Apparently we're getting more Eobard Thawne soon.

Yay.

I think I've said this before, but I'm still waiting for Matt Letscher to get a chance to shine with the character the way Tom Cavanagh did in, say, the "you've been dead for centuries" scene in The Flash Season 1. I still get chills just thinking of that scene, actually. Brr.

Arrow 5.10, "Who Are You"

There is no way to discuss this without les spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow 2.09

...I actually don't want to put the title up there, because it's a giveaway to something I want to build up to.

Every science fiction show, if it lasts long enough, will eventually do an episode where the cast meets some historical figure, usually a writer. If it's a time travel show, that historical figure is more likely than not going to be H.G. Wells. Heck, Legends already met H.G. Wells last year. (Come to think of it, the way they hid Wells's identity until the reveal suddenly looks like foreshadowing.)

And that makes sense, right? I mean, H.G. Wells is pretty much the father of science fiction, so of course he'd get honors in every show ever. But the Arrowverse has gotten pop-culture overdosed in recent years (thanks Cisco) and it's not surprising that they did this eventually.

Star Wars VIII: The Search For More Money has a new title

And it is The Last Jedi.

Because that's not officially the dumbest Star Wars title ever.

Not like titles matter. Let's be honest. You'd watch a movie called Milking the Money Tree: A Star Wars Story. 

Now, the "last" Jedi refers to Luke, right? We've been over this. Ma-Rey Sue tapped into the dark side to defeat Clueless Ren. She has great innate dark side energy because she is, obviously, Palpatine's granddaughter. So if Disney had any stones whatsoever, VIII would see her be tempted by her past, as Luke was, and unlike Luke, she'd fall.

Of course, if Disney had any stones whatsoever, VII wouldn't have been a shameless rehash of IV. On the flip side, Rogue One did end the way it did...

No, that's not what's going to happen. Luke's going to die, very sad. Rey will be the Last Jedi, all light and incorruptible pure pureness. Clueless Ren will stomp around and Pathetic Boy-Tarkin will continue to be pathetic, and guys you cannot make good movies without good villains. 

The main series is f*cked because its villains are awful. I hold out hope for the anthology films. Even if they are all Milking the Money Tree: A Star Wars Story. 

The last word on SUICIDE SQUAD

All right guys, time for some real talk.

I really liked Suicide Squad, in spite of its obvious flaws, because it spoke to me. No, I'm not talking about Margot Robbie's ass in hot pants, although... Okay let's not go there. Its entire off-kilter tone is something I could identify with.

See, I have never been part of the "in" crowd. I played Pokemon well past when the rest of my middle-school class dropped it. I was a right-wing student on a campus in Wisconsin during the anti-Walker protests. I could go on, but point is, when Harley Quinn says "Normal is just a setting on the dryer," I was like "Fuck yeah." And when she gets zapped into a fantasy of a normal life, I was still like "Fuck yeah. I feel you, movie, because you fucking get me."

Well, David Ayer tweeted out a message to his fans. And, wow. He went for it. And I salute him for it.

Yes the label is "DCCU" instead of "DCEU" because as far as I'm concerned it's a cinematic universe rather than an extended one. An extended one would incorporate the shows instead of shafting them.

Some random links

Apparently liberals progressives made a big deal about Trump not having a poet at his inauguration. To which I can only suggest that perhaps Trump himself should have quoted William Shakespeare:

Tickle us, do we not laugh?
Prick us, do we not bleed?
Wrong us, shall we not throw people from helicopters?

Just trying to have a little fun here, folks. But in all seriousness, progressives don't seem to get why this happened, and I'm not holding my breath for them figuring it out by 2020.

Okay. First off... are you sitting down? Okay, good. Get this: there is going to be another Terminator film. "Oh," you're saying, "That's just the studio milking the money tree. I mean, it's not enough to just have a franchise now, there has to be a whole cinematic universe, so you can expect a spinoff starring Lance Henriksen's character from the first film within six years." Yeah, let me stop you there. James Cameron is involved. And it's being called "a reboot and a conclusion." Whatever that means.

Here is TvTropes's page on the new Justice League of America title, noting that the lineup seems to be a massive sop to Arrowverse fans. I can't help but notice this will be the third ongoing title Black Canary's in. (And I stand by my earlier analysis that this is the Dinah Laurel Lance incarnation of the character, which means she was re-integrated into comic continuity the same year her show version was killed off.)

Speaking of the Justice League, here's a Watchmen reference in Justice Leave vs. Suicide Squad #5. Given the whole bloody point of Rebirth, I have to assume this is a deliberate reference... but then, I thought the whole bloody point of Rebirth was that Watchmen is not a how-to rubric for how every comic story since 1986 must be written. So go figure.

Here's another political one: Private Manning should never have made it out of basic.

Nathan "Malcolm Reynolds" Fillion managed to bring some levity to today's events.

Here's a British (I think) guy explaining why Fallout 3 is garbage and, you know, he's not wrong. My problem with the Fallout games - well, to be specific, the Fallout 3 and 4 games - is that... look, Skyrim is basically my baseline for a Bethesda game, because it was the first Bethesda game I played. It had six factions, and you could join five of them (two of them were mutually exclusive), and you had to join zero of them to finish the game. As far as I know, 3 doesn't give you any sidequest-factions to join, and 4 requires you to join one of the three factions and wipe out the other two. It makes the world feel a lot smaller and more forced. Hell, in Skyrim, those two factions that are mutually exclusive? You don't need to join either! You can convince them to set a truce that will last until you, the player character, break it. Incidentally, here's someone who thinks that 3 offered him choices, but 4 did not. (Granted, he obviously had not gotten two-thirds of the way through the plot, but he's right about it just being a shooter.)

Here's a new trailer for Arrow 5.10, which airs Wednesday. Let's just say that Laurel, or whoever she is, does the city a public service. And here's the trailer for Legends 2.09, which airs Tuesday. No trailer for Flash because I'm not caught up yet, but that comes back Tuesday as well.

Another reason why LEGENDS is basically the Sara Lance show now

not that there's anything wrong with that

Two of the three main villains this season are personally responsible for wrecking her life - Malcolm Merlyn destroyed the Queen's Gambit, sentencing her to six years in hell, and then later orchestrated her murder; Damien Darhk murdered her sister - but none of the three have a personal connection to any of the other characters.

Here's another reason Prometheus is Tommy

The show likes to forget it's not Batman With a Bow, yeah?

Hush...

Legends of Tomorrow could just rename itself Sara Lance Murders/Seduces Everyone

And it is excellent.

Season highlights: basically every episode that isn't 2.04, "Abominations," but especially 2.05, "Compromised," 2.07, "Invasion!," and 2.08, "The Chicago Way."

Season lowlight: 2.04, "Abominations," easily.

If Rey isn't Palpatine's granddaughter somebody needs to ask John Williams why her theme intro is a rework of Palpatine's.

I'm thinking I'll be reading Justice League of America Rebirth, because, well, look at the cast!

Prometheus is Tommy Merlyn, right?

I'll tell you the theory first, and then the evidence:

Arrow's Season 5 villain, Prometheus, is a resurrected Tommy Merlyn. After he died in the Season 1 finale, Talia al-Ghul stole his body and dipped him in a Lazarus Pit, with the intention of turning him into a weapon to use against his father, League of Assassins apostate Malcolm Merlyn. But Tommy didn't play entirely according to the script, and went off-mission to hunt down Oliver. (Church telling Prommy Oliver is the Green Arrow (Arrow 5.05) is a red herring; Prommy already knew.)

So Lord of the Rings is, as most fanboys know, just a story Tolkein wrote in order to show off all the languages he'd invented.

...plus the one he'd straight-up cribbed from history.

Batgirl and the Birds of Prey #6

Maria Panessa is a stone-cold bitch.

Okay here's how I'm going to get caught up this weekend

Arrowverse crossover

Why all three shows are redeeming themselves

Prometheus is totally Tommy Merlyn

Probably something political

Bond film review?

Arrow Season 5

is a surprising improvement, yay.

All the throwbacks to Season 1 made me worried this was the end, but no, the show got renewed for another year. Also yay.

Am I behind on my blogging? Oh dear I am behind on my blogging. Well. I'll work on that. Where are my keys?

I will run for president on a single-issue platform.

"Webpages must load their actual content before they load any images or ads."

I will not run for re-election, but I'll get 60% of the vote as a write-in candidate anyway.

James Bond: Octopussy

(This has been sitting in my Drafts folder for three years. Enjoy.)

First time, ladies and gentlemen, that a Soviet Russian is the Big Bad. (This film was made in 1983.) Second and last appearance of Maud Adams, making this the only film where one named Bond Girl looks an awful lot like a previous one (she was the doomed Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun).

More ramblings about Fallout: New Vegas

New Vegas fixed the biggest complaint I had about 3 (you can't aim), and weapon decay isn't really a huge problem.

So in my first four hours of New Vegas gameplay, I managed to get to the outskirts of New Vegas, where I was turned away by the robot because I didn't have 2000 caps to get my green card. Yes, I suck at Fallout games. But I got to explore Goodsprings, the Mojave Outpost, Nipton, Novac, the Helios facility, and the outskirts of New Vegas.

See, what I love love love love love about Skyrim is that right out of the gate, you could go anywhere. Yeah, Falkreath was a bit easier than everywhere else, and you were hosed if a Sabrecat happened to find you at a low level, but it wasn't like you had to wait until you were Level 20 to go to Solitude or Windhelm without dying constantly. The Fallout games seem to want to dissuade this kind of behavior. You have to go and do the things in the order we want.

I guess when you really get down to it, that's the problem I have with every Fallout game I've played - you can't instantly join the faction you want. If you want to join Ulfric's rebellion in Skyrim, walk to Whiterun, take a carriage to Windhelm, and you're off. But if you want to join the Legion (you awful person) or the Institute (you scientifically-minded awful person), well, you have to wait until the main quest gets around to it. Skyrim just feels more free, like you can actually do anything.

I guess the idea is that New Vegas gives you a couple of hours to settle into the setting before making you make the Big Decisions. You see the Legion sack Nipton, for example. Which, okay, I get that, but Fallout in general and New Vegas in particular is... well, it's candy for a min-maxer, somebody who figures out exactly what character build they're going for and who will restart their game if they suddenly realize they need two more points in Agility to get a super-useful perk. Which means playing through the same couple of hours over. And over. And over. Again.

So that's a bit dull. And the game's a bit glitchy. But it is the best Fallout game I've played, and I'm really starting to get into it (now that the settlement-building of 4 has lost its charm and I've come to realize how paper-thin the rest of the game is).

Immersion and the Fallout Games

Fallout 4 has a problem. No, I'm not talking about the lack of a "disable iron sights" option or the fact that it is absolutely impossible to shoot things in melee range in third-person view, although those are significant problems as well.

Put simply, the problem is this: it's been 200+ years since the bombs fell, and there's been no rebuilding? Hiroshima doesn't look like an atomic wasteland today, never mind what it'll look like 140 years from now. And we're also required to believe that no scavengers came through the area before me?

Fallout 3 had this problem as well, for that matter. New Vegas skated around it by virtue of the fact that New Vegas was literally the frontier in an ongoing war, with neither side willing to divert resources towards policing the civilians - not unlike the situation in Skyrim, which also doesn't have this problem.

But, look, guys, it's obvious that Mad Max is one of your inspirations, and only one of those films had no civilization whatsoever - not saying the civilizations on display in the first, third, and fourth films were particularly good, mind you, but there was some semblance of authority. The Fallout games, in contrast, all seem to take place in a Road Warrior-esque setting, where the "civilians" are being preyed on constantly by bandits and raiders and don't seem to have much in the way of help. And Road Warrior takes place only a few years after the apocalypse... well, insofar as Mad Max has a consistent internal chronology, at any rate. (Just to name one very obvious example: If Max is supposed to be as young as Tom Hardy in Fury Road, how on Earth was he a cop in the pre-apocalypse when Furiosa - whose actress is a couple years older than Hardy - was clearly born after it?) 

New Vegas remains one of the greatest games ever made.

(with sincere apologies to Dean Martin)

I love Vegas in the springtime.
I love Vegas in the fall.
I love Vegas for the creatures of the region.
I love Vegas like it's Caesar and I'm the Legion.
I love Vegas every moment,
Every moment of the year
I love Vegas, why oh why do I love Vegas?
Because my guns are here.

Speaking of guns, here's a Fallout New Vegas PSA: If you're like me and you like shooting things from as far away as humanly possible, you want to get your hands on a unique, overbuffed Varmint Rifle called the Ratslayer. Here's how to get it.

• Play the game normally until you get to Nipton.
• When you get to Nipton, enter the general store.
• Talk to Boxcars. As tempting as it may be, do not kill him.
• Ask about what happened. Then ask about the lottery.
• When the option comes up, ask about the slaves.
• Exit the conversation. Restrain the impulse to kill him.
• You'll receive a quest called "Booted." It will tell you to go to a specific Legion camp.
• Go to the camp and head east.
• You'll see a new location marker slightly to the north, but mostly east.
• Enter the Broc Flower Cave and follow the path to the right.
• If you're playing with the Wild Wasteland trait, enjoy the Princess Bride reference.
• The Ratslayer is in a room on a ledge at the end of the path, right in front of a table.

Enjoy!

Guys we need to have a talk about Season 2 of THE FLASH

For a quick introduction to what The Flash is, watch this. I agree with probably 80% of everything until he starts talking about Season 2. Season 2 of The Flash is bad.

Really bad.

Spoilers, obvi.

Hello 2017

I'm gonna swear less and work out more and actually have this log live up to its title. Voila, "daily" post.

Status: tired.

I have some comics to catch up on, do I not? Might happen tomorrow. I have the day off.

G'night.