Peter MacDonald

Power Rangers Retrospective Part Five: Oh Jesus Christ

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So, first things first: I’ve put a bunch of thought into what I’m going to do with this series, in light of the revelation that there are sixty episodes in the first season of this show. I really don’t feel like dedicating upwards to a year to doing Power Rangers recaps just to cover the first season. This has been fun, but I don’t care about Power Rangers that much, and it’s already starting to feel a bit samey.

So what I’m going to do is that this will be the end of me covering every episode in the series. That’s a good ten-episode retrospective, that’s not bad at all. I am, however, going to keep watching it, and I’ll come back and do recaps for episodes which strike me as particularly interesting/bad/important.

But first, we have to get through two more episodes. And oh boy. The first one is…it’s definitely a thing.

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Gaming Hot Takes: Round 1

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Everyone who spends any amount of money on Steam is liable to wind up with a bunch of games they never play. I’m certainly no exception to that. And I’ve decided to turn it into a feature! Using the Wheelhaus, I’ve rolled up five games in my Steam library which I’ve never so much as touched, and given each of them half an hour of my time. I’ll play exactly half an hour of each, and write up my thoughts. The only condition on which I’ll stop early is if for whatever reason, I just can’t get the damn thing to work and 5-10 minutes of troubleshooting doesn’t solve it, in which case I’ll skip it and roll a new one.

Although I normally don’t like scored reviews, I am going to give each of these games a score on a scale from 0-5. This score reflects one thing and one thing only: how likely I am to play the game again. 0 means the game didn’t work at all, 1 means it’s shit and I’ll never touch it again, 2 means I probably won’t play it again, 3 means I might, but don’t feel strongly about it, 4 means I likely will come back to it, and 5 means it’s awesome and I plan to complete it.

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Scorpion: Ethernet Cables on a Plane

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled Power Rangers to bring you something truly special. My friend forced me to watch this, and now I feel obligated to share it with you as well, so that you too can comprehend my suffering. For your consideration, I present the dumbest thing I’ve watched this year: the first episode of Scorpion.

No, uh.

scorpion_logo_backplate1

Right, that one. Although actually, that first one feels thematically appropriate.

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In Defense of Tomb Raider’s Quick Time Events

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The Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 was fairly controversial for a couple of different reasons, many of which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever read internet commentary about any reboot of a classic games franchise, no matter how well-made. There were two major points of criticism that rang fairly true, though: the game has massive ludonarrative dissonance (I’ll explain what that means in a moment), and the game has too many damn quick time events.

I’m not interested in defending the game from the first charge, because it is a real problem. But I do take exception with the second one, because not only are there fewer QTEs than most people think, the game actually uses them in an interesting way to reinforce Lara’s growth throughout the game.

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Power Rangers Retrospective Part Four: Putties in White Vans

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Whew, we’re finally back. Illness and back problems kept this post back for a week but we’re back in the Mighty Morphin’ swing of things! This week, we have no one but TWO monsters specializing in kidnapping children. That kind week, I guess.

Also, Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize how many episodes this fucking show had. Season one apparently has sixty fucking episodes. Holy shit! I had been planning to do the first season at least but wow I might have to reconsider that. That is way too many episodes.

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How I Would Fix Man of Steel

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Many people have many different feelings about Zack Snyder’s 2013 Superman film, Man of Steel, but this is my blog so we’re mostly here to discuss my feelings so let me tell you what I think of the movie:

I spent the whole movie alternating between boredom and offense. And not because I don’t like Superman! I love Superman. But Zack Snyder’s vision for Superman is colorless, drab, and almost entirely devoid to the inspirational values that define Superman. And all of that is before you get into my nitpicks with how the film was made, like how even totally static scenes are shot with more shaky-cam than all of the Bourne movies put together.

None of this is news, though. A lot of ink’s been spilled over the past three years about how the movie has problems, and while it does have its defenders, the general consensus seems to be the it’s not a very good Superman film. I’m interested in doing something a little different, though: I want to talk about how I would fix it, without radically changing the plot and without going back to technical nitpicks. There are two points where the story is severely broken, and fixing these would go a long way towards fixing the movie as a whole.

These points are Jonathan Kent and The Death of Zod.

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Manga You Might Have Missed

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…and other amazing alliterations.

No Power Rangers this week, for the simple reason that my back acting up delayed Sunday’s post to Monday, which gave me a shorter timeline to pop out today’s post, and the Power Rangers Retrospectives take longer to do than other posts. Instead, I’m going to review and recommend two of my favorite obscure manga series: Double Arts and Qualia the Purple. Both of these are short-running series which can be consumed fairly quickly.

There will naturally be some spoilers within, but I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.

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Fandom, We Need To Talk

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We_need_to_talk_Steven_Connie_Listening

Well, it’s happened again. Steven Universe writer/storyboarder Lauren Zuke has been hounded off of social media by supposed fans upset that their preferred ship isn’t the one being teased at the moment. This isn’t the first time a creative force has been forced to flee Twitter after being hit with absurd and uncalled-for harassment – just last month it was Leslie Jones. It’s not even the first time the Steven Universe fandom has done this sort of thing (discussions of suicide within, and then discussed again below), which is absurd given that Steven Universe is about as friendly and inclusive a show as it possible to make without going full saccharine.

I’m not interested in getting into the substance of the complaints made against these people, or any number of others who have endured the same sort of treatment, both because it’s not particularly relevant to their critics’ shitty behavior, and because it serves as a distraction from the main topic: whether it stems from right-wing reactionism or left-wing kookery, too many people within fandom think that they’re within their rights to act like complete shitbirds to other people, and it seems to be getting worse.

A lot of ink has been spilled over this problem, generally identifying the problem as some new attitude of entitlement and usually involving a lot of veiled fist-shaking about those danged millennials being on the lawn. I don’t think that’s correct, because there is absolutely nothing new about the kinds of behaviors which lead to these incidents. What is new, however, is the platform it’s carried on. Tumblr and Twitter alike are terrible platforms for fandom activity, and as a result of fandom largely moving onto them, these kind of behaviors are amplified until they become the dominant form of fandom activity. Hashtag fandom is great for throwing bombs and starting witch hunts; it’s not so great for actually having a conversation.

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On Fight Scenes: Three Things That Make For a Good Fight Scene (and Aren’t Choreography)

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I love a good fight scene. Not every story needs to be a slugfest, but I do love a really good session of slugging.

When we talk about fight scenes, we tend to speak in terms of choreography and editing; how the characters move and how those movements are shown to the audience. And those are important, don’t get me wrong! But I want to talk about three other factors that go into a really great fight scene. And I’m going to do it using what I think it one of the best fight scenes ever put to film, the trailer fight from Kill Bill:

God, I love that fight. Unfortunately, this version cuts off before the final confrontation but the only other version of it I could find on YouTube was absurdly low quality, so here we are I guess.

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