Oh boy, okay, here we go. This trailer is… longer than the original teaser trailer, and we, um, get a look at some more characters, like Wonder Woman and Lex Luthor. So yeah, that’s exciting… but I’m gonna be honest. I’m beyond disappointed in how this is developing. I want to be excited for this movie, but it looks so boring.
Spoilers after the cut!
The Inheritance Cycle is one of those series that is just filled to the brim with bad idea after bad idea. While that was rather apparent when reading the first three books, it didn’t occur to me just how much the author had no idea what he was doing until the last book. Like other fantasy narratives, the mechanics in The Inheritance Cycle are based on numerous myths, fairytales, and folklores. But one of the many problems with The Inheritance Cycle, however, is that it has no restraint. It doesn’t know which myths to use and which ones not to. It also doesn’t help that, once again, the story relies on telling and not showing.
We can see this in numerous instances, from the morality between the good and bad guys to how magic works to the roles dragons play in the narrative. The Inheritance Cycle has many common fantasy tropes, but it doesn’t utilize those tropes to the best of its ability, or at all. Instead, they become pointless instances in the story that rise up out of nowhere and have no impact on anything. A perfect example of this is when the series introduced changelings in the fourth book, Inheritance.
Who has a soul? The question seems pretty simple when we first think about it, but can get complicated very quickly. Do animals have souls? Unborn fetuses? Plants? The soul is a tricky thing to discuss, largely because there is no way for us to truly quantify or fully understand the soul. People who are religious tend to think of the soul from everything as the spirit that lives on after your death to that spark of God that truly makes you you. Most people will say that living things have souls. But what about your computer? Does it have a soul? This is a question that sci-fi authors have asked about robots and/or androids over the years. Can something man-made have a soul in a similar way that a human does? Is it something more than an inanimate object or more like a human being? Age of Ultron is one recent movie that gives us a glimpse of this issue.
Spoilers after the jump.
More puns! The praise train for Splatoon and Nintendo keeps going!
For many of us, video games are a form of escapism. This can come in a few flavors, either by having equal standing in the game’s society, being able to perform outlandish feats, or just experiencing a world unlike your own. Another form of escapism is getting the chance to roleplay as something other than yourself. One of the most common ways to roleplay in gaming is to take on a character of another gender. In light of this, I want to discuss Splatoon and Super Smash Bros. some more.
Our plot train has left the station and continues to chug along in this week’s episode of Hannibal. “Dolce” is both a meal course and a musical term: for food it means sweet, in music it means sweetly and softly. While many elements of this episode gave the illusion of sweetness and delicacy, its ending was far from it.
Spoilers, trigger warnings for gore and the usual Hannibal fare below!
As a kid, one of my favorite movies growing up was The Mummy (and its sequel, The Mummy Returns. It had no other sequels). I was drawn in by its pseudo-Egyptian mythos, but I stayed for its protagonist, Evelyn O’Connell (neé Carnahan). Evy was a fantastic, formative protagonist—she was driven, brilliant, and altogether too reckless for her family’s liking, and despite some scenes where the movies tried their best to make a damsel out of her, she’s a character I return to again and again as an example of great writing.
With all that in mind, today’s fic is a charming story about Evy and Rick O’Connell in between the events of the movies. The Mummy franchise is filled with timeskips, so the fic has a lot to expand on. We start in 1926 Cairo, as the O’Connells get married, and follow them through their adventures, their careers, the Second World War, and the rest of their lives together.
A new Pixar offering is always going to get me in a theater seat, and Inside Out was no exception. I saw it a few days ago, and while it was definitely a good movie, I don’t know that I’d call it a great one. Mild spoilers below the jump.
What child didn’t know about Goosebumps growing up? And what adult looks back on their Goosebumps-filled childhood with any kind of joy or nostalgia? Certainly not me. As I have an older brother, Goosebumps was an inevitable part of my adolescence, and not one that I particularly enjoyed. The entire horror genre has never been my thing, and while looking back I hardly find any Goosebumps story scary, I had a much different opinion on the matter when I was seven.
Just about everything involving Goosebumps terrified me, and nothing was worse than that godawful puppet—you know which one I’m talking about—but there was one story that I actually kind of liked: A Night in Terror Tower.
Supervillains are historically inseparable from their superhero counterparts. Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor, Joe Biden has Nixon’s Ghost. However, as comic movies keep getting bigger, and as the MCU sucks up the world’s supply of white dudes named Chris, the villains are increasingly left behind. These guys fall into a few tidy categories, and alive or dead, find themselves forgotten when the credits roll.
Somehow, the greater realism applied to superheroes, the less room there is for supervillainy. Instead, we’re left with a handful of tropes, with only a few bad guys able to break out of the box. This dynamic is crucial to the ways our current crop of superhero blockbusters reflects our wider psychology. We ache for something bigger than ourselves to believe in, and assemble the Avengers. We question that ache, and begin the Civil War. But when it comes to evildoers, we haven’t figured out what we want. Sometimes it’s just exaggerated versions of the bad people in the world, sometimes it’s faceless alien hordes, sometimes it’s pure evil, given the nasty explanation of “mental illness.” In contrast to the depth we’ve given our heroes, our villains keep falling short.
The spark of creativity for writers can come from innumerable sources—a line from a television show or book, a color, seasons, watching Food Network; who knows. Sometimes for me getting started down that path to a thousand words and beyond can seem impossible, but there’s always one thing that seems to motivate me: music. While there’s certainly something to be said for the method of repeating a song on YouTube for hours on end, or clicking on the related videos until you get to that whispered about “strange side” of the streaming site, these days I find myself drawn more towards online mixes. While I’ve made quite a few mixes, I always love going on sites like 8tracks and Spotify to not only find new music to add to my library, but to see other interpretations of certain characters, ships, and events. And while I can’t link the sites themselves, I was lucky to recently come across a Tumblr that filled this niche of mine: the aptly named Fanmixes.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 