Like a lot of people I went to see Age of Ultron opening weekend. I’m not going to be blasting the film, but I will put out there point blank that one of the best movies I’ve ever seen was Iron Man and I only gave it four out of five stars. I’m a notoriously harsh critic, just ask my friends. And this post is probably not going to earn me any cred with most people because I’m going to bash icons in it, and I won’t give away spoilers while doing so. First off, from a fangirl perspective Ultron was the wrong choice to have for a 2nd movie villain. I wish that in the marvel movies they’d sat down and planned and made better use of their villains. A few devious lines of dialogue some nearly off camera shots of Kang the Conqueror would have been a true treat for those fans who know about the avengers and set us up for Avengers 3. Now that said Ultron is a big villain in the Avengers continuity and has been fought multiple times. The image I’m using for this is part of the Annihilation Conquest, it’s a cool picture. But he’s certainly not the baddest villain they could be fighting. On an aside I’m honestly going to be disappointed when Thanos gets taken apart by the Guardians of the Galaxy, which I have issues with the portrayal of those characters in the movie to begin with. I honestly don’t know who I would have picked for a follow up villain and I’m glad it wasn’t Loki. I don’t want them going back to the well to often with him. The reason I don’t believe Ultron should have been the second villain is simple, build up. He comes out of left field in this and just sorta acts like a wrecking ball with a snarky attitude. I instantly began to dislike Ultron in the movie when he started to be jokey. You pull me out of the movie when a character who is normally pretty straight laced becomes a jokester. What has happened to Hollywood where the smooth sophisticated villain is now seen as being unworthy of their time? My only complaint about Daredevil is Kingpin and how he stutters through his lines and generally acts like he doesn’t want to be there. Just my opinion but the only thing the Kingpin teaches me as he is now is dude has an impressive temper and he’s somewhat capable of planning. Ultron who should be this force to be reckoned with comes off as half cocked and perhaps a little bit insane. Which kudos for making him seem insane, insanity is a very hard thing to hit for bad guys. You either get lame attempts like Heath Ledger’s Joker, deal with it he was a terrible Joker and only got vaulted into super stardom because he died, or you get jokes like when Gollum had his heart to heart. All in all the movie isn’t terrible. It’s perhaps pretty tight, except that it suffers from the fact that because Marvel has announced which sequels are coming out you know whose not dying. Oh no they killed someone within five minutes of the movie and over the top foreshadowed that someone’s going to die, but it’s not that person!, that it’s sort of laughable. RDJ and Evans are coming back for respective movies, Thor’s going to have a new movie. The only characters not mentioned in having direct movies are Widow, Hawkeye and Hulk. And thank god we’re not getting another hulk movie. It’s the friggin’ Hulk. He’s a boring character with little to no character growth nine times out of ten. Let him sit on the back of the bus like he did in this movie and lets give more time to… I don’t… the guy who was playing Galaga. In my heart I’m calling that guy Eric O’Grady for he shall always be an irredeemable ant-man to me. So why should we care that Ultron’s going to destroy everything we’ve built in the previous movies? Good question, I can’t answer that because I know even before going to the movie that Ultron is going to be defeated. I don’t have to give you spoilers. If you’re paying attention to the marvel release schedule you already know Ultron is a stop gap. The best you can hope for is that he’s a good villain. And AoU doesn’t really let most people down on that. His styling is cool, his voice is awesome but for me he’s not as menacing as he could be. He’s like Cobra Commander. You know he’s trying, but you’re just not expecting much out of him. I mean he is a world class buffoon, Destro told me so and how do you argue with a man whose face is metal? Without giving any spoilers away the Age of Ultron is a good popcorn movie, and for the casual marvel fan it’s good. But for the fangirl in me it’s not quite there yet. Now don’t get me wrong. I loved Loki in the first Avengers. But Loki has always been a character about mischief and I expect a certain amount of levity. Whedon’s terrible on the whole for story development, but credit where credit is due, man is great at snappy one liners. I could be wrong, it’s been known to happen. But I keep expecting the Marvel Cinematic Universe to unravel. Comic books can make great movies but they have to be done just right. And I suspect we’re about to watch DC try this and flop because they’re not approaching it as what you need to do to make these series work. Same with Sony and spider-man. When you’ve got a comic book you have to walk that fine balancing line of movie and comic book story. For instance everyone was clamoring for Venom in the 3rd spider-man movie. Less is more. Dropout Sandman, tease the black Venom suit. Make James Franco, so good, into the movie villain. Have him use the power of media, his money and his supervillain go get’em attitude to really put the screws to Petey. Pete kills Harry in his new emo suit and then in the 4th movie… and only then when this new black suited spider-man has gone too far do you reveal that Pete’s no longer in control. You make the entire fourth movie about Venom. Now back to AoU. It’s a good movie, you should see it. But it’s only a good movie. It’s not great its story doesn’t really do anything but move from point A to point B. Heck there’s a number of fights I couldn’t watch because it was just left right left right drop the mike, of course that could have been because I had some idiot teens trying and failing to MST3k the movie, and it’s off to the next scene. On the whole I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed. As for me, I’ll probably see it again if my friends ask to go see it again but I won’t go out of my way to rewatch it. So at best it’s a solid 3. At worst it’s a 2.5 out of five. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

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I’ve never understood the appeal of the masses had with Cthulhu. I really don’t see how he became such a popular icon for nerds and horror types. I fell into reading H.P. Lovecraft by sheer accident. I picked up the Robert E Howard Conan novels and backed my way into H.P. Lovecraft that way. The thought of an ancient, powerful sleeping monsters in the depth has been around for centuries like the Kraken, Leviathan, The Bloop or cuttlefish. Supposedly scientists known more about what’s going on in space than what’s happening in our own oceans. Personally I think we know the same amount on both sea and space. NOAA says 95% of the sea is unexplored. And frankly we only have theories and conjectures on space. Which is important to note when dealing with Cthulhu. H.P. Lovecraft says that Cthulhu is a priest for dark gods(Great Old Ones) who are from a time and place outside our comprehension. Which in a horror story is always a nice creepy element. The unknown is what scares people. And there’s a lot to be scared of under the sea. The problem with Cthulhu is that his very presence will drive people insane. And there’s only so much insanity that you can read before you have to just shrug your shoulders and move on. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading H.P. Lovecraft and a few of the stories really did send a shiver down my spine. The language is hard to read, for me at times because of it’s blatant racism, but sadly that was the time. And that aside it’s best to ignore it. But the work of fiction is large and it’s loved by people and it keeps growing. Personally I’m more of a fan of Dagon and when I’ve traveled I’ve come across places where I get that “outsider vibe” as soon as you step in. Of course that could just be because of who I am and I always feel like I’m an outsider. So anyway, Cthulhu sits beneath the waves in a continent that may or may not be the city of Atlantis since it’s located in the pole of inaccessibility it’s hard to tell. And it’s not like there would be any cause for anyone to go looking for anything in that location, except for being a fan, so when Cthulhu does rise from his slumber he’ll wreck havoc on Coney Island. So problem solved right? Just keep Coney Island around until you can get him struck by lighting. Or just make sure never to raise Cthulhu from his sleep. I’m still not sure why Cthulhu has become pop culture icon that he is. I really don’t understand how things get popular. But this is one instance where I’m not terribly upset to see one of my favorite authors getting credit for his creation… Even if he happens to have died almost 80 years ago at this point. Just keep telling the story over and over, adding in new features and new ideas. I personally believe that The Call of Cthulhu is one of the major influences into the Urban Fantasy genre. Since it’s dealing with “modern” times and the supernatural. True it has a horror element and is told in a deliberately spooky manner but the idea of Urban Fantasy is a fantasy novel that is set in an urban setting and just because it’s now almost 100 years after the roaring 20’s when Lovecraft’s books took place it is still very much an urban setting. And there’s a lot of unexplained items out there. And you don’t have to be a skeptic about it but you don’t have to be a hard core believer that we’ve not found everything on our planet. We discover new species all the time. Whose to say that the bloop wasn’t Cthulhu? And I for one Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn when I Cthulhu. Incorrigibly yours, J. E. Flint

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So like many people who grew up in the 80’s I grew up playing video games. A lot of good times were had in Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger and countless other role playing games from the 80’s and 90’s. Then I made a mistake in high school. I got accepted into the Beta for Everquest. I learned the fine art of Player Killing in Blackburrow. My actions eventually got me kicked off the PVP servers to the Carebear servers where I rerolled my Dark Elven Cleric Amir Kalfoxx into Amilya Kalfoxx, the first Dark Elven cleric of my server. And there started what some of my friends called my massive “trolling” campaign against MMO’s everywhere. See after I realized that PVP players don’t like to lose I moved on. I started focusing on the story of my characters. Which at the time was Amilya Kalfoxx, Dark Elven Cleric of Hatred. My hate would heal the whole world. A phrase I used frequently as I did the unthinkable. I solo’d. As a cleric in NeverQuest. From open launch until The Legacy of Ykesha. It took me forever to level high up doing mostly solo. Oh sure I could be found frequently in the company of other players, normally charging them to act as the team healer. I would frequently join a guild long enough to team up with others to do Raids. And boy the excitement I had staring at the ground for hours watching people’s life bars because internet connections and computers couldn’t handle all the magical effects at the time. I learned how much fun that was sitting staring at the ground for hours drinking mountain dew and eating pop corn. So much fun I swore I would never get my own planar gear cause it was so annoying to do so. I made a lot of friends in my EQ days. Some I still associate with. Others gone. But that’s neither here nor there. From there I moved on to City of Heroes. I stepped up my game of “trolling” by inventing Sogan Kaiser. A scrapper who specialized in Spider-man type dialogue while in combat. See I had figured out how to Macro things by this point so I would hit an attack and quickly hit a keyboard command to input a paragraph of text. Hit another attack and continue. I also become highly proficient at in character smack talk to the NPC villains, firing quips between my attacks. Such to the point where Sogan made an enemy of much of the Sentai Squad on my server. It was a jerk thing to do, I will admit. But I’m incorrigible so I don’t feel bad about it. See in Japan Sentai means Team. But these guys all looked like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But often I would compare them to the encounters that Sogan had with his friends who were rangers with mighty morphing powers. Needless to say they never appreciated it. But that was Sogan and his backstory and a few of the members thought it was funny and would congratulate me on my in character performance. Which I wouldn’t break. The Macro smack talk became a stable from that point on. For a time I moved to World of Warcraft and started the Amilya Kalfoxx line all over again. Amilya Kalfoxx the noble paladin, who was sworn to protect the Kalfoxx name against the evil elves. See It was stupid, and still is stupid of Blizzard to enforce the inability to switch sides and be the same race. I hate the Night Elves and Gnomes and would love nothing more than to be a human and on the side that could freely kill gnomes and “elves”. When I played EQ Gnomes earned a special place in my heart for how stupidly annoying they were in PVP. And I hate the design of the Night “Elf”. I was told by several Blizzard GM’s that my character couldn’t switch sides because it was story reasons. It’s not like anywhere in the history of war have we ever had someone switch sides. And it’s not like you can’t learn another language. They even disprove this in their own game. If you go to Booty Bay, and then later cities that were both Horde and Alliance the NPCs, regardless of race, can speak your language and work hand and hand with one another. The only characters who cannot speak two languages are Orcs and Humans. The Story is touted as being very deep as to why you can’t learn languages. Which is basically saying that WoW races are mentally incapable of learning new languages. Which means that for the sake of all they should be eliminated. But anyway, Amilya Kalfoxx progressed onward through her quest to smite the evil elves who weren’t yet introduced. And along the way I grew more proficient in the art of not breaking character. I moved on to EverQuest 2 and was thrilled that they allowed Dark Elves to switch from evil to good or a wood elf to switch from good to evil. It was a thrilling, if a little lame, quest that basically made you betray your starting city. I did so happily with Amilya Kalfoxx the Shadowknight turned Paladin. I hoped for the programming for NPC’s to sneer and jeer the now noble dark elf. Sadly the programming was incapable and I went back to WoW. This was about the time of the Burning Crusade. With the introduction of the Burning Crusade Amilya’s familia line now had the evil elves to fight. Kiadan of house Kinka, and her three sisters. I leveled the heck out of those alts until they were the same level as Amilya. And then began the epic battle… that I couldn’t do anything with because they were my alts. So I took it offline and began constructing a story about the fight. Amilya, a human, had aged and managed to kill Farilis, Mistal and Ayrios. Leaving Kiadan, the oldest sister, alive in the wilderness. I am looking forward to when I finally get around to finishing that story. I then moved on to Star Wars The Old Republic. Creating a family divided by the empi… I mean the sith and the republic. And reacted to the stories in the game as only family members would do. Shasti, the youngest sister out to make a name for herself gets her ship stolen. What does she do? She tells her older brother whose a Solider for the Galactic Republic and then she fires off a message to her bounty hunter sister. Only to be told that because we are in a society that is so divided and we all speak the same basic language we can’t communicate. I naturally informed a GM of this gross oversight into the role playing asspect of a Massive Multiple Player Role Playing Game. The GM told me in polite ways that I was crazy and that I should play the game. Which I told him, sincerely, that I was playing the game and that no where in their media did it mention that you wouldn’t be able to talk to family members. So, I’m that asshole who came into your PVP world, saw how stupid and repetitive the game was. Knocked over the building of legos you were using to construct your world and tried to have fun on my own. You raid so you can get better equipment so you can raid to get better equipment. You do pvp so you can kill more people by getting better gear to pvp. You farm 10 items for this npc then run north and find another 10 things to give to another NPC and then you pick 30 flowers. Those are not games. Those are a monetary time sink. I have a value that my time is worth. My company that pays me to do HL7 interfaces says I am worth XYZ Quatloos an hour. So if I pay these games $15.00 a month and I spend any time in them I am costing my time which is costing me monetary compenstation. These games are now so reptitive that there is no point to play them. When I talked to people in WoW when I came back for a bit they talked about how often they had to sit and grind their dailies. Not to call anyone out but I talked to a guy who I play Table Top RPGs with once a month and he said he used to spend about 2 hours a day doing his daily maintenance and grind. that’s a total of 14 hours a week, and total of 56 hours a month just working. Over and over again to make sure you can raid to get more stuff to raid. Games shouldn’t be a chore. They should be fun. This post was brought about by the new Destiny expansion. The achievement hunters talked about it and frankly it baffles my mind now as an adult to have to spend so much time doing the same repetitive actions again and not get something tangible for my time. A prime example of spending to much time on reptitive tasks. For those who didn’t want to click the link it’s a guy whose played the same raid so many times he can now solo it. Now I do love replaying games now and then. I replay Dragon Force often. Even though you learn the trick to combat really early on to be come nigh unstoppable, it’s my favorite “tactics” games. I love Ogre Battle and Final Fantasy Tactics but my go to game is Dragon Force when I want to replay a fantasy tactics game. But I don’t spend 50 hours a month doing it either. I would spend 50 hours a month if I could roleplaying on a server. But frequently no one is there to do that. They just want to collect 10 more flowers and return to the quest giver so they can get another quest to collect 15 wool. Incorrigibly Yours, J.E. Flint

My brother has challenged me to read the book series Malazan Book of the Fallen. See he knows I like to read books. He knows that I purchased a kindle so that I could slow down my reading speed to make books last me more than a few days. Well he’s been talking about this books series for better part of a few years now. Allow me to preface this, he doesn’t know why he’s reading these books. He’s been reading them, bought and read all the stuff, then moved onto the expanded/side stories, which is another 6 books. He describes these books as being a few thousand pages and each one has 24 chapters. So this sounds like it would be a serious undertaking. And I’m only reading these because he’s challenging me to do so. He’s given me some backstory for this story. All heresy, I’ve only got a bit of actual knowledge on this book series. Hell I guessed it was GURPS before he told me it was. That is not a good sign, in fact this is the sign of an amateur writer. How can I say that when I’m not a multi-national best selling author? Because I understand that a story should be run tightly and not require so many books. Robert Jordan died in his series, and it still didn’t end. When will authors learn we don’t want mega epic volumes? If you tell me there’s about 90,000 characters and they’re dying all the time in it and the writer can’t keep perspective and has to switch to progress the story and it also needs ten books to tell the story it makes me think the guy doesn’t know how to write. There are very few reasons you need a thousand pages and ten books to tell a story. And I suspect the reason is because the author likes to hear his own voice. And another thing I’ve noticed about GMs is that they try to stay faithful to their campaign that, and let’s be honest, they are the only ones who care about it. If your campaign setting was truly cool you would have written a story about it first and not subjected everyone to an celebratory wank at your campaign notes. So, here’s what I know about the series, based on listening to my brother. It sounds like it’s heavily influenced by Greek Mythology because there’s a lot of Gods in this series and they drop like flies. Meaning they’re only “Gods” because… reasons. The books take breaks between characters switching back and forth between them as the author gets bored of writing about one particular set of characters or realizes he needs to tell us how awesome/terrible a particular set piece is and can’t help but expand on this for a few thousand pages. His characters aren’t terribly interesting because you don’t get to spend much time with them before a person dies, or was dropped out of the campaign cause it was probably incredibly boring. Oh and because he needs explosions and stuff there’s guys who make TNT for some reasons… and then there’s the stereotypical land of the east. So, I’m going to read this series because my brother challenged me, then I’m going to see if my opinions have changed about it. They probably won’t but they might. I’m not an inflexible jerk. I can be swayed, but it’s hard. Incorrigibly yours, J. E. Flint

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