Baltimore

Dear my friends on the right: I do not care how long Freddy Gray's rap sheet was. This is America, not Putin's Russia, not Iran, not North Korea. Even if Freddy Gray was the fucking Boston Bomber, I'd have a problem if he just keeled over and died in police custody. That is not how our system is supposed to work.

Dear my friends on the left: Everything Else.

The Hunger Games, Part 2.5

I finally circled back to this franchise about a young woman brutally exploited by a vicarious-thrillseeking society. And also the character she plays.

So in this third film of this four-film trilogy, we have a couple of new locations. We get to see District 13, which as best I can tell is comprised of a futuristic hospital set; a completely untouched high school cafeteria; the gathering room from Alien 3; a 1980s missile silo; and a big, poorly-lit stairwell. I guess I should clarify that the stairwell is EXTREMELY poorly lit, because most of the film is in fact poorly lit. And oddly edited. And unnecessarily padded. Why did they need to do this?

$

"Go play Game X, because it's a precursor to Game Y, which you really love."

Eh.

Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim might be the two games into which I've sunk the most time (an accomplishment, given that I've only owned Skyrim for less than a year). I also own Knights of the Old Republic and Morrowind. And do I feel the same way about those games?

Uh, no.

SACRILEGE! HERETIC! BLASPHEMER!

Yeah, okay, okay. It's not the graphics (although good grief, Morrowind's draw distance is godawful). I'll gently knock their soundtracks for being "of their time" in the sense that there's no rhyme or reason behind why they transition from one piece to the next - but having said that, they're both great, and I was under the impression that I owed Jeremy Soule an apology for saying that the Skyrim theme ripped off the Pirates of the Caribbean theme when in fact Soule's theme debuted in Morrowind, one year before the first Pirates film, but I can't actually find the post on this blog where I said that.

Rah rah worldbuilding and storyline and all that - yeah, okay, but the thing is, these things aren't storybooks (something that BioWare seemed to understand for the first two Mass Effect games and then forgot again for the third one).  Player interaction is kinda what makes video games, you know, video games. And I don't care how well-constructed your little fantasy world is if interacting with it is a major hassle.

I'm not even complaining about Morrowind's lack of quest markers here, because I thought they held your hand in Skyrim and I didn't really miss them. (Also, Morrowind still gives you a compass, without which you'd be totally f*cked.) But if anyone can tell me how to read a book in Morrowind without first taking it out of my inventory and dropping it on the ground, I'd appreciate it.

I'll also complain that my health and magicka don't regenerate. The hell is this, survival horror?

Now, I admit that my Morrowind experience was a bit tainted by the fact that my very first character (and the custom class I created for him) are gone forever because I died in the first dungeon I found and didn't realize that the game doesn't autosave as often as Skyrim does. That was a bit obnoxious. But I will say that my first hour of Skyrim was much more enjoyable than my first hour of Morrowind, even aside from that.

I shall now pre-judge Avengers 2: Age of Marketing

I could try to keep this fair and balanced and not let the fact that Joss Whedon is an uninformed jackass running his mouth to his millions of mouth-breathing fans too lazy to fact-check about GamerGate influence my opinion of the things he does, but I'm not going to.

So anyway the greatest accomplishment of Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Can Do was putting six superheroes on a team together. The film was written and directed by a man who primarily did ensemble-show-style television as well as a really good Space Western movie that completely failed to recoup its budget at the box office. Unsurprisingly, the film lacks a single protagonist and the guy who gets the most character development is the one a) whose superpower is anger, and b) who's played by a different actor this time around.

Compare Avengers 1 to Captain America 2 and the shortcomings of the Whedon approach become rather obvious. Even though Cap 2 is supposed to be a standalone film, not only did it flesh out more of the MCU world, but it also changed more of the MCU world than Avengers 1 did. The reason why they were able to do this might be because they were focusing on a much smaller group of characters, and actually had a few themes to explore, rather than the old "group of badasses having pissing contests" that everyone got sick of midway through Buffy.

The good news is that in Avengers 2, there are going to be even more characters to crowd out each other. All so that Marvel can sell more toys. Now, maybe this is Marvel's idea, in which case, yeah, the guy famous for long-term character arcs in ensemble shows might make a bit of sense to write and direct. If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints. (I mean, Casino Royale is basically TWINE done right, but it's not like changing Bonds was the only thing they did.)

But serious question, given that Whedon's magnum opus was and in my opinion remains Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why haven't they assigned him the Black Widow movie?

Seriously, though, I wish they'd stick to the Cap 2 style approach of having one or two other Avengers guest-star in the title character's film, rather than try to mash everyone together and run through the obligatory "let's find something for everyone to do at the expense of everything else" sequences.

My latest Skyrim character

is a Thalmor plant.

"How does this work?" you might be asking. Well, I'm here to tell you.

It's that time of year again, where we gather 'round the TV to watch a vain, sanctimonious, incompetent, cuckolded harridan muster her forces to try to control the land. Yeah, I could be talking about either Game of Thrones or Hillary Clinton's campaign.