Tag Archives: Editorial

by | September 2, 2013 · 6:39 pm

Editorial | The Batman is Dead, Long Live the Batman

So you may have heard the news… there’s a new Batman in town.  Ben Affleck, of mixed Hollywood reviews, has been signed to play the caped crusader in the sequel to Man of Steel, which will feature both Batman AND Superman.

The internet reaction to Affleck’s casting has almost been visceral.  Twitter was aflame for most of the first day with angry fans declaiming the franchise.  Honestly, I see their point.  Affleck’s breakout starring role was in a movie he co-wrote with his best friend.  It would make sense that he would seamlessly morph into his character in Good Will Hunting, since the movie takes place in Affleck’s hometown of Boston, and features the places and social norms with which he grew up.

After the 1997 instant hit, however, Affleck’s career became a series of boring (and sometimes nameless) roles in ridiculous movies—and yes, I include Pearl Harbor among those.  In 2003, the actor spandexed up for the first time in the title role of Daredevil.  The movie did pretty well at the box office, but tanked in critic and viewer reviews.  His performance in this last superhero movie seems to be the main talking point for Batfleck haters.

To be completely fair, the early 2000’s were not kind to superhero movies of any kind.  Does anyone remember the first X-Men movie from 2000?  Hulk, which came out the same year as Daredevil?  Still, although there were other terrible comic book movies in that half of the decade, Daredevil was still a pretty awful representation.

While I don’t actually see any fans of the decision, a few people have actually tried to defend the move, citing Affleck’s recent move to the director’s chair with movies like The Town.  Here, I again have to point out first that The Town  would have made a TERRIBLE comic movie, and that it was also set in Boston—Affleck’s home town.

I find it telling that typing the words “Ben Affleck batman” into Google gives me 106,000,000 hits, and the headlines read:

“Ben Affleck’s So-So Batman” (Daily Beast)

“3 Out of 3 Former Batmen Agree: Ben Affleck Will be Fine” (Wired)

“Matt Damon Defends Ben Affleck’s Batman: ‘You Know He’s Not Playing King Lear” (Huffington Post)

Matt Damon is secretly hoping to be cast as Robin…

Even those defending the casting decision point out that Affleck will be ok.  They say that the franchise will be fine.  Life will continue on.  No waves will be made.  Affleck will not do anything amazing with Batman, but neither will he destroy the movies.

Ultimately, I think that this is the best that any DC comic fan is going to be able to look forward to in the next few Batman movies.  To be perfectly blunt, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight brought an unparalleled level of brilliance to Batman.  Until his spectacular three-movie feat, DC’s comic movies have been mediocre at best.  With his departure, Batman will subside back to what it was before him.

Do you agree with the Warner Bros. decision?  Let us know in the comments!

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by | August 26, 2013 · 9:59 pm

Editorial | Seek the Geek!

Sitting here on the bunk in my “new” dorm room makes me feel very, very young.  It’s a very unusual thing to live on my own for so many years, only to find myself sharing a room with two other people in a self-contained ecosystem where the organism highest on the food chain usually wears shorts and a hoodie.

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Home sweet home?

From the moment I stepped foot on the campus of William & Mary, I knew this was the place for me.  That feeling was cemented even further in the few short days that I’ve been here, because everyone (and I do mean everyone) here is a geek like me!

My first encounter with my roommate involved a stack of graphic novels with vectoring interests.  She is a dance major, but likes Marvel and is interested in some of the smaller, creator-owned comics.

Next was a statuesque, blond transfer student who was talking about the girly things she was doing to prepare for her wedding.  She wore sundresses and high heels and sprinkled her conversations liberally with references to Game of Thrones.  We spent a fifteen minute walk to the Campus Center discussing the character development of Edrick Storm, and GRR Martin’s reasons for leaving him out of the HBO show.

Then was the ice-breaker game that my group of new students played to learn each other’s names and interests.  Students announced one fact about themselves and then everyone else who shared that quality or experience (such as breaking a bone, or loving cats) would trade places until someone was caught out and had to start the whole thing over.  “My name is Tracy, and I cosplay,” I announced and only one other person stepped into the center with me.  My crestfallen face lasted less than a second as instantly almost everyone in the circle began to ask what my characters were and which conventions I attend.  I received high fives all around.  When the hubbub died down, we asked the foreign exchange student who had switched places with me what he had cosplayed.  Without skipping a beat, he shrugged nonchalantly and said, “The green power ranger, of course.”

Apparently this is how they cosplay in the Netherlands.

Wherever I go on this campus, my geek status is welcomed with open arms.  Other students who look as though they would fit into categories that do not seem to jive with geekhood, such as prep or jock, still share my love of words, memes, video games, comics, or sci fi.

The moral of my short tale is twofold.  First, seek out the company of other geeks—the sense of acceptance is unbelievably warm and fuzzy.  Second, and please forgive my triteness, never judge a book by its cover.  I’m excited to be here and excited to share some of my experiences with all of you, our wonderful readers.  In the meantime, I’ve got an early morning registration appointment.

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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 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.

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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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