Samothrake

I like it that they are taking things slowly with the crossovers. And starting small
It's been eight months now with the New52. The two page ‘editorial’ section at the end of Superman #8 this week, they give a good explanation as to what’s going on. They are calling it ‘world building.’ They seem to have a plan. These little crossovers are a way for them to show that these characters all live in a shared universe. This isn’t really for us long-time readers. It’s for the supposedly new readers who supposedly have started reading these things with the ‘softboot.’ According to DC they have spent the last eight months establishing these characters in their own little part of the world, and now we get to see how these new-ish characters interact with each other. Although some have been connected from the start.

The Bat-books and the GL series have been the most untouched from this reset, and they have interacted throughout the entire time. Animal Man and Swamp thing have been connected pretty much from the start with The Rot, and that story-line is going to come to a head soon as well.

These two little ‘events’ that are happening in May are more akin to what Marvel did with the X-books a while ago with ‘Days of Future Past’ and ‘Mutant Massacre.’ I like that those of us who want to follow the story don’t have to buy much more than we already do, and that the whole thing lasts only a month, instead of six and flows through twenty books a month.


Having read the “Rise of the Vampires’ crossover between Justice League Dark and I Vampire, I think it was pulled off really well. I hope that The Culling and Night of the Owls can be done as well.

I have not seen the original '60s version of Dark Shadows, but I rather enjoyed the 1990 version.

You folks are all missing the point. He was bitten by a radioactive mutant spider. As such it can have more than eight legs and can have grown a head all its own. This symbol is just acknowleging the mutantness of the spider that gave Miles his powers.

for me the best part of the trailer was with the bike.

"Oh yeah! that's what I'm talkin' about"
"Brake! Brake!"
BOOOM
"Not brake, not brake!"

Remember, there's a reason that people have nicknamed the hobby 'Warhammer $40,000.'

I'm a little confused by that article.

They say the film cost $350 million to make, but needs to gross $600 million to 'break even'? Somehow I just can't see them spending $250 to distribute and market this movie.

Something's not right with the math in Hollywood, and this ain't the first time I've noticed. But it is the most recent and the biggest difference.

The wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Since the whole thing is based on a 200 page book told in the first-person, the on-screen story had to be expanded in places, but I think that they succeeded admirably.

The visuals really impressed me, which is usually something that I don’t really pay attention to. Everything from the set pieces, the costumes, armor, jewelry, the fliers and all the props were extremely well done. Even the CGI characters were very well done, including Woola. Unlike some movies, the CGI characters really seemed to have presence on screen.

And, most importantly for me, there was nothing in the story that took me out of the story. Nothing that disrupted my suspense of disbelief and made me say ‘wait-a-minute, that’s not how that works.’

I shall how have to read the e-book I have been putting off since I heard of this movie last year.

I liked the lightsabre flashlight (I think I may have actually seen that one somewhere), the Cloud City Desklamp and the Deathstar Basketball. Though the carbonite popsicle is cool too.

On to this week’s episode. The one thing that kept going through my mind was ‘the sooner Shane and Andrea are out of this group, the better for the group.’ However, Andrea did make a good point to Shane in that a lot of his decisions are not necessarily wrong, sometimes even right. It’s just the way he goes about them that’s going to get him (and probably others in the group) killed. But there was really good character development between Shane and Rick in this episode.

Another thing about the passage of time in this show hit me. According to Hershel near the end of the previous episode, Randall wouldn’t be walking on his leg for ‘at least a week.’ So the episode has to open ‘at least a week’ later (Randall is shown to be able to walk), and at least 10 miles from the farm. Actually I can accept this amount of time passing. It leaves enough time for Rick to figure out how he wants to confront Shane, and leaves Shane to stew for a while as well. Also, the entire episode takes place within the passage of a few hours. Add in the fact that Rick keeps talking about the ‘approaching winter’ (which is a good thing) and the fact that the writers have played fast and lose with how much time has actually passed this season and I have to wonder just how long the group has been mooching off of Hershel’s good nature.

I want to comment on the Lori and Andrea confrontations in the episode, and both character’s stupidity. First, I respect Lori’s decision to be house wife, but her trying to push Andrea into that role is just plain stupid and wrong. Especially to a career girl like Andrea was before the zombie apocalypse. One person’s clothing does not put any extra burden on the other five women at the farm. And just how much cleaning other than dishes is taking place on any particular day? For Lori to expect that every woman in the place will revert to roles from three hundred years ago after having the relatively equal rights and roles of the modern day that they have enjoyed for their entire lives is incredibly stupid. But Lori is not the only one to show incredible stupidity in this episode. Andrea shows some as well. Also, I realize that Andrea a rather fatalistic world view now, and her giving suicide-girl the chance to ‘opt-out’ may have been the right thing to do, but the way she went about it – especially how calculated it was – was the wrong way. Especially after she talked to Shane about the way he approaches problems.

The wife and I just got around to watching the last two episodes we had recorded. And so I think it’s time that I commented on them, and some of your comments as well.

About time in the last two episodes: boy did I have trouble with that! Especially the one from the 19th.

Right at the beginning of the episode we have that wonderful ‘previously on Walking Dead’ and it shows the lighting and where the sun is very nicely. In fact when Lori has her car crash we actually see the sun through the trees. It would appear to be about ‘two fingers’ from the horizon – or an hour or two before it sets. During the ‘previously on’ segment, we are also shown how light it was in the bar when the two others come in, and the Rick baddassery. Now when Lori crashed ‘Maggie’s new car,’ the sun is in a position that looks to be an hour, perhaps two, before sunset. So she was out for at least a few hours.

When our two new gunshot victims show up, they are shown in the doorway in full daylight, and while they do close the door during the comercial break, their entire scene is played out with lots of light coming in through the windows in the door and windows at the front of the bar. The ‘previously’ recap ends with the shooting. We then fade to black, and fade back in with Lori in an uncomfortable position in her crashed car and an walker trying to get in the windshield, illuminated only by what appears to be her dashboard hazard light flashing. Full dark here. Fade to black again and commercial. Back from commercial, and we get a brief replay of the bar shooting. First we get a shot from the outside of the bar with the sound of the three gunshots. It’s total night here, with what looks to be the moon out, judging by the illumination we see of the buildings and vehicle. We then cut to inside the bar, and Rick is still pointing his gun at newly perforated fat-guy, and then holsters it. Glen and Hershel come up to Rick to look at his handiwork and the episode is properly started. So, in between episodes, in between gunfire and breathing even, it’s gone from what could have maybe, maybe, have been ‘the sun has just touched the horizon’ to ‘full night with a moon shining.’ Wow. Talk about jarring a person out of the story.

Now I’m going to go on a slight tangent here about day, sun, and night. See, a couple years ago I had the chance to go to Indianapolis for the first time. Now, being from Colorado all my life, something really struck me about that area with it’s flatness. See, here in Colorado, when the sun goes behind those mountains it gets dark, sometimes quite fast. And that can happen pretty fast. But pretty much after 9PM, you can consider it night. And that’s in the summer. In December, it can be full on night-dark at 5PM. However, in Indianapolis on the Fourth of July, I was quite surprised to see that it was still light at 10:30, almost 11 at night. The reason I bring this up is because what we’re shown of ‘Georgia’ is very similar to what I saw in Indiana, with lots of open land and a few hills. What I mean by all this is that with no working clocks in the show, it could have been quite late at ‘night’ before the sun was fully over the horizon and twilight had faded into full night. But even that progression takes longer than an eyeblink. What we have here folks is television a retcon without even the courtesy of telling us ‘this is what really happened.’

Now I’m totally OK with having Lori being unconscious for several hours after her car crash. And depending on which way the bar is facing, it could be illuminated by the sun quite nicely until it went behind the other buildings in town. But to go from that ‘previously seen’ scene to what we’re shown is totally wrong.

The only hesitating the group did between the shooting and heading out was to scavenge weapons and ammo, and that took all of 30 seconds. “Let’s head back,” Hershel says after to them after their wordless understanding about the shooting. Before our group can even get to the door, headlights from the interloper’s truck sweep the bar and our group starts to hide. We’re then shown the truck pulling up, hear a guy get out and call for Dave and Tony. Then we’re shown two silhouettes through the curtains at the bar windows and later we’re shown all three men outside through the curtains

Now we don’t know how big a group this other party actually has, but we see that there was five men sent out scavenge the town and we hear mention of a Jane (who was apparently attached to Dave or Tony) and possibly others back at their camp. So that group was at least six people big. But for now it really doesn’t matter. A part of their group went out with five people, only one came back. That’s worse odds than going out on a mission with just you and Shane! That survivor isn’t going to go out scavenging any time soon.

Anyways, on to Lori, her stupidity, and Shane’s lies. When Shane finds her and she asks if Rick is back, and he replies “safe and sound,” the first words out of her mouth should have been “well, why isn’t he with you?” I realize that she was rattled by her crash and confrontation with the walkers, but to not to think that he should be in, and leading the search party when we’re led to believe that there are only so many roads to that lead to the town? Yeah, not very smart there Lori.

And then Lori just sets around the house, waiting for Rick to return with Hershel and Glen? Ok, I can see getting some rest, and dressing wounds, but really. Then we’re shown the sun just peeking over the horizon, get a scene with Maggie, suicide-girl and Andrea, before we cut to Shane preparing to go look for Rick with Andrea. Then the Suburban comes down the road with the missing men +1 (Randall). So our group spent at least four to six hours after getting Randall into the vehicle getting home.

So the vast majority of the episode takes place during full-on night, after the previous episode ended at sunset at worst. I can kinda accept that, but the time it takes to get back to the farm after we’re led to believe that town is perhaps an hour horse ride from the farm. Final verdict: an interesting episode with some possible future complications due to the opposing group, but ultimately deeply flawed due to the episode-to-episode hand-off time blunder and how little happened during the amount of time we’re shown has passed.

According to my brother - who has been playing Pathfinder since it came out - the low leve stuff is great. However, you know how the high level stuff in 3.5 started to break? Well, according to him, since Pathfinder put more oomph into the low level stuff that breakdown starts sooner in Pathfinder. Like level 12.

I think I just may have puzzled out Lori’s motive in going to get Rick. It is exactly because she thinks the girl is being zombified.

At this point, there’s four men on the farm. T-Dog and Shane are out burning the zombie corpses. Dale’s doing whatever Dale does, and Daryl is off being mad at the world. If the girl turns zombie, it is bad for all. However, if Shane realized she’s turning, at this point, he’s likely to go in and kill her right away. The other girls there will do everything they can to stop him, which means somebody else is getting hurt. Dale won’t do it. T-Dog has been mostly talk this entire time. And Daryl is off being mad at the world. So Lori wants to go get Rick, tell him her suspicions, and have Rick be the shield between Shane and changing-girl.

At the end of all this, I see Hershel and his zombie daughter dead, with Maggie and the other boy joining the group to go onward.

Of all the fights taking place here (if they are actually as shown), the one that I think would be the closest, and the one I am most looking forward to is the Beast/Cage fight. Cage is stronger and harder to hurt than Beast and has some training by Iron Fist (that he never seems to use). Beast is faster, smarter and more agile than Cage, plus has a fighting style that Marvel describes as ‘similar to Spider-man’s” and has trained with Captain America. Both men have a bit of healing (Cage ‘accelerated’ vs. Beast ‘regenerative’), though by the descriptions, Beast’s is better. Both men have ‘superhuman stamina’, but Cage can go for longer before tiring (with Beast listed as several hours and Cage at 24 hours). We all know about Cage’s ‘steel skin’, but Beast also is listed as having Superhuman Durability able to “withstand great impact forces” …”physical impacts, such as falling from several stories or being physically struck by many super-humanly strong beings that would either severely injure or kill a normal human with little to no discomfort.” This is the kind of punishment Beast will take from Cage.

I really am looking forward to the fight, and I think its outcome comes down to how smart Beast fights, how many gadgets and how much of the environment the writers let him use. I really hope they let Beast win as he hasn’t really had much in the way of fight wins in recent years (most writers seem to be using him for his science), while Cage for the past two or three Bendis years has been in the spotlight doing Avenger-y things. (and having sex and procreating with his now-wife.)


The other fight I think will be interesting will be the Emma/Hulk one. As Sinister proved recently, Emma’s ‘diamond’ form is not indestructible as we were led to believe for the past few years. (of course that all depends on when AvX takes place, when the whole thing was written, and if the writers care.) Hulk, on the other side, has proven in the past to be rather resistant to telepathy (dependent on incarnation and anger levels.) Depending on how hard Hulk pushes attacks on Emma, she can’t afford to not be in her diamond form to avoid being squished. But while in that form, she cannot use her telepathy. I suspect this fight will be half within Hulk’s mindscape (which is no simple thing, what with his MPD) and half Emma trying to keep away from him so she can do the mental battle thingy.

It's too bad that this section isn't part of the "everybody can post" areas of the forums. It really should be.

The wife and I went to see this flick this week. We enjoyed it. There was a constant sense of tension as the team was pretty much playing catch-up the entire movie.

I liked the fact that the Ethan Hunt character took more of a leadership role in the movie. Sure, he was team leader in the other ones, but this one seemed to spread the action around to the rest of the team nicely. They all got moments to shine, and we liked that. In fact, Hunt was so leaderly in this one that I rather expected him to be the director of IMF by the end of the movie. And he was kinda, with the way he handed out the phones to his three teammates at the end. Whatever his actual rank, he does seem to be pretty high up in the organization’s ladder. But to have him accepting a mission at the very end of the movie kinda broke that line of reasoning.

I often tell the wife that I know to much to truly enjoy certain things as presented in movies. The big one that jumped out at me in this movie was the scene where Hunt and the other team member are being shot at under water. Sure it's a nice effect, but I watch Mythbusters. And because I do, I know that any bullet loses pretty much all of its power within six inches of hitting water. The Mythbusters tested that at with much closer range, and with a variety of weapon powers. The more powerful the weapon, the more the bullet loses when it hits the water, with .50 cal sniper rifle bulets disintigrating pretty much on contact with the water. So that scene, while fun and dramatic, is not at all realistic.

One other thing we noticed with some of the very close ups of Tom’s face is the man is starting to show his age. He will be 50 later this year.

They also have teeny, tiny medicine droppers you might try to apply the release agent without damaging the paint.

In many ways DVRs are the new VCR. When the VCR came about the entertainment industry sued to make them illegal. That failed. When DVRs were introduced, multiple suits were tried and each time they were defeated.

Some have said that a VCR tape is a ‘permanent’ copy. However, there’s nothing stopping a person with a DVR and a DVD recorder from doing the same. The inputs and outputs are there and they have been ever since the introduction of the DVDR. I know of a gentleman (and no, I’m not talking me here) who has for the past couple years been renting from his local library and making personal copies of everything. He is a pirate.

There are antenna/cable tuners for your PC that turn it into a DVR. I don’t know of a single PC sold in the US in the past 4 years that hasn’t had a DVD recorder in it. My TiVo is connected to my PC by way of wifi and a little program provided by TiVo called TiVo Desktop. With it, I can transfer my TiVo recordings to my PC and free up space on my recorder. They don’t have infinite capacity. (I first found out about the TiVo Desktop a couple years ago when I was trying to save my recordings of a Canadian/South African show called Charlie Jade.) Once on my PC, another program translates it to DVD format and my DVDR makes me a ‘permanent’ copy, just like that VCR tape. In fact once any program is on a PC – from many a different format – it’s rather easy to convert it to DVD. There are even free programs to do so nowadays. They will even let you chop out the commercials easily.

So, this longwinded explanation is to say that DVRs, even when used to make a ‘permanent’ copy, are no more illegal or pirating than a VCR.

But the entertainment industry are very worried about them because of the ease in which they can be used to let people become pirates for profit. Once on a PC and edited (which might take a couple hours, depending on edits), a two hour program can be recorded to DVD in under 10 minutes. That same program on a VCR would still take two hours to make each copy. With DVDs, there are copiers that you can buy that can let you make 10 or more copies at the same time. 60 copies an hour – 1440 possible in a day. That terrifies the Hollywood executive.

Unfortunately the entertainment industry has taken a very weird and unrealistic stance on piracy. They see every copy watched/copied, but not paid for, as a lost sale. However, no matter how many studies that show that those who pirate actually buy more stuff than those who don’t, and despite the fact that we don’t know how many people who pirate would have never have bought the product ever, they continue to cling to their ridiculous views. The entertainment industry’s Nirvana would be that each time a person listens to a song, views a movie or television show, or reads a book, they get paid some money. It will never happen, but that’s what they want.

Anyways, DVR=VCR as far as the courts are concerned. And that means that no DVR is a piracy tool any more than any VCR is.

Yes but Immortals was the beginning of gods and men when the defeat the titans.
This is the end of gods and men, when the titans make their carefully planned return.