic that anything said by developers concerning how games are made will be accused of lying or cheating the gamers in some way.  I read the thread about a day before the story broke on news outlets, so I've had more time to think about the issue than others. And he does have a point. Whenever a video game is about to come out and it has a feature that is unfamiliar, weird or shady, (or had a feature that was in a previous game taken away), the gaming community will rage and troll and launch boring tirades against the developers of that game, claiming they will boycott the game. Then the gamers buy it, enjoy it, and wait for the next outrage to cross their path. If you want a really good example of this, take a look at the outrage surrounding No Man's Sky . Even I wrote about this game, and while I have softened my sta...

Never be afraid to mislabel a product - Rule of Acquisition #239 Jim Sterling has brought up the issue of Triple-A video game companies reaching into gamers’ wallets to yank out additional cash AFTER they have originally paid $60 for a video game again and again and again . He has repeatedly stated that he will stop talking about this anti-consumer practice immediately once these game companies stop doing this. Well, good luck with that, since apparently game companies seem disinclined to stop. Let me be fair to these companies. Businesses exist to make a profit. And I’ve argued before that companies can be as greedy as they want. But I’ve also maintained that they don’t need to be jerks about it. I could go on about this, but for now I want to focus on this video made by Jim Sterling. The subject is how to have microtransactions in games correctly. I will expand on this video by comparing the advice he gives with Star Trek Online, which does all these approaches right. Noti...

Hi, I’m back. It’s been a while (thanks to real life concerns, really sorry about that), but a recent event has brought me back to the internets once again, and that event is the recent release of the Destiny 2 video game. And in my opinion, this game represents everything wrong with the AAA game industry. I will present my case through a unique method; by responding to the comments about Destiny 2’s new way of giving shaders to players. Shaders are color palettes that can be added to your in-game gear. You know; make your gun red, your boots green, your armor gloves purple, that sort of thing. In the first Destiny game, once you acquire shaders, you can keep them & apply them to all your gear. In Destiny 2, shaders are consumable items that you apply to individual pieces of your gear. And once you apply a different shader, the original is gone. Same thing if you get better gear down the road. Once you get rid of the other gear you applied shaders to, the shaders  on...

Whelp, Devin Faraci has been accused of sexual assaults he had apparently done in the past. As I have said before , I never agreed with a lot of what he said, but I respected his opinions. Now I must withdraw my respect of him. Why? Because it's my personal choice to do so. The reasoning behind my decision doesn't really matter, but as a human being I cannot condone what he has done. And no, I will not discuss my reasons here. This is a nerd site, and I am determined to keep it that way. No politics & no religion. I created this blog to be a safe zone for us nerds.  However, one of my blog posts has dealt with Devin, and I felt I needed to address that. While it dealt with his profession and not him as a person, and while I believe in my readers' ability to tell the difference, there may be those who may choose not to parse out that difference due to personal belief.  So I wrote this so that I may assure new & longtime readers who come to this site that I don...

It has been 2 weeks since No Man's Sky came out, so let's look at the state of play in this particular part of the nerdspace. According to Steam, it was the top seller  before it came out, and player count topped 212,000 before it dropped to it's current 3,000 player count. I expect that type of drop on a game like Evolve or Star Wars: Battlefront, because both those games were multiplayer only, had only 10 maps, maybe, and not a lot of content to keep the player's interest. But this is No Man's Sky. It has 18 quintillion planets and procedurally generated wildlife (you can name the planets & wildlife), crafting mechanics, and a story that takes you to the center of the universe. These sound amazing. That is, until you found out that the names you give the planets and wildlife disappear after a while, the crafting mechanics are a little weird (you can feed iron to animals & you have an extremely limited inventory), and the story is dependent upon you kee...

Niantic recently disabled the tracking feature on their PokemonGo game app. After a few days of silence, Niantic finally explained why, saying that the feature was “confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals”. They also said that they had “limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users”. You can read the whole statement here . A lot of articles have been written about this, and I have a lot to say about a few of them. First, some context. Here is the original PokemonGo game trailer when it was first announced last year. Notice at the 25 second mark that the video promises that the app tracks distance to a pokemon clearly and accurately. That’s not what we got though. Instead we got the app showing how far pokemon were by how many footprints (called steps) was shown underneath the graphic. The more steps there were, the farther they were, as this article shows . But then the 3-step g...

Recently Devin Faraci (columnist and Editor-In-Chief of Birth Movies Death) was invited along with other film critics to the Justice League set, currently filming in London. You can read the article on his visit here . According to him there was a subreddit on his visit, with people wondering why he was invited, despite the fact that he was a hater of the Batman v. Superman movie (hereafter called BvS). Devin says his reason right in the article that it was precisely because he was a hater of BvS that he was invited. It was to show Devin that Warner Bros. was learning the lessons that the last film taught them, and that those lessons were being implemented in Justice League.   I find this very interesting. Warner Bros. could have invited any of a hundred film critics who didn’t like BvS to the set, but they invited him. Sure, it’s because he’s a hater, but I think there are additional reasons that go beyond him being a film critic. Before looking at the reasons below, read his r...

It's a weird time to be a DC Comics fan. The movies based on those comics aren't all that great ; the constant albatross  that keeps hanging around the company's neck is bad for their PR image; the majority of the stories told in those New 52 comics aren't compelling ; and doing line-wide reboots  every few years keeps fans confused about which timeline to invest their money, time, and energy on (though DC is not calling this a reboot). But the big secret behind this Rebirth reboot-not-a-reboot is that Dr. Manhattan (from Watchman) was behind the creation of the New 52 DC Universe. This means that Watchman is now canon in the DC universe.  So the entirety of New 52 universe stories are a huge giant sequel to Watchman? Does this mean grim-gritty-grimdark New 52 DC universe? Will the Joker be the Comedian in disguise?  Will  Owlman in Earth-3 secretly be Nite Owl ? Will Silk Spectre kill Wonder Woman and take her place? Will Rorshach fight Batma...

I sit here, wondering why I'm so angry over Batman v Superman (hereafter called BvS). You see, I saw Captain America: Civil War (hereafter called CA:CW), and I thought it was a great film. I began to wonder, how could BvS be so bad, but CA:CW be so good? It's not like Warner Bros. set out to make a terrible film. I'm sure nobody there sat down and thought "I am going to greenlight this movie, spend money on this project, and produce a bad film that will insult not only the intelligence of the fanbase, but general audiences everywhere! This will produce a profit for us!" No sane person thinks this. But BvS comes out, then CA:CW comes out, and suddenly we have a basis for comparison that either amplifies the goodness of CA:CW, or amplifies the badness of BvS, or both.  How could this happen? A few theories come to mind. It may be any, all, or none of these theories. Pick whichever one that fits your worldview. Please note that I have no special knowledge or ...