Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 50 - The Verdict

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites. 

Spider-Man

Jenny Sparks

The Batman

Blue Beetle (Ted Kord)

Lindy Reynolds (Dark Avengers)

Captain America

Gauntlet

Superman (All-Star Superman)

Elijah Snow

Cable (Cable & Deadpool)

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It's the Magic: Darkness has Ascended

Dark Ascension, the second set in the Innistrad block, is upon us. Things get...well, "darker" seems a bit obvious, but it is accurate. It'll actually be out on February third, so it's not upon us, really; it's moving toward the point where it's going to be upon us. So the darkness hasn't ascended yet so much as it's still queuing.

There Will Be Brawl, Episode One: Twilight Ruin

A few weeks ago, Skiltao suggested I watch the "There Will Be Brawl" web series. I did. I once thought that the only way to add this much insanity to my life this quickly was to start making friends with women. I'm pretty sure the only way to make it this enjoyable would be to have sex in front of them.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 49

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites. 

Elijah Snow is a pretty good candidate for heroism because after his team is crushed, his memory is erased, and he finds that the most powerful beings in the world have become more powerful and more evil, he returns to his mission of finding them and stopping them. Just by opposing The Four, Snow is putting himself at risk because it’s the right thing to do, but when he's about to defeat them, he gives them one last chance to renounce their path and do good for the world. When he destroys them, it's very reluctantly. 

 

Throughout the series he makes sure that many special people are taken care of by the Planetary organization. He engages people of dubious moral character and offers to be friends with them rather than enemies. He loves the world and fights to keep it beautiful and free. His duty has always been to journey to the strange corners of the world and share the wonders he’s seen with others. Maybe he isn’t entirely responsible, taking on The Four again and putting his team at risk, but they're adults and willing to follow him and the very same ideals that bring him into conflict with The Four. That said, as grumpy, disagreeable, and self-righteous as he is, he doesn’t ever back down from doing what he thinks is right. Even when he thinks he’s just a peon field agent, the commits Planetary to generous acts that protect the unique landscape of the world around him. Elijah Snow is a hero, and he’s one of the best.

Field Manual Kris: A Certain State to the West

I spent a week in Texas. Since I'm not working now, I'll be moving out of my apartment and over there with Terry and Katie when either my lease is up or my roommate finds a new sucker to take my place. This trip was definitely a dry run for that. I mean, once I live here, everyone's going to need more space than we usually get for a week-long visit, but that's an issue for March.

I also introduced Terry and Katie to Zombies!. Terry suggested that we begin playing Pandemic and only only get around to Zombies! if we lost the game. I tried to explain that the length of Zombies! precluded mixing it with anything else, but when it comes to zombies, the only substitute for experience is experience. Eventually (all Zombies! games finish in the time frame of "eventually"), because I had a lot of nothing to do the next day and didn't want to miss any of it, I helped Katie to the helicopter so we could all get some sleep.

Blog in Exactly 1000 Words: Whales

Sorry there's no It's the Magic this week. This whole week has been...wow. Updates on Monday.

SOPA & PIPA

You guys have probably heard of The House's Stop Internet Piracy Act and The Senate's Protect IP Act. The idea is that in order to protect the profits of companies whose intellectual property is infringed by internet piracy and bootlegging, The United States should be able to block sites which directly engage in piracy and selling bootlegs, as well as sites which support them.

This is a fine idea. Illegally downloading commercially available intellectual property--whether it's a movie, a book, a video game, or a comic book--is wrong. I won't elaborate why(it's baffling that I have to, but I can certainly address it another day.). Certainly, the internet is a large facilitator of these things.

However, SOPA and PIPA are not the way to address piracy and bootlegging. These bills allow websites to be held accountable for content created by users, for example, holding YouTube accountable for its comments section. They allow tech-savvy users to bypass them while locking out the rest. They put the onus for copyright cases onto the accused and not the accuser. Worse, they seek to create jobs in the movie and recording industry, but whatever money will end up back in the pockets of the MPAA and RIAA to make jobs, it can't possibly hope to measure up to those lost by putting small businesses and internet innovation at a disadvantage.

Anyway, there are a lot of sites that are blacked out today and a number who are actively working to get senators and representatives to change their votes. I've linked a number below and I suggest you look into it and take a moment to call or email your congressperson today about it.

SOPA Countdown

American Censorship.org

Comics Alliance

Google

Kaspersky

AOL

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 48

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites. 

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Blue Beetle 2 (Ted Kord. Let’s also take a second to give mad props to The Blue Beetle for being a legacy character that stays dead. Long live Jamie Reyes!), but I do know he figured out that the telepathic, meta-phobic Max Lord was behind an organization called Checkmate that was going to subvert the OMAC system that Batman helped create to expunge all superheroes from the planet.

GoMnomnom: It doesn't get blogged anymore...

Last week, Kris mentioned how he quit his job to go back to college and how torn up inside he was about it and all twelve of you had a good cry about it. Since he &@#$ed up talking about his last hitch and torturing you with slides of the same, it falls on me to get this done.

I'm only doing the torturous part, naturally.

It's the Magic: Worst Deck in the World

I couldn't find a clip of the episode where Data beats a guy at space finger-chess by playing for a stalemate, so here's 15 minutes of Worf getting shot down:

It's long been a dream of mine to make a deck that's incredibly bad. I mean, I've made hundreds of decks and about half of those have been god-awful. What I'm talking about is the creation of a deck that finds new depths for poorness of existence.

GoMnomnom: Sunsets on the Shipyard

Everyone thinks that the new year is a time to do something different with their lives. It's an arbitrary line that people take as permission from heaven to begin changing their life for the better or maybe a point at which they feel obligated to examine their actions from the last year.

I don't adhere to that; I've had my life uprooted and overturned in all four seasons, with and without cause. If change is going to roll out of bed and randomly decide to find us for a visit, I think we're entitled to hold a four am fire drill in it's apartment building.

To that end, I've decided that 2012 is the year I go back to college and finish my degree. Once. And. For. All. I've put enough cash away that I can afford to go back and finish up and live for a few months without the hassles of a full-time job. I have to cut back on the luxuries, but it'll be worth it to finally have a degree and be able to

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 47

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

Alright, let’s consider Dick Greyson instead of Damian Wayne, Captain America instead of Ultimate Captain America, Katy Kane instead of The Midnighter, the Blue Beetle instead of Booster Gold, Spider-Man instead of Deadpool, and instead of Rorschach, Crusader. Tentatively, of course.

Exit Past Through Doors on Right, Part II

Last Monday, I started a blog with the intention of talking about the best things of 2011[1], but ended up waxing nostalgic about one of Earth’s few female specimens which had gained my attention and respect.

After the assertive, confident woman I'd come to expect act so demure in a new setting, uncertainty was all I had. To this day, it's all I have. This isn’t a story where an omnipresent point of view reveals the full depths of each person’s character and the audience comes away with a clean resolution and an appreciation behind the A-Type personalities they encounter every day. It’s a real story, and like most real stories, we can only read the tea leaves and divine our own meaning from it.

People aren’t constants; a person isn’t a static value impervious to other factors. It’s easy to see people that way:

It's the Magic: Duels of The Planeswalkers

Duels of the Planeswalkers was just 3.99 on Steam the other day. Terry and some of my other friends have been nagging me to pick this up, so I figured that was the time to give in.

In retrospect, "never" was the time to give in. This...I expected a little bit of Magic to tide me over while I was away from friends, but I don't even know what this is anymore.

Triskelion.

Waits for Triskelion to kill his 1/1 Steel Overseer.

Does nothing.

Exit Past Through Doors on Right

There’s an old zen story[1] [2], A man asks a zen master what the key to happiness is. The master says, “Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies.” The man expresses his dissatisfaction with this answer and the master replies, “This is happiness, for each must happen, but any other order is tragedy.”

By that standard, 2011 was not a happy year. I started writing this to mention the best things of 2011, both within that my proximate social sphere and the world at large, but as I struggled with it, I came to the realization that couldn't reconcile everything.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 46

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

So, yeah, it looks like in my category of bad-guys who aren’t bad-guys, I like the ones who believe strongly in their purpose, don’t kick puppies, and provide the reasoning behind the actions of otherwise unsympathetic actors in the universe. These characters aren’t heroic in the conventional sense, though they do have strong beliefs that bring them into conflict with their own side. In fact, villains who just do whatever they want when they want usually aren’t that interesting.

This conflicts with my pettiness point somewhat. Sure Lex, wants to kill Superman and he doesn’t ever say, “I can’t kill Superman this way; it would destroy this orphanage.” In the trailers for the DC Universe Online, he wrecks the world (or at least Metropolis) just to kill the Justice League just to kill Superman. I suppose there’s a difference between pettiness of means and pettiness of ends. While Chaplain Action, He-Man of The Cloth and Victoria Hand have fairly high-minded goals and means, Lex and Doom have very petty ends and very highbrow means. Minor criminals have tiny goals and pathetic means. I suppose they’re called petty criminals for a reason.

Blog in Exactly 1000 Words: Community

Instead of finishing up a real blog tonight, I showed Richard some episodes of Community and talked with Terry about Warhammer Fantasy.

Expect something classy on Wednesday.