Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • House of Clubs

    You have a weekend to burn, and you’re planning a viewing marathon of a TV show on Netflix. If that’s your thing, who am I to judge? Perhaps I can help you make a decision, however, on what show to watch.

    The first season of Netflix’s version of the show, “House of Cards,” totals 13 episodes at just under an hour per episode, give or take. The only existing season of the anime, “Ouran High School Host Club,” totals 26 episodes at about twenty three minutes per episode, if you don’t skip the theme songs and previews. The run lengths balance out, more-or-less, for each show’s initial season outing.

    “But Karel,” I hear you asking, “what is it about either of these shows which would make me choose one over the other?” Well, let’s put it this way:

    One show centers on a group of rich and powerful people who use their money and influence to shape the world according to their whims, leverage the media to fashion narratives of their choosing, trample the fourth wall, shamelessly exploit taboo behaviors, and engage in complex schemes which would never actually come to fruition in the real world.

    The other show, of course, stars Kevin Spacey.

  • Why I Left WildStar

    I canceled my WildStar subscription this morning. Admittedly, most of the reason for this comes down to finances: It’s a tough time of the year, this month’s tighter than most, and so forth. Fifteen bucks for a game I rarely play is fifteen bucks I could put toward… food, let’s say.

    To be fair, WildStar is a great MMORPG-type game. It’s inventive, it’s colorful, it’s clever. It features the best housing system I’ve ever seen in a game. I love the “telegraph” feature, which lets you know exactly where a given power is going to strike. (Those of us who cut our MMO teeth in City of Heroes know the pain of having to guess where that cone AoE is going to land.) The worldbuilding detail is incredible.

    However, what a lot of people love about the game is what I don’t love at all: WildStar is MMO gaming on Hard Mode.

    (more…)

  • Lacking In Blue Öyster Cult

    And right there in the subject line of this post you’ll find my major gripe with the new “Godzilla” movie, if you can call it a gripe.

    They played it straight, it does what it says on the tin, it clocks in at two hours instead of nearly-three, and the biggest kaiju fan I know gave it her full approval. Hell, the movie even does a respectable job (all things considered) of figuring out how to get the main POV character into position for each action piece he’s thrown into, which is usually one of those parts of such movies which tend to make you say, “Oh, COME ON.”

    A great work of modern cinema? Maybe, maybe not. A solid giant-monster movie worthy of its name? Oh, hell yes.

  • Good day. Sunshine.

    It may be chilly out there in late February but hey, sometimes we get quite the view…

    image

    Not bad. Not bad at all.

  • One Night In Portland

    I’m going on record (ha ha) with an unpopular musical opinion, and I don’t really care who knows it.

    Back in early 1985 two singers released their own versions of the same song. I was thirteen years old at the time, right in the target demographic for Top-40 “Z” stations like Z-100 here in Portland. One of their gimmicks involved voting for the better of two songs via a phone-in tally. Since this one song’s two renditions came out within weeks of one another it probably seemed a brilliant idea to put them up against one another.

    It’s possible that I still have my cassette tape recording of the event kicking around here somewhere but I wouldn’t put money on that bet.

    Everyone who lived through the ’80s is familiar with and may even like the version that went on to become a one-hit wonder. Me? I still prefer this one, and I always will. So be it.

    (For the love of your sanity, don’t seek out the actual promotional videos for either rendition. They’re very, very… ’80s. Hooboy.)

  • Gundam Winging It

    Oh hey, look at what I assembled over the weekend.

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    Such a fierce little dude, isn’t he?