July 2012 Archives

Posting pictures of you grinning as you order your Chick-fil-a meal tells me pretty much all I need to know about you. Just as boycotting Chick-fil-a says something about I believe (I choose not to patronize a business that is so open and so dedicated to trampling gay marriage rights), you gleefully showing off your red-and-white chicken sack says something about you.

Of course, I've been a vegetarian for well over a decade, so I've been boycotting Chick-fil-a for years. And in the end, I doubt an organized boycott will accomplish much. It's too easy for the anti-gay crowd to just go to Chick-fil-a more and negate any financial threat to Chick-fil-a's bottom line.

But really, that's not what this is about. This is bigger than punishing Chick-fil-a for the company's vocal support of hate groups. This is about punishing America for the vocal support of hate groups. Chick-fil-a has become an easy shortcut to communicating your beliefs on gay marriage, but slamming Chick-fil-a means more than "I hope this bigoted company goes out of business." It means that we've noticed what your company supports, we know a lot of people in America feel the same way, and we really wish you'd all stop using inconsistent and outdated Bible quotes to back up your own personal hang-up that two guys kissing is icky.

Because, honestly, if we investigated every CEO and Board Director and donation by every company out there, we'd find ourselves unable to do business with 80% of American companies. No matter where you stand on any issue. The difference with the Cathy family is that they chose to go to the mats on it. They've issued statements laced with religious appeals; they've espoused their belief that "God's judgement" is forthcoming for our arrogant ways. Which is another way of pulling a Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson and blaming natural disasters on homosexuals. They made it public, because they're proud of it.

We're disgusted by it. And if any other companies do decide to double down on this kind of thing, we'll be public with our disapproval.

One thing I don't get is the reasoning on display when clowns like Mike Huckabee say Chick-fil-a "is being smeared by vicious hate speech and intolerant bigotry from the left." That's quite a switch. Hey stupid, you guys are the ones who elected to hate and oppress an entire class of people without rational cause. You don't get to call marriage equality defenders "intolerant." Intolerant of what, bigots? Your Biblical inconsistencies?

Eating at Chick-fil-a has become a dividing line. And that's dumb, but maybe the simplification of "chicken sandwich vs gay rights" is what some people need to forge a viewpoint of actual tolerance. The Cathys brought this on themselves, and in the end, they'll go down in history as the small-minded religious bigots that they are.

So, so bad at it.

I stumbled on to this commenter treatise on a recent CNN Belief Blog entry about what in fuck God was doing the Aurora shooting. Clear, concise, and without even the kind of nasty shots that I would have written, it covers just about any reasonable Atheist riposte you could imagine.

OK, so maybe there are some nasty shots in there. The following is one of over 10,000 comments at this writing, posted by an individual known only as "Colin" (apparently in response to a post from "Mike.")

Actually Mike, you'll find that most (ex-Christian) atheists don't believe for one or more of the following reasons:

The concept of an immortal being makes no sense to us.

The concept of an all-powerful being makes no sense to us.

The concept of an all-knowing being makes no sense to us.

We tend to have a good working knowledge of the age, size and history of the Universe and the idea that a being would create the entire thing - with 400,000,000,000 galaxies, EACH with 100, 000,000,000 starts and even more planets, then sit back and wait 13,720,000,000 years for human beings to evolve on one planet so he could "love them" and send his son to talk about sheep and goats in Iron Age Palestine makes no sense to us.

The answers usually proffered for what we see as basic logical flaws in Christianity - "you have been blinded by your lack of faith" "God moves in mysterious ways" "God is outside the Universe" or "our minds are too small to understand the greatness of God" are never satisfying to us. We see a retreat to mysticism as the first refuge of the cornered fool.

The common argument, "well, what caused the Big Bang?" with the implication that, because we have only theories and no iron clad explanation for the Big Bang yet, [the Christian] god must have caused it - does not make sense to us. "I don't know" does not equal "god" to us, much less the Judeo-Christian god. We feel the answers to such a question are much more likely to be found in Einstein's equations, quantum physics, large particle accelerators and radio telescopes than in Genesis Chapters 1 through 20. We're crazy aren't we?

We do not see miracles in things like tornadoes missing a certain trailer in a trailer park, cancer going into remission or Tim Tebow winning a football game.

We understand that Christianity is one of many, many religions in the World, and we don't think that we were lucky enough to have been born in the one part of the World that "got it right".

We tend to have a basic knowledge of history and know that there is nothing magical or special about the supposed history of the Jews, gospels, letters, apocalyptic story (Revelations) and other materials that found their way into the Bible, in that they are largely indistinguishable from the other mythology and religious writings of the time and region.

Human beings are terrified of their own deaths and we see the various religious beliefs that try to "wish it away" such as reincarnation, living happily ever after in Heaven with Jesus, having your own Mormon planet etc. as nothing more than childish stories for the more naive, timid minds among us.

We do not see morality as predicated upon a belief in the supernatural. We accept that one can be moral without believing in the supernatural and that doing so is no guaranty that one will conform to the norms of society that people call "morality".

"You can't prove God doesn't exist" is not a convincing argument to us, as in inability to disprove something is a far cry from it being true. We cannot prove that the Hindu gods Shiva or Vishnu do not exist either, nor Santa Claus for that matter, but that is hardly a reason to believe in them. It is almost always impossible to prove a negative in this sense.

When one looks at the various Christian beliefs that were once firmly believed - Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, people living to be 700 or 900 years old, the Red Sea splitting, water turning into wine, talking snakes, a man living in a whale's belly, people rising from the dead, Jesus driving demons out of people and into pigs - but which are now acknowledged by most thinking people to be mere mythology, it is pretty hard to give a lot of credibility to what's left.

It is hard not to consider Christianity as based on circular reasoning. Most Christians believe in God because the Bible says so, then turn around and say they believe the Bible because it is the word of God. To draw an analogy, "I believe Obama is a great man because his biography says so, and the reason I believe his biography is that it is about Obama, who is a great man."

In short, the more one comes to understand mother nature, the less reason there is to believe in a god and the more one understands human nature, the more one sees why so many of us still do.

So, the next time you proudly proclaim that you know the secrets to life, death, the origins of life on Earth and the origins of the Universe, because your parents or priest taught you some comforting stories from late Bronze Age Palestine as a sub-ten year-old, you might like to consider where your beliefs fit into the bigger picture.

There's some hasty typos and whatnot in there, but hey. Sure beats the frothing wild-eyed lunacy coming from the Christian crowd.

Good on you, Colin. I hope you don't have to re-type that over and over again, because that shizz needs to be copy/pasted at the end of every Yahoo News article that allows user comments. Even the ones not even close to being about religion, because some jackhole always manages to twist religion into the mix anyway. Or Obama.

Also, kudos to CNN for finding a solid gold pageview mill:

1. Post three sentences about how SOME people MIGHT think God is MAYBE either not real or grossly disinterested in human tragedy.
2. Wait for everyone to chime in with SCREW YOU LIBERAL MEDIA, FAITH IS ALL I NEED.
3. Profit!

"We see a retreat to mysticism as the first refuge of the cornered fool."

God-DAMN!

I was really looking forward to LEGO Batman 2, but it's a mess.

I 100%ed it this weekend, to the tune of just over 30 hours. Which seems to be a normal time cost; that's more or less what I put into LEGO Pirates, LEGO Harry Potter 1 and LEGO Harry Potter 2, according to my PS3 game stats. But this game was just frustrating as hell.

I'll pick apart little fannish DC things in a minute, but first I need to call out the many times the game serves up buggy, glitchy weirdness. We hit a problem in the very first level, where the game would not let us progress to the next section. After the boss fight with Harley, she jumps down a hole and the implication is that you should follow her. We couldn't. Our little Batman and Robin went into that dumb "paused fall" animation and just floated over the open hole. Knowing that the LEGO games can get pretty obtuse about where to go next (but please, by all means, re-state how Penguin can create bomb goons EVERY TIME I select him), we wasted quite a bit of time trying to destroy everything in the room, seeking whatever would let us proceed after Harley. Turns out, the game just went kerplunk kerplooey.

That happened one other time when I flew Green Lantern too close to the roof and got him stuck in a section of the level that I wasn't supposed to be in yet.

But what is really, super, unbelievably terrible is how many times (like, every time), the game refuses to render in key interactive elements until you've been standing there twirling the camera around. In the otherwise-very-cool open world Gotham City, there are these Batcomputer terminals you use to choose your vehicle, like selecting cars from a garage. The terminals are locatable in the city by these tall beams of light that stretch from the street to the heavens. But when you walk up on one (or fly to one... but controlling flying characters in Gotham really sucks), it's never there. Just a beam of light. You have to stand in the light and rotate the camera around to get the terminal to pop in. And this is not some kind of in-game "oh, the Batcomputer needs to animate up out of the ground" thing. No, this is plain old PS1-era graphics pop-in.

This also happens with the unlockable vehicles scattered around the city. The map will tell you there's a helicopter waiting on top of a building for you to buy, but when you land on the roof there's nothing there. Until you stand around for a bit and rotate the camera. It's nuts.

I also ran into a problem where one level would not let me switch characters. Which, when I freaking needed Aquaman in order to unlock a hidden minikit and I couldn't freaking swap to him, that was a huge pisser.

And why can't these games work out an awesome character building mode? I can't think of one where you actually have a nice assortment of LEGO pieces and colors and decorations to work with. It's always a handful of awful, character-specific stuff where the best you can do is make a Batman with green pants. Am I missing something?

Although I did find one tantalizing exception to this... one of the custom shirts has a Vixen pattern, and Vixen is totally not a pre-existing playable character in the game. Although good luck making a passable Vixen thanks to the limited set of available pieces.

And what's with the music? Why in fuck are we living off the 20-year-old soundtrack to Tim Burton's "Batman"? The entire game is scored with the Danny Elfman soundtrack album. Again. When you start flying as Superman, you're treated to selections from the even older "Superman" movie, which is at least different, but annoys me that they did not bother securing other hero media music to match up with other characters. Like the Flash or Wonder Woman TV themes, or something from the Green Lantern movie. Doesn't sound like a lot of work went into the scoring.

Now let's get picky.

Why is Martian Manhunter just a Superman clone (complete with heat vision) when he should absolutely have the power to go intangible and mimic Batman's Sensor Suit? Hey, Mr. Terrific would have been a great choice for another Sensor character, come to think of it.

Why does Zatanna fly? And not do magic?

Why only one Green Lantern (Hal, duh), with no ability to make your own Lantern character (thanks again to the awful character-creation system)? But you can create your own characters with freeze guns, batarangs, and select other weapons.

Obviously this did not ward me off of devoting 30+ hours to it, because I still enjoyed tooling around LEGO Gotham as a little superspeedy Flash. But wow, what an unfortunate mess.

I arrived to pick up Clark at the grandparents' and he surprised me with a Wham-Shell.

Wham-Shell was the last Skylander we needed (out of 32) to complete the set. We got into Skylanders figuring "Oh sure, we'll just get one from each of the eight elemental categories so we can unlock everything in the game. Fin." Well, *I* got into Skylanders figuring that. But the stores kept running sales and deal gimmicks, and the fever to collect them all started burning.

A minority portion of our collection was assembled for free, because last winter it seemed like there was always a BOGO deal or some other kind of offer in place. But in the end, I'm still loathe to calculate the overall expense in play here. Skylanders has probably defeated the original Animal Crossing as the single game in which I've invested the most bucks.

Wham-Shell was the last dude we needed. His partners in this last rarity wave, Warnado and Camo, were found at Toys R Us several weeks ago. Clark and Grandma found Wham-Shell at a K-Mart. I'm told the K-Mart had two of them. The good side is that we never had to resort to paying secondary market prices for anything. We just waited out the lean times and stumbled into every great find... which was the silent deal I made with myself when we leaped into collecting these dumb things: that I would never stoop to paying some eBay asshat 5x price just because he got to the store before I did. GameStop, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, we checked them all and they all had figures we needed at one point or another. (Can't wait for the heat to completely fade and these damn things to start popping up at closeout shops like Five Below. #eyeroll)

I said 32 figures, but the total toy count is actually quite a bit higher. We have all four adventure packs (which are now all quite commonly found, which is good to see because if you're considering buying into Skylanders, you really need to get the adventure packs if only for the power-up toys). We have the dumb Best Buy exclusive Volcanic Vault. We have all four Legendaries... and Dark Spyro. We have the silver Spyro I picked up at E3. We have the translucent red Drill Sergeant and the translucent blue Bash... it would be nice to know if there's any more of these off-color figs coming as retailer exclusives, incidentally.

We've sent in our order forms for the sidekick mini-figures available only on the Frito-Lay snack offer.

And it all begins again when the sequel game, Skylanders: Giants, comes out this fall. Which will have another 32 figures, ahem. My fingers are crossed that they seriously improve the actual GAME part of Skylanders. What we have now is mostly good, but obviously clunky in parts and in severe need of polish. A sequel could really solidify things and justify all the money we've put into Skylanders. It would be a predictable shame if Activision just gave up and settled in for more toy money. I saw Giants at E3, but the demo did not show off much other than "Hey, now you'll have Giants in the game that can pick up boulders."

Another wish for the future: some toyetic that uses the figures. Like, a board game or playsets or something else to do with the toys themselves. Some years back, there was a line of microchipped Pokemon toys that worked in concert with a battle arena playset. It would be super cool if Skylanders could come up with something like that as well.

The absolute best Skylander side project is the iOS game, Cloud Patrol. It lets you unlock in-game characters for free if you have the corresponding toy. And it happens to be a fun game as well, considerably better than the console original.

From The Walking Dead episode 2.

Bizarre scaling errors like that happen all the time in video games. For instance, pick absolutely any open world game (like GTA IV or Batman: Arkham City) and go stand by a door. It will be HUGE.

Hot Wheels has a new set of Batman-themed vehicles (I wonder why?), pulled from decades of Batman media. The set is exclusive to Walmart. Out of the eight vehicles, seven of them are Batmobiles.

I dig seeing the various bat-symbol log designs! The more yellowy oval logo is intended to represent a pair of comics-based cars (and you should recognize the goldish one from the Michael Keaton movie, right?)

Hey, wait a minute... all the bitching I have to hear about rebooting Spider-Man and making another Oz movie, how come nobody complains about the dozens of Batman restarts we've had over the last eighty years?

Missed winning that game by 40 points.

The Binding of Isaac, which is not especially good, was Clark's first stab at dual-handed keyboard controls. Left hand on WASD (movement), right hand on arrow keys (shooting).

He gave it a shot, but announced that he wished there was an option for arrows on movement and space bar to shoot.

Patio is coming together. We're fighting the good fight against both dead grass and live wasps, but we took time to get in some plants! We are very into this.

Rocksteady's two Batman games, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, are fantastic. They proved that genuinely good games can come out of comics characters, even if all anybody really needed was time, attention and the lack of corporate suits pushing for quickie releases based on movies and cartoons.

So what's next? Apparently a prequel game featuring other heroes, set during the Silver Age, telling the first time Batman met the Joker.

So far - this rumor is still minty fresh - I've seen some upbeat responses... from writers and critics. I'm nervous about how the "core" gamer audience will react, because silly Silver Age Batman is not exactly the kind of Batman that group tends to want.

(Batman first met Joker back in the Golden Age, as if that matters.)

I wonder why they'd start name-checking Silver Age on this. The Silver Age was all Batman fighting Riddler on giant typewriters and meeting Bob Hope and putting a mask on a dog so no one could find out the dog's secret identity. Somehow I doubt this new game will go that way. Although, wow, if it did. I can't even imagine how a game would capture that unrestrained 1960s craziness. But I can imagine how the usual gamer hivemind will panic.

Wait until they announce the voice talent for this game, and it's not Kevin Conroy. NERDRAGE INTERNET EXPLOSION.

I have a feeling no one's assumptions on this rumor will pan out, except mine: the new Rocksteady Silver Age Batman game will be an iPad port of the Wii U Armored Edition featuring a silver Batman costume.

This part of the article gave me a genuine sad face:

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is also expected to reteam a number of DC characters through the [new game] in some form, as part of a push to get audiences used to seeing the superheroes in media outside of film. The game, which WBIE declined to comment to Variety about, will likely hit during 2013, Variety reports.

This comes as part of a mandate by Time Warner to monetize the superheroes through films, games, televised series', and cartoons.

Found nowhere in that little window into corporate structure: comic books. Sigh. Comics have long since ceased to be the entry point for super heroics.

Hey presto, we now have a patio. Tomorrow, it's lawn-building and little extra bits like fixing our gimpy back door.

There's a close up of the brick style we went with.

And now, a fire pit.

Found this great little kids' book featuring lots of recycled Silver Age Superman art, done in a sort of "Pat the Bunny" fashion where you have textures to rub and tabs to pull. One bit includes this classic bit of x-ray vision usage:

What's going on behind that wall, Supes, is Lois Lane working up some crazy way to get you to marry her.

Look at all that sparkly ice!

The book also has this great image of Superman and Krypto.

I saved out a really huge version of that, in case you need something cool to frame and hang in your stairway.

Courtesy that rarest of beasts, a contractor who works on Saturdays.

Hey, check out this patio coming together!

We're having a patio installed, and today was the first day of construction. Above is what our backyard looked like a few days ago. (Before I took out all the giant weeds and junk.) And here it is today:

This conversation started because we knew we needed to regrade the lawn, to guard against future flooding issues. So the redesign here has to both tackle that AND look good. In the top photo, you can sort of see the layout of the incoming patio. In just one day, we can already see the new lawn shape, leading water away from the house. More updates to come.

Chuck E. Cheese announced a new look for the restaurant's mascot and 80s nerds stuck in a world that is never allowed to change went into full-on panic.

Right. Because this...

...is somehow incalculably worse than this:

As if Chuck E. Cheese has never been changed by board rooms packed with marketing execs.

Ahem.

If anything, these people shrieking about their murdered childhoods ought to cast back a little further and be pissed off about the loss of this:

Chuck E. has always been a very cheap company. For decades, it has run on a variation of Kevin Yee's Rizzo Factor, where corporate decisions are determined by the mission statement "They're kids, what do they know?" Remember, when Showbiz Pizza locations were turned into Chuck E. Cheese's, they didn't bring in new robots. They didn't even bring in the specific robots that were made for the original Chuck E. restaurants. They just stripped the Showbiz robots of their fur and put them in new suits, whether the existing cartoon character designs matched or not. And go stop by your local Chuck's and tell me how long it has been since they changed the interior decor. My local Chuck doesn't even close the curtains anymore where the show is paused.

Now, I'm not saying *this* isn't creatively bankrupt...

...but this is just another terrible step in a restaurant that has been pretty terrible for generations. So reactions like these...

...just show off an ignorance of history, a misunderstanding of business, and a bizarre loyalty to a company that has never been more than a kid-pandering playpen for mediocre pizza.

THEY own Chuck E. and THEY need to stay in business. So THEY get to do whatever they want. If Chuck E. dies, it won't be because they put Chuck through a redesign wringer, it will be because the company has been ailing for years.

The real question will be, how will they adjust the robot show? Because I don't have a lot of faith that they'll even bother. Maybe this will be the excuse they need to dump the expensive-to-maintain robots altogether and just install more TV screens. The show has been inching toward that for years anyway.

Who approved this awful figure of Bane high-stepping it? I can't wait to see what scene framegrab inspired this ridiculous sculpt.

I have a sinking feeling that this movie's version of Bane is Not For Me(tm).

As not-promised, here's more shots of the new Gotham City Imaginext stuff.

There's another shot at Bane, packaged along with a THIRD van. We've had this van painted for both Joker and Two-Face, and now the good guys finally get one. (And actually, I'm pretty sure this model came from another Imaginext line in the first place.) Note the round-head GCPD officer included, which is the first non-DC hero Fisher-Price has put into the line.

What's strange about this pairing is that the van has a big cannon in the bank. This isn't a paddy wagon. So if Bane is stuffed in the back, he pretty much gets his own cannon.

Here's the Catwoman/Batman two-pack I mentioned:

It's the same bike and whip as in the Catwoman single toy pack, but without the odd pet cat figure.