Looking forward to 2012.

...is moments like this one from a game we played this Sunday evening.

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty.)


Me: "So guns don't work here, and I'm not close enough to punch it. Is there anything around here I can throw? Fire extinguisher? Potted plant?"
The GM: "No, it's just kind of a big, empty space. You're here, [the Hacker] and [the Big Guy] are here-"
Me: "Well, I guess I could throw [the Big Guy] at it."
All: *laugh*
Me: "...actually, yeah. I'm gonna throw [the Big Guy] at it."
Big Guy's Player: "Wait, what?"
Me: "I figure he has it coming after that last stunt."
Big Guy's Player: "Hey!"
Me: "Bah, you'll be fine. You're wearing a helmet."
The GM: *laughs* "It's like an inverse Fastball Special: the smallest member of the team scoops up the biggest member and throws him at the enemy."
Me: "What can I say? He's the heaviest thing within reach."
The GM: "Roll it. Plus three dice for making everyone laugh."

Aww, I wanted to make that remake! Sam Raimi beat me to the punch!

(How did I not hear about this sooner?)

Hope it's well-done and attracts some new viewers to the original.

(Huh... first La Femme Nikita and now this? Suddenly there's an interest in remaking shows with French titles from ten years ago about female assassins. Coincidence?)

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone enjoys 2011.



(I'd rehash my running gag from last year, except it seems that nobody ever sets stories in 2011.)

(...well, almost nobody.)

...because I've been sorta neglecting some other things I really meant to take care of. Had too much Halo on the brain. Damn the allure of those daily challenges!


-A thought: With the new option in Halo: Reach for players to pick their SPARTAN's gender, then the ones I've seen in online multiplayer just confirm that a lot more women/girls play than most people assume. (But I'm also a little annoyed, because it's not supposed to be possible to tell the gender of a SPARTAN in full armor unless they speak....)

-Another thought: While I love that Halo: ODST's story-driven campaign has three different layers of plot happening concurrently and three former Firefly actors doing voice work, with five different playable characters would it have killed them to make even one female? Would anyone really have missed resident jerkass Romeo if he'd been swapped out for (to continue the stunt casting) Gina Torres?

...since it took about an hour for it to sink in.

(At least half of you will not care about this since it involves comic books, but I feel compelled to write it.)

So, the antecedents: ( Antecedents behind cut to not abuse my flist. )

Long story short, I started to really dislike the character.

So after five or six years of having my annoyance with Tim keeping steady at a level of about 3 millishinjis (a millishinji being a unit of measure for my distaste for a character, defined--as one might expect--as 1/1000th of my hatred for the protagonist of End of Evangelion), he's been becoming much less of an asshole. I starting thinking I could start liking him again.

And then, when I was poking through a friend's wiki, I noticed a particular little tidbit of information that, while mostly a good thing, rather implies that Tim has been achieving an all new level of asshole behavior all this time right under our noses.

More backstory: ( Backstory behind cut for same reason. )

...So imagine my surprise when I saw on the wiki that employees of DC had stated in an interview that Dana Drake had actually survived and been evacuated and was alive all this time.

Initially, I was rather pleased by this. One less female character meaninglessly exterminated. Potential source of future storylines. But about an hour later, when I was on patrol (always a time where a lot of brainstorming happens, since there's little else to occupy my thoughts), it hit me. (Hence this being "Fridge Horror".)

If Dana Drake has been alive these last (in the setting) two years or so, then the fact that Tim has not acknowledged her existence in all that time is downright horrific.

( Reasons this is bad behind cut. For space, or just because it's sickening? )
So, in essence, Dana gave her all to the Drake family, and Tim repaid that loyalty by abandoning her to what is in all likelihood a life of abject misery. And thus, Tim Drake is back on my shit list. (This may have sort of subtlely shone through in my attitude when I reviewed a few pages of his book last week.)

I swear, it's like DC Comics wants me to hate their work and quit giving them my money.

Because what's the point of having a scanner if you never use it for anything?


( Scans and commentary within. 7 pages. )

All in all, despite the nitpicking, I liked this more than I disliked it. This is probably the most in-character Cass has been since her book ended. Other than the obvious wrongness of Tim being able to surprise Cass, anything that doesn't seem right here can be explained with the simple expedient of "Tim is an ass and doesn't know what he's talking about." I would not be opposed to Nicieza writing Cass more in the future. Just... preferably not in Tim's book. I'm a bit tired of seeing her forced to play second fiddle to him.

Still... $2.99 for only seven pages of Cass... DC suckered me good. Worth it? Maybe. Depends on if there's a sales spike that convinces them that doing more with her would be profitable.

Because Cass is in it.

EDIT: She's only in the first seven pages. Just long enough to make the previews look like she'd be in more of the book. Typical.

In my desperate search for new things to watch these past few months, it completely slipped my mind that I started watching Utena in 2002 and never finished it.

Might be about time I corrected that.

Of all the cheap, half-assed, creatively-bankrupt, money-making stunts...

Lucas re-releasing Star Wars again... in 3-D.