#also all of 2017 was my favorite era for him it was a Fantastic time

[drybranmuffin]

tagged by @cosmicrhetoric to share my top ten films... i am possibly the worst person to share my taste in cinema. but you asked for it babe i’m sorry i warned you. in no meaningful order, here we go:

1. WEIRD: the al yankovic story (2022): saw this movie the night it came out (11/4) and am STILL thinking about it. it’s (guess what) a really uh, strange film and not at all what i expected--or actually kind of wanted??? bc i do really like Actual “Boring” Al--but i thought it was a lot of fun!! and the re-records are fantastic. the entire rocky road scene makes me so happy.

2. baby driver (2017): hey look i know i know half this cast is absolutely terrible and they should’ve gotten run over with a car in real life but the first time i saw this movie i was in kansas visiting my freshman college roommate for her wedding and it was only like. the third time i’d ever been stoned and it was incredible. literally was the most incredible and life changing experience. made me want to become a stunt driver. i cannot legally operate a motor vehicle at 24 so that isn’t happening but it was a nice feeling while it lasted.

3. dead poets society (1989): i rented this movie the first weekend at college--literally got a library card just to check out the physical DVD copy of this movie because i did not have netflix yet. i was so dramatic and 18 about majoring in something i didn’t want to do, at a college i didn’t want to be at in the first place, that watching dps immediately made me cry. also mr. keating’s little speech of “Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing” haunts me every day.

4. how to survive a plague (2012): idk if this counts but this is my favorite documentary. it always makes me cry but i think it is such an important and informative documentary. but also it tells the whole story of all the people involved so well. like the way people’s voices stop appearing as voiceovers as the years go on. like you MISS THEM you FEEL the loss of all those people from the queer community in the 80s and 90s. it’s just so fantastic.

5. rocketman (2019): i don’t think i can accurately describe how much i love this movie. elton john is such a cornerstone of my childhood and feeling at home. and the performances in it are so incredible. i watch the crocodile rock scene whenever i’m close to losing my mind. it contains curing and healing properties.

6. glass onion (2022): not to be like i finally watched a modern, relevant movie and fuck people were right it IS GOOD but. guess what i watched a modern, relevant movie and fuck people were right it was very good and i had a lot of fun watching it. also blanc’s outfits made me feel so goddamn envious. the linen pants COME ON!!!

7. ghostbusters II (1989): not to say i don’t also love gb1 but the the “higher and higher” sequence, baby oscar, sigourney weaver being a cellist, “boys, you’re scaring the straights.”, “no, i believe it's one of the fettucinis...”, like c’mon. this movie is amazing. okay i’m realizing that i really need to make you watch ghostbusters II with me. even if you haven’t seen the first one i don’t care we’re watching the guys imply that egon has fucked the goo.

8. groundhog day (1993): okay so maybe i’m just a guy that really likes a certain era of bill murray movies??? ironically this is a movie that, i’ve found, i can really watch again and again and again. like: credits roll, start it again. andie macdowell’s blue coat has been on my mind since i was eleven and saw this movie for the first time. i love the town it looks so delightful--and actually was reminded a lot of it when i was in vermont recently--but it has destroyed me to know that the set was not in punxsutawney but actually somewhere in illinois... boo.

9. beetlejuice (1988): i’m saying beetlejuice as a stand in for like all tim burton movies from 1982-1993 (& like, two in 2005). but i remember watching this movie as a kid and literally not being able to regurgitate the plot at all. like, jump in the line is playing and i’m like “i have no idea what anyone’s name is and don’t know what’s going on. but that lady’s dress [barbara] was nice!!” haven’t changed much but now i at least know what’s happening. also: know that me listing this movie is also me saying that anything danny elfman touches is amazing and i love the soundtrack to this movie so much i wrote a paper on it in undergrad [music in film class] and made my professor read ten pages about the genius of danny elfman making the film’s main melody motif be three. notes.

10. barbie as rapunzel (2002): best for last. i don’t need to explain myself here. the movie is like: 20 minutes of experiencing the horrors of both servitude and otto, 5 minutes of the best dress montage of your life, 10 minutes of being like “oh my god is the prince really that stupid?”, 10 minutes of “yes, he is...”, 15 minutes being confused by the romantic pasts of the kings and gothel, 15 minutes of family therapy between two talking dragons, and 3 minutes of crying over “I know Rapunzel's secret. She painted what she dreamed.” “When you do that you’ll never be wrong.” and it deserved an oscar.

#personal #isha i'm so sorry #also this tag game is SO OLD i will let it die here unless you feel so inclined to do it yourself... #also yeah i had to put a read more bc i can't shut up ever apparently and wrote reviews for all of them #man i'm SORRY #*

[sonjongdae]

@seosri requested: jongdae during your favorite era. ↪ aka all of 2017. 

#exosnet #chen #kim jongdae #exo #gfx #mgroupsedit #boydolnet #thank you again for requesting i TTTTTT #A lot of things have been going on hence why this is so late ;; #but i had actually so much fun pushing myself creatively to do something different! #so i really appreciated the request ♥ thank you for giving me the excuse to do something for myself hdfjdf since i struggle doing that - #regularly #♥♥♥ #also all of 2017 was my favorite era for him it was a Fantastic time

[feelingofcontent]

DNP Rewatch: Dan and Phil AND DOGS!

Date video was published: 11/02/2017 (X)

DNP Main Channel Rewatch: 363

How was the the dog calendar four years ago?! I’ve seen this video so many times; it’s definitely a comfort video for me.

In early October, Phil talked in a live show about them getting ready to shoot the calendar. And then Dan accidentally spoiled that it was dogs before they announced it officially (and shared some of the calendar photos), whoops.

0:00 - already adorable. also, I just realized the jumper in this shot (that they used for the calendar cover photo) is the same one they end up sticking black felt to for the photo with the dalmatian

0:03 - Phil wearing a dog-themed jumper of course

0:13 - all of their calendars were hilarious

0:24 - I love that this was a Martyn idea

0:53 - that is quite the combination of inspiration

1:22 - that is early for them, lol

1:44 - “what pokes out of that hole” ...great start there, Phil

1:47 - Phil tongue-thing! I love that they just went with it for the joke

2:15 - talking during the makeup application is not very helpful for the poor person trying to do it for them

2:23 - that’s slightly creepy

2:28 - Dan really does look good in color

2:37 - oh my god that dog is cute. Phil just recently shared another photo of him with this one too 🥺

2:47 - I love this look at their process (also that it’s literally just powerpoint slides 😂)

3:10 - I don’t think Phil was prepare for filming at this moment

3:27 - I don’t know about the color of those shirts

3:34 - also disturbing 

3:45 - will never be over the soft voice Dan uses with small animals and babies 😭

3:48 - Phil seems much more nervous holding the dog than Dan

3:51 - “I can’t function on any level right now” me watching this video

3:53 - I love that they hauled that houseplant from their house to the studio for this, lol

3:57 - those shorts must be a bit too tight 👀

4:01 - Phil shared a couple outtakes with this puppy during the stereo era (1, 2)

3:05 - this Dan pose is adorable

4:09 - those puppies do not want to be in that basket, lol

4:13 - Dan’s favorite! and the one he shared on Instagram, of course

4:23 - that is a happy doggo

4:30 - “shower us with cherry blossoms” sometimes I hate it here (affectionate)

4:41 - Phil does love a theme

4:51 - love them referring to themselves as “D&P” in the planning

4:56 - “dog also wears sunglasses” I love it 😂

4:58 - please pause and read their concept slides; I’m dying 😂😂😂

5:15 - I would be scared I would sit on the dog accidentally

5:21 - incredibly soft Dan voice again 🥺

5:38 - “giving people pick up lines” sure...and of course the addition of the ‘sexy’ music

5:46 - they’re so happy and soft about this

5:53 - “it’s ‘cause you’re so warm” help 😭

6:07 - a whole crowd trying to keep the dogs’ attention

6:11 - danger and an unnecessary “wooo!” from Dan there

6:31 - they said later (in a live show, I think?) that all of these dogs just belonged to Martyn’s friends

6:44 - Phil looks a bit tired at this point

6:52 - bouncing jokes off of each other to refine them as usual

7:03 - too many puns

7:13 - king of comedy Phil there

7:25 - they used these jumpers for the Halloween baking video

7:41 - more fantastic concept text

8:08 - wonder if this inspired the idea for the UK vs JAPAN School Lunches! video

8:18 - the ass shot is already something, but Da deciding to zoom in just really adds another level 👀 christ.

8:27 - bread-face Dan smile

8:39 - jesus christ 😳 and Dan’s tongue-thing on top of it

8:57 - more joint joke creation

9:33 - that is a look

9:53 - I love that they have bobble hats that I’m pretty sure are ones Phil's aunt makes

10:07 - Phil looking very fond

10:20 - Dan implying that this is the concept that could just be from their everyday life

10:23 - quiff Phil! just a few months away from that for real at this point

10:52 - they both look like they’re wearing extra comfy clothes after the end of the shoot

11:03 - lol at merch-promoing Dan

11:13 - “best time of our life” 🥺 it’s much more rare for Phil to let an “our life” slip than Dan

I love every moment of this video. There really are so many fantastic videos at the end of 2017.

#dan and phil #dnp #dnpRewatch #amazingphil #daniel howell #phil lester #danisnotonfire #amazingphil videos #Dan and Phil AND DOGS!

[hootenanie]

tagged by @steampunkforever and @psygull to share some albums i've been listening to lately. im sorry this took SO long omg

The Idiot by Iggy Pop: the secret 4th album in the Berlin trilogy thanks to Bowie’s very hands on and fairly overbearing approach to producing :P.  really cool atmospheric synths in this one, and what Iggy does contribute is a sense of inebriated desperation, slurring his words over the thumping mechanical backing tracks. it’s a mix of style and grit that works, Nightclubbing and Dum Dum Boys being practically enjoyable cultivations of bad vibes

Station to Station by David Bowie: this album is just a ton of fun. I know it has a reputation as the dark Bowie album, but that’s largely undeserved, especially next to albums like Lodger and Blackstar.  I’ve listened to the title track a thousand times and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the way it builds, adding layers of sound for three minutes before Bowie’s vocals cut it to introduce the thin white duke, singing about returning to throw darts in lovers eyes in a tall room overlooking the sea. it’s much more camp than genuinely sinister, especially once the duke starts singing about being in love.  most of the album is blue eyed soul, which I don’t usually care that much for, but it’s done well enough that it wins be over. TVC15, an upbeat number about a magical television that ate the narrators girlfriend, is also particularly memorable. 

New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Lenard Cohen: I’m not usually into music that's as spiritual as his stuff, but I’ve been getting into Lenard Cohen anyway because 1.my boyfriend adores him and 2. he’s just that good. It’ll probably be a while till I’ve got devolved thoughts on the lyrics in this album, but I definitely enjoy them a lot already

The United States of America self-titled: I’ve got such a soft spot the analogue sound of early electronica and this mixes that with influences from the era’s in-vogue psychedelic rock. delightfully experimental, the results aren’t always fantastic, but they are very often interesting. Also, sometimes they are fantastic! The Garden of Earthly Delights is actually probably one of my favorite songs of all time

From The Fires by Greta Van Fleet: this one sounds like it should be quintessential dad rock but was released in 2017.. it’s a bit more simple than what I’m used to (I know that sounds pretentious I’m sorry) which takes some getting used to, but it’s soaring electric guitar and falsetto vocals make it great background noise for some of the physically strenuous work I’ve had to do this week  

Dreaming With Alice by Mark Fry: another album that feels temporally displaced! this one only by a few years rather than decades, with it’s gentle descriptions of butterflies & flowers & happiness and soft, also pop-ish, psych folk instrumentals it seems to speak to a time and place when hippiedom was on the rise and hope was in the air. in actuality it was largely created in 70s Italy, against the backdrop of the years of lead. the album has gained a cult following, but honestly I think it deserves to be widely listened to, it’s absolutely beautiful. The title is a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and I think there’s a tendency nowadays to dismiss psychedelic takes on Alice In Wonderland as edgy garbage but that really couldn’t be further than accurate here

White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground: I’m finally listening to tvu beyond their first album.. it only took me about a year to get around to doing so. I really enjoy this album’s rough edges, which come off as a deliberate artistic choice and I was surprised to find out was actually accidental.  John Cale and Lou Reed swapping vocals back and forth, often mid sentence, over ghastly surgical noises in Lady Godiva’s Operation is a personal highlight

Acquiring the Taste by Gentle Giant: I always feel like I enjoy gentle giant in theory more than in execution. maybe because that while their music is good, it can be a bit boring to listen to if you aren’t devoting most of your attention to it. it’s certainly an ambitious album with a lot going on, and knows it, inside the vinyl the band printed that “It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with the one thought – that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating.  It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this.” but do they achieve their lofty goals? maybe. not much. but enough that it’s worth checking out, if exactly not writing home about

The Use Of Ashes by Pearls Before Swine: a not very folky acid folk album, and probably my favorite of the group’s. Very melancholy, very pretty, very very good. there’s a song here that Elton John stole! definitely deserves more attention here but I’m really running out of steam so I’m just going to skip to tagging people.

@chymical @itsonofthem @lrvu @power-chords @aeschylus-stan-account @nikcage @lew-basnight 

[celiabowens]

Book recommendations, Literary Fiction edition(?)

A companion to this post (which should be updated, at some point lol)

Short Story Collections: 

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield: grotesque and disquieting collection about women and their experience in society, how they view and perceive their own body and desires. Pretty strong mythic, magical realism, body horror elements in here.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks: fascinating collection in which Sacks reminishes some particularly odd stories of patients who had to cope with bizarre neurological disorders.

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang: a collection focused on the Chinese millennial experience. Stories about love and loss, family, immigration and the uncertainty of the future. (also there’s an extremely beautiful short story about a pair of Chinese divers that broke me forever!!!)

Bestiary: The Selected Stories by Julio Cortázar: unforgettable selection of short stories that mix surreal elements to everyday life and apparently ordinary events. Would also recommend All Fires the Fire by the same author.

Novels:

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang: one of the biggest debuts of 2020, it follows two recently orphaned children through the gold rush era. An adventurous historical fiction piece that focuses on themes like gender, identity and immigration, this is one of my favorites 2020 reads so yeah, I’d really push it in anyone’s hands to be honest.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent: historical fiction inspired by the last days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in the 1820s. A quite bleak, but beautiful novel (the prose is stunning).

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: historical fiction novel set in Norway in the 17th century, following the lives of a group of women in a village that recently (barely) survived a storm that killed all of the island’s men. 

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead: the 2020 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book follows the lives of two boys sentenced to a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. A bleak, but important book, with a shocking final twist (side note, I’ve been recommended The Underground Railroad by Whitehead as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. If you’re looking for something quite peculiar, if a bit less refined when compared to The Nickel Boys, The Intuitionist is a quite odd pulpy noir set in an alternate NY about...elevator inspectors *and racism*). 

The Leavers by Lisa Ko: haunting book about identity and immigration as the main character is apparently abandoned by his own mother (an undocumented Chinese immigrant) during his childhood. Mainly a story about living in between places and constantly feeling out of place. 

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: when everyone would probably recommend Murakami (not much against Murakami besides his descriptions of women and their boobs), I suggest checking out some of Ogawa’s books. The recently translated The Memory Police, published in Japan in the mid 90s, is an orwellian dystopian novel set on an unnamed Island where memories slowly disappear. Would also really recommend The Housekeeper and The Professor, a really short novel about a housekeeper hired to clean and cook for a math professor who suffered an injury that causes him to remember new things for only 80 minutes. 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, following a son writing a letter to his illiterate mother. The book seems quite polarising due to Vuong’s writing style (his poetry background is really quite clear and the book doesn’t really follow a regular narrative, rather than portrays events and memories in brief flashes), but I loved it and I’d really just recommend going into it without knowing much? It’s a beautiful exploration of language, family history, trauma, sexuality and more.

Exist West by Mohsin Hamid: this book was fairly popular when it came out (in 2017 I believe) and was often incorrectly marketed as magical realism. Hamid’s book is a brief and quietly brutal journey with a few fantastical elements, following a couple trying to escape their city in the middle of war, as they hear about peculiar doors that can whisk people far away. The doors are, of course, a quite effective metaphor for the immigrant experience and the book does a great job at portraying the main characters’ relationship. 

Family Trust by Kathy Wang: this has a really low rating on goodreads which...wow i hate that. Family Trust is a literary family saga/drama about a Chinese-American family residing in the Silicon Valley. It’s often been compared to Crazy Rich Asians, but I believe it to be more on the literary side and definitely less lighthearted. 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: historical family saga (one of my favorites tbh, I’m absolutely biased, but this book deserved more hype) set in Korea and Japan throughout the 20th century, following four generations of a Korean family. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the prose, the book has really great characterisation and absolutely fascinating characters. (I’d suggest checking out eventual TW first, in this case). 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker: another recent read, The Silence of the Girls, while not faultless, is a pretty good retelling of The Iliad, narrated through Briseis’ perspective. The prose can feel a bit too modern at times, but it provides the reader with some really strong quotes and descriptions. 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng: and also Little Fires Everywhere by the same author, to be honest. If you’re looking for really really good family dramas, with great explorations of rather complex and nuanced relationships? You should just check out her stuff. Vibrant characters, good writing, and some superb portrayal of longing here. 

Nutshell by Ian McEwan: i’m starting with this one only to grab your attention (if you’ve even reached this part lol, congrats), but McEwan’s one of my favorite authors and I’d recommend almost everything I’ve read by him? Nutshell, specifically, is a really odd and fun retelling of Hamlet...told from the pov of an unborn baby. But really, I’d also recommend Atonement (of course), The Children Act, Amsterdam? All good stuff. 

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: I’ve read this book this summer and, while I’m still unsatisfied with the ending, I’d thoroughly recommend this? The novel follows Count Alexander Rostov, who, in 1922, is sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest in the Metropol, a luxurious hotel in the center of Moscow. A singular novel, funny and heartbreaking at once, following a vibrant cast of characters as they come and go from Rostov’s secluded life. 

Human Acts by Han Kang: from the bestselling author of The Vegetarian (which honestly, I thoroughly despised lol), Human Acts focuses on the South Korean Gwangju uprising. It’s a really odd (and at times grotesque) experimental novel (one chapter is narrated from the pov of one of the bodies if I remember correctly), so one really has to be in the mood for it, but it’s a really unique experience, worth a chance.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: sort of a really chunky historical adventure novel following two artists in 1940s/1950s NY, who create a superhero and use him to wage a one man war on the Nazis. A bit slow in places (the pace can be uneven at times and the book is quite long), but an enjoyable novel that does a pretty good job when it comes to exploring rather classic themes of American contemporary fiction: the American dream and the figure of the artist (I think there’s a particularly interesting focus on how the artists navigates the corporate world and its rules) and their creative process.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: this is a pretty classic rec, the book really got a lot of hype when it came out? It’s a dystopian-ish novel set after civilisation’s collapse, following a post-apocalyptic troupe (of Shakespearean actors). It’s a really odd, but surprisingly quiet book. Not sure if a pandemic is exactly the right time to read it, but I thoroughly recommend it. 

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng: I feel like this book is extremely complex to summarise to be honest. In short, it’s a book set in Malaya at the end of the 1940s, following a woman who, after surviving Japanese wartime camps, spends her life prosecuting war criminals. But truthfully this book is about conflicts and contradictions and in particular about remembering and forgetting. Lovely prose. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: and also The Goldfinch. I’m sure no one really needs me to introduce Donna Tartt?

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton: quite cerebral mystery set in New Zealand in 1866. Honestly you have to be a patient reader who enjoys novels with a pretty complex structure to like this, but if you’re into this sort of challenging read...go for it? It’s a book of interlocking stories (with 10+ pov and main characters) with a really fascinating structure based on astrological charts, which provide insight to the main characters’ traits and personality as the mystery unfolds.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham: ok...do not watch the movie first. The Hours is an incredibly difficult novel to describe to be honest: it begins by recalling the last moments of Virginia Woolf’s life, as she’s writing Mrs. Dalloway. The book focuses on three separate narratives, each one following a specific character throughout a single day of their own life. Goes without saying that I’d suggest being familiar with Mrs. Dalloway itself first though.

An Artists of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro: not one of Ishiguro’s most famous works (most start reading his work with Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day), but probably my favorite out of those I’ve read so far. The novel follows  Masuji Ono, an artist who put his work in service of imperialist propaganda throughout WWII. Basically a reflection and an account of the artist’s life as he deals with the culpability of his previous actions. 

Stoner by John Williams: I feel like this is an odd book to recommend, because I don’t think someone can truly get the hype unless they read it themselves. Stoner is a pretty straight-forward book, following the ordinary life of an even more ordinary man. And yet it’s so compelling and never dull in its exploration of the characters’ lives and personalities. Also, I’ve just finished Augustus by the same author, which is an epistolary historical fiction novel narrating some of the main events of Augustus’ reign through letters from/by his closest friends and enemies. Really liked it. 

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien: back to integenerational family sagas (because I love those, in case it wasn’t clear lol), Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows a young woman who suddenly rediscovers her family’s fractured past. The novel focuses on two successive generations of a Chinese family through China’s 20th century history. While not every character got the type of development they deserved, the author does a good job when it comes to gradually recreating the family’s complex and nuanced history. 

There’s probably more but I doubt anyone’s going to reach the end or anything so. There’s that lol.

#book recs #book rec #litblr #2020 reads #all the typos are my own LOL #also i didnt put here philip roth or auster #but tbh #i dont think anyone needs me to rec them???

[tcm]

“Much More to Movie Monsters Than Meets The Eye” By Raquel Stecher

With his latest book Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond, author and horror expert David J. Skal provides readers with the perfect guide for watching spooky films throughout October and the year. The book takes a look at 31 different horror films from NOSFERATU (‘22) to GET OUT (2017). Skal offers insights into how German Expressionism and WWI influenced early horror classics, how Val Lewton threw out horror conventions with CAT PEOPLE (‘42), how DRACULA (‘31) was a financial gamble and how more recent films like HOCUS POCUS (‘93) achieved cult status. If you’re worried that 31 horror films are not enough, don’t despair, as each of these films is paired with a bonus recommendation on a similar theme. Fright Favorites is now available from Running Press and TCM.

Raquel Stecher: Can you tell us a bit about your background as a cultural historian and horror expert?

David J. Skal: I was one of the original “monster kids” of the 1950s and ‘60s, who discovered the old Universal horror classics when they were first released to television, and for a while I couldn’t get enough of them, or of the fan culture they set in motion. I was an avid reader of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and when I came back as an adult to write about the history of horror entertainment from an adult perspective, it would never have happened without those photo-filled periodicals that engaged and obsessed me as a kid.

RS: In the book you discuss the connection between Hollywood and Halloween. Tell us a little about how that came about and how the two have become so intrinsically tied with one another.

DJS: In the golden age of American horror movies in the 1930s and 1940s, there was no supplemental merchandizing or other tie-ins to Halloween. It was still a pretty homespun holiday. The holiday’s potential wasn’t fully exploited by the film industry until after World War II, when we saw Universal franchising its monster characters as Halloween masks and costumes. In the ensuing decades, October became the major month for horror movie premieres, including studios other than Universal, and all the major theme parks got on the bandwagon, profitably extending their summer seasons with Halloween nights that are almost always tied in to some horror franchise or another, frequently of the slasher or chainsaw variety.

RS: What was the research process like for writing Fright Favorites?

DJS: Over the years I’ve done much more research for my books than I’ve been able to ever use, so Fright Favorites was an ideal opportunity to make use of information and anecdotes I’d never had room for in previous projects. As a result, it took about six months rather than the usual full year I most often devote to completing a book. Although the final selections were mine, the people at TCM are also—no surprise—very knowledgeable about movies with many favorites of their own that I was able to incorporate. There weren’t really any disagreements, just a bit of a juggling act to maintain a balance between the films included.

RS: In the book you wrote “Some early commentators on the medium worried that film might be nothing less than the arrival of living death. It is in horror movies that this pervading sense of the uncanny still speaks to us.” Were studios worried about making horror films? How did Universal's success with the genre affect the film industry as a whole?

DJS: In a way, the film medium itself is the very definition of the uncanny, bringing dead actors back to life, or its convincing simulacrum. This strange fact is always there, staring back at you. And remember, actors themselves have amounted to a species of shapeshifters, slipping in and out of identities in the manner of movie monsters. Film is a dream-like medium that has been irresistibly drawn to the fantastic and the bizarre from its very beginning, at least in Europe. American movies didn’t approach truly fantastic subjects until Universal took a chance with DRACULA in 1931. Previously, American films observed the tradition of explaining away any ghostly occurrence as a criminal conspiracy or ruse. But DRACULA, along with FRANKENSTEIN the same year, became two of the most influential and imitated films of all time.

RS: Stars like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Vincent Price, etc. became known for their horror roles. How did some of these horror stars embrace the genre or how did it typecast them?

DJS: By definition, any “horror star” is already typecast, although some deal with the pigeonholing better than others. I once had the privilege of sitting in on a classroom visit by Vincent Price with a group of acting students who asked him if he resented being considered a horror star and how they could avoid being typecast themselves. He told them in no uncertain terms that show business was already a difficult way to make a living and that being typecast would be the best thing that could ever happen to them professionally. Most horror stars I’ve met or interviewed are grateful for their fame and the attention of their fans.

RS: Many horror stories have been revisited in remakes, new adaptations and re-imaginings. Why has Hollywood been so keen to revisit horror classics?

DJS: Horror is a genre with financial profit baked in from the get-go—it’s almost impossible to lose money even on a poorly made scary movie, which is why so many prominent directors have gotten their start in the genre. It’s a fairly risk-free way to take a chance on new talent. In terms of remakes, if a formula has worked before, why not do it again? Fortunately, the remakes usually veer substantially away from the original stories in ways that keep the legacy of one monster or legend perpetually alive. Horror evolves the way anything evolves—through endless change and adaptation.

RS: What are some of your personal favorite horror films?

DJS: I don’t have a number one, or number two favorite. I admire many films for individual reasons: directors, scripts, actors. People most often ask me what my favorite version of Dracula is. I tell them that it doesn’t yet exist, but it would be a master version of the story edited together from all the major adaptations, with actors from different versions interacting with each other. It would be a huge job, but if done with the right flair would be hugely entertaining and probably bring out important aspects of each version that you wouldn’t notice watching them individually.

RS: Some of the films you feature in Fright Favorites are also considered science fiction classics. How do the two genres of science fiction and horror complement each other?

DJS: Literary horror and literary science fiction are fairly separate categories, but on screen the genres tend to blur together. For instance, ALIEN (‘79) is a haunted house story set in outer space. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (‘78) is an alien invasion story that’s also about zombies. Being a visual medium, movies tend to spotlight science fiction’s bizarre and grotesque imagery and end up emphasizing the horrific over the cerebral.

RS: How do horror films tap into the pervading anxieties and fears of their respective eras?

DJS: This is the through-line of most of my books: that horror entertainment amounts to a secret history of modern times, with each new cultural upheaval or trauma setting in motion identifiable kinds of stories and characters. The anxiety and fear need to be processed, but it’s always easier to deal with real-world horror if you don’t have to look at it too directly. WWI tore about human bodies like no previous war, and all through the 1920s and 1930s we looked at one disfigured face after another, even though the films weren’t about battlefield combat. Unprecedented numbers of mutilated men were returning to society, and they were being shunned. Nonetheless, they popped up in our cinematic dreams. During the AIDS epidemic, there was an explosion of books and films about another mysterious, blood-related scourge: vampirism. Repress awareness of an uncomfortable fact, and it will always rise somewhere else in a different form.

RS: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

DJS: So far, the book does seem to be engaging readers who have a general knowledge of horror entertainment but are curious to know more. The most important thing a reader might take away is the simple revelation that there’s much more to movie monsters than meets the eye.

#Horror #halloween #Fright Favorites #scary movies #classic horror #old hollywood #old horror #Vincent Price #dracula #Bela Lugosi #nosferatu #cat people #TCM #Turner Classic Movies #Raquel Stecher

[mad-prophet-of-the-airwaves]

My top 10 favorite films of the decade

1. Frances Ha (2012, Noah Baumbach, USA)

I can’t imagine that this film would appear on many decade end lists, much less at the #1 spot, but this film spoke to me on a deep, personal level that few films have. I’ve never seen a film perfectly represent both the ups and down of being in your 20s. Despite dealing with some complex issues, Frances Ha is lovably lighthearted, it’s sweetly optimistic tone is incredibly infectious and every time I watch it, I’m left with a huge smile on my face. It may not be the most sophisticated film ever made, but any film that eases my mind about being an aimless twentysomething deserves to be called the best of the decade.

2. Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig, USA)

Absolutely hilarious from beginning to end, but also unflinchingly honest with some pitch-perfect characters, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut is an incredibly intelligent story of growing up. What really impressed me about this film is that, while it does acknowledge the difficulty of being a teenager, sometimes it can be just as hard on your parents, a theme often ignored in coming-of-age films. This really is a special film and I hope it dazzles audiences for many more years to come.

3. Joker (2019, Todd Phillips, USA)

Joker was a film that took me a while to really appreciate. After my first viewing, I enjoyed it greatly, but thought it was a little rough around the edges, but as I thought about it more, I realized how brilliant it really was and after three viewings, I feel confident ranking it among the best of the decade. It is undoubtedly the boldest reinvention of the comic book movie I’ve ever seen and one of the most transgressive Hollywood films in recent memory. It’s dark, character driven style is something I hope will influence the superhero genre for the better. Not only does this work as an origin story, but it succeeds spectacularly as a social commentary on the effects of mental illness and our broken care system. Joker can be a bit of an unpleasant viewing, due to it’s consistently dark and depressing tone, but beneath that is an incredibly intelligent character study that pays tribute to the greats and boasts a bravura Joaquin Phoenix performance.

4. Blue Valentine (2010, Derek Cianfrance, USA)

I’ll be honest with you....this film made me cry....a lot, so much so that I’m actually reluctant to ever watch it again. An absolutely heartbreaking account of how it feels to fall out of love, Blue Valentine never lets go of it’s depressing tone, even the scenes that flashback to how the lead characters fell in love have a certain melancholy feeling to them, due to the juxtaposition with scenes of their crumbling marriage. Despite how brutal this film is, it is fantastic, from beginning to end. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are at their best and lend realistic, devastating performances to match the tone. I’m glad to have seen this film, but don’t expect me to revisit it anytime soon.

5. Paterson (2016, Jim Jarmusch, USA)

Much like Frances Ha, Paterson is a film that moves me with it’s sweetly, optimistic tone and warm sense of humor. A simple ode to the beauty that can be found in day-to-day life, it’s a film that’ll make you pine for the simple pleasures of routine and home. It’s a very meditative film that has a very calming effect, I can watch this film in a horrible mood and still feel relaxed. Simple, but effective, Paterson is another excellent entry in Jim Jarmusch’s filmography that I look forward to seeing again and again.

6. Julieta (2016, Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)

This is a film that, while well-reviewed upon it’s release, seems to have been forgotten, even by some Almodóvar fans, which is a shame because I think it’s among his best works. Paying tribute to the female-centered melodramas of his youth, Almodóvar weaved together a touching, tantalizing anti-mystery that provides a sad, but strangely hopeful look at the struggles women face in our modern society. It’s a fascinating film with a great message that I hope audiences will gain a new appreciation for in the future.

7. Nebraska (2013, Alexander Payne, USA)

While Alexander Payne’s works usually have serious themes, masked underneath a playful, comedic tone, Nebraska is a more serious, introspective work from the filmmaker. Focusing on the on-set of old age and dying familial relationships, Nebraska is a film that’s often poignant, but not without Payne’s distinct sense of humor. What really struck me about this film is how realistic the characters are. I could compare each and every character to someone in my own life, from Bruce Dern’s senile Woody to Will Forte’s cynical David. Without a doubt, this is my favorite Alexander Payne film, due to it’s touching story, brilliant acting and it’s crisp black-and-white cinematography.

8. The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

If I had to pick one living filmmaker as a favorite, it’d be Paul Thomas Anderson. Each and every one of his films is an absolute labor of love and are technically perfect, from first frame to last. The Master is, by far, his most audacious. Every asepect of this movie works perfectly. It’s cinematography is absolutely breathtaking and captures the post-WWII setting, all of the performances are astounding, especially from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his best roles, the film’s themes of the nature of man and humans desperate need for a sense of connection are very thought-provoking and ring true. Admittedly, I had a hard time between choosing this film and PTA’s equally brilliant Phantom Thread, but the ambiguous nature and brilliant performances of The Master seems to have left the bigger impact on me.

9. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Coen brothers, France/USA)

While containing many of the familiar traits of the Coens’ work, Inside Llewyn Davis feels unlike any of their other works. It’s a slow, profound and melancholy film, unlike their previous eccentric comedies. I’m surprised at how well the duo can handle such a simple film. Oscar Isaac gives an excellent performance in this film as the titular Llewyn. It takes a lot of skill to take a character as unlikable as his and make him endearing. I loved the attention to detail of this film, the Coens made sure that this film was as accurate to the period as possible and it shows. At times, it felt like I was watching a documentary about 60s-era Greenwich Village. It may catch some Coen fans off guard, but it’s a fantastic entry in their filmography that you don’t want to miss.

10. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay, UK)

Definitely one of the most unnerving films I’ve ever seen, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film that has an added poignancy in recent years due to the rise of attention given to our treatment of the mentally ill. This is a film that gnaws at you by asking uncomfortable questions about mental illness, motherhood and responsibility for our actions, without ever picking sides or providing us with easy answers. Making this all the more impactful are the top-notch performances from Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller as the troubled mother and violent son, respectively. A successful blend of horror and drama, this is a film that will unnerve even the most hardened viewers, so naturally, a second viewing isn’t guaranteed, but it’s a great film that deserves your attention, even if it’s only once.

...And that’s my list for the 2010s. Hopefully, the 2020s will be as strong a decade for film as this one was.

#frances ha #noah baumbach #lady bird #greta gerwig #joker #todd phillips #blue valentine #derek cianfrance #Paterson #jim jarmusch #julieta #Pedro Almodovar #nebraska #alexander payne #the master #paul thomas anderson #inside llewyn davis #coen brothers #we need to talk about kevin #lynne ramsay #film #cinema

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

For the movie asks, how about D, R, T, Z, AA, and AB?

Let’s do this!

D. Favorite movie soundtrack

Favorite Movie Score: Wall-E (2008)

Favorite Movie Soundtrack from an Orignal Musical: The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Favorite Movie Soundtrack that Used Pop Songs: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

R. An underrated actor.

Sam Rockwell can use some more love. He always gives an interesting performance no matter what he’s in. I’m always happy to see him.

Also, Lee Pace! Where is he? I miss him. And stop having him play assholes!

For a dead actor, I have to go with Thomas Mitchell. If I were to make a movie and could pick any actor from any era, I would make sure to have him.

T. An underrated director.

Michael Crutiz. He’s never a director brought up in film school, but I guarantee you’ve watched at least one of his movies. He’s did Casablanca (1942), The Adventurs of Robin Hood (1938), Captain Blood (1935) and so many others. He directed most of the big budget Hollywood blockbusters of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He is the definition a working director and he deserves way more credit than he gets.

Z. Favorite movie characters.

Oh God...okay, here are the ones that have really stuck with me for some reason or another over the years. The lists changes a lot, so it might be best to narrow it down to era or director or something. Also, I’m pulling away from fandom stuff, since you all know who I love.

In no particular order:

Willy Wonka from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

It was the first time I can remember being fully mesmerized by a character and wondered what they were going to do next. The credit goes entirely to Gene Wilder and I can’t thank him enough for it. I re-watch the movie, just for him.

Hector Rivera from Coco (2017)

I love Hector so much it hurts. The ending when he’s walking across the bridge, and there is the split second of fear but as he realizes he can walk across he looks up with this smile and, excuse me for a minute while I cry. I can’t remember the last time I was so invested in a character.

Rapunzel from Tangled (2010)

Rapunzel is always going to have a soft place in my heart. Her journey of figuring out what she really wanted out of life, her fear of disappointing her Mother and her general out look really hit me at exactly the right moment in my life.  I was Rapunzel and Rapunzel was me.  I never saw that in a character before.

George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

I watch this movie every year, and every year I get something new out of George Bailey, who he is and what his life means to him and those around him.  He’s a good man despite his best efforts and it gets me every time.

Captain Louis Renault from Casablanca (1942)

Every word that comes out of his man’s mouth is iconic. Another character who you’re not a hundred percent sure what he’s going to do or why, he’s a fantastic character in a movie full of them.  I just want a movie of Louis and Rick fighting in the French Foreign Legion, is that too much to ask?

AA. A film that was better than the book.

Controversial, possibly.  Neil Gaiman still is my literary idol, but I’m going to go with Stardust (2007) on this one.

I’m not sure what is was about the book, but I just did not enjoy it as much as I did the film. The movie takes a very different tone, closer to The Princess Bride, while the book is the classic almost dreamlike state Gaiman has perfected.  Maybe I need to go back and re-read the book, but as it stands, I really love the movie and am lukewarm on the book.

AB. Best remake.

Top 5 in no particular order:

Fright Night (2011)

The writing is better, the tension is better, and you’ve got David Tennant going full slut in leather pants.  What’s not to love?

True Grit (2010)

Dads across the nation may lament this choice, but it’s true.  The Coen Brothers trump John Wayne on this one.

The Thing (1982)

I do have a soft spot for the original, but there is no denying the superiority of its remake. It’s a horror classic for a reason.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

A movie based on a musical based on a B-horror movie from the 1960s, and it’s one of my favorite films of all time.  How could it not be on the list?

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

A cheesy Rat Pack movie re-envisioned as a slick heist movie with an all star cast.  I love it.

Let’s Talk Movies

#movie list #top 5 #long post #movie recommendations #movie rec list #movie rec

[dangermousie]

‘They can’t do transmigration properly due to censors’ what do you mean by that?

I have just answered it in a previous ask, but a little more detail.

China, like many dictatorships, has a censorship office that ensures that whatever media comes out does not say anything those in power dislike for whatever reason (from completely understandable the government will ban it - no criticism of the Communist Party or the ruling President, to bizarre as hell - no time travel or zombies.)

Because of this, every show released in China must be entirely filmed and then submitted to censors for approval. Censors will then either clear it or state what changes need to be made (or say it’s unsalvageable.) That is a reason some shows sit on the shelf for a while. Two of my most anticipated dramas, The Wolf and The Fated General, have been on the shelf since 2017. The former, due to episode count and violence. The latter, due to episode count - which censorship also limits, and because it’s about a historical person and the rules there are super strict, is likely to never see the light of day. There is also Love of Hypnosis, for example, which ran afoul of censorship, because one of secondary actors made comments about the Massacre of Nanking that were not good. There are many other examples.

Sometimes the censors can yank a show bare minutes before airing - happened to my second most favorite cdrama, Novoland Eagle Flag, which literally got yanked 20 minutes before it was set to air and didn’t premiere for months and had to be edited. Sometimes they will yank it mid airing - as happened with Luo Jin’s Gods. Sometimes the show is released but the censors messed with the storyline to its detriment. The recent near-masterpieces Rise of the Phoenixes and Royal Nirvana missed the masterpiece status due the storyline cuts and changes mandated by censors.

The rules are somewhat looser for web-only dramas than those that air on TV but the bulk of them apply to both. And censors have been getting extra zealous recently. It gets especially tricky for period dramas because they are too popular.

Anyway, censorship rules are arcane and change from month to month and sometimes are completely arbitrary. They also seem to vary from drama to drama (I have no idea how Love and Redemption or The Untamed were able to get away with half of what they got away with.)

But nonetheless, there are also a number of topics that are explicitly prohibited. If you don’t have them, the drama might still run into issues. If you have them, you certainly will. Everyone knows those rules and tap dances around them.

Transmigration (ie a person waking up in a body of some fictional or real person in another world/era/setting) has been banned since 2011, when Bu Bu Jing Xin and Jade Person Lock Heart became monster hits - the heroines of both of them transmigrate into a body of a Qing person. Ostensibly, the reason was because some deeply disturbed person tried to transmigrate and died. What the real reason was who knows, though censors and rules don’t seem to like things that are popular and too fantastical (with exception for things in traditional Chinese folklore, like fox demons and similar.) Until recently, they weren’t even big on science fiction.

So, you can not have a character transmigrate on screen. This is a sure way to have your drama banned. However, transmigration is one of the most popular set-ups in web novels many dramas are based on. So the makers have to come with work arounds.

They include:

1. Completely ignoring transmigration and just making the transmigrator a person of that period/country. Some of my favorite dramas do this - The Story of Minglan, Ever Night, The Princess Agents, Singing All Along, General and I. Those are usually stories where the fact that the person transmigrated is relatively easy to deal with by just making them a normal very smart/tough person.

2. Making that person somehow magical/twin/double instead of a transmigrator into the original body - Princess Silver, Legend of Fuyao, Untouchable Lovers.

3. Wink wink nudge nudge. In Love Better than Immortality, the heroine supposedly enters a game simulator. In Joy of Love, they really did an eff you and the set-up is the student telling his professor story the main character of which transmigrates, heh. The Untamed is a great example - in the novel, the protagonist’s soul gets summoned from the dead and put into another body. In the drama they play coy and make damn muddy as to whether he even died in the first place and magic just somehow revived him in his original body.

4. Shared dream or coma until it’s time to wake up. Go Princess Go - sort of (as an older web drama they got away with a lot more than a drama could nowadays), The Romance of Tiger and Rose. Though even there, they usually make sure to have the person wake up in the end and it was somehow a shared dream or similar.

So, basically, they could not have the heroine of Renascence transmigrate her soul into her sister’s per se. Having her soul merge with her sister’s is skirting a millimeter away from what is forbidden, but as someone who comes from another country with censorship, there is a talent in knowing exactly how far you can push without breaking the rules and how to have things between the lines.

#asks #cdrama #censorship

[astromechs]

What are your expectations for Ewing's GotG? And have you read any of his other work? Also where would you like Rich's character development to go and what writer would you like to see write him after Ewing? And when will Peter kiss him?

i’ve read part of ewing’s immortal hulk! it’s slow going, because this is the time of year that work tends to get really busy for me, but i’m really enjoying it so far — and i’ve honestly never cared about a hulk comic before this in my life. i like how creative and character-centric it is, and these represent ewing’s strengths as a writer; he’s willing to try new and interesting things, but he doesn’t lose commitment to character as his first priority.

and i think, where a lot of people are criticizing the more episodic, character-driven nature of his gotg run, i actually really like that. the #6 issue is one of my favorite comic issues of all time at this point, honestly — and not just because i love rich and i’m biased in that way; i saw criticisms of that issue calling it “filler”, but it was the opposite of filler. it was a very character-centric piece, exploring his thoughts and emotions with actual depth, and ending with a really positive step for his mental health. with how plot-driven superhero comics typically are, you don’t see this a lot, and as a reader/writer who appreciates character stuff above all, i really dug it.

i know we’ve got the king in black tie-in coming up that sort of interrupts some of the flow of this, but i have actual hope for ewing to make it more relevant than other obligatory event tie-ins; it seems he has actual plans for his cosmic stuff, and there’s been some interesting worldbuilding going on, in addition to the character work. it’s my hope that this good character work will continue (i’m excited for #9, and #11 looks like all my hopes and dreams come to life) while weaving this new tapestry of cosmic elements, making this comic feel like its own distinctive thing again like it was in the DnA era.

as far as rich and his character development goes — i think it’s made some really positive strides of healing and growth that i’d like to see continue. i was frustrated by the premature cancellation of the 2017 nova series, because loveness and perez had actually set rich up on a path to start healing from his trauma... only for that rug to get ripped out from under our collective feet as marvel just decided to pile more trauma on him (you know, as superhero comics usually tend to go). but ewing’s really picked up that thread again, and i’m beyond pleased.

what we’re seeing now is a rich who’s willing to work on himself, and to actually accept help to do so. that is fantastic. i’m really optimistic for him to get to a place to where he can actually start to accept, not just in a maybe, that he’s worthy and deserving of love. so, with this thread, i’d love to see his relationships with others being brought back into focus again, especially because a lot of the writing with him often tends to isolate him and play toward his tendencies to do that to himself and insist he has to take on everything alone. so i’m actually really pleased he’s in a team book right now, because that’s an ideal place to address this.

it’s actually an ideal place to explicitly further develop a romantic arc with peter — really, for both characters. i don’t want to get my hopes up too much, because this is marvel, after all, but if a kiss happened in #9 or #11, not only would i be over the moon, but i also think there’s been quite a bit of narrative buildup even just in ewing’s run alone, and it would legitimately be a really fitting character beat — for rich, who’s learning to accept that he deserves love, and for peter, who’s figuring out his place in the cosmos (pending what we’re going to see, of course). not to be that it’s always sunny “carol” meme, but if they are, in fact, the lovers....

honestly, i’d love to see ewing tackle a nova solo book, because there are also so many plot threads that need to be picked up, and this arc would also be a perfect time to do so (having rich reconnect with sam, finally resolving the talonar plot and bringing his baby brother back into the picture... i actually have a whole pitch for a solo book in mind surrounding the theme of brothers and it needs to be done, yo!!; man when will rich actually reunite with the new warriors, it’s been too long!!). barring that, or getting loveness and perez back? i know it’d never happen, but me speaking as someone who generally likes waid’s writing a lot, i think waid would write a good rich — so that’s kind of, like, my pipe dream wishlist.

#asks #anonymous #richard rider #and elements of: #riderquill #al ewing #my splooge of thoughts? #SORRY THIS WAS SO LONG #i have a lot to say #but thank you so much for asking!!!!!!! #i am always happy to ramble about these things all day long

[jaybug-jabbers]

Top Bug Pokes By Gen

So I thought I would next discuss my favorite pokes in each type. The problem is, it’s tricky narrowing down to just ONE in your favorite type. ;____;

As such, I’m going to cheat for this first type (bug) and pick a favorite out of EACH generation of games.

Gen 1 - Parasect

It has to be Parasect. This is not a popular choice, and I know it. Parasect’s typing (Bug/Grass) makes it a very difficult poke to use. I’m not going to deny that. I’m also not going to try and deny its rather lackluster set of stats.

Paras and Parasect are really special to me, though. I still remember when I was a kid, playing Pokemon for the first time, and running into a Paras in Mount Moon. That awesome little sprite and its etheral cry (incidentally, a cry deemed cool enough to also be used on Mew) filled me with such a sense of fascination and wonder, as did its relative rarity. I’d been wandering around the cave for ages and didn’t expect to run into anything new, and especially nothing so alien and cool-looking. I immediately added it to my team and brought him all the way to the Elite Four, where he joined the Hall of Fame. Lackluster stats didn’t hold him back from being a useful and valuble member of the team.

I named him Sopea. I’m not sure why. I just made up a word, and it sounded like it suited him.

Paras and Parasect remain possibly my favorite bug type to this day. It is a bug with a parasitic fungus that gradually consumes it, and that is fascinating as heck. A zombiebug, basically. That’s why its eyes are white. There are real species that are preyed upon by parasitic fungi, which ‘control’ their insect hosts, and it’s a truly fascinating thing I strongly suggest looking up sometime. :)

Anyway, my second-favorite of gen 1 is probably Venomoth or Scyther. I love them both a lot. I don’t care for Scizor’s design too much, despite its popularity in the meta game.

Gen 2 - Heracross

I mentioned before how I’m not super-attached to Gen 2. I never played it as a kid (after gen 1 I didn’t play pokemon for many years), so there’s no nostalgia factor for me. I honestly often forget which pokemon originated in gen 2, in fact. Regardless, Heracross is definitely the coolest bug type from that era. Other than Sun/Moon’s funky Ultra Beasts, his typing is entirely unique. A Fighting bug type is truly awesome, and his design is really beautiful. Simple but elegant, with an adorable little smirk, and a really cool species in real life.

Gen 3 - Shedinja

Yes, I think most can agree, Shedinja is a novelty poke. Yes, he’s not actually useful in battle except in extremely circumstantial situations. I know. I don’t flippin’ care. He’s adorable, and the idea behind him is amazing. Spooky ghost pokemon that’s the discarded shell of a cicada? Something that literally will swallow your SOUL if you look into the empty hole in its back? Sign me the fuck up, ayyy. Again, a totally unique typing, and I can’t help but adore him. Cicadas in general are awesome, and if I can’t pick Shedinja as my favorite from this gen, I would choose its bouncier, livelier partner, Ninjask.

Gen 4 - Kricketune

I know you givin’ me an ugly look for this choice. And I’m not gonna bother trying to convince you he’s useful in battle.

But he’s got swag. Dele-dele-whoop, bitch.

(Look, gen 4 was pretty bad for new bug types, so gimme a break)

Gen 5 - Galvantula

Gen 5 had some fantastic bug types, but the prize probably has to go to this crazy electric tick-and-then-spider. Joltik is adorable AS FCK and its evo is awesome AS FCK. I had one on my team during my run of White, and I loved the thing to absolute bits. Once again, before SuMo its typing was totally unique, and I was beside myself with excitement for getting a badass electric tarantula. This speedy spider will run laps around the unfortunately clunky Vikavolt, and I’m happy to see him sometimes used competitively as well (though usually just as a sticky web lead, but compound eyes + thunder is still a tasty combo that’ll pack a punch).

My second-best for gen 5 is reeeeeally hard to say. That gen was definitely the best in terms of getting awesome new bug types (FFS, we even got a Mythical Bug type, and Volcarona), and probably the best for bug lovers of ALL the gens.

Gen 6 - Vivil– oh uhh this is awkward

Yeah, that’s the only new bug type that gen. Needless to say, not the best gen for bug catchers, BUT not the worst either maybe?? Because we DID get a bug type with a TON of forms to collect, and I have to admit, I had a good time collecting them. I still don’t have those special event forms though. ;___; Oh Pokeball Vivillon, someday you will be mine. Also, Scatterbug/Spewpa are the cutest caterpillar/chrysalis forms. (Sewaddle comes close, admittedly)

Gen 7 - HELP I CAN’T CHOOSE

I mean come on, we have an insanely badass isopod thing (with an adorable AF first evo) or a super-adorable fairy-bug thing (with an adorable AF first evo). I gotta tell you, it was pure agony during my run of Moon, because I wanted both on my team so badly. I didn’t put both, because I wanted a more diverse team than that, but it really, really hurt leaving little Wimpod behind. They are both so fantastic.

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Feb 19, 2017.

#pokemon #mycontent #top3 #bug pokemon #pokemon favorites

[365days365movies]

January 5, 2021: The Running Man (1987) (Part 1)

Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Stallone, I hadn’t seen a lot of, Arnie, on the other hand. Oh, I’ve seen plenty of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando, Predator, Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Jingle All the Way, Batman and Robin, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines fills my list of seen Arnie films. What’s missing?

Kindergarten Cop, Twins, Junior, Last Action Hero, and True Lies certainly come to mind. And yeah, you might’ve noticed that those are all action-comedies. Two of these will be seen during Comedy April; one’s gonna be watched tomorrow. Of course, there are still other movies missing in that list above, but Schwarzenegger has a LOT of movies. And so, today, we’re going for one of his ‘80s action films, based off of a Stephen King story. That’d be a little movie called The Running Man.

A movie set in the far-flung dystopian future of...2019...The Running Man is one of Schwarzenegger’s understated classics, at least as compared to his other dynamos of the era. All I know is, it’s his only major big pure action film of the time that’s slipped under my radar. I don’t have any particular expectations going in, but I’m expecting some typical Schwarzenanigans. 

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Recap

So, the global economy collapsed in 2017, eventually leading to a global police state and state-controlled television. High censorship reigns, and the most popular show (of all time, apparently) is a gladiator-type series called “The Running Man.” Any dissent is quickly crushed, which (naturally) has led to a small underground resistance movement, like it always does. 

As we start, police helicopter pilot Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an authority figure with a conscience (unsurprisingly), using his vehicle (which operates off of the above seen UNIXSYSTEM (I know this)) to monitor and detect potential riots. Richards proceeds to defy orders to fire on innocent citizens who only want food, and gets knocked out by his coworkers.

We cut to 18 months later, where Richards is confined to a work camp, where people die, and nobody’s loved. They’re all wearing detonator collars, and I know the plot of the movie.

Seriously, the plot, the ending, Schwarzenegger’s role, it’s all done. I got it. I’ve seen this story a thousand times. He’s gonna be recruited to join the Running Man game show that the guards are talking about, escape just before they’re gonna kill him (probably), join up with the rebellion, bring new life into them, probably fall in love at some point, and then take down the head of the police state and/or the game show.

I got this. Which is a little disappointing, if I’m right. Automatically got some points against it, but hopefully I’ll still enjoy the ride. 

Anyway, back to the gulag. Schwarzenegger and another prisoner stage a fight, allowing the third prisoner to try hacking the perimeter fence that triggers the collars. After losing a guy so that we can see somebody’s head blow up, the perimeter is shut down, and all of the prisoners escape. 

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, we’re introduced to the Running Man, a DOJ-sponsored game show in which the contestants are “criminals, traitors, and enemies of the state,” who are essentially executed on national television. Dark. I like it. Our escapees meet up with the underground, and they get their collars taken off. Not wanting to get involved in any rebellion (yeah, OK, sure), Richards leaves the city. And he’s definitely never gonna come back for any reason.

We now meet our villain of the piece, Damon Killian, played by the Kissing Bandit himself, Richard Dawson. And I’m not gonna lie, casting Dawson as the country’s greatest game show host is...great, it’s great, it’s one of my favorite casting choices so far this month. Dawson, for those of you who didn’t know, was the first host of Family Feud. He also had a well-known penchant for kissing the female contestants that came on the show. That’s how he earned the moniker, “The Kissing Bandit.” And yeah, it was a little creepy, in retrospect.

Killian immediately comes off as a two-faced slime, and I am more ready for this character than I have ever been. I mean, an evil game show host? SOLD! If they ever remake this movie, I would give good money to see either John O’Hurley or (please, please) Steve Harvey take up this role, since both have been Family Feud hosts. Could you imagine?

We also meet Amber, our inevitable love interest played by Maria Conchita Alonso, who’s watching the news, with Ben’s face on it. We learn that he’s known as the “Butcher of Bakersfield,” being framed as a “maniac” who fired on innocent civilians (when, of course, that’s what he was trying to prevent. I feel like there’s a comment on the media to be made here, but I ain’t gonna make it. Yet.). Amber now lives in his brother’s apartment, as he was taken for reeducation. I’m sure he’s fine.

Killian sees footage of the escape, wants Ben Richards for the show, and immediately calls the President’s agent to make it happen. I love it. Richards, in the meanwhile, coerces a tied up Amber to help him get out of the city. We get to see the treat of a 6′4″ Austrian man wearing a badly-fitting Hawaiian shirt, which just looks ridiculous, and I appreciate it. 

It immediately doesn’t work, and she rats him out, leading to his inevitable capture by the cops, and to our hero meeting our villain for the first time. 

Dawson makes Ben an offer he can’t refuse, having kidnapped his prison friends in order to coerce Ben to compete in his show, “The Running Man.” Ben agrees, and is subjected to a medical procedure and sedated. Amber, in the meantime, starts to realize that the government sucks, and might be framing Richards. And then, Climbing For Dollars comes on.

I am more confident than I should that that show either does or will exist. Bet.

Anyway, Ben “The Butcher of Bakersfield” is the main attraction on the show tonight! We get a montage of women dancing on a darkened stage in ‘80s tights, choreographed by original American idol judge, Paula Abdul! Small world, that. 

Damon Killian comes on stage, pouring on the smarmy charm to the audience, on and off screen. Something about how slimy he is just reeks 80s, and I’m living for it. Ben Richards is introduced using a bit of edited footage framing him as the Butcher, which also places Killian as an avenger and hero of the people, which...yeah, continuing to dig it. The audience jeers as the dancers parade around him in theater, eventually revealing...

I can’t decide if he looks terrible or fantastic in this outfit.

It’s revealed then that Killian’s double-crossed Ben (unsurprisingly), and his friends have been brought to compete in the game regardless. It’s also revealed that the “Runners” will be pursued by the “Stalkers.” And if they survive, they could win prizes like a fair trial, or maybe even a pardon if they get far enough! Whoof. This is a rough dystopia, and one with enough tinges of reality, that it’s palpable. BUT ANYWAY! It’s time to start running!

The guys are shot down a sick-looking bullet tube that’s almost certainly given someone an epileptic seizure in the past, and they exit into the mean streets of Los Angeles. Edith from the show audience picks the first Stalker to go out and hunt them down: Subzero.

Actually, this is Professor Subzero, played by Professor Toru Tanaka, a professional wrestler of the day. The group meet him in a hockey rink, where he’s covered in armor, carries a weaponized hockey stick, and uses explosive hockey pucks like a GODDAMN BATMAN VILLAIN.

I love this movie.

Well, the future Mister Freeze kills Professor SubZero, Because there can only be one ice-themed supervillain here. This is also the first time a Stalker has been killed in the show’s history. And wow, Ben is making himself look REAL bad. Both because of killing a Stalker, and by spitting out TWO shitty action movie lines in a row.

Ratings are up, Amber gets caught proving Ben’s innocence, and the next two Stalkers are chosen. One is Buzzsaw, armed with a chainsaw and super-strength.

The other is Dynamo, a GODDAMN OPERA SINGER WITH A METAL MOHAWK WEARING A SUIT THAT GRANTS HIM ELECTROKINESIS.

This film is our greatest achievement as a species. I am crying. I’m gonna need a minute.

Part II coming later today!

#the running man #stephen king #arnold schwarzenegger #paul michael glaser #maria conchita alonso #richard dawson #jesse ventura #ben richards #action #dystopia #dystopian #action genre #action movie #dystopian action #365 movie challenge #365 movies 365 days #365 Days 365 Movies #movie challenge #a movie a day #a year at the movies #a year at the cinema #movie essay #movie essays #movie review #movie recap #gameraboy1 #stream #userstream #action january

[zaggitz]

Top Ten Games of 2020

This year being the shitshow that it was, I ended up playing quite a few games I missed out on last year! First though, my lists from the previous years:

2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019

I like having my actual top ten being games that came out the year of but here's a few games that would have been on my list last year if I had played them:

Control

Really fun gameplay and a great weird world to play around in that scratched that weird cryptid/scp itch in a really satisfying way. I still have the final DLC left but I'm excited to do a full replay of the game at some point down the line

Outer Wilds

This game was worthy of all the praise it got last year and more. Amazingly crafted clockwork world with great lore and characters and an absolute blast to explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and oh damn is that a singularity cool I wonder what happens if I- and then explore and get lost WOAH there's two of me now!

I wish I could forget this game and play it for the first time all over again.

Honorable Mention:

Ghost of Tsushima

This game is an absolute blast to play and has some of the best seamless open world navigation I’ve experienced in the genre. How much I love playing the game is however at odds with how much I LOATHE its absolute horseshit main story. Might check out the multiplayer mode some time since it’s all the stuff I liked and none of the bad stuff.

Now for the actual list:

10. Man Eater

This game scratched a deep PS2/PS3 B game itch that I've had since probably the last Saint's Row game came out. It's nothing special but I had a really fun time with this weird, bite-sized(heh) comedy game.

9. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori 2 is in every way a massive improvement from the first game. The mechanics feel tighter, the level design is a lot more open and freeform, the writing feels sharper and the addition of tons of new characters with lots of dialogue helps flesh out this very beautiful world the designers at Moon Studio have crafted. I played this game on Switch and it played pretty smoothly though it was extremely jarring seeing XBOX GAME STUDIOS upon loading the game up on a Nintendo console.

8. The House in Fata Morgana: Reincarnation

This epilogue to the previous two visual novels did a fantastic job of closing out all the characters personal arcs and rounded out the story in a really good way that didn't choke me up at all, shut up.

7. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Now here's one I didn't expect to get sucked into as much as I did. There are a lot of plot expectations coming into this game from Breath of the Wild and it takes no time at all for HW2 to subvert the shit out of them. It toes the line really well between being both a prequel and a pseudo sequel really well and the combat is that good chunky big musou stuff I love. It also doesn't have any Imprisoned fights so it's immediately better than HW1.

6. Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Speaking of pseudo sequels... This game was just an absolute blast. The combat is hectic and strategic in a really satisfying way. The way it fleshes out all the characters from the early parts of FF7 while also having kicking rad world building and a few(not enough) new areas entirely ruled and much like HW2 it absolutely loves to set up expectations from the original game and flip them on their heads. I can't wait to see this shit go off the rails in the eventual sequel.

5. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I have like 300 hours logged into this game at this point. I've never been much of an AC guy but boy did this game luck out by coming out just in time for me quarantining at home for 7 weeks. I don't really have a lot to say about the game itself, I'm just glad I had it to occupy my time during the start of this hellshow.

4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 4

This game has some of the highest highs in the Trails series along with some of the absolute lowest lows. It's an absolute mess especially on the romance side of things but CS4 also wraps up longstanding plot threads from like 7 games prior with surprising amounts of finesse so the pros ended up outweighing the cons for me overall. This series was a core example of scope getting out of hand over and over. In a world where these games are tighter paced and end up being the 2 games they planned instead of 4 I could see this being a top contender. Sadly that wasn't the case. 

Now that the arc of these games is over I'm excited to see if they can return to form with the next one.

3. Hades

Amazing combat, amazing writing, well integrated roguelite elements and plot, dope ass music, this game's got it all baby. The amount of variety and build potential on hand makes me constantly excited to hit up a new run.

2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero

Take all my complaints out of the CS4 blurb and this (finally) fan-translated version of the first game in the second Trails arc is what you get. This game had some of the best worldbuilding in the series due to it taking place entirely in one huge Hong Kong style city. It closed out a major and extremely emotionally satisfying plot thread from the first 3 games and ends on such a fantastic high note of a finale. Trails fans who haven't touched Crossbell yet, don't miss out!

1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Why is Yakuza 7 my favorite game of the year? It’s not the brand new, huge city to explore filled with stuff to do. It’s not the shift to JRPG combat that works extremely well in context and gets really fun by the end of the game. It’s not the fact that this is easily the funniest game I’ve played all year, and hell, maybe ever. It’s also not the way the game perfectly closes out the Era of the last seven games while ushering in a new, extremely exciting one.

It’s because the new protagonist, Kasuga Ichiban, is not Kazuma Kiryu.

Let me back-up for a sec. This game’s biggest change above all else is the shift to a new protagonist. Now, for a Yakuza game, having a different protagonist isn’t normally a huge deal; we had new guys in 4, 5 and Judgement. But they all functioned within the narrative framework established by Kiryu.

Kiryu is a character whose core philosophy I feel can be broken down into one sentence: Don’t let anyone stand in the way of you living your life the way you want to live it. Every main story in Yakuza 0-6 revolves around this philosophy, as do most of the substories. Kiryu only gets involved in a game’s main story when he has no choice, because something is threatening the life he wishes he could be living. Hell, if anything, you could argue his ending in 6 is him finally accepting he can’t have the life he wants if he wants the people in it to be safe.

So when RGG studios created a new protagonist, built around a whole new combat style, they also had to change the philosophy behind their storytelling.

Kasuga Ichiban is a character who, after this first game at least, to me has a core philosophy of: Everybody deserves to be alive, to be seen, to be helped and to be understood. The changes this brings to the story are incredible and lead to one of the most emotionally satisfying games I’ve ever played. 

Sure, this is a Yakuza game, with it’s typical conspiracies and crime melodrama, but it’s also a game about the dehumanization of homeless people and sex workers. A game about the rampat mistreatment of immigrants and elderly people. A game about the dangers of rampant puritanical nationalism.

That it manages to be all those things so loudly and proudly is something that could only happen with a loud, rambunctious, heart on his sleeve type of guy like Kasuga Ichiban driving it.

Also the reason it’s a JRPG now is because he’s a huge Dragon Quest nerd, and you get to summon a crawfish named Nancy to kill people. Game of the Year.

#game of the year

[altalksaboutstuff]

My Top 5 Games of the Past Generation Youtube Script Plus Notes

This is, more or less, the script for My Top 5 Games of the Past Generation video that I just published on Youtube: With the Xbox One and Playstation Four about to head out of the door to make ways for the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5 respectively to lead us into the next generation of consoles were only Nintendo has been sitting comfortably with the Switch, the Wii U has been long gone and Nintendo also recently announced the official end of the Nintendo 3DS line cutting all the ties to this last generation.  With that almost everyone is now releasing their lists of the best games of the current generation, myself included, I couldn't help but notice a lot of same-soundy lists such as Game Informer's top 5 list.  I myself have to disagree with these, not to say that any and/or all five of those games on Game Informer's Top 5 aren't good, important or worth playing just that I don't think they are the best representative of this generation in terms of impact and wide appeal, so much as had the most money backing them. That these games on the list are more the best representative of the biggest Triple A titles.  The games that I had in mind are more impactful on how this generation swayed and set new standards.  I want you to keep in mind that while I liked some of these games, these aren't my personal top 5 of the past generation either but I think closer to what best represents our closing era of gaming, when I say the “best games of the current generation.”

First off I'd like to make an honorable mention of PT.  PT or playable trailer was supposed to be a demo for the new Silent Hill S game that unfortunately never came to be for the Playstation 4 from Konami.  A joint venture between film director Guillermo del Toro and the famous creator of Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima, this demo spooked the pants off of everyone and was probably the reason a lot of people decided to buy a Playstation 4.  Unfortunately Konami let Hideo Kojima go under less than favorable conditions and the demo vanished with him in time.  Since then the immersive, first person perspective horror game demo changed the landscape of what survival horror could be.  We then saw Resident Evil VII by Capcom, the Park by Funcom, Layers of Fear by Aspyr and Death Standing by Hideo Kojima's new studio Kojima Productions that were all heavily influenced by PT (this point made more obvious for Hido Kojima's Death Stranding) and the future of Survial Horror / Suspense games seems to be headed there with upcoming games like Resident Evil VIII: The Village.  The only reason this isn't officially on the list is because, well, it was sadly never a game but its influence was too important for me not to mention.

Number 5: Sonic Mania.  Ok so Sonic Mania isn't anything new but it is very important in the sense that it is a major franchise, Sonic, by a well established publisher, Sega, and they had officially given the keys of Mobius to the fandom to make a new game and it was fantastic. While that's oversimplying things a bit errr a lot, since Sega just didn't come out of the blue offering that opportunity.  Rather Sega saw a Sonic game pitched by Christian Whitehead, aka Taxman, who worked on porting previous ports of Sonic games to Mobile platforms. Why I think it is important is that this validating the bridge between fandom and passion projects in world where game hacks and fangames are traditionally shut down almost immediately after gaining the slightest attention.  While Sonic Mania isn't a fangame, its roots were deep from the Romhack community.  This represents cracking the door between what the fandom produces and what the corporate offices allow being available to consumers in a world were popular fangames and hacks result in cease and desist orders - which is why I think is very important to put Sonic Mania as the number 5 game of this console generation.

Number 4: Rocket League.  As of today, Rocket League is a now free to play game for better or for worse.  Rocket League is high-octane fun, blasting balls across various courts and fields such as basketball and football with fast automobiles but what it is most well known for is basically soccer with cars.  Rocket League is a lot of fun to play and has a large audience of  in the streaming and esports field which would be reason enough to put this game in a top 5 but what this game marks maybe even more importantly is cross console online play. While other games have and do continue to have online play across systems, back in March of 2016 Microsoft was very interested in allowing online play between Xbox One and other consoles them being extremely hopeful for Playstation 4 in particular, however Sony was holding out.  Sony was hesitant, citing their emphasis on providing a certain quality online experience but finally came to the party and in 2019 you could finally play Rocket League online with all your friends whether it be on PC, Xbox One, Switch, or Playstation 4. Since then we have had other games slowly roll out this feature such as Wargroove and the trend seems to be expanding.  I hope to see all games adopt this in the future and since Rocket League “birthed” this concept coming to the table for cross console online play for us all to enjoy, this is why I think Rocket League deserves the number 4 slot.

Number 3: Bloodborne/Dark Souls III.  This past generation and hell even to some extent decade, spanning to the PS3/Xbox 360, has lead us to compare every challenging game that comes out to Dark Souls.  Cuphead is the Dark Souls of run and gun shooters, Dead Cells is the Dark Souls of Metroidvanias, Celeste is the Dark Souls of platformers, etc.  While the meme of “X is like the Dark Souls of” is hard to find a concrete start, according to Google Trends this first seemed to spike in April of 2015 around the release of Bloodborne, the PS4 game created by FromSoftware.  While not technically a Dark Souls game, it was made by the same team and the game play and feel is very Dark Souls in the sense that I feel the phrase is used today, in contrast to the first two Dark Souls games.  Then we can see that in/and around October 2017 the trend has risen to its peak a little after a year and a half of the release of Dark Souls III.  While this justification may seem more flimsy and ultimately the Dark Souls brand was established in 2011, I do think Bloodborne/Dark Souls III is more in the zeitgeist, if you will, of the “X is like Dark Souls” comparison that has shaped the conversation of so many games today.

Number 2: Undertale.  Undertale is perhaps the darling of this generation. A game chock full of charm with multiple ways to approach it.  Will you save everyone, sacrifice everyone, or something in-between?  This game does look next gen, current gen or even comparable to past gen games until you hit perhaps the SNES or even late NES.  Maybe a number 2 spot is too high on list – this game didn't revolutionize the industry in ways that the other games on this list did nor was it the first anti-RPG of its kind, that would probably go to MOON, but Undertale just had such a powerful impact on gamers when it came out and became so unforgettable.  I feel like Undertale will be a game that we remember for a long time and to not include it in this list because its an indie game would be a real tragedy which segways me to my number 1 game.

Number 1: Shovel Knight.  Shovel Knight is the indie game that, I think, lead to the current boom of retro inspired indie games we have been enjoying.  A love letter to the NES games of the past such as Castlevania, Mega Man and Ducktales to name a few.  Shovel Knight wasn't the first retro inspired indie games but I feel like the attention to detail in trying to stay as true to what the hardware could run in terms of look, color, sound and pixel art with its overwhelming success showed that there was a market for these type of games.  Its success kickstarter in 2013 also showed that Kickstarter could be used as a viable platform to create indie games for a wider audience without having to rely on that Triple A model of good gaming synonymous with big budget corporate funding.  I firmly believe that we wouldn't have the great retro inspired games like Celeste and Dead Cells or the Kickstarter'd Yooka Laylee and Bloodstained or games that did both like Blasphemous if it wasn't for the hard-work and ingenuity that Yacht Club Games paved with Shovel Knight.

To use a popular Youtube cliché to conclude this list, “At the end of the day” I didn't make this list to put Game Informer or anyone's personal preferences down.  If you believe that they got the Top 5 games of the decade right that's perfectly ok and valid too, to have as your opinion.  I also want to reiterate that those five games – The Last of Us Part II, the Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Zelda Breath of the Wild and God of War are all important to this generation coming to a close as well in their own way.  While this list isn't my favorite games of the past generation, maybe I'll do that in the future, they are my subjective “best games list” of the past generation for what I think they did to the industry and you are free to agree, disagree, pick and choose between my list and Game Informers list or make a completely different list of your own.  I'm personally excited to see what the future of gaming has for us in this coming generation and optimistic for what's both around the corner and late into the next systems' life-cycle.  Happy gaming to you however you play.

Webpages noted: https://www.polygon.com/2020/9/17/21443683/nintendo-3ds-discontinued-lifetime-sales-hardware-software-units

https://www.fandom.com/articles/sonic-mania-just-nostalgia

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15807138/sony-playstation-cross-network-play-xbox-block-response

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/were-ready-microsoft-says-about-xbox-one-ps4-cross/1100-6438654/

https://www.rocketleague.com/news/full-cross-platform-play-now-live-in-rocket-league/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/shovel-knight

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php

Games shown/referenced in the video:

The Last of Us Part 2

God of War

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Red Dead Redeption II

Witcher 3

PT / Silent Hill S

Sonic Mania

Rocket League

Blood Borne

Dark Souls III

Undertale

Shovel Knight

Shantae: Half Genie Hero

Cuphead

Celeste

Yooka Laylee

Mega Man 2

Ducktales

Castlevania

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Blasphemous

Dead Cells

Resident Evil 7

Resident Evil 8

Moon

Layers of Fear

The Park

Death Stranding

Bonus Footage:

Xbox Series X reveal trailer

PS5 reveal trailer

Also note: I messed up in the original video and said the phrase, “X is like Dark Souls of” spiked in April of 2015 when I should have said first peaked in January to April of 2015.  I noted it in the video but wanted to note it again, sorry.

#Xbox #XboxOnex #XboxSeriesX #Playstation 4 #Playstation 5 #Playstation #PS4 #PS5 #Playstation4Pro #GodofWar #TheLastofUsPart2 #Witcher3 #Zeldabreathofthewild #Zelda #Reddeadredemption #Reddeadredemtion2 #Sonicmania #Sonic #Sega #RocketLeague #PT #SilentHillS #SilentHill #Bloodborne #DarkSouls3 #Undertale #ShovelKnight #Bestof #Top5 #BestofGeneration8videogames

[johannesviii]

Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 2017

Not a very good year for hit songs. Still better than the next one, though.

And a very satisfying #1 that launched an entire infodump about a specific band. I’m not even sorry.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will be stuff in French. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

2017 might not sound super distant, but it’s already distant enough to analyse what started to happen to me that year with some clarity. This is when I started to lose some of my energy and motivation. A lot, in fact. Everything suddenly felt exhausting and this whole “what’s even the point of anything” mentality started to fall on my shoulders. And you know what, at first, while making these recaps, I had no idea what started it all. Was it that super rare infection I caught in early 2018 and almost made me lose a part of a finger? Was it both my grandfathers dying in mid 2018? Was it the general state of the world? But no, I did some digging and noticed this general exhaustion actually started right during summer 2017 and I was like what the f█ck happened in summer 2017? That summer was fine?

And then it clicked. I know exactly what kickstarted my spiral into about 18 months of depression, and it’s got nothing to do with health or family. It’s something that shouldn’t have affected my life in any way, and that I kinda tried to ignore at the time, and some of you might even find me overdramatic or cringy for letting it affect my life. But yeah, as I’ve realised while making these lists, Linkin Park was actually a super important part of my life, so it makes perfect sense: what started it all was Chester Bennington killing himself. Clearly, someone who had contributed so much to convince me that life was worth living and who suddenly decided it wasn’t worth it, that had a huge impact on me, whether I wanted it or not.

Aaaand now I’m crying again. Great.

Anyway. Uh. Important albums that year! Yeah so uh. Depeche Mode made Spirit and it wasn’t good, and so I kinda lost faith they would ever make a great album again, but I did realise one of my teenage dreams and saw them in concert in the Stade de France in July 2017 (it was huge. Going home after that felt like waking up from some sort of hypnotic trance. They even played Walking In My Shoes, one of my absolute favorite songs from them, along with a video featuring a trans person going to work and I started to bawl my eyes out in the middle of the f█cking crowd). Nine Inch Nails also made Add Violence and continued to be super good, and Indochine made 13, and while it wasn’t nearly as good as Black City Parade, it was also better than La République des Météors, so I was pretty happy about that. EDIT: Forgot about Under Your Spell by The Birthday Massacre, which blew my goddamn mind, but still not as much as the next album I'm gonna talk about.

But the defining album of the year, to me, was Mike Oldfield making a sequel to my favorite album from him, with Return to Ommadawn. Of course it’s not as good as Ommadawn. But still. If Ommadawn felt like discovering a new strange country full of weird folklore and forests and mysterious buildings, Return to Ommadawn feels like going back there half a century later and seeing things in ruins and wounded people, but still trying to seek beauty and joy in a partly destroyed landscape. It makes perfect sense considering the circumstances that surround the making of this thing, and it was the only way to make a good sequel to such a legendary album.

Unelligible songs that piss me off... uh, actually there’s only Cut to the Feeling by Carly Rae Jepsen. Why wasn’t it a huge hit. Come to think of it, why hasn’t any Carly Rae song been a huge hit since Good Times. This feels unfair.

Time for some honorable mentions, then.

Feels and also Slide (Calvin Harris and a lot of other people) - Got nothing to say about either of these songs, but they’re both pretty good.

Katchi (Ofenbach) - Nice little earworm.

No Roots (Alice Merton) - Super surprised this was a hit. Good.

OK (Robin Schulz ft James Blunt) - That’s a James Blunt song in the year of our lord 2017 and it sounds actually good??

What About Us (Pink) - Really caught my attention and made me wonder if I should listen to Pink again after a long streak of mediocre Pink songs.

Congratulations (Post Malone) - I find the song mostly boring but the guest verse ending with “uh, Malone... I gotta play on my phone...” is the stuff of legends and that got a chuckle out of me every time I heard it.

Glorious (Macklemore) - I’m glad this was a hit here but at the same time it’s not my favorite song from him. The music video is adorable, though.

Fly (Odyssey) - Nothing to say about that one.

XO Tour Life (Lil Uzi Vert) - The fact that I was regularly humming this is either a sign of quality or yet another sign I was depressed as shit.

Devil in Me (Purple Disco Machine) - What a great artist name.

Symphony (Clean Bandit) - Nothing to say here either, just good sound all around.

Attention (Charlie Puth) - 2017: The Year Charlie Puth Made A Great Song.

All Stars (Martin Solveig & Alma) - The last cut. It was on the list at some point. I really like it a lot, though.

And now, the list. The stuff I genuinely love starts at #6 and things that are still on my mp3 player to this day start at #4.

10 - Chained to the Rhythm (Katy Perry)

US: #73 / FR: #10

I just love the concept of a Katy Perry song about how Katy Perry songs are happy nonsense distracting you from actual issues. What can I say, I’m a sucker for meta stuff.

9 - Water Under The Bridge (Adele)

US: #88 / FR: Not on the list

An Adele song projecting actual positive energy!? That automatically goes on the list.

8 - Praying (Kesha)

US: #67 / FR: Not on the list

You know I mostly dislike slow emotional songs regardless of how good they actually are. I will, however, make an exception for this one even though I very rarely listen to it considering how emotionally taxing it is. That’s definitely a fantastic song, though.

7 - Viens On S’aime (Slimane)

US: Not on the list / FR: #53

“Listen, we love each other, f█ck it, f█ck their words and their decorum, listen, we love each other, f█ck it, f█ck their ideas and what they’re saying”. Well said, dude, well said.

6 - There’s Nothing Holding Me Back (Shawn Mendes)

US: #23 / FR: #91

That’s a very good song for running and that is becoming increasingly rarer, so I’ll take what I can get.

5 - Paris (The Chainsmokers)

US: #42 / FR: Not on the list (that’s irony for you)

Unlike Closer this is an unrelatable song about rich young people that can afford to live in Paris just “to get away from [their] parents” but honestly that’s the only negative thing I have to say against it. It sounds fantastic.

4 - Castle On The Hill (Ed Sheeran)

US: #40 / FR: #50

We’ve now entered the realm of songs that are still on my mp3 player to this day. This is the only Ed Sheeran song I’ve ever liked, and I love it. It sounds like a lost U2 song. Maybe from a strange dimension where U2 became more fragile and emotional instead of more pretentious.

I have no idea why this guy keeps making such boring stuff when he’s got that kind of song in him. I have no clue.

3 - Something Just Like This (Coldplay & The Chainsmokers)

US: #5 / FR: #19

Hey so Coldplay is still on my lists, apparently. It’s a bit too slow, some lyrics about superheros don’t make much sense, and the drop isn’t super good, but my god, that guitar near the end makes everything worth it. Just amazing colors and textures all around.

It’s not even my favorite song on that EP! I think Miracles (Someone Special) is even better, but eh, this one is a close second.

2 - 24k Magic (Bruno Mars)

US: #16 / FR: Not on the list (#13 in 2016 but I put it on the 2017 list instead)

Am I the only one to like this more than Uptown Funk? It’s so much fun to sing along to it. And unlike Uptown Funk, it’s making me feel nostalgic for an era I actually (vaguely) knew, the super colorful and ridiculous early 90s. My s.o loves it too and when it comes up on the radio or on our playlists you can bet we’re both going PUT YOUR. PINKY. RINGS UP. TO THE. MOOOOOOOON like two idiots.

This is the song I could have put on the previous list but elected to put on this list instead since it was elligible for both years, by the way! Since 2017 was less good than 2016, I thought it would be more interesting to save such a great song for later.

It would have topped the list too, if it wasn’t for something I didn’t expect to be elligible before reading the French year-end list.

Strap yourselves in, because I had no real opportunity to talk about this band at length in the posts made for the years when it was the most relevant in my life, so this is going to be quite long.

1 - La Vie Est Belle (Indochine)

US: Not on the list / FR: #44

As you already know if you remember some of my previous lists, Indochine is a band I started to love right in the middle of the absolute worst years of my life. These guys had been around since the 80s as a super successful new wave band, then became very unpopular and went underground for about twelve years in the entire 90s, then one of them died, then every member except the singer basically rotated, and then they suddenly re-emerged in 2002-2003 with Paradize, a monster of an album, full of energy, sinister themes and weird provocative songs, and an entire generation of angsty teenagers (me included as you can guess) embraced it wholeheartedly.

And all of a sudden Indochine was the favorite French mainstream band of local young punk/goths! So many kids with the Indochine logo in highschool. Nowadays the band is mocked and well-loved in equal doses by just about everyone, but I suspect it’s just because we’ve all grown up.

Placebo, Linkin Park and Indochine were the bands that ruled my entire world in 2003/2004. My mother hated all three of them, because of course she did, but especially Indochine, because according to her it was partly their fault if I was gender non-conforming. See, she used to say, they had put all kinds of bad ideas in my head and now I was all messed up.

...Holy shit, that’s a lot of blame to put on a ridiculous new wave band who’s first hit song from 1983 is just a long nonsensical list of shitty old Bob Morane pulp novels.

But here’s the problem. Even if Indochine kept having hit song after hit song, those were never the best songs on their albums. Here I am, 31, making these top ten lists since last December, and becoming more and more frustrated to see none of my favorite modern Indochine songs are elligible. My favorite Paradize singles were Mao Boy, Popstitute and especially Marilyn (god, this song rocked my entire year alongside Placebo’s The Bitter End. 2003 was such a fantastic year for dark energetic hit songs)? Too bad, the biggest hits were J’ai demandé à la lune and Le Grand Secret. Alice & June had four fantastic singles? Too bad, none of them is elligible! Same thing for the entirety of Black City Parade. Oh, but that song I hate from La Republique des Météors is elligible, I guess!

So we’re in summer 2017, and my life is completely different now, and Indochine releases La Vie Est Belle (I’m linking the album version and not the music video because it has some violent themes in it). I’m in my car doing some errands and the local radio goes “hey new song from Indochine” and I’m like “oh shit, gotta hear this” and then two minutes later “oh wow, that is super good. Won’t be a hit though”.

And yet, it was a hit! It became huge, even! And at that point I was already loving that song even though I thought it was just a super good but tragic love song about a significant other dying too young.

And then, about a month later, the wordplay of the first line finally hit me with the force of a semitruck. It’s not a love song. It’s a song about the singer’s dead twin. Who died in 1999.

It’s such a devastating, beautiful song, and yet it’s full of energy. I. adore. it. It’s exactly the kind of song you need to continue to fight and to live and to help other people in this day and age. “Life is beautiful and cruel, it looks like us sometimes” indeed. And it’s one of the best on the album, too!

So yes, 15 years after I first fell in love with this band and after they helped me during super dark times, finally, I can put one of their songs at the top of one of these lists, hands down, no debate whatsoever.

That probably sounds ridiculous but it’s genuinely making me feel extremely emotional.

Next up: I thought music sucked that year because I was depressed but I relistened to it and no it wasn’t just me

#Johannes’ bad not good pretty terrible music lists #music #long post #eye contact tw #suicide mention tw #I can't believe I'm almost done with these lists #that was a wild ride guys

[aion-rsa]

Best Marvel Comics to Binge Read on Marvel Unlimited

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With an enormous swath of the world involved in varying degrees of social distancing, many of us suddenly find ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Never fear! There are more options for streaming comics than ever before, and that means we have access to more of comics history, more hidden gems, and more epochal runs than ever before. But the variety of options to read can be daunting. That’s why we’ve put together a recommendation list of some of our favorite comics binge reads to help you through quarantine. Marvel Unlimited has been around for more than a decade. It runs about six months behind print release of books, so it’s a good way to stay sorta-current with the stories you love. But the real draw is the back catalog: with 25,000 issues in its library, you’ve got access to some of the most important and most entertaining runs of superhero books of all time. From Lee and Kirby creating the modern superhero comic in the pages of Fantastic Four through Chris Claremont and John Byrne revolutionizing the X-Men, and through several Wars (Secret, Infinity, or Civil), everything is here. 

You don’t need us to tell you to read some of these stories. You know “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” Kraven’s Last Hunt, “Demon in a Bottle,” or Jonathan Hickman’s behemoth are all important and good. And some of them, Marvel’s even giving you for free. We’re going to skip over some of the obvious ones and point you towards hidden gems, the harder to find stories that fill in the edges of the Marvel Universe and make it such a rich, lush experience. We are also looking for monster runs that will keep you occupied – you can read six issues in one sitting with no danger of nearing the end. Some of these might take you an entire round of social distancing to finish. 

A quick note about the reading guides: We’ll list out the issue numbers for most of these. Many of them may have their own separate entry under Marvel Unlimited’s reading lists – those are helpful, but these are definitive. One of them, we’re going to refer you to the events – to find those, you can go to “Browse”, then scroll over to “Comic Events.” And for one of these, we’re linking to the inordinately helpful Comic Book Herald. They’re a great site for comic reading orders in general, and have helped me through several other binge reads before. 

Walt Simonson’s Thor

Thor (1966) #337-360, Balder the Brave (1985) #1, Thor #361-362, Balder the Brave #2-4, Thor #363-382

This probably shouldn’t be on the list. It is in the conversation for the greatest runs on any superhero comic ever. But if you’ve never read it, you’re truly missing out.

If you watched Thor: Ragnarok and loved how it looked or any of its story, chances are you are going to adore this, the run that Ragnarok borrowed so much from. Walter Simonson took the Asgard realized by Jack Kirby, the mythological realm pumped full of color and Kirby dots, and turned everything way up to create the most iconic Thor run of all time. Simonson started the run on art before handing off to Sal Buscema, and Simonson and Buscema are two of the artists I could recognize by style the soonest. Everything is HUGE. 

Read more

Movies

Thor Comics Reading Order: Ragnarok for Beginners

By Marc Buxton

Movies

Thor: Love and Thunder Release Date, Cast, and Story Details

By Mike Cecchini and 1 other

It’s paced immaculately, with whatever story is in the foreground holding your complete attention, but always with something drip drip dripping in the background that will eventually crescendo. This run made so many characters wonderful, but Loki, Volstagg, and Beta Ray Bill are highlights. And have I mentioned the art? It’s incredible, and doesn’t suffer one bit when Buscema takes over. This is my favorite run on any comic of all time. You absolutely must read it. 

X-Men: the Messiah Cycle

Messiah CompleX, Messiah War, and X-Men: Second Coming

The hottest take you’re going to find on the internet today is this: the Messiah Cycle is the best era of X-Men comics. It has everything I want from the X-Men line: books have distinct voices and missions, but contribute to the overarching direction of the line. There IS an overarching direction to the line. New characters are brought to the front, and new ideas are injected into the line.

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Comics

First New Marvel X-Men Crossover Revealed

By Jim Dandy

TV

X-Men: The Animated Series – The Essential Episodes

By Michael Mammano

You get all of that from the Messiah era. Messiah CompleX picks up with Cerebro identifying the first mutant birth in years; Messiah War has the members of the Mutants with Claws and Swords era X-Force heading to the future to check up on that baby; Second Coming is when she returns to present day. Each one has a different tone; Messiah CompleX and Second Coming bring together every book in the line to tell their stories, but also let each creative team keep telling their stories and end up being the best-handled X-crossovers since Inferno. And Second Coming is the best straight action X-book I think I’ve ever read. 

If you like these crossovers, you should absolutely check out other books from this era. Utopia X, a crossover between Uncanny X-Men and Dark Avengers, is amazing, as is Duane Swierczynski and Ariel Olivetti’s Cable and Zeb Wells’ New Mutants.

Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America

Captain America (1968) #307-422, 424-443

Full confession: this is my current binge read. After years of hearing about how wonderful Gruenwald’s Cap was, I finally decided to jump in and within three issues, I was texting people to scream at them for not forcing me to read it sooner. For starters, the goddamn Serpent Society turns into a union. In fact, the Serpent Society’s union meeting is the most fun I’ve had reading a comic scene in a while, and the fact that it is based on a real meeting of comic book creators from 1978 makes it both more accurate sounding and HILARIOUS (I think Constrictor is Gil Kane, when you read it).

Read more

Comics

Avengers: Endgame – The History of Captain America’s Climactic Moment

By Gavin Jasper

Movies

Captain America Comics Guide and Reading Order

By Mike Cecchini

But the real appeal is how much movie Cap is based on this era. Gruenwald’s Steve Rogers is a really nice guy. Everybody loves him, everyone respects him, and there’s not a lick of condescension or mean spiritedness about anything he does, from sparring with Black Knight to taking on a gang of criminal jugglers with Hawkeye to trying to help joke villains like Rocket Racer. He’s also extremely competent, and Gruenwald and artist Paul Neary do an incredible job of showing this, as Cap breaks into the West Coast Avengers’ headquarters while trying to figure out, through his jet lagged brain, what day it is. It only gets bigger and more traditionally superhero as it goes on, with artistic contributions from the likes of Kieron Dwyer, Ron Lim, and others.

You’ll see even more of this run’s influence in Marvel’s The Falcon and The Winter Soldier TV series on Disney+, as it introduces key characters who we’ll see on screen there, so get reading, and pay attention!

Runaways 

Runaways (2017) #1-current

Rainbow Rowell’s current run as writer on Runaways captures the Marvel spirit better than just about any comic coming out right now. It’s a masterful mix of superheroics, joyful immersion in Marvel continuity, and soapy teenage drama. A lot of people are doing good work at Marvel right now, but nobody is hitting these notes as consistently well as this crew. 

This book is remarkably accessible for something so steeped in its own history. If you’re new to comics, or if you’re here because of the Hulu show, you’ll find plenty to love. But if you liked the original series from Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, you’re going to be shocked at how much this feels like if that same book had never ended. Even though the characters have grown and changed substantially, their voices are distinct and seamless. This is one of my favorite Marvel comics being published right now, and once you’re all caught up, make sure you add it to your pull list at your shop.

Darth Vader

Darth Vader (2015) #1-12, Star Wars: Vader Down #1, Darth Vader #13, Star Wars (2015) #13, Darth Vader #14, Star Wars #14, Darth Vader #14-25

Remember that moment in Rogue One where Vader just kicked the shit out of everyone without looking like he was trying? And how everyone squealed in delight at old, force of nature, badass villain Darth Vader being back? If you were reading the comics at the time, that moment had already happened for you a full 18 months before the movie came out, in Darth Vader #6. 

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Comics

Star Wars Canon Timeline in Chronological Order

By Megan Crouse and 1 other

Movies

Star Wars: Darth Vader’s Best Moments from the Marvel Comics

By Marc Buxton

This entire series is Vader killing everything he can. It’s like watching a space tornado. What’s especially surprising, though, is how Kieron Gillen manages to sneak some important character development into the book. While Vader slices through Sith intrigue and Rebel scum and the entire royal line of a mining planet and a bunch of others, we’re also learning about why he’s the way he is. This series takes place between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, so some of the lines that get filled in add to the rest of the OT as well. There have been several very good Star Wars comics since Marvel got the license back, but this run on Darth Vader is the best. 

Ultimate Spider-Man 

Ultimate Spider-Man saved Marvel Comics. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley didn’t do it with flashy variants or crossovers. They did it by telling good, pure, core Spidey stories. 

It’s hard to separate Peter’s origin from Ultimate Spider-Man from Peter’s origin in the 616. The Ultimate origin is so definitive and iconic in how it fills in the spaces between the necessary beats. Bagley’s art especially – even now, thinking about this series that I haven’t read in forever, I can still pull up Peter jumping over Norman’s car, or MJ’s face when she and Peter have “the talk.” 

Read more

Movies

How Shifting MCU Release Dates Could Impact Spider-Man 3

By Don Kaye

Movies

Spider-Man 3 Story Is “Absolutely Insane” Says Tom Holland

By Kirsten Howard

For the absolute best, and purest this book can be, just read the first 38 issues, ending with the first Venom arc, but the book stays solid for its entire run. Bendis’ work with both Peter Parker and Miles Morales is my favorite work of his career, especially when Miles joins the cape world, but nothing will ever match just how fantastic these first few arcs of Ultimate Spider-Man are.

The Annihilation Era

Annihilation, Annihilation: Conquest, War of Kings, Realm of Kings, and The Thanos Imperative

You will be hard pressed to find better comic book space opera than the Abnett/Lanning era of Marvel’s cosmic characters. Marvel’s cosmic line was an afterthought when these first started coming out. By the end, it was a widely beloved corner of the Marvel Universe that was popular enough to be mostly transcribed whole by the movies.

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Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Cast, Release Date, Director, Story, and News

By Mike Cecchini and 1 other

Comics

Guardians of the Galaxy Reading Order

By Gavin Jasper

The nice thing about this era of the cosmic line is how neatly the main books move from event to event. Annihilation tells the story of a cataclysm that befalls the universe, and how the remaining heroes – Nova, Star Lord, Silver Surfer, Drax, Gamora, Ronan the Accuser, and Super-Skrull, among others – fight a war to survive. Rich Rider gets his own solo Nova comic from there, and it leads right into Annihilation: Conquest, about the catastrophe that follows in Annihilation’s wake. It also sees the formation of the Guardians of the Galaxy as we know them and launches their book, before tying both comics together in War of Kings where the Shi’ar and Kree empires collide. Realm of Kings is the aftermath of that war (and has one of my favorite Shi’ar Imperial Guard stories of all time), and that leads directly into the conflict that mostly closes out the era, The Thanos Imperative. This is a great introduction and immersion in Marvel’s cosmic universe, and will have you hooked by the halfway point of the first crossover.

Black Panther

Black Panther (1998) #1-22, Deadpool (1997) #44, Black Panther #23-62

There are certainly better parts to this run, but there is a scene where Namor, T’Challa, Doctor Doom, and Magneto stand around an apartment outside of the United Nations shouting at each other about diplomacy, and to this day I still have not found a comic book more specifically designed for my interests than this one. 

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Movies

Black Panther 2 Cast, Release Date, Villain, Story, and News

By Mike Cecchini

Movies

Best Black Panther Comics: An Essential Reading Guide

By Jim Dandy

Priest is one of the sharpest minds ever to write comics. He’s so good at misdirection and storytelling – he will overwhelm you with style and flash, and you won’t even notice the subtle clues he’s dropping, or the way themes and characters weave together to show key parts of the story. This run on Black Panther is probably the definitive one for the character, and contributed a ton to the movie version, but there’s so much more depth (and humor!) that Priest puts into the Marvel Universe that it’s very worth reading.

Incredible Hercules

Hulk (1999) #106-112, Incredible Hercules (2008) #113-115, Hulk Vs. Hercules: When Titans Collide, Incredible Hercules #116-137, Assault on New Olympus Prologue, Incredible Hercules #138-141, Hercules: Fall of an Avenger #1-2, Heroic Age: Prince of Power #1-4, Chaos War #1-5

Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente are two of the best people writing comics right now. Each individually writes really good comics, but the two of them working together almost always put something special out. Incredible Hercules spun out of World War Hulk and came out better than it had any business being. 

Read more

Movies

Hulk Movies Marvel Should Make

By Marc Buxton

TV

Who is She-Hulk? A Guide to Marvel’s Next TV Star

By Gavin Jasper

Hercules exists in a unique place. Pak and Van Lente used him as a gateway to the mythology of the Marvel Universe – the Greek pantheon, but also the Norse pantheon, Japanese gods, Inuit gods, even Skrull deities. And several of these aren’t exclusive to Marvel, so you get a very clear and obvious statement about some of the differences between the Big 2 universes, some clever in-jokes, and the requisite moving story about godhood. This all comes with wonderful characterization, clever plotting and a great sense of humor. 

Nextwave: Agents of H.a.T.E.

Read Nextwave after you’ve read everything else, not because it’s a good capstone to your Marvel experience, but because it’s aggressively anti-continuity, and (lovingly) EXTREMELY disrespectful of the rest of the Marvel Universe. It’s also one of the funniest comics Marvel’s ever put out. 

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This whole story is Warren Ellis brutalizing superheroes. Boom Boom from X-Force, Monica Rambeau (sometimes Captain Marvel, sometimes Photon), Machine Man, monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone, and Captain &#($$&*#!@ (or The Captain) are brought together by the Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort (H.A.T.E.) to fight Unusual Weapons of Mass Destruction. It’s aggressive nonsense, less anti-continuity than acontinuitous which isn’t a word but also fits the spirit of the book – characters make no sense even from issue to issue, and only serve the plot, but that nonsense later serves the plot. And it is an absolute tour de force from Stuart Immonen, who draws every type of comedy you can imagine – slapstick, absurdity, somehow sarcasm, puns – with incredible layouts and storytelling. This is not a good Marvel comic, but it is an incredible comic book that you’re going to love.

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