A to Z Challenge Announcement

It's almost April which I guess means it's time for the A to Z Challenge...again. [Sigh]  How many times have I done this?  Hurm...5?  I suppose this year would be six.  Maybe.

The Trivia Challenge will be suspended for April.  Or maybe forever.  No one really gives a fuck, right?  Anyway, I've already used the A to Z thing to promote my books (a few times) and last year I talked about books/movies.  Early this year I read a bunch of Transformers comics and it made me think:  why not talk about Transformers for my stupid A to Z Challenge? I'm going to do one good guy and one bad guy for each letter.  X-Z were a little dicey and weirdly E for the Decepticons.  For whatever reason there wasn't a Decepticon with a name starting with E until the "Generation 2" toys in 93-94.  Most of the characters are Generation 1 (US) and Beast Wars because I'm most familiar with those.  There a few other odds and ends though.

I'm not going all that in-depth.  It's mostly based on stuff I remember or have seen around.  If I'm wrong about stuff, Christopher Dilloway can set me straight.  Or maybe one of those annoying fanboys who has to start everything with, "Well actually..." who I just want to punch in the goddamned face.  I'm not writing their biographies here, just kind of outlining who they are and where they've been. 

As part of my "research" for this I rewatched the original cartoon on the TubiTV app on my Roku--it's also on the Internet and such.  It's pretty funny how many bloopers there are throughout the show:  characters miscolored, Aubobots with Decepticon symbols, in one episode the Autobot Sideswipe is standing right next to Megatron in the Decepticon base, and in the episode "Child's Play" four Autobots are lost in space and all of the sudden a fifth Autobot (Smokescreen) appears!  This goof had big ramifications since Smokescreen was the main player in the next episode that was largely a continuation of the previous one.

One thing that occurred to me that while Autobots are always saying they care about humans and don't want to put them in harm's way, they're always letting humans hang around with them, mostly Spike Witwicky in the first two seasons.  A few times Spike comes in handy, but far more often he's getting into trouble and needing rescued.  In the "Dinobot Island" episodes he nearly gets fed to a pterodon's young and then about a minute later almost gets eaten by a brachisaur.  In another episode Optimus Prime shields Spike from a blast and gets badly damaged, requiring Autobots to travel to Cybertron to save him.  Even worse in the third season, Spike lets his young son Daniel hang around with the Autobots, which then puts him in harm's way, culminating in the fourth season miniseries with Daniel being crippled.  At some point Child Services should really have stepped in.

On a related note, an episode of the old cartoon show and an issue of the newer comic book gave me an idea for one of my gender swap stories--with giant robots!  The idea is that three giant robots come to Earth searching for some comrades who crashed on the planet.  To move around without drawing too much attention, they transfer their consciousnesses into human avatars.  Inadvertently the male robots transfer their minds into female human bodies.  And then I kind of throw a little Third Rock From the Sun in there as the avatars are kind of inverse of each robot's personality:  the youngest one is a middle-aged woman, the oldest one is a teenage girl, and the scientist is smoking hot trailer trash.  They fan out and explore a small Arizona town and learn about Earth and its customs--including romantic customs--until they and their new human friends have to stop some evil robots from taking over the planet.

I only have the first draft done.  It ended up about 65,000 words, which I guess makes it a short novel.  I'll probably put it up for sale in a few weeks.  This is the rough draft of the cover:

Anyway, the "Challenge" starts tomorrow.  Til All Are One!

Trivia Challenge Answer #12

The question was:  in GAIA:  Rogue State, what does GAIA stand for?

You probably figured out that C & D were not correct.  So it was between A & B.  Did you guess right?

The answer was...A, Global Autonomous Intelligence Agency

After Girl Power:  League of Evil, the world was in a shambles, so former sidekick Melanie, aka "the Outcast" recruits a former assassin, a Neanderthal (literally), a brilliant scientist, and her mom to form a spy agency that worked under the aegis of the United Nations.  Signifying its global reach was the acronym GAIA, as in Earth.  The agency was also in the volume of short stories for the Girl Power series.

I might have written more than one book in the series but I had other things to do.  Sad!


Cindy guessed A so she got 5 points for 51 points total.  She wins the Trivia Challenge!  Congratulations.

Friday the A to Z theme is revealed.

Trivia Challenge Question #12

This might be tough.  Answer in the comments and good luck!

In GAIA:  Rogue State, what does GAIA stand for?

A.  Global Autonomous Intelligence Agency
B.  Galactic Alliance of Interstellar Arsenals
C.  Global Alliance of Intelligent Aardvarks
D.  Gentrified Airports and Industrious Arabs

More Stuff I Watched

You know the drill:  I post about stuff I watched and everyone ignores it and I get lost of views from the bots.

Iron Fist:  Another of Marvel's Netflix series leading up to The Defenders, this is yet another story of a white male billionaire who loses his parents and becomes a superhero, just like Batman, Green Arrow, Iron Man, and probably a few others.  To mix cliches the rich white boy is taken in by monks who train him in kung fu.  It feels kind of like Arrow mixed with Daredevil.  "The Hand" and their leader, the evil Yoda-ish Madame Gao, were already featured in the first two seasons of Daredevil.  Now they're trying to flood New York with synthetic heroin and are using Danny Rand's company, which is run by his two childhood friends, a brother and sister who are an incestuous fling away from the Lannisters on Game of Thrones.  Danny makes friends with a martial arts teacher named Colleen Wing, who helps him find the Hand and stop them.  The flashbacks in Arrow became grating after a couple of seasons but some more flashbacks in this show would have helped understand K'un L'un, but I guess it saved them from building more sets.  If you can put aside the racial issues, it's a decent show. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  Claire Temple, the Night Nurse, shows up again in this show along with the other three.  Carrie Anne Moss reprises her role as attorney Jeri Hogarth from Jessica Jones, but there aren't any gratuitous lesbian scenes this time around.  Still, except when Luke Cage first appeared in Jessica Jones, the four Defenders have had little contact with each other and I really have no idea what is going to bring them together.)

Transformers Prime:  This isn't a continuation of the Bay movies but characters like Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Megatron look like their movie counterparts for the most part.  For some reason Transformers is so much better on the small screen and in comics than in those live action movies.  Probably because the focus in shows and comics is on the robots, making them more like real characters.  Though there are humans too.  The Autobots have set up base in Jasper, Nevada and inadvertently take in three teenagers who become their buddies.  Like the old series, the Autobots care so much for humans and don't want to endanger them...yet continue to endanger these kids a bunch of times.  Anyway, I really liked this series.  Like the Beast Wars series from about 20 years ago it uses computer animation and has stories that are not so goofy only little kids could enjoy it.  In fact, the violence and some of the stories might be a little too much on the grown up side for younger kids.  Besides the 65 episodes of the series, there's a standalone movie "Rise of the Predacons" that are all available on Netflix. (4/5) (Fun Facts:  Regarding the voice work, Optimus Prime and Megatron have the same voice actors as the old 80s series.  The human Agent Fowler is voiced by Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters and The Crow.  In the third series Ultra Magnus is voiced by Michael Ironside of V, SeaQuest 2032, etc.  Star Trek's George Takei guest starred as Alpha Trion in a couple of episodes.  The voice actors for Bulkhead and Knock Out also do voices on Fox/TBS's American Dad as Principal Lewis and Stan's father/Krampus respectively.  In the first episode Duane "The Rock" Johnson provides the voice of Cliffjumper, who is quickly killed off; when he's in a flashback in a later episode someone else does his voice.  At least in the first season the voice director was Susan Blu, who voiced Arcee in the original show and also worked on Beast Wars.)

Transformers Robots in Disguise:  This follow-up to Transformers Prime is traditionally animated and a lot more kid-friendly.  It was a chore for me to get through one episode.  Probably a lot better for the little ones.  I'll take a pass. (2/5)

Snatch:  This is a new series on Crackle that takes its cue from the Guy Ritchie movie at the turn of the century that starred Brad Pitt.  After they lose a bunch of money from a boxing match that went against them, three friends in London decide to rob a van filled with a strip club's cash on a tip from the strip club owner's girlfriend.  Except the truck they rob is an identical one that's full of gold.  From there they go through a lot of mishaps while trying to sell the gold and collect their windfall.  It's a decent show; like the movie it's violent, dramatic, and funny in equal measures with some twists and turns. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  One of the three friends is played by Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter movies I never watched.  A corrupt cop is played by Marc Warren, who played psychotic assassin Teatime [pronounced tee-uh-time-ee] in the TV movie version of the Discworld novel Hogfather.  Dougray Scott playes the father of one of the friends; he also starred in the Drew Barrymore Cinderella story Ever After.)

The Young Pope:  This HBO series stars Jude Law as a "young" (as in 47) new Pope who is kind of an asshole.  It's pretty boring, though not quite as boring as Crackle's The Art of More.  What it really needed was for Jude Law to break the fourth wall like Kevin Spacey in House of Cards.  Otherwise it's just a dull slog. (1/5)

Pumaman:  Now that Netflix is rebooting Mystery Science Theater 3000, they have a smattering of the old episodes, including Pumaman.  This 70s superhero movie features cheesy effects, a lot of bad acting, and a soundtrack that sounds like the demo mode of a Casio keyboard.  A doofus scientist embraces his destiny as Pumaman who has the power to fly awkwardly and bop people on the head.  He might be the only superhero to wear khakis.  The villain is played by Halloween and You Only Live Twice's Donald Pleasance, who pronounces the hero's name "P-you-ma-man" not "Pooh-ma-man."  The MST3K gang makes this abysmal movie somewhat tolerable. (2/5)

Caught in the Crossfire:  Boring, cliche-filled cop drama.  The description said it was supposed to be in "suburban Detroit" but it was actually filmed in Grand Rapids.  I suppose to a lot of people a city 150 miles away would be a suburb of Detroit. (1/5)

All American Bikini Car Wash:  I guess you can say it delivers what it promises:  lots of cheesecake shots of girls in bikinis washing cars.  Even so it was pretty lame.  For extra credit a college kid takes over his professor's car wash and he and his lunkhead friend, with help from their nerdy black friend, decide to make it a bikini car wash and employ a lot of hot girls.  A lot of it seemed to be apologizing for the sex industry, like where a girl says they're not really being exploited because they decided to work there and it's good money and fun and they make a lot of friends. [eye roll]  The bad acting and lack of any tension in the plot would be more acceptable in a full-on porno instead of a soft core like this. (1/5)

Trivia Challenge Answer #11

So the question was:  in Sisterhood, what French city do Sylvia and her sisters live in?

And the answer is:  B, Marseilles.  If you guessed D, shame on you; Brussels isn't even a French city--it's Belgian!


Sylvia and her sisters grow up on a vineyard outside of Marseilles in the 17th Century.  Sylvia befriends a young farmhand named Henri; they grow up together until Henri is killed in one of the many stupid wars of the period.

For the first time Cindy Borgne was stumped.  So she gets 0 points while Chris Dilloway picks up 5 points.  Not that it matters since next week is the last question.  By my count Cindy has 46 points and Chris has 27, which makes next week pretty meaningless I suppose. 

Trivia Challenge Question #11

Here's today's trivia question.  Answer in the comments.  Good luck!

In Sisterhood, Sylvia and her sisters Agnes and Sophie live near which city in France:

A.  Paris
B.  Marseilles
C.  Lyon
D.  Brussels

More Stuff I Watched

Happy St. Me Day!  Instead of green beer and corned beef, here's some stuff I watched:

Doctor Strange:  This was the first Marvel movie I didn't watch in the theater because I just never got around to it.  It mostly follows the somewhat goofy origin story in the original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics:  gifted surgeon gets in car wreck, damages hands, seeks out a guru known as "the Ancient One," and becomes the "Sorcerer Supreme."  The plot does largely follow the template set forth in Iron Man; really it's like if Tony Stark had found the Ancient One in the cave instead of stuff to build a suit of armor.  Instead of a mentor, the villain is another student of the Ancient One with a name I don't remember but who was played by that guy from that Hannibal TV show I never watched and Jyn Erso's father in Rogue One.  The less good part of the Marvel template is that most of their villains aren't really developed into real characters and this is no exception.  Basically the bad guy wants to turn over Earth to the evil Dorammu (or whatever it is) for...reasons.  And eventually Dr. Strange has to stop him with magic stuff--and quantum mechanics.  There are some nice Matrix/Inception visuals to liven things up.  As much as I've liked Tilda Swinton in other things, I don't think she was so awesome that it forgives using a white woman for the Ancient One, who in the comics was an Asian guy.  Mordo's villainous turn at the end was as slapdash and ill-conceived as Sinestro's in Green Lantern, which is obviously not a superhero movie you want to copy.  But otherwise it was another decent Marvel outing.  If nothing else, you have to admire the consistency. (3/5)

Spy Game:  This pairs Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, who I think of as the 90s-2000s version of Robert Redford, as CIA agents.  Pitt has been captured in China and in 24 hours is going to be killed.  Redford is his former handler who's being grilled by the government but manages to save his protege with some phone calls and well-placed bribes.  Um, yeah, about the least exciting way to rescue a secret agent ever.  So the payoff is pretty weak and most of Pitt's scenes are in the flashbacks to various missions they went on in the 70s and 80s; he and Redford have no contact in whatever the movie's present day is. (2/5)

Open Grave:  Sharlto Copley (District 9, Powers, etc) wakes up in an open grave and is rescued by a mute Asian woman.  He's taken to a house where no one (including him) remembers who they are or why they're there.  Gradually it becomes clear that there are zombies on the loose and the place they ended up was experimenting with a cure that happens to cause temporary memory loss.  Interesting but a little slow. (2.5/5)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen:  A Yemeni shiekh has an interest in fly fishing and wants to bring the sport to his home country.  His assistant (Emily Blunt) contacts a British scientist (Ewan McGregor) to get his help.  He thinks the project is mad but political pressure is applied by Kristin Scott Thomas and so they end up building a dam and rounding up a bunch of salmon from hatcheries to dump them in a river.  In the process there's a love story and also political realities involved as some of the locals are not thrilled by the project.  Overall a decent light drama. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Lasse Hallstrom who also directed decent dramas like The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News, etc.)

Behaving Badly:  Three couples (two straight and one lesbian) and their various infidelity issues are featured.  Not really all that steamy or funny with a small budget and no-name cast.  There's really not much to recommend it.  I feel kind of misled by the cover picture on Amazon showing a couple of lesbians making out; it made me think it'd be sexier than it was. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was I guess shot in 2006 and released in 2009 but all the phones and stuff look about 2001 vintage.)

Blood: The Last Vampire:  Centuries ago a young Asian girl became a vampire (somehow) and fights the demons who killed her family.  Like Blade she isn't a traditional vampire in that she can go outside and stuff.  In 1970 she goes undercover on a US air force base, where she and a general's daughter find the demon she's been looking for.  The story was decent but really bad CGI effects mar the production. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The girl's handler is played by Liam Cunningham, who is a regular on Game of Thrones.  That's the only name I recognized.)

Devil in a Blue Dress:  In LA in 1948, Denzel Washington is an unemployed guy who gets paid by a mob thug to look for a white girl.  Naturally things take a turn and soon the girl's friend is dead, followed by a couple of other people, and the corrupt cops are looking to pin it on Denzel, because when in doubt, just point to the nearest black guy.  Soon he realizes that all of this is mixed up in the city's mayoral election.  It was a good movie, though not quite as good as LA Confidential, which dates from near the same time in both setting and release date.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  One of the corrupt cops is played by Beau Starr, who played a not-corrupt cop in Halloween 4 & 5 and the CBS/CTV series Due South.)

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome:  The plot of this movie made almost no sense.  It starts with Max having his team of camels stolen by a little kid and his father in an airplane.  Max tracks them to the outpost of Bartertown, where he's recruited by Aunty (Tina Turner) to kill the minion of some dwarf who manages the pig farm that runs the town with methane gas.  But Max can't go through with it when he sees the minion is mentally handicapped, so he's exiled to the desert, but his pet monkey brings him water so he can make it to some Neverland-type place populated by a bunch of Lost Boy-looking kids (Peter Pan Lost Boys, not the vampire movie).  Then for...reasons they go back to Bartertown and break the dwarf out on some kind of train, which thankfully in this post-apocalyptic world railroad tracks no one has used in decades are still fully operational.  There's a big car chase and Max helps the kids escape to the ruins of Sydney but is at the mercy of Aunty and her henchmen...who just let him go.  So the big chase all seemed kinda pointless.  The whole thing just seemed pretty goofy.  But it did have a decent theme song:

Overall I'd give it a 2/5

Phantom of the Opera:  This was a version from the 50s or so starring Claude Rains.  It was on one of those late-night local TV shows that shows old horror movies.  Except this isn't really much of a horror movie.  It's pretty tame and boring, with far too much singing.  I mean come on, who watches horror movies for singing?  Not me. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  The actress who played Christine once turned down a role that went to a then-unknown Elizabeth Taylor because there wasn't enough singing in the movie.  Ha.)

Trivia Challenge Answer #10

The question was:  True or False, in Justice for All (The Outcast #1), Robin's father is a fireman.

And the answer was:  FALSE.  He was a police captain who was murdered by the evil Madame Crimson's goons.  This is because he was going to put her away in prison.  Thus begins Robin's quixotic quest for vengeance.

Trivia Challenge Question #10

Here's today's trivia question.  Answer in the comments.  Good luck!

Let's change it up with True or False:  in Justice for All (The Outcast #1), Robin's father is a fireman.

Some More Comics I Read 👀🎴

The title says it all...more comics I read.

Spider-Man Worldwide Vol 4:  The "Dead No More Clone Conspiracy" begins to ramp up.  The evil Hyena is making clones of dead Spidey foes and loved ones of other people like J Jonah Jameson's wife and Electro's girlfriend.  His attempt to bring back the Kingpin's wife is far less appreciated--the Kingpin snaps her neck.  At the same time, Peter Parker's step-uncle (Jameson's dad/Aunt May's second husband) needs an operation that the Hyena's front operation could help with but Peter convinces him not to go through with it because he senses something is wrong.  And after being Peter Parker for over 2 years and then downloading himself into a robot, Doctor Octopus finally gets his body body!  It's all just a lot of table-setting for what should be the big event. (2.5/5)

Transformers vs. GI JOE (IDW):  Back in the 80s Marvel did a crossover of their Transformers and GI JOE titles.  It was notable for GI JOE killing Bumblebee for whatever reason, though he eventually came back as Goldbug.  This is a completely different thing.  It's an Elseworlds story that starts out making very little sense.  Transformers show up on Earth and fight with GI JOE before teaming with COBRA while GI JOE invades the Transformers homeworld of Cybertron, where Megatron has taken control of the planet and banished the Autobots to ghettos while Optimus Prime has gone missing.  There are three volumes, the first of which is almost nonsensical.  Gradually the threads start coming together to an ending that almost makes sense...in a still pretty gonzo way.  There are some nice references, even including the obnoxious "Kremzeek" entity from a terrible Transformers cartoon episode, but besides the story the art looks like Napoleon Dynamite drew it most of the time.  IDW makes it look worse by including alternate covers drawn by real artists to promise what might have been. (2/5)

Drift: Empire of Stone:  After being banished from the Autobots for taking the fall for a crime he didn't commit, Autobot Drift has been rounding up renegade Decepticons on the edge of the galaxy.  But then a threat takes him back to a planet where as a Decepticon Drift encountered an army made of stone that could help to take over the galaxy.  Decepticons are trying to revive the army now and only Drift can stop them!  The stone army thing reminded me of Hellboy II and the Discworld novel Interesting Times.  It was a fun miniseries and helps to fill in what happened to Drift after he left in the More Than Meets the Eye series. (3/5)

Drift Miniseries:  This was Drift's first solo appearance after appearing in the All Hail Megatron series.  It tells how he tries to overthrow his unit commander and gets banished.  Crashing on a seemingly uninhabited planet, he finds some slavers and a Cybertronian wanting to free them.  There are more Cybertronians underground, all of them refugees from the Autobot-Decepticon war who have sworn off war.  Drift eventually decides to switch sides and help them take down the slavers.  Overall a good comic though maybe it should have gone one issue longer to let things have more time to wrap up. (3.5/5)

Autocracy:  This is a Transformers prequel from IDW Comics co-written by former Transformers cartoon/1986 movie writer Flint Dille.  Decepticons and "insurgents" across the Transformer homeworld of Cybertron have led to a brutal crackdown by Autobot leader Zeta Prime.  Orion Pax is a disgruntled cop for the "Autocracy" who ultimately joins forces with Megatron and the Decepticons to stop Zeta's grand scheme.  The alliance is short-lived because of course Megatron turns on Orion, who then rises from the grave as...Optimus Prime.  There are obvious nods to our post-9/11 world and Transformers history, including a scene from the 1986 movie that goes a bit differently this time around.  It's was a fun read to deepen the Transfomers mythos. (3.5/5)

Trivia Challenge Answer #9

The question was in Sky Ghost: Army of the Damned, what did the army of the damned refer to?

And the answer was...D, Zombies.

A crazed "reverend" and his minions gather up zombies and tame them with shock collars and such so they can then drop them on neighboring settlements.  How do you drop zombies on a place?  With big cages that have parachutes to slow them after they're dropped from planes.  If a few zombies happen to break their legs on the descent, so what?  Plenty more where that came from.  It's kind of like a biological weapon.

Triva Challenge Question #9

Here's today's question, answer in the comments.  Good luck!

In Sky Ghost:  Army of the Damned, the army of damned refers to what?

A.  Vampires
B.  Werewolves
C.  Mummies
D.  Zombies

More Stuff I Watched 💪🙉

Yeah, this again...

The Legend of Tarzan (2016):  This was better than I thought it would be.  I'm not really a fan of Tarzan, though I did like the Disney version in 1999.  This is one of those soft reboots where it's not really starting over but it is kind of a start.  Basically Tarzan (John Claymore is his real name) and Jane have returned to England until he's contacted by the Belgian government to go back to Africa.  He refuses until a black American (Samuel L Jackson) convinces Tarzan to go back to Africa because the Belgians might be enslaving some of the natives.  The Belgians are trying to get some diamonds to pay for their colony in the Congo and need to bring Tarzan there so some natives can kill him.  Anyway, a lot of the CGI is obvious but the story is OK and it has an impressive cast including Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L Jackson, and Alexander Sarsgaard--the son of Stellan Sarsgaard, whom you might remember from the Thor and Avengers movies. (3/5)

Voltron Legendary Defender Season 2:  This season uses wastes the first two episodes to get the team back together after their narrow escape from the evil Zarkon at the end of last season.  I didn't really think this was necessary, but whatever.  Most of the season is spent with the team dodging Zarkon's forces, gaining new allies, and setting an elaborate trap for Zarkon.  The last episode features an intense battle that almost makes up for the lack of Voltron fights earlier in the season.  I mean the plotting is much better in the old series, but sometimes you just want a Robeast to show up, them to form Voltron, and chop the fucking thing in half like the old days.  There was a pretty funny episode where they go to a space shopping mall and find a store that's filled with all sorts of old Earth electronics like video game systems that were sorta like the Sega Genesis or SNES.  The last episode "kills" a member of the team but it wasn't a surprise because they'd telegraphed it all season and really, who's the one character in this version who wasn't in the previous version?  Yeah, really.  So maybe next year Princess Allura will finally get to fly a lion--probably the red one. (3/5)

Sausage Party:  Seth Rogen and friends make the anti-Pixar movie.  Food in a supermarket is alive and thinks humans are "gods" who take them to the "Great Beyond" to live happily ever after.  But then Rogen's sausage finds out the truth.  He and his friends have to unite to stop the gods from devouring them.  It's filled with sophomoric humor as you'd expect from Rogen and company but there are some decent jokes.  The anti-religion message is pretty obvious.  Still wondering what a "lavash" is. (2.5/5)

Green Room:  A garage punk band traveling around in a van and siphoning gas to make ends meet gets a gig in what turns out to be a white supremacist compound.  They play their gig but when Pat (the late Anton Yelchin) goes back for his friend's phone, he sees a woman murdered in the "green room" for the bands.  The band then takes shelter in the green room while the supremacists, led by Patrick Stewart looking like an older British Nazi version of Walter White (complete with drug making!) plot to break into the green room and kill them.  Mayhem ensues.  It's oftentimes gross but sometimes funny and mostly tense. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The casting crosses Star Trek streams as you have Captain Picard and the reboot Chekov.)

Ratchet & Clank:  I never played the video games so I don't really know how accurate this is to the source material, but as far as video game movies go it was good.  Like Luke Skywalker, Ratchet is on a small desert planet dreaming of adventure.  The main difference is that Ratchet is some kind of meerkat-looking thing.  A defective warbot crashes on the planet and warns Ratchet that the evil Drek is going to kill the heroic Galactic Rangers.  When they inadvertently save the Rangers, Ratchet and Clank become part of the Rangers to stop Drek from carving up planets to make his "ultimate planet."  Which mashing parts of planets wouldn't really work in real life, but whatever.  It's light sci-fi adventure that's pretty funny in parts.  I guess not every video game movie is a stinker. (3/5)

The Confirmation:  A boy spends the weekend with his alcoholic father (Clive Owen) and they learn valuable lessons and bond and stuff.  Mostly they look for some valuable old tools stolen from the dad that he needs for a job starting on Monday.  It's a good movie with enough action and humor to keep things moving.  (3.5/5)

Beyond the Reach:  Michael Douglas is a wealthy businessman (when isn't he?) who employs a guide to take him to the desert area called "the reach" to hunt bighorn sheep.  When he accidentally kills some dude instead of a sheep, Michael Douglas decides to stalk and try to kill his guide, though he has ample opportunities to do so.  I didn't really pay much attention to it and really, why didn't he just kill the guide right off?  Pulling a total Dr. Evil there. (2/5)

Stark Raving Mad:  It's like a D-list Ocean's Eleven as Seann William Scott assembles a team of idiots to steal a priceless artifact and stuff.  As cover for the robbery, he throws a rave downstairs in a club.  Then complications ensue.  And so forth.  I didn't really care. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  If you get cornered by a lion, you should charge at it according to this movie.  Don't quote me on that though if you really do get cornered by a lion.)

Knock Knock:  This is like one of those Penthouse letters:  a middle-aged guy (Keanu Reeves) is home alone and two hot chicks show up in the rain.  He lets them in and they ask to take of their clothes to dry them and then ask to use the shower.  And then they suck his cock.  But then the next morning they start acting like a couple of rejects from The Purge, terrorizing him just for the hell of it.  Mayhem ensues!  Some of it sexy mayhem. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Eli Roth, the guy behind those Hostel torture movies, so yeah it's not surprising that again we have a torture scenario.)

The Last Heist:  A safe deposit company is closing down and so some robbers decide to go in and steal some drug money.  Their scheme is foiled by a guy in the bank.  Not an off-duty cop like Bruce Willis but a serial killer (Henry Rollins) who likes to cut people's eyes out because he thinks it saves their souls.  So that creates a lot of mayhem.  It's otherwise not really anything you haven't seen before in a heist movie.  I guess the "last" part refers to the bank going out of business.

Humans vs Zombies:  The movie is as generic as the title!  I mean it's just a bunch of standard zombie movie shit you've seen done better on The Walking Dead or movies like Dawn of the Dead and even Shaun of the Dead.  Basically a virus escapes and starts infecting kids on a college campus and mayhem ensues.  At the end for the "cookie scene" they use the Dawn of the Dead remake trick of using camcorder-looking footage to show the last people being eaten in case you had any hope.  Lame. (1/5) (Unfun Fact:  A couple of times they joke about this one girl having a "lesbian haircut" because she has curly hair to almost her shoulders.  No, Mr. Director, that's not a "lesbian haircut."  Rachel Maddow has a lesbian haircut.  Ellen Degeneres has a lesbian haircut.  If you're going to make homophobic jokes, do it right!)

St. Elmo's Fire:  This 1985 movie co-written and directed by Joel Schumacher had an all-star young 80s cast:  Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estavez, and Andrew McCarthy!  They're a bunch of whiny yuppies in training who have graduated or flunked out of college and are moving on to that next phase of their lives.  And sleeping with each other and stuff.  Honestly it was better when I saw the beginning, fell asleep, and woke up for the end because then I missed all the boring soap opera stuff.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The AM station my brother and I used to listen to for Tigers games would use the "Love Theme" from this movie as filler when they had a couple of minutes left between the end of a song or Tigers broadcast or whatever and the news at the top of the hour.)

The Magic Sword:  This cheesy 60s fantasy movie makes the original Clash of the Titans seem like Lord of the Rings.  Some dude goes to find a princess with a magic sword and help from his mommy the witch.  What a wussy "hero."  The Rifftrax gang makes it more fun but there's only so much they can do. (1/5)

The Art of More Season 2:  I jokingly called the first season "The Art of Snore" because I never stayed awake for an entire episode.  And guess what?  I didn't stay awake through the second season either.  It's good to help put me to sleep because try as they might, there are really almost no stakes in this feeble drama.  Oh no, someone's taking over the auction house and putting Kate Bosworth out of business!  She'll have to get like a real job now I guess.  And oh no the billionaire guy's modern art museum might not get built on time!  Ooooh.  Heavy stuff man. (1/5)

Narcoleptic Theater:  One night I started out watching Money Train, fell asleep, woke up for part of the middle of The Motorcycle Diaries, fell asleep, and then woke up for the end of Animal House.  Now there you go, put those together into one movie:  Money Motorcycle House or Train Motorcycle Animal or something.  To rob a train full of money to pay their tuition, some college frat boys hop on motorcycles to stage a daring robbery!  Or something like that.

The Easy Way to Make a Paperback on Amazon & Trivia Challenge Answer #8

I recently decided to make my first paperback directly from Amazon's KDP site.  Most of the process was OK but the cover part was super annoying.  Createspace gave you more than a dozen templates for making a cover (I think "Pine" was the one I used most of the time) but Amazon only has half that.  A problem most people won't run into is my stupid Russian anti-virus program kept thinking the button to add a graphic was a text box.  I finally had to use Microsoft's browser to load the graphics for my cover.

Matte Cover Taken With My Phone's Kinda Shitty Camera

Anyway, you have to bring your own interior file even if you already made an ebook version.  The easiest way to do this is to go to Draft2Digital.  You just load your ebook file and then go to where it creates a PDF for the paperback.  They used to let you load to CreateSpace but now you can't do that but the PDF is all you need anyway.  Once you download the PDF you can unpublish your book on Draft2Digital if you want and then load the PDF onto the KDP site.  It's maybe not as pretty as I would make it but it takes only a couple of minutes instead of hours or days.  Here's what my book looks like:

Two Interior Pages and my fat hand and fingers

Interior Page & Chapter page and my fat fingers

You save hours of futzing around with headers and footers on Microsoft Word, so that's great.  I'd like drop caps and maybe bigger chapter headings and putting the chapter on a facing page, but this is decent and very low effort.  For all the paperbacks I sell that's enough.

Here's another pro tip:  you only need one book on Draft2Digital.  For instance to make that book above I just posted the file on the Draft2Digital page for Another Chance.  I didn't change the cover, just the interior and title and author.  As long as you change the name of the book to the right one it doesn't really matter.  Then you don't need to create a whole new listing for each book you want a paperback for, especially nice since D2D doesn't let you archive old books you don't care about.

The only other hitch is they don't yet let you buy proof copy books so I paid retail.  I think it counted on my sales so I get $0.26 of that back!  I think they mentioned that eventually you'll be able to buy proofs like on CreateSpace.

One other idiotic thing is despite that I made the ebook and paperback through the KDP site they still have separate listing on Amazon.  You'd think they'd make it smart enough that it could combine both editions into one page without me having to send them an email or something.  Yeah, really, get it together Amazon!

So still some bugs to work out but the end result is all right.  Thus we have the first real paperback by Eric Filler!  I have a few other ones but they're really short and I only made them because I used D2D for non-Amazon ebooks and had the PDF files so why not?  I'll probably do more in the future to squeeze a few more pennies out of the unsuspecting public.

Now then, the Trivia Challenge no one cares about1

OK, so the question was in Another Chance, con man Vince becomes a woman of what descent?

And the answer was...C, Indian.  Yes, as in from India, which is why I put Native American as well.  Vince's new name is Vinaya Gupta, who pretends to be an army lieutenant to steal some scientific secrets.  This is what she looks like, more or less:

Cindy was the only one to answer so she gets 5 more points.  I think when we get to the last question I'll have to pull a Briane Pagel and make it worth a million points to render the rest of this competition pointless.