Warp_Factor

I'm still around from time to time, as is Deathspider. Jack hasn't been playing CoH, but he's still gaming with us in Another Popular Game Pertaining to Constellational Combat. Message me sometime, we should catch up.

F$*k those other months. Pride Month has Batwoman and Midnighter and Apollo. Pride Month can kick the s^%t out of those other months.

Happy Pride Month, peeps. I haven't really been playing lately, but I'll have a drink in your honor. Possibly several drinks. You never know. Be your bad selves and never apologize for it.

What do you mean? She gets her spine fixed and decides to go back to being Batgirl, that's how. It's really pretty simple. Killing Joke doesn't need to be retconned out for her to be Batgirl again any more than Knightfall needed to be retconned out for Bruce to be Batman again. She got paralyzed. She got better. She went back to her old role that, if you've been reading BoP, she clearly misses. Simple as that.

I don't know for a fact about digital movie distribution, but in digital video game distribution like Steam the reason the prices are like that is because retail chains will literally stop stocking a publishers' titles if that publisher undercuts them in the digital market. Even with digital game sales exceeding brick and mortar retail sales now, publishers simply can't afford to be completely removed from the brick and mortar market. It's kind of similar with comics, but the comics market is so small that the concern isn't so much that retailers will stop stocking a publisher's books, it's that undercutting them in digital could damage their profits badly enough that they'd just close up shop. I've read about a couple major comics retailers closing up already or making firm plans to, even with digital comics in their infancy and at high prices, that's how scared some retailers are of them.

Here's some interesting thoughts on that.

It sure looks to me like the Asgardians are flying through space when they go to Jotunheim. They refer to it as another "realm", but a realm could just as easily be another galaxy, another solar system, whatever.

He didn't use the word "alien", no. I'm not sure what else you'd call a non-human non-god being from another planet, though. I'm probably going to see it again tomorrow night, I'll see if I can remember the exact words he uses.

The movie very explicitly explains at the beginning that it's version of the Asgardians are aliens and definitely not actual gods. It's much clearer on that than the comics are. So much so that I'm beginning to wonder how many people who've complained about black Heimdall actually watched the film

I'd go further than that, actually; they're Ken Brannagh's version of the Ultimate version of the Marvel version of the Norse gods. Even in the classic Marvel mythos the Norse gods really are gods. The movie makes it very clear that they are not actually gods at all, despite having been worshipped as such.

Nonsense, everybody knows Snorri's Edda clearly refers to Odin's giant robot security guard.

If Marvel had stuck close to Norse mythology I'd agree with you, but keep in mind that this movie is asking us to accept that the Norse gods are really super powered space aliens whose magic is actually unimaginably advanced technology, and that Odin is a peace-loving protector of the weak rather than a god of war and death. If you can swallow that, I don't see what's so hard about accepting a black Heimdall, especially given how well Idris Elba played the role. As for Hogun, the way he's always been drawn in the comics it's not really a stretch to make him Asian, though I did think he was probably the weakest member of the cast.

No, people who like kickass superhero action enjoyed all the SMASH fighting scenes. And no one thinks X-Men 3 was the best movie of the trilogy. Anyone who claims to is messing with your head.

If I remember right, Tom Hiddleson's said he's signed with Marvel for 3 movies, one of which is Avengers. Good odds the 3rd will be a Thor sequel.

I mostly was fine with the lighting, but at the end of his fight with the Destroyer and in the opening sequence with the war with the frost giants, I have to agree. My friend and I actually showed up a couple minutes late and had to find seats during that first scene, and we literally couldn't see anything around us in the theater. It was just dumb luck that we found decent seats without accidentally groping or sitting on someone. :P This was 3d, so in 2d it might not have been so bad.

That's going to come down to what the story is really about in Avengers. Something I found myself thinking about after seeing Thor was, if this movie had been about whether or not Thor could beat up the bad guys it would have been horrible. He's just too powerful to base a story around whether or not he can kick butt, but at the same time you can't really depower him without screwing up so much of what made him awesome. You can do that with Spider-Man or Cap or even Hulk or Superman (since they have obvious weaknesses that can be exploited), but not Thor. So the trick is to make the story about something other than whether the hero is tough enough to beat up the villain. Thor did a great job of that; at no point are we seriously in doubt over whether Thor can win a fight, either he's human and can't do jack or he's an Asgardian and can take basically anything that gets thrown at him. They had to create a story about characters and the world they inhabit rather than about punching, and it worked. If Marvel does the same with Avengers, they'll be golden no matter how much disparity there is between the characters' powers.

Yep, that was Hawkeye. Agreed more or less about the 3d, too; it didn't really bother me exactly, but it wasn't the best 3d I've seen. I expect I'll see this again in the theater, and if it's in 2d I won't be too upset about it.

That said, this movie kicked my @$$. Such an awesome cast, I had no idea who Tom Hiddleson was before and now he's one of my favorite villain actors. Someone should cast him for a Bond movie, he's plays a colossal a-hole so well it's ridiculous. And they managed to sell me on the crazily elaborate costumes. The biggest gripe I have is that the last fight wasn't as insanely great as the battle in Jotunheim near the beginning, and if that's the worst thing I can think of to say about a movie that had the kind of trainwreck potential this one had (not that I expected it to trainwreck, just saying it really could've if it hadn't been handled well), it's all good.

Agreed on both counts. I had previously thought Mamoa made a good choice for Conan, but after watching this I am SO sold. His dialogue is only okay, but his physical acting and facial expressions are f'n fantastic; the guy scares the crap out of me with just how much he seems to enjoy killing the hell out of everything he can get his sword into. The fast cuts aren't doing it for me, but it's pretty common for trailers to overdo that sort of thing. I'll catch it on opening night, but I do wish they'd stayed truer to the source material and gone for a hard R rating.