Media Consumption – Page 2

Media Consumption 10/24/2015

October 24, 2015 by Belghast

Week of Star Wars

This week was extremely dominated by my burgeoning love of Star Wars. I have written many times about how I just was not feeling the franchise after the prequels… and that all of the hype surrounding me has rekindled that little kid inside of me that wanted to be “darfa bader”. I’ve always loved the empire more than the rebels, and I feel kinda bad about that… but Storm Troopers and Darth Vader…. come on. I was sick for a chunk of the week and while home sick… I caught up on a few things… namely Star Wars Rebels. So without further rambling… lets talk about stuff.

Star Wars: Force Awakens – Trailer 3

This trailer is absolutely amazing and only serves to bump my hype for this movie up to a fever pitch. This honestly scares me more than a little bit. I am as excited right now for Force Awakens as I was for Phantom Menace… and we all know how that turned out. I think the thing that gives me confidence more than anything is the giant trail of money attached to this movie. Disney paid four billion dollars to purchase the Star Wars franchise… and I think the realize if this movie is the stinker than Phantom Menace was… they have essentially flushed the vast majority of that money down the toilet. That said I have also come to realize that quite simply I don’t think George Lucas knows how to direct human beings with human emotions. I’ve recently watched the prequels again… and those movies are full of some really damned good actors… all of which are chewing up scenery with some of the most unnatural dialog and acting I have seen. You take those same actors and put them in quite literally any other movie and they do amazing jobs… so it has the be the movies themselves that are the problem. Anyways… enough of that and on to the trailer.

I love the feel of this trailer, how it is a sequence of more fleshed out vignettes this time. I have gone back and forth on the popular conspiracies and at this point I simply don’t have a clue. I don’t know why Luke Skywalker isn’t on the movie poster, and I am starting to question if it is him with the robotic hand reaching out to R2-D2. I am playing this game of “who is the Skywalker”, and I right now I am starting to think that maybe Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren are all connected to the previous trilogy. I am still leaning heavily towards Kylo Ren being the child of Han and Leia who has now turned to the Dark Side and become essentially a Vader fanboy… since he knows that Vader was essentially his Grandfather. You see Rey behind the seat of the Millennium Falcon in one of the shots that has come out… so that would lead you to believe that maybe she is ALSO the child of Han and Leia… maybe sibling to Kylo? Finn is the one I cannot place… since we see him wielding a lightsaber we know he is a force sensitive. Makes me wonder if maybe he is the child of Luke, but with whom. He could also be the child of Sana Solo which is now apparently the in canon wife of Han. I feel like a lot of this movie is going to center around Kylo Ren essentially going on an Artifact hunt trying to find relics of Vader, but past that I am not sure of anything. I am absolutely looking forward to December so I can finally see how the pieces are going to fit together.

Star Wars Rebels

While sick this week I caught up on watching Star Wars Rebels, which I found out you can stream from the Disney XD website so long as you have a cable provider to validate with. The only problem with this is that it isn’t really clear where one season ends and the next begins. At this point I am apparently caught up and into season two, and I have to say this show… is so great and just what we needed to bridge some gap between the prequels and the modern age movies. This show is essentially about the birth of the Rebellion as we know it episodes four through six. I’ve talked about the show in the past on my blog, and I will warn you it honestly takes a few episodes before it starts to feel right. Sabine Wren is awesome… just going to get that out there. I love Mandalorians and she has this awesome quirky nature that is just great, and I love the fact that she tags her armor every time they take down another imperial target. I also adore the paint job she did on the captured Tie Fighter.

The coolest part about this show however is the fact that we get to find out what happens to Ahsoka Tano. That was the biggest problem I had after Clone Wars you weren’t really sure what became of her. You know she isn’t in any of the prequels… largely because I don’t think the character existed until the Clone Wars cartoon… but we just know she is not around in any form. Here we find that she is fighting the good fight and acting as the rebel operative known as “Fulcrum”. It is awesome to see her again, but we know that issues are going to come up… and with a brief interaction with Darth Vader he realizes exactly who she is… and that she is still alive. You are left with the impression that she has her assumptions that Vader is Anakin… but she isn’t nearly as certain as Vader is in that interaction. I thought it was awesome that they brought in Commander Cody as well, and it makes me so damned happy that essentially Clone Wars and Rebels are a continuation of the same basic story arc. I was afraid that all of the great characters that got invented for the Clone Wars show would simply be gone, but now we are seeing them almost all revitalized as part of the Rebels show… which also I believe means they are being inducted into the canon universe. The hope is that maybe some of these characters will have brief cameos in the new movies as well.

Walking Dead Season 5 – Episode 2

Wow… this episode. I thought the first episode was intense with the quarry full of walkers, and herding them down the path. This episode starts off very benign showing you how the rest of the characters were spending the time while everyone else was out in the field with the walkers. Then in a manner so quickly that I thought it might literally be a hallucination… we see the wolves get into Alexandria and just start slaughtering the residents. We all knew the wolves would eventually get there, and it seems as though either someone jumped the fence in the same way that Carl and Enid have done… or someone left the damned gate open again. Last week we theorized as to who was hitting the car horn and leading the walkers of the pack, but this week we find out that it was instead a semi truck that was heading for one of the walls to break it down. The gun in the guard tower managed to shoot the driver… but then the driver fell on the horn while dying. The episode as a whole was just so strange to see how absolutely feral and blindingly fast the wolves were.

The part I am thankful for however is the fact that essentially this incident forced Carol to abandon her disguise. She had to become the badass we all know she is, but I do think it is significant that she once again took on the disguise of a wolf, much like she took on the disguise of a walker getting into Terminus. I think this is the sign of something more with her character… I think she got used to having to wear a mask in the years she was in her abusive marriage, and now it is just comfortable for her to keep adopting them in order to stay safe. This episode however was a tale of two styles conflicting… the monk like pacifism of Morgan, and the brutal and honest force of Carol. The body count from this episode was massive and I think in one show we have whittled down the folks in Alexandria to only the reliable and self sufficient ones are left. The wolves came in and killed all of the sheep as it were… all of the people who simply could not take care of themselves. As a result I think Alexandria is going to be a vastly different place in the coming weeks as they have to deal with this horde of walkers bearing down upon the walls. I am amped for this week to see what happens next.

Media Consumption 10/17/2015

October 17, 2015 by Belghast

Television Lite Week

This week has been one that has seen me absolutely consumed with Destiny on the PlayStation 4, and as such I have simply not spent much time watching television. I have however watched quite an excessive amount of YouTube videos, namely as I try to find information about Destiny. There is this shift that is happening where certain games with certain audiences… simply do not have information blog posts about them. I’ve gotten spoiled in a world with Dulfy.net and WoWHead.com in that I expect pretty much every game I have to have this quality of resources. Instead for many games lately all I am ever able to find is YouTube videos on a given subject. I am sorry to all the YouTubers out there… but I am of a generation where I feel like a video is the least useful way to disseminate information. I will take a written explanation and some good screenshots any day over a lengthy video walk through. At some point in the near future I hope to take some of these things that I found frustrating and attempt to write some blog posts outlining how to do this thing or that thing in Destiny. Granted that is not to say there are not a lot of really good Destiny YouTube channels… but I would still rather have an informational post.

Destiny Lore

The first time around when the AggroChat crew played Destiny… we joked that it was a game almost entirely devoid of story. That apparently is not the case… they just go to strange lengths to hide it from you. The story of the game is told through a series of grimoire cards, item descriptions, quest text, and hinted at in cinematic scenes. In fact there is actually apparently a TON of information about the characters in the game, their background, how they arrived at the tower… and all sorts of legends from the golden age, the city age, and the now tower age. In my search for information about Destiny I happened to stumble across a really awesome YouTube channel called Myelin Game… which is not to be confused with long time friend Mylin1. The channel is chock full of videos where Myelin digs into the lore of Destiny and connects the dots, weaving all of the known information… and speculated information into a narrative around a certain subject. I linked the Black Garden video since the game does a pretty poor job to explain what the hell it actually is… but I also highly suggest the trilogy of videos talking about thorn, last word, and first curse. I have always guessed there was this rich story somewhere behind Destiny… because the dots connected too neatly at times not to be well planned, but now that I am starting to learn some of the actual story I am loving it. I still feel it is a strange choice to make players dig for this knowledge, rather than letting you experience chunks of it through the story. The Fallen King expansion does a much better job of being more forthcoming with information… and it gives characters that previously did not have much of a personality… plenty of chance to show it off. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these lore videos while doing other things and I highly recommend them.

Star Wars Minute

Another thing that I stumbled across this week is Star Wars Minute, which is a great YouTube channel that takes segments of the Star Wars universe and condenses them into roughly one minute long narrative explanations. Much like the Destiny Lore, this feels as much podcast as it does YouTube video because the narrative explanation is the important part… and the images going along with it are nice to have but not 100% necessary. I ended up finding this as I started doing some googling related to the Star Wars universe, namely for the upcoming pen and paper game that should have its first session tomorrow. The funny thing about this is how much of the universe I already had a full grasp on but have no clue why. I guess even though I have been a sleeper Star Wars fanboy since the prequels… I was still subconsciously hungry for knowledge about this favorite of universes. Star Wars Minute is great to play in the background as you do something else and they release three new episodes a week, so there is a silly amount of content available already.

Arrow Season 3

Be warned I am going to go into some serious spoilers here, so if you have not watched Arrow Season 3 or if you intend to at a later date… you might want to skip this section. Here is the point at which I get really frustrated with this show. Generally speaking I am all for a television show deviating from the source material to make the universe work better for the TV audience. For example most of the Batman movies have worked really well… and they are essentially a condensed soup version of the batman universe… gathering up all the good bits and trying to weave a story out of them. You have a very limited amount of time on television, and what might work fine to slowly build over the course of several years of a comic run… needs to happen in an under two hour long movie. Television shows have a bit more leverage when it comes to pacing something out, and this is also cool. The thing that apparently pisses me off though… is when you take actions attributed to one character and apply them to a completely different character.

What I mean is that this story line that has played out throughout the season around R’as al Ghul didn’t happen to Green Arrow… ever. Essentially this is a Batman storyline, and all of the events that are playing out happened at one time or another to Batman. This caused me to think about Arrow the television show in a different light and realize that essentially… they have been turning Arrow into Batman this entire time. Maybe it is because Batman has been tagged as a “film” universe and is not available to be done in a Television version that they feel the need to create someone that is Batman-like. Green Arrow was admittedly a comic that I did not really follow. I mean I knew that him calling his sister Speedy when that was the character that would ultimately become Arsenal was wrong… and I knew a few other points seemed less than correct. However I lived in this world of relatively little knowledge about the show so I was able to pretty much ignore any differences… until they started stepping foot into the Batman universe. THAT is a universe I know considerably more about, and after a whole lot of research and the council of Thalen… I pretty much determined that nope… Green Arrow has never really interacted much with R’as al Ghul at all. So I am sitting here two episodes away from the end of the season… questioning if I care to finish watching it.

Walking Dead Season 6 Premiere

Thank god Walking Dead is back. “Fear The” was such a pale imitation of Walking Dead, and I am exceptionally happy that they chose to back up the start of Season Six to the end of the first season of Fear. I do have to say though that it makes me extremely happy that Talking Dead has been pulled in officially for Fear as well, because for me at least that has become so much of that experience. This is one hell of a first episode, and I really liked the way they handled Flashbacks in this episode by making them Black and White. That is always the challenge with a show, how to visually tell the watcher that the events they are seeing are not happening in real time but instead an imagined replay. When you are dealing with older characters and younger characters, it works naturally… but when you are dealing with only a few hours or days passing… it becomes much more challenging. So the choice of black and white gave a nice clear demarcation point between the two time-frames. As to the rest of the episode… Rae sent me a text as the show as going on that simply said “Nosh Pit”.

The premise of the show has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg style plot devices I have seen in awhile. To figure out a way to draw the walkers out of the pit and along a fixed path to get them away from Alexandria. The parallels to herding cattle… was extremely strong in this episode. They even managed to draw them down a chute just like you do cattle for a period of time… and then cleared out the farm supply store just to make sure nothing would spook them and draw their attention away… kinda like you do cattle. The slightest noise can distract cattle and get them to move in a different direction, and that apparently is the case with walkers. The thing is… going into this episode… you knew something was going to go wrong. There were scenes in the Season 6 preview show of Walkers in Alexandria or at least the hint of that happening. This show is really good about misleading us, for example the above poster would seem like we are heading towards some central conflict between Morgan and Rick… and in truth… it seems like Morgan instead manages to back Rick down from the ledge a bit.

As far as the walkers… when they are nearing the clear zone… someone sets off a horn in Alexandria, causing the mega horde to turn that direction. So the question is… who did it. At work the popular theory for awhile has been that Enid is a spy from the Wolves, and that the scenes of her in the car with the walker outside… hint that she set off the horn. My personal theory is it is Father Gabriel once again trying to destroy everything around him. He wanted to go out on the mission to herd the walkers, but Rick shut him down immediately. My theory is he is vindictive, and after being shut down by Andrea as well… he is still on some mission to destroy this community and in the process allow himself to be kill in some sort of twisted act of contrition for letting his parishioners die. In truth it could be the wolves themselves, who have been watching everything happening and see this as their opportunity to let the zombies batter down the defense of Alexandria and allow them to come in after they are done… and loot the resources. If nothing else this episode explained why Alexandria had been left fairly unscathed… because the giant pit of zombies had been drawing in more zombies and keeping them away from the town. It is going to be interesting to see how the next few episodes play out, and who we lose in the process.

Media Consumption 10/10/2015

October 10, 2015 by Belghast

Netflix Binge Time

This week things felt like they were starting to get back to normal. Since last week was so freaking crazy I ended up taking Tuesday off and just hanging out around the house. That meant it was the perfect time to binge watch something on Netflix. Unlike the previous week there have been multiple times that I simply hung out downstairs with the laptop and television, and as such have some shows to talk about. Of note, if anyone has something they suggest I watch feel free and chime in. I am always looking for something interesting, but the caveat is it must be available either through Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming. I know iZombie has started back up, and I have the episodes recording to my DVR but am largely waiting on my wife to watch them since she also was able to get into the previous season.

Dark Matter – Season 1

Dark Matter is one of those shows that folks had been suggesting to me for some time now, but I never really got around to watching it. When I first checked to see if the show was streamable somewhere, I was only able to watch like the last five episodes through Hulu. Now the entire series is on Netflix and it seemed like the perfect time to watch it. I can’t think of this show without also comparing it to another SyFy channel show Killjoys. There are moments where you wonder if this is set in the same universe, because they seem extremely similar. Distopic future where corporations control pretty much everything, and folks are forced to carve out their lives on the fringe of society. The twist here is that the crew woke from out of cryosleep only to find that they have all had their memories erased. During the first season we spend a lot of time trying to sort out who they are and what exactly they were doing, and at the same time blending together as a team.

So far my two favorite characters are “Five” aka the hacker stowaway girl, and the Android…. that they sadly just keep calling Android. I am hoping in season two they finally give her a name, because I like the character and actor playing her. If you are a fan of Lost Girl it is the same actor that played the Fae Doctor on that show, and sometimes love interest of the succubus title character. What is awesome is that obviously there is some malfunction with the Android as she is starting to develop emotions, which makes the experience very “Data” like. As far as the hacker… I knew she looked familiar and it finally hit me. She is the little girl that played Alessa in the Silent Hill movie, and I IMDB’d to confirm it. There are moments where the show gives me very Cowboy Bebop vibe to it, as they wander around space looking for jobs to pull…. so you know they can eat and have fuel. All we need now is a genetically modified Corgi.

Arrow – Season 3

Also showing up on Netflix is season 3 of Arrow, which I somehow completely missed arriving until last night. While playing SWTOR I binged my way through about half of the season and plan on trying to finish it up today. So far I am liking it, but I am not super keen on some of the events that have transpired. There is a lot of this season that just feels like it is set up material for future events. I feel like I also really need to watch Flash after this to help piece together some of the parts that are missing when ONLY watching this season. The cross over episode felt a bit odd, because I am assuming it started with Flash. Also the lengthy set up for Atom has been interesting but a little contrived. I am also not super sure what is going on with the character of Felicity this season, she seems to be shifting personalities a lot. I am largely cool with Laurel taking the mantle of Black Canary as well. The problem with the DC universe is that I only really know a shallow version of it that tends to be very Batman-centric.

Growing up I was a Marvel kid, and the only comics I really delved into were the Batman and Green Lantern universes… other than Superfriends that is. Marvel always felt like the universe of gritty anti-heroes and that was the sort of thing I thought was cool. DC however tended to have much more detailed story arcs, and they obviously did a far better job of licensing their properties than Marvel since we have the ability to see all of these cross overs. Obviously the whole handing Cupid over to Suicide Squad bit… is going to end up biting them in the ass. I am hoping as the season goes on we see more of the Suicide Squad, especially as this season and season four probably really need to set up for the Suicide Squad movie, seeing as that is not a part of the DC universe that most people know anything about. Well that is other than Harly Quinn… at this point everyone knows and loves Harly Quinn. Looking forward to finishing the season today, as I continued to work my way through the Bounty Hunter storyline.

Fear The Walking Dead – Season Finale

The funny thing about Fear the Walking Dead is how the episode finale had two vastly different effects on me and my wife. Up until this point in the season she had been watching the episodes with me, and it seemed like maybe she was almost getting into the show. Whereas honestly I was bored and kept waiting for the inevitable other shoe to fall, because having been a long time walking dead watcher… you knew the bad stuff was coming eventually. Finally in this episode everything starts to go wrong, and this is the point at which my wife completely loses interest. It seems like she is fine with a world where people have to sort out how to survive, but not so much in a world where they are constantly being chased by the dead. Daniel still rises from this episode as my favorite character, namely the only one who is truly prepared to exist in this world. The only problem there is he takes what is a bad situation and makes it even worse by letting loose the first horde.

In earlier episodes we find that they were using a stadium as a shelter, much like they did in Katrina with the super dome. Something goes wrong and people start turning, and the military is unable to sort out who is living and who is dead and just ends up chaining the entire contents in essentially assuring that all two thousand plus people end up as zombies. So when Daniel turns them lose to use them to attack the military compounds, it gives us a hint and maybe HOW the hordes form. Maybe they get started when zombies finally break out of places they have been pinned up in and keep wandering together because they don’t exactly have free will. Which makes you wonder… where exactly did the mega horde near Alexandria come from? The big thing I wanted from Fear the Walking Dead, was more insight into WHY the world fell to hell and that seems to be something that was not on the menu. Largely I am disappointed in the show, and the lack of Talking Dead after it was a problem for me. Talking Dead essentially played the role of having someone to talk about the show with, in a strange way. I am hoping when Season Two comes around they will do a “Talking Fear” show or something like that. In any case this week we get the return of the real Walking Dead show so in the meantime I am pretty amped for that since experiencing the watered down version.

Media Consumption 10/3/2015

October 3, 2015 by Belghast

Week of PS4

This week was pretty much the week of me intending to play other games… and then never quite getting off of my PS4 in time to actually do that. As a result I spent most of my time upstairs in my office with my chair turned to the side pointing at the television that runs my consoles. Also as a result I did not really watch any television other than last Sunday night, which means that portion of my usual media consumption was pretty scant. However that said I did watch a bunch of really interesting things on the Internets own television station… aka YouTube. As a result this episode of Media Consumption is largely going to focus on things I found interesting on YouTube.

Tommy Westphall Theory

So firstly I have to give a major shout out to the PBS Idea Channel for creating videos that are almost always thought provoking or at least makes me want to discuss whatever it is they are talking about with my friends. This week however they posted a video that quite literally blew my mind. Tiny fireworks went off followed by lots of mental pain… as I attempted to reorient myself to accept the notion that what they were saying could be real. They delved into this idea called the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, where essentially over four hundred different seemingly unrelated televisions shows… all occur in the same universe. To make things even stranger the suggestion is that this entire universe exists in the mind of one autistic boy named Tommy Westphall that appeared on Saint Elsewhere. If this sounds interesting then by all means watch the video and prepare to make mind explodey noises.

Ahoy – Nuclear Fruit Series

The problem with the internet is that things change regularly… and there is little to no way to track down what things previously were called. There is this great channel that is currently called Ahoy, but I cannot for the life of me remember what the original name was. Essentially it is a channel that does these awesome videos that explore video game concepts with amazing narration and artful two dimensional graphics. I first was made aware of the channel through the Brief History of Graphics series where they delve into computer games and explore the various eras and the graphical changes that came into play as part of them. There is also a really great series called Iconic Arms where they delve into the ubiquitous guns that we use in shooter games, and the origins of them… usually delving into the maker and the real world conflicts they were actually used in. Today however I am here to talk about their latest five part series called Nuclear Fruit, where they delve into our fascination with nuclear warfare and the games that were inspired by it. As of writing this there are only four parts available but the next part should arrive this coming week if they follow the standard schedule. If you look in this playlist the video appears to be available but just flagged to “private”.

Cool Ghosts – The Taken King: Does it Fix Destiny?

If for some reason you missed this yesterday, I am a really huge fan of this video. It does an excellent job of highlighting the things that felt wrong with Destiny Year One and the way many of those have been improved in Year Two. Yesterday I also went into my own reasons for why I think the game is in a much better state, but still the video is well worth watching. Matt Lees the guy who appears in the video makes absolutely brilliant videos, the problem being they are somewhat sporadic. My hope is that his new “Cool Ghosts” initiative where he collaborates with another friend will serve to be a fertile ground for new content. In the mean time we can always just re-watch his crowing achievements of the PS4 and Xbox One reveals.

Fear the Walking Dead

There is a huge part of me that is excited for this weeks Fear the Walking Dead… because it means this season is over and we can return to the normal Walking Dead television show. In all fairness I have to say last weeks episode had things finally starting to get interesting. From this point out… I am going to delve into a ton of spoilers and if you have not been watching this show you might just want to stop reading this sub section. We found out a bunch of stuff that does not bode well for the characters. I have a feeling that there is no way that they are getting out of tomorrows episode without at least losing one of the characters. Essentially the crazy old man… aka Daniel Salazar… aka the only person who has the survival instincts necessary to survive the undead apocalypse… has kidnapped the soldier that his daughter Ofelia is sweet on. Then he proceeds to do what so many fathers have wished they could do to the guys dating their daughters… slowly peels away his skin in a cruel torture ritual. The thing is… as horrible as this act is… it is quite literally the only way he was able to get him to spill the beans about operation Cobalt. This is apparently a planned execution of all of the civilians when they abandon the Los Angeles Basin. As we go into this weeks episode it is essentially the day these events are supposed to play out. That said it seems like most of the soldiers who would have been involved in said plan… got nommed on in an overrun hospital. So here we go… things are finally going to get crazy… because I am tired of this suburban living under armed guard phase of the show. Let the bodies hit the floor! It is seriously time to weed out some of the characters.