Good... good, let the hate flow through you...

Well, here we are.


Nine months. A record? Perhaps... most likely not. I joked this might become a semi-annual blog, perhaps one update every six months... and well, to be fair, that does imply two updates a year, so here we go!
 
Life has progressed swiftly since my post in March. I have found two wonderful new addictions to add to the roiling mass of fandoms and gaming madness that encompasses my free time. 

The first was picking up a game which has been out for a good many years now, that of Hat Team Fortress 2! 

 

Yes, that marvelous first person hat simulator first person shooter MMO that continues to prove that while killing boars and skeletons with swords and magic can be fun... sometimes, just shooting another persons character in the face is just as rewarding. I personally, have found the subtle art of roasting someone like a screaming, flailing marshmallow to be the most therapeutic and  rewarding of the nine varied classes available.

The second obsession of mine is quite recent, and has rekindled my love for a classic science fiction series:

Yes, the new, biggest and best game to come out in the world of online gaming is indeed my latest obsession, because if there is one thing setting people on fire with a flamethrower, or battering against their armor with a sword/axe/mace or blasting them with magic from your fingertips can't do... it's batter people with a sword/staff made out of light or shooting them with mystical evil lightning from yours hands!


BUT IN SPACE!!!


I would go into greater detail about the amazing dialogue options in the game, the top notch voice acting with many familiar and fan-pleasing voice actors playing impressive roles in the game, but instead, I am going to focus on one of the most polarizing subjects in the game: Space combat.

You see, space combat in SWTOR is rather... limited. Sort of a late addition to a game already packed to the gills with content. Mind you, that could have made it feel rushed or unnecessary, and many people have voiced their opinions that it does, in fact, seem exactly so, but personally? I enjoy it. I enjoy it /alot/.


It reminds me a great deal of the old Star Wars games like Rebel Assault, with a bit more freedom in where your ship moved and what it prioritized, rather then just firing and firing and firing, and repeating one level over, and over again, until you get the pattern they need from you correct... but then again, I enjoy rail shooters, as well as simple, Star Fox-esque space combat.


Many people complain that it looks like a Nintendo 64 game, to which I say, so what? It's hardly mandatory, and it brings back a bit of neat nostalgia for me. It costs me nothing extra, and gives you a chance to put your awesome starship to a more epic, sci-fi use.


Well, that's the news for this half the year, until we meet again!

~Signing off.

THE RETURN!

Well here we are again! Six months later and I still have yet to truly give up on this blog! Well, many things have, naturally, happened since my last little post, and some of them bigger and more important then my usual 'I found something else interesting and retro to gush about needlessly' kind of posts!


Well, let's see, to the meat of it, since my last actual post didn't cover most of 2010, I'll get that out of the way:


A few months after my post in March, Jessica and I attended our first BotCon, the official Transformers convention, in Orlando, Florida! Which, of course, meant a trip to a Disney-based Theme park! We decided that since Disney world is essentially just a bigger Disneyland, we would go to a different one, so, we chose the Animal Kingdom Theme Park. It was very pretty, more like a giant zoo mixed with Disney based Animal Rides and attractions. The only down side to the entire trip? The humidity. I remember when I was much younger going to the East Coast in June or July, the Washington DC area, and thinking 'My goodness, this place is warm, and I'm wet, sticky, and this is most unpleasant!' Well, I foolishly told myself I would be more prepared next time. I have never had my skin set on fire, but, I imagine, that is what it feels like. The end of June in Florida. Thankfully our rental car came with an A/C that could tap into the primal powers of the Arctic, and froze us to our cores.


Alright, that being the biggest event of 2010, we'll go to the very end of the year, as well as the beginning of this one! I finally got the crazy notion that Jessica and I would do well in our own setting, and convinced my parents to help me in purchasing a house! Yes, of course this seemed the logical thing to do! And I love living in my own home, fretting over bills I haven't seen yet, like an unseen specter haunting me from beyond! But that's part of becoming a full fledged adult I suppose... which, I'm not sure my mind has fully accepted, given the piles of unopened boxes and lumps of clothes stuffed into sacks still lumped around... but that's life for you! So, until the next meeting in six to nine months!


~Signing off

FOR THE WOMAN SEATED RIGHT BEHIND ME-- Seriously, stop looking over at me.... creepin me out...

1. Something I'll learn about you by looking at your LJ page for 13 seconds.
2. Which color you remind me of.
3. My first memory of you.
4. What Transformer you remind me of.
5. Ask you something I've always wondered about you, and your answer has to be as vague as possible to keep the suspense.
6. My favorite thing about you.
7. Give you a weird nickname.
8. What's on my shirt right now.
9. Challenge you to post this on your journal

-------

1. Well, obviously you enjoy rainbows, unicorns and sunny walks down the beeAAHAHAHA... ok... ok, no... seriously though... *wheeeew* ...I'm good.

2. Sort of a mix of blues and greens, so I guess sort of like the sea really.

3. A somewhat hyper, excited young girl leaping into my newest (and soon to be most recently failed) attempt at a Yahoo! Groups RPG... who upon her first post and question made me rewrite some of the hardset rules I had laid down to begin with... what can I say? It must have been destiny...

4. Rattrap. Full of snarky wit, and at times a bit too afraid to get close to others for fear of exposing yourself, but when it comes down to it, you're always there, and no matter how many times you tell me you'd probably cut and run, you never do, and you prove that you're a far more wonderful person then you may ever give yourself credit for being. Also you smell bad.

5. Um... well, there's not much I can think of for this one, really... so....k... next...

6. Well, I've gone over a few hundred different things that I thought I could put down, and in the end, will simply say 'all of the above'.

7. Jehsoo.

8. Grey. Varying shades. In stripes.

9. HA, TAKE-- wait... you did...ok then.

Seeking Out Strange New Life And--HEY! IS THAT REBOOT!? SWEET!

Yes, hello again, it is I, writing another small snippet of random nerd-indulging trivia! Well, as I stated in my last entry I was playing Star Trek Online, and the game was indeed great amounts of fun! Yes... yes... I clawed my way swiftly up through the ranks from Ensign to Admiral in little less then a month's time, and upon reaching the coveted rank of Federation Rear Admiral... promptly had my ass handed to me like an Ensign all over again! Yes, the jump from trouncing Cardassians and Romulans to Borg and the enigmatic Undine was QUITE the learning experience... that is to say, 'Wow! My new super cool ship is unstoppable! --Oh, no wait, I'm a pile of space debris now'.

But I digress! As the odd title above this particular entry indicates, my interest has once again shifted, if only temporarily. Yes, I have begun sitting through an old computer animated cartoon called ReBoot. Now, this is relevent to my usual passion, that of Transformers, as the animation studio that produced Beast Wars was also the show that created ReBoot.

ReBoot was a cartoon that took place inside a computer system named Mainframe. It followed the adventures of a Guardian program named Bob, whose mission was to protect the various computer systems connected to a network simply known as 'The Net'. In Mainframe he is often tasked with playing in various Video Games sent as massive purple blocks of energy into the city, where he fights against the computer's User. The User is never seen outside of his in-game avatars, and if he wins a video game, it wipes out a large section of the city, therefor, it is up to the Guardian to ensure that doesn't happen. The other threats to the city come in the form of two computer viruses, Megabyte and Hexadecimal, who obviously want to infect and/or destroy the city for themselves. 

ReBoot was notable for being the first fully CGI television show ever put on the air for multiple seasons, though often times that honor is mistakenly given to Beast Wars, as the show did have a bit more popularity at the time, and Reboot was only on the air originally for two seasons, in the United States at least, as the show was created by a Canadian company.

The show has been off the air for some time now, having started it's run in 1994 and ended in 2001. My recent rediscovering of Beast Wars sparked my desire to watch this series again, and it was perhaps by coincidence that shortly before I began watching ReBoot again, I stumbled upon a small teaser trailer for what appears to be either a... *ahem* 'reboot' of the series through a movie, or hopefully a continuation of the story the series ended on.

Well, I suppose that's all for now.

~Signing off

To Boldy Go Where Many People Are Going Too!

Well, it seems once again I am shifting topics quite abruptly here. After my last post I recently began testing the upcoming game Star Trek Online, and I must admit, it is quite enjoyable!

You begin as your basic run of the mill officer you'd see pantomiming in the background of some scene in one of the shows and work your way swiftly into 'expendable crewman' once you're whisked away to another Starfleet vessel to help defend it against a rogue Borg invasion. Though thankfully these Borg did seem to forget their brains or... processors, or what have you, and slap at you with all the fury of angry kittens. After you defeat your feeble foes, and endure the endless droning tutorial of the Medical Hologram on board the other ship, you finally return to your own vessel! ...where everyone higher ranking then you is dead. And considering you are only an Ensign... that must be about every enlisted member of your crew. However, you're not just any ensign, you're that guy/gal who has a last name! And in Star Trek, that is all you need to survive and likely make some form of meaningful difference to the story lines taking place around you! 

After you finish the swift tutorial levels, you can choose to customize your ship, look over the officer you've chosen and enter into the exciting world around you! The gameplay is varied enough to keep it interesting, most of your time takes place in the space segments of the game, be it traveling from star system to star system or battling with Klingons, Romulans, Gorn and the like to even doing mundane things like scanning some malfunctioning satellites. The other parts of the game are the away team missions, which are much the same as the space segments in that you can either have a mission devoted to combat, or just scanning some new kinds of plant life. The missions can get a bit repetitive, but nothing too unusual for an MMO.


Well, that's enough babbling about the game for now, I'll likely babble on about it more once I have the full version available to me, but for now...

~Signing off

HAPPY NEW--wow... September? That's how long...

Well now... this... is a bit surprising. I swore I'd posted here at least once in the last three months, but, ah... it would seem I might have been mistaken. Yes...

Ah, so, what has a...what has changed in the last three months, well lets see:

• We ended our first decade of the new millennium, entering into 2010, two years from the Mayan year of destruction! Huzzah!
• Transformers is still a driving force, though the collection's growth has reduced to a trickle of it's former overwhelming flood, though with the news of future releases proves to change that soon enough...
• Following up on my last topic of discussion, Batman has taken a bit of a backseat for the moment, though his presence is still deeply felt in this household, if only by a few devout followers of the Cult of the Bat. Namely me.
• World of Warcraft has gained renewed interest in me, my lust for more power and riches knows no bounds!! ...save downtime, writing, watching Kitchen Nightmares or other Gordon Ramsey fare, work... ah... well... when I am actually playing the game, my lust for these things knows no bounds!

Well, that was a very basic recap of the more fandom based events of my life... and I suppose that should be a good place to stop for a recap of my end of year events, and hopefully... hopefully, I will get a chance to write here more then just quarterly. For now though...



~Signing off

I am not vengeance, I am not the night... I AM NOT BATMAN!!

Why hello there! And welcome to another exciting installment of: That Thing That Might Get Updated Quarterly! I'm your host, Alex!

Now, let's see... where to begin... ah yes! Rather then bore you with another long winded post about Transformers. My soul. The black pits and eldritch powers I have sold myself and others to, to attain greater power and more valuable robot collectibles, I have decided to bring you up to speed on my newest diversion: That of the Dark Knight.

Now, Marvel comics and DC comics were a tightly knit part of my childhood, possibly eclipsing even that of my robot masters. I would say a great deal of that also came from my father as he had grown up with the stories of Super Men and Winged-Nocturnal-Mammal Men. I was of course absorbed quite swiftly by the tales of wonder that superheroes can bring, though I must admit, my interest waned a bit more as I reached my teenage years. Not to say that it ever truly disappeared, oh no! I always found joy in watching the cartoons or films produced about them, though in specific, I suppose that came down to two particular figures: Batman and Spider-man. Ironically two of the 'poster boys' for their respective companies.

But as it came down to it, I found myself revisiting one of my most beloved shows, though I cannot say from my childhood, as it aired around the turn of the millennium. Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. This film... is gold. It brings together the world of Bruce Wayne as the Batman and the world of Terri McGinnis, his successor 20 years in the future, in a way, I had never dreamed. Sure the show had it's moments, revisiting old enemies and the like... but this film was the real deal. But then again, it revolved around the true final showdown between Batman and his twisted nemesis. How could that not be pure unadulterated win?

Censorship boards and 9/11 is how. Yes, that's right. A dark, brooding masterpiece was cut, spliced and hacked into a simple, ordinary masterpiece. You see, both the unaltered and altered films are similar enough to be fantastic... but the changes that were made... were ludicrous at times! There was a scene with red spray painted words changed to purple, simply because it looked too much like blood. Seriously? The color red for paint is off limits? Fine. Why not. Yellow looks a bit too much like urine as well. Right out. Green? Bile. No. But I digress.

Next we had the real kicker. The death of the Joker. Now.. I won't say to much, but, suffice to say, cutting out the Joker's final words should have been a crime. He had finally pushed the envelope too far, and the censored version gave him an easy, clumsy way out. No. He died the only way he could have. Leaving you with a grim smirk on your face. Other then that it was merely a few changed lines here and there, things that were just juvenile, and could easily have been ignored.

I know I've rambled alot about one little film, rather then any large, over arcing topic, but... well... there will be plenty of time for that later. Till then...

~Signing off

The darkness to which I sold my soul...

So it is no surprise that I babble on endlessly about Transformers on this blog, but there was a time when such would not have been the case... however, my love was rekindled by the newest incarnation of the animated television show and at this time, I had decided to rope my ever-loving girlfriend into my obsession... little had I realize the depths I would be forced to lower myself into to accomplish this goal...

It began simply enough at first. A year prior I had taken her to the Michael Bay film, and she seemed genuinely intrigued, but not yet ready to leap onto the Transformers band wagon... so, when I was watching the first episode of Transformers Animated, I came across one singular moment that I saw as the gateway to hooking her in and making her slave to the cybertronian gods:


A simple image, yes, but... given some of my beloved's interests in fiction, namely those of a homosexual nature... that small shading of red on Bumblebee's cheeks-- that in all honesty, I have still yet to discern as to WHY it was there.-- was the one thing that could win her over.

...I think it was then, deep in the pit of my soul that I knew what was to come... as though a premonition... I felt a heavy hand on my heart, and a whisper in my mind telling me that once the doorway was open... it would never be closed.

I stepped through it regardless. And the obsession began as I detailed it in my blog before, those small little drabbles of toys I mentioned before have grown, filling shelves and desks to the brim with small, mechanical dieties... and yet, I was not yet satisfied with just the small victories... so I introduced her to Beast Wars, as I mentioned before as well. I used similar tactics, finding the two characters she would identify with, find the most plausible way to construe a relationship with, and now...


now....



Eh Gods...

what have I done....

I admit that I used tactics to decieve her into falling for the pairing above, some I thought merely a clever ruse that would remain undiscovered while her love for Transformers grew... but now, her power exceeds even my own...she is corrupting me... showing me what were once clever ruses... leave very real questions unanswered...

I am undone....

~Signing off

GIVE ME YOUR FACE!!

Ah yes...the title, it will explain everything to those who recall those famous, motivational words, uttered by none other then Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime as he attempted to resolve a situation through careful diplomacy, rather then brutal violence.

Yes. Thank you, Michael Bay, you once again take my hopes and smash them on the ground from your throne of money and broken dreams. To say simply that Revenge of the Fallen did not meet my expectations is an understatement. Now, I have complained about the first Transformers film, to be sure, there Autobots were hardly on screen, and the Decepticons even less! But still... when I compare these flaws to the newest entry into Michael Bay's disturbingly idiotic vision of my beloved franchise... they seem quite insignificant.

I know this is quite late, and it seems quite unlikely Transformers is playing even at a five dollar theater in the bad part of town anymore... but I wouldn't be keeping to my schedule if I made -timely- updates.

Now then, Revenge of the Fallen was a film I was looking forward to with every fiber of my being, the anticipation was maddening, and ever bit you saw on trailers or in stills were always just so fantastic! But... that's because no one really TALKS in those trailers, and truly, that is what they probably spent millions of dollars trying to cover up. The dialogue in this film makes the first's seem like it should have won an Oscar. Character development must have been thrown out in favor of a few more minutes of explosions and Shia LeBouf screaming. The only new human added to the cast has one motivation it seems, be annoying, scream like a woman, and just be an albatross around the neck of the other characters. Bravo screenwrites, truly, you have mastered the art of entertaining five year old children.

This also has the unfortunate side effect of making the act of telling a story almost impossible. Either the characters are off rattling away on some randomly unexplained tangent, or they evil robots are talking about vague, unexplained acts of revenge for something that is never really explained.

It should be worth mentioning that though they are delivering lines that would have to have a multimillion dollar salary behind them to get you to actually say without groaning in agony... the voice acting was actually quite good. The new robots, for as little as you see them, are voiced well for their part, and certain characters actually changed how they spoke to better fit their character: namely Starscream. Gone is the pseudo-macho deep voice from the first, and now he whimpers and squeaks like the whipped little girl he was in the old show.

And now we return to the title. You see, in the first film, Optimus was quite caring, respectful of innocent life, and only turned to open violence when there was little choice besides., much like he was in the cartoon. But in Revenge of the Fallen, he is particularly blood thirsty, seeming to actually ENJOY killing his misguided brethren... and is probably the most disturbing turn in this film.

Well, I think I've prattled enough, bottom line, Revenge of the Fallen was not a good movie. Seeing the Transformers was enjoyable but...that couldn't save this film for me in the long run. And I shudder when I look online and find articles declaring it has become the 9th highest grossing film EVER in the United States... what does that say about this country now days? Truly...


~Signing off