Category Archives: Editorial

by | August 19, 2013 · 4:26 pm

Editorial | The Picky Entertainment Consumer

Due to a secluded childhood in a religious family, for many years my exposure to most entertainment was quite limited.  Now, as an adult, I am very often disappointed in the quality of entertainment in all forms, whether it be movies, comics, or games.  Don’t even ask me about popular books these days.  In order to suspend my disbelief (more on this in a later blog), entertainment must hit a number of points on the quality checklist I have in my head.  I have had my selective taste called into question by my friends many times, (::cough::Andrew::cough::) most recently as I prepared for my review of Saga; so I think it would be a good thing to point out why I am so demanding, and why a more discerning consumer can only be good for entertainment.  For your consideration, here is a rather foreshortened list.

This meme was based on my life.

This meme was based on my life.

First of all, any piece of entertainment—and in this case, that mostly refers to movies—that considers itself dumb entertainment (i.e. Dumb and Dumber, The Hangover 1-3, and anything with Will Ferrell) almost always gets a pass from me.  This isn’t the type of entertainment that I enjoy and I definitely have a little less respect for an individual who seeks out this type of entertainment.  At the same time, I also do not feel that these movies try to classify themselves as anything but stupid humor, so at least I don’t feel that the marketing hype is lying.

The next type that I see is entertainment that tries to be suspenseful and intriguing (“smart” entertainment), but in the end falls woefully short.  Often this happens when a piece of entertainment, such as a movie or a book, sets up a system of natural laws that apply within the created universe of the piece, and then breaks those laws by mistake.  My favorite example of this (and by favorite, I mean: the one to which I refer in my long-winded rants) is The Lake House.  The idea of the movie is that a woman is able to write letters to the man who previously owned her house.  The twist is that she is writing to the man two years before the present and he has since died.  In the end, he stops writing, and she realizes that in his timeline, he has died, but then she is somehow able to still write him before he has died to give him instructions to avoid his fatal car accident.  No matter how you work it out, the timeline of events isn’t even possible within the supernatural parameters of the of the movie.

But it has Keanu. How can you go wrong?

But it has Keanu. How can you go wrong?

Another issue I have that is related to item one, but can also be separated into its own class.  Inconsistencies in entertainment drive me completely bonkers.  Book series’s often fall into this trap in descriptions of characters—for instance, the heroine will be described with long, flowing, brunette hair and stunning, blue eyes in the first book, only to have green eyes by book three.

I’ve spoken before here on the blog about the frustration I feel with inaccurate historical portrayals, so I will not dwell on this point for too long.  Suffice to say that even small details, such as the moments in Gettysburg in which the Union army is shown scraping beans from the bottom of the can, juxtaposed with a Confederate officer announcing to General Lee that there is plenty of fruit and some buckwheat pancakes to eat, can give an audience completely the wrong idea about a historical event (and subconciously advise them on which side is right and which is wrong).

Last but not least, entertainment that heavy-handedly preaches the opinion or philosophy of its creators is perhaps the most grating frustration that I have with modern media of any kind.  Entertainment, for me, is an escape from a life filled with stress and frustration.  I highly dislike sitting down to enjoy a good book, only to realize that the author is not telling a story, but instead preaching a social more with which I do not agree.

All in all, across all forms of entertainment medium few pieces capture my undivided attention, and leave me satisfied.  This is not a bad thing!  After all, the classics that have remained from by-gone eras of literature, film, and music are the solitary beacons of excellence in a sea of medocrity of their time.  Therefore, with or without Andrew’s permission, I will continue to be a picky consumer with pride.

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by | August 12, 2013 · 6:18 pm

Editorial | Review: Saga

With the upcoming release of the thirteenth installment of Brian Vaughan’s Saga, now seems as good a time as any to briefly review the previous twelve issues.

As someone relatively new to comics in general, I was pleased to start Saga right at the beginning, before realities split and the universe has been reimagined with a new history four or five times (I’m looking at you, DC Comics).  Fiona Staples’ artwork in the book is simple, but not overly so.  Action is clear and it is easy to understand what is happening.

Their facial expressions capture the essence of these characters, but the controversial pose is unnecessary.

The story is narrated by the infant who is being born in the first frames of the book, as a memoir.  This makes the entire issue (and subsequent ones) feel like a prologue to the main storyline, but no main storyline ever actually appears.  Instead, the narrative follows the exploits (sexploits?) of Alana and Marko, two creatures who are defying a centuries long feud between their species to fall in love.  Alana gives birth to their daughter, Hazel, the story narrator and then the pair begins a mad dash to get somewhere that they and their daughter would be safe.

Alana is a winged creature from the planet Landfall.  She seems to be undereducated and has a brash attitude that has helped her survive a hard life, but makes me concerned for the survival of her marriage.  Her husband Marko’s character seems likeable and a little bit ordinary.  His people are from one of Landfall’s moons, called Wreath, and sport mountain goat horns growing from their heads.  He is disillusioned with violence and warfare but is torn between a pacifist life and protecting his new family.

The characters are all fairly believable, considering that the main couple has either wings or horns, and that the supporting cast includes an enormous half woman/half spider, and a race of humanoids with old fashioned tube television sets for heads.  The writing style is clear and concise.  The problem that I have is that there is no discernible plot line.  The adventures are told in a rambling fashion and feel as though they are leading up to some main plot, which never materializes.

The top half of a ghost wants to permanently bond with my infant’s soul? Sure! What could go wrong?

I appreciate the effort Vaughan makes to flavor Saga with unusual elements; and some of the strangeness of the characters and locations really appealed to my sense of whimsy.  I liked the idea of a spaceship forest, where the fruit of the trees is not edible, but rather rocket fueled.  Another interesting character was the Lying Cat, a large jungle cat who hisses, “Lie!” at anyone who attempts to twist the truth in its presence.

While the artwork is crisp and easy to follow, I did find that the art was occasionally unnecessarily graphic (read: lots of gratuitous sex).  Considering that the writing was not lazy and that the stories progressed well on their own, it seemed ridiculous that the book would work so hard to shock its audience.  The cover art especially seemed chosen to be deliberately controversial.

All in all, I enjoyed Saga, and I look forward to the next six issue story arc, but I do not see that it merits the critical acclaim it has received.  From me, it gets four out of five Death Stars.

4 Death Stars

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by | August 5, 2013 · 9:42 pm

Editorial | Code for America: volunteer opportunities

Volunteering can be an extremely rewarding activity, but for many, it’s difficult to find a volunteer project that is also intrinsically enjoyable.  For a geek, this may seem especially hard.  With this in mind, I started searching for opportunities to volunteer that didn’t necessarily involve sorting old clothes at a thrift store or walking dogs at the SPCA.  Surely there were more “geeky” ways to do good in the community.  With a few well phrased search terms, my investigation was rewarded.  Code for America is an organization that provides a way for computer programmers, web developers, and others to help cities make information such as bus routes, crime rates, and non-emergency phone numbers, among many others, available to the people who live in them.

CfA is divided into two different sections.  The Fellowship is an eleven month program in which recruits, called fellows, build open-source apps for their host cities.  Fellows are paid a small stipend while they are in the program, during which they travel to their host cities and find a problem to solve.  They then spend the rest of the program in San Francisco to finish working on their project.  For instance, in 2012, Chicago was one of the sponsor cities for Code for America.  Their CfA team worked to make their system to handle civic requests (such as fixing potholes) available to a wider range of people, since many of the general public didn’t even know that they could report these types of problems.  This year, ten new host cities have been chosen, and the application for fellows closed on July 31.

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Anyone can get involved.

In 2012, CfA launched the Brigade portion of their organization.  The brigades splintered from the Fellowship in multiple cities simultaneously; usually either in a city that had previously had a team from the Fellowship, or else a city that simply could not afford to sponsor a team.  In the brigade cities, small and not-so-small groups get together on Civic Hack Nights once a week to work on projects to help their communities.  In one short year these brigades have already covered a lot of ground with projects such as Textizen, which started as a Civic Hack project from CfA, but has now become a commercial product.

I was privileged to sit in on one of these brigade meetings held in the city of Virginia Beach by Code for Hampton Roads.  This brigade works in both Virginia Beach and its sister city Norfolk, and the group organizers alternate weekly meetings in each city.  This particular brigade is headed up by two men.  Kevin Curry, the head organizer for Code for Hampton Roads, is also the national director of the Code for America Brigade, and he reminded me immediately of Jeff Daniels.  According to all the hackers at the meeting, Kevin knows everyone.  Literally.  Everyone.  Bret Fisher, co-organizer, was friendly and welcoming, even after I explained that I could not code to save my life, but that I was actually a word geek.

2000-series-bus-005

Are these things ever where they are supposed to be? Now you can know!

I’ll admit, I was intimidated at first… until it took twenty minutes for six highly intelligent programmers and front and back-end developers to check into MeetUp.  Then I relaxed quite a bit.  The primary focus of the evening was a mobile app that would help Hampton Roads public transportation riders locate their bus no matter where they are (or where the bus is).  The app is mostly complete, and Kevin and another wordsmith named Beth were working on the press release.  The presence of another editor made me feel much more at ease and promised that there would be opportunity for many different kinds of input with the group.  Another project in the works is a mapping system that would interpret police data to show the likelihood of a criminal incident in any area of the city.  As Kevin put it, cities can pay IT departments, but the citizenry doesn’t have that option.  The Code for America Brigade focuses on making public information available to the average citizen in a way that can be easily understood and applied.

The brigade calls for coders, designers, social media coordinators, and civic leaders and organizers, so there is room for geeks like me who cannot necessarily help design a mobile app.  It is easy to join:  either visit the Code for America website and find the local brigade, or type “Code for [city]” into a search engine.  The MeetUp site makes it easy to know exactly where and when the next meeting in the area will be and provides contact info for the local organizer.  I’m excited to add Code for America to my list of volunteer projects (which, yes, includes walking dogs from the SPCA), and I encourage my fellow geeks to get involved in this or similar projects.

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by | July 30, 2013 · 5:33 pm

Editorial | Review: The Wolverine

While the fearless leader of Therefore I Geek has pretty much given a flawless review of The Wolverine, there are some things I wanted to point out in the movie.

First of all, I must say that I have always been a big fan of the star-crossed love story of Jean Grey and Wolverine. Jean may have loved Scott Sommers, but she shared a special part of her heart, and a psychological connection that transcended even her death, with Logan. While her appearance in The Wolverine might have been confusing to someone new to the X-Men movies, it resonated with die-hard fans, I think.

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However, having said how much I enjoyed seen Jean again, I must also point out that Mariko is, to paraphrase one of the above mentioned diehard fans, “Wolverine’s greatest love.” It seems like an odd decision to lessen the impact of her arrival on the Wolverine movie timeline by continuing to show Logan’s flashbacks to his deceased flame whose consciousness may or may not still be around.

Speaking of Mariko, a study of Wolverine’s behavior would seem to show that, given a choice of two attractive Japanese girls, he would choose to love the bad ass one, not the one that didn’t know how to fend for herself.

Finally, I would like to point out that superheating a blade does not increase its cutting power. In fact, if adamantium were heated to the point that it could cut through adamantium, it would be melting on itself. Fail.

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Overall, I walked out of the theater feeling unimpressed. These plot points coupled with a ridiculous amount of handcam for action sequences, and an overly dark palette of colors force me to give this move just three out of five Death Stars.

3 Death Stars

[I DID however squeal ever so slightly over the X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer at the beginning of the movie. Well done, movie creators!]

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