Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Pardon the Interruption: Vote for ME!!!

We interrupt my blog's silence for a special announcement.  I keep putting off writing a query for my novel Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1) and looking for markets to submit to.  Then I saw a link to Amazon's new Kindle Scout program.  It's basically like a literary American Idol kind of thing where people pick their favorite stories and "nominate them" and Amazon might decide to give the winner(s) a publishing contract.  I know at least one publisher had something like this and I probably still have Chance of a Lifetime there, though I have no idea which publisher it even is anymore, so I don't much care.
http://www.amazon.com/Justice-All-Outcast-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0150SJO8U

I submitted my book and today is when my "campaign" starts.  You can visit the page here and nominate my book.  It runs for the next 30 days I think.  This would probably be a better program for someone like Alex Cavanaugh or Andrew Leon who has more flunkies followers, but what the heck.  Maybe by the time I don't get picked I'll have gotten around to finding somewhere else to ship it off to.  I'd like this one to get traditionally published.  I think it could be.  I mean, zombies and awesome dogfights, what's not to like?  Basically just imagine The Walking Dead if instead of walking or driving they flew airplanes.  There you go.  Simple concept, no?  And really it seems like a marketable concept.  It'd be nice if it could get picked up and maybe make enough to pay for the cover art, unlike the other mainstream novel I released this year.  BTW, I'm making that one free for the next 5 days, so be sure to pick up a copy and then not give it a good review!

Anyway, Vote for me!

I have new blog entries ready starting January 4, 2016, so be sure to come back then.  Happy Holidays!  (Oh no, it's the war on Christmas!)

Friday, October 30, 2015

Turn Out the Lights

I'm going to take a page from Michael Offutt's playbook and close my blog down for the end of the year starting after this post.  I really don't have any new idea for posts and at the moment I don't care.  There just enough people making me angry I guess.  You know the best posts come when someone like Andrew Leon or Jay Greenstein annoys me.  Or someone writes a stupid article and I feel the need to say how stupid they are.

Plus in November everyone's all gushing over NaNoWriMo and then there are the holidays, so it doesn't seem like much point in blogging.

There are a couple of final thoughts.  First, what's the deal with Ben Carson?  I keep hearing from right-wingers how "brilliant" he is and yet he says the stupidest shit like the Jews could have stopped the Holocaust if they'd had guns.  Or when he blamed Oregon school shooting victims for not rushing the gunman.  Which he would have done, except he admitted when someone was going to rob him at a Popeye's that he told the guy to rob the cashier instead.  Yeah, that sounds like the genius I want in charge of America.

In large part it's a good example of a stereotype that sounds positive.  It's like the stereotype that all Asians are good at math.  Only in this case it's that neurosurgeons must be smart at everything else.  The "logic" basically goes:
  • Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon
  • Neurosurgeons are smart
  • Therefore Ben Carson is smart

And no matter what stupid shit he says, the comeback is:  He's a doctor!  Which obviously he knows something about surgery but that doesn't mean he knows or understands geopolitics.  I mean come on I graduated magna cum laude from college but does that mean I should run America?  No.

The other part of it is he's the Right's black friend.  You know how every racist when called on it will say, "I have black friends!"  Ben Carson is the black friend for all the Dittoheads so they can feel good about hating Obama for eight years.  Rupert Murdoch even called him the first "real" black president.  To which Bill Maher had the hilarious retort, "Yeah the problem for Republicans is Obama wasn't black enough."

Anyway, like Trump before him Carson is peaking too early.  The reason guys in the back of the pack are still trying to hold on is they're just waiting for their turn.  I suppose next it'll be Carly Fiorina's turn.  She'll be lauded for her business experience, despite that she was horrible at business.  There was a great article about how when she ran HP, Steve Jobs duped her into making knock-off iPods in exchange for putting iTunes on all HP computers.  The knock-off iPods flopped while iTunes grew bigger than ever.  If she can't handle Jobs, do you think she can handle Putin?

Maybe in a way this whole Republican fiasco is the public trolling the political world.  Since there's over a year for the election, why not kick the tires on Donald Trump?  Or Ben Carson.  Or Carly Fiorina.  Or Bernie Sanders on the Left.  Which as much as I like Bernie and his ideas, Hillary's overcoming the Benghazi "scandal" gives her almost a clear path.  She'll still probably lose New Hampshire as that's Bernie's home turf, but otherwise she'll win.  Which is disappointing as she's owned by corporate America like the rest of them and we'll only get more wishy-washy liberalism like her husband.

That's enough political analysis to last you until 2016, right?

As for Stuff I Watched, since it's October and I've seen the Halloween series and Friday the 13th series and no one has Nightmare on Elm Street free (the whole series anyway), I've been watching the Hellraiser series on Netflix.

The first movie has a convoluted plot.  It's like this girl's evil uncle is in Hell but through a mysterious box (kind of an evil Rubik's Cube) he contacts the girl's stepmother and she brings him through a gateway to the real world, but like The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one) he has to devour people to take their flesh and stuff.  And somehow the box also summons nasty fetish monsters known as Cenobites.  And confusing mayhem ensues.

If any of that stuff from the first movie made sense the second movie would be up your alley because it adds to the convolutedness.  The stepmother is brought back this time by an evil shrink who feeds her inmates from his asylum.  But then the shrink becomes a Cenobite with snake fingers who kills the other Cenobites, even "Pinhead"--the guy with the nails all over his head.  But with the help of a catatonic girl who knows puzzles, the girl from the first movie somehow stops him and kills the stepmother and stuff.  The most interesting thing about the movie to me is that dialogue from it was sampled into the Queensrhyche song "Silent Lucidity," which I have on my MP3 player.  You have to listen for where a guy says, "How's....better?"  And where a woman says, "Help me." 

The funny thing with this franchise is it's like Friday the 13th where Jason wasn't the original focus.  Apparently the stepmother was supposed to be the focus, but everyone liked Pinhead the most, so from the 3rd movie on he's like the head Cenobite and kind of ambassador of Hell.  The third movie explores his origin a little more while there's also a female reporter who finds the evil box and is going to use it to stop Pinhead from...whatever.

The fourth one is sort of literary in its scope.  It tells three generations of the Merchant family.  Back in 18th Century France a toymaker named LaMerchand or whatever builds the evil puzzle box for sort of a Marquis de Sade guy, whose son (Adam Scott of Parks & Recreation) somehow uses the box's power to live to 1996, when his evil girlfriend tries to steal it and get the current Merchant guy to build an even bigger one.  Finally it jumps to like the 22nd Century where the Merchant guy of that century designs a space station that's like a floating version of the box that is supposed to kill Pinhead.

The fifth and sixth ones are largely the same.  In the fifth one there's a detective trying to find a killer who cuts off the finger of a child to leave at each crime scene.  The detective is a really bad cop and what we find out is that the killer is himself and really when he found the box at a murder scene he was sucked into his own private hell.  I liked this one probably the best because it reminded me of a story I wrote in 2004 called "Tartarus" where an assassin's hell is to live the day his family died over and over again, each time his family dying no matter what he does differently.  The sixth one features another guy who crashed his car off a bridge and killed his fiancee.  He has a lot of memory problems and hallucinations while a police detective comes ever closer to bringing him in for murder.  He's not in Hell.  If you paid more attention than I did, you'd have realized his fiancee is the girl from the first two movies, only an adult now.  She doesn't die but to get off the hook with Pinhead, she kills 5 people--including her jerk fiance.  Which seems like a WTF ending to me.  I mean if she killed all these people, isn't she going to Hell anyway?  I don't think St. Peter would say, "It's cool that you killed those 5 people.  They were all bad.  And you had a deal with Pinhead, so come on in!" It was kind of a lame M Night Shymalan way to end it.

The 7th one starts out OK.  Again there's a female reporter who finds "the box" while investigating a cult in Bucharest.  This weird cult has the members kill themselves and then their leader brings them back to life somehow.  It gets increasingly convoluted, bringing back the largely nonsensical feeling of the original movies.  It kind of spoiled what was to that point an OK movie.

With the 8th one Dimension Films does what they did with Halloween Resurrection, which is to add a dose of Scream-esque meta content to the franchise.  There's a Hellraiser RPG game online and this group of college kids play it and get invited to a party at a spooky house hosted by Lance Henriksen.  One of the kids is the current Superman, Henry Cavill, who dies like a bitch.  While it's OK it's basically just a slasher movie with the dumb kids being killed one after another until only a couple are left.  Even the identity of the real killer is pretty easy to figure out.  (Lance Henriksen is the father of a boy who died playing the RPG game and created the whole party scam to kill his kid's friends.  The whole "parent after revenge thing" is the premise of numerous horror movies like the original Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th V, and Scream 2 for starters.)  As convoluted and nonsensical as a lot of these movies are, at least they had their own format.  at the very end there is a little of that when Lance Henriksen opens the box and Pinhead shows up to kill him.

While the 8th one used the slasher template, the 9th (and final) one uses the found footage trope.  Two college kids go to Tijuana and buy the box off some dude and mayhem ensues.  It's kind of lame.  Not just the story but the acting and the production values.  It's also the only one not to feature Doug Bradley as Pinhead.  I guess the idea was for a reboot, but like almost every other horror movie reboot it sucked.

No final post for the year would be complete without shameless plugs!  Tomorrow's Halloween and last year I wrote one gender swap story, Transformed for Halloween
Five wives, tired of their husbands' behavior, hire a witch to put a curse on them. At midnight on Halloween, the men are transformed into their wives' costumes: a little girl, a schoolgirl, a whore, a Goth girl, and a cheerleader. Now they have to spend all of Halloween in these bodies, under the control of their wives.

This year I wrote two!  First there's Transformed for Halloween Too:
In every neighborhood there's a house no one wants to visit. On Waukegan Street it's the house of Old Lady Montgomery. On Halloween night Gabriel Tobman goes up to the front door of the house to play a trick on the old woman. Instead, she's the one dishing out the tricks by turning him into a girl. Now every hour he's getting four years older. The only way to end the curse and get his life back is to have thirteen orgasms by dawn. Can he make it or is he destined to become the new old lady of Waukegan Street?

My Amazon nemesis "John Daniels" of course had to write a bad review, complaining about the "abrupt ending."  Which makes no sense.  I mean this is a ticking clock plot.  Gabe has until sunup to win the game.  So the story ends shortly after sunup when the game is over.  It's like, WTF, dude?  How is that "abrupt?"  Maybe he's the kind of idiot who thinks these should end Happily Ever After when most of these (especially a Halloween one) are horror stories in my mind.  He said the same shit about another story where I did kind of a Back to the Future thing, where someone altered the past and then jumped back to the future.  That one actually did end Happily Ever After and he still bitched about it!  Again I can't help shaking my head and wondering why the fuck the guy keeps buying these books when he only complains about them?  Maybe the fifth time will be the charm, right?  Moron.

And then from another pseudonym is Trick or Treat:
http://www.amazon.com/Trick-Treat-Halloween-Age-Regression-ebook/dp/B016YGYTNM/
As easy as stealing candy from a baby.  For Billy Knutsen this is more difficult than he thought.  After he steals Halloween candy from some kids, he and his best friend are turned into little princesses who have to fill their treat bags or be stuck as girls forever.

So there you go, if you want something creepy to read for tomorrow, you got plenty of options.

And that's it, I'm out.  See you in 2016.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Writing Wednesday: There's Always a Catch

A couple weeks ago I got a private message on Twitter asking, "Would you like to write a series for Channillo?"  To which my first thought was, like yours probably is:  the fuck is a Channillo?

So I went to check it out.  Basically it's a Wattpad kind of service where authors post stories in small bites, either short stories or serialized novels.  The difference being that unlike Wattpad, you get paid based on the number of views for the parts of your story.  Which since you can use a book that's published so long as it's not free anywhere, I thought since they don't allow erotica I'd put up my latest normal release Justice for All.

Well you know what they say, right:  anything too good to be true, probably is.  Also:  there's no such thing as a free lunch.  So, here's the rub:  in order to subscribe to any series on the site you have to buy a membership, ranging from $5/month to $20/month.

Now the caveat here is you can post a series without buying a membership, but as with Wattpad or Twitter, it's probably better if you follow some people if you want them to follow you.

The site seems fairly new and I don't think there are enough members that it would be worthwhile to post there.  In all honesty, I don't see how it can really be a profitable venture for writers.  I mean if I'm paying $5-$20 a month, I'd have to make that back per month just to break even.  The site itself is not very sophisticated and I don't think they have a mobile app.  Since Wattpad has all that and is FREE, why would I as a reader want to use it?  If you want to read stuff and pay money, a Kindle Unlimited subscription would be a much better value.  I'm just saying.

Meanwhile, I was browsing Snagajob for no good reason and this ad comes up for trucking school.  They'll train you and guarantee you a job!  Sounds like a good deal, right?  Well of course there's some fine print.  If you pass the training and get your CDL license and all that (which is pretty iffy I think for me) the job they're guaranteeing you is for 10 months you spend 3 out of 4 weeks driving across the country in a "team" with one or more other person.  Which for some people might seem awesome, but to me sounds like crap.  Not the being away from home part (obviously given what I was doing a year ago) but I really don't want to be stuck in a truck with some random stranger and staying in crappy motels and stopping at crappy truck stops and all that.  Though if it were just me I'd probably end up crashing and burning, so maybe neither option is really good.

Another recent example is the big Michigan-Michigan State football game was on ESPN and I don't have cable, so I decided to try Sling TV on my Roku.  It promises that you can watch live TV through the Roku without paying for cable.  Of course the hitch is that you need a really, really strong Internet connection.  Trying to watch the game, there was so much freezing, buffering, and outright crashing that it was really frustrating.  It's especially bad for scripted shows or movies because it'll freeze or crash and then you end up missing stuff.  So yeah, too good to be true.

Anyway, the point is whether in writing or job searching or life in general, there's always a catch.  You don't get something for nothing.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Do You Know More About DC Comics Than a Robot Chicken Writer?

Recently Adult Swim aired the Robot Chicken DC Comics Special Volume 3, which I missed so I bought it on Amazon.  There was also a free segment you can "buy" separately where the writers for Robot Chicken attempt to answer 20 questions about the DC Universe.  Surprisingly though I only really started reading comics like 3 years ago, I knew most of the answers, so it wasn't actually that difficult.

Since you don't probably know a lot of the answers, I'll make it sporting and use multiple choice.  If you get them all right you win...self-respect.

Here we go.  Starting with an easy one.

1.  Clark Kent is the alter-ego of which hero?
A.  Batman
B.  Superman
C.  Aquaman
D.  Green Lantern

2.   Who killed Batman's parents Thomas and Martha Wayne?
A.  Joe Chill
B.  The Joker
C.  Someone Else
D.  Depends on the version of the story.

3.  What is the name of Wonder Woman's mother?
A.  She-Ra
B.  Hera
C.  Hippolyta
D.  Athena

4.  Which DC Comics hero's father died in a plane crash?
A.  Green Lantern
B.  Green Arrow
C.  Red Tornado
D.  Cyborg

5.  What city does the Barry Allen Flash call home?
A.  Keystone City
B.  Star City
C.  Coast City
D.  Central City

6.  Which speedster went by the name Siegfriend the Speedster?
A.  Jay Garrick
B.  Barry Allen
C.  Wally West
D.  Professor Zoom

7.  Who crippled Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) in The Killing Joke?
A.  The Penguin
B.  The Riddler
C.  The Joker
D.  Commissioner Gordon

8.  In the comic titled "Sacrifice" who did Wonder Woman kill?
A.  Malcolm Merlin
B.  Maxwell Lord
C.  Monty Hall
D.  Matt Murdock

9.  What is the name of the prison in Gotham City?
A.  Arkham Asylum
B.  Blackgate Prison
C.  Supermax Prison
D.  Both A & B are acceptable

10.  Which villain once was elected president of the US?
A.  Solomon Grundy
B.  Harvey Dent
C.  Lex Luthor
D.  Donald Trump

11.  Where does Nth metal come from?
A.  Thanagar
B.  The Fifth Dimenson
C.  Apokalips
D.  Who the fuck knows?

12.  Which Green Lantern is from Planet Bolovax Vik?
A.  Killowog
B.  Sinestro
C.  Mogo
D.  The squirrel-looking one

13.  What is Batman Incorporated?
A.  A TV Show
B.  A short-lived comic book series by Tony Laplume favorite Grant Morrison
C.  A company to franchise Batmans (Batmen?) around the world
D.  Both B & C

14.  Connor Hawke is the son of which hero?
A.  Hawkman
B.  Green Arrow
C.  Speedy
D.  Green Lantern

15.  The first appearance by any Green Lantern was in which comic book?
A.  Action Comics
B.  Radio Comics
C.  Detective Comics
D.  All-American Comics

16.  The alter-ego of Captain Thunder was originally who?
A.  Donna Troy
B.  Dick Grayson
C.  Billy Batson
D.  Clark Kent

17.  Who killed Superman in the comics?
A.  Lex Luthor
B.  Doomsday
C.  Lois Lane
D.  Bizarro

18.  When did Lois and Clark get married in the comics?
A. 1986
B.  2015
C.  2002
D.  1996

19.  Which villain discovered Batman's secret identity by deduction?
A.  The Riddler
B.  Hugo Strange
C.  Ra's al Guhl
D.  Both B &C

20.  Which member of the Minutemen (from the Watchmen series) dated Hooded Justice?
A.  Dr. Manhattan
B.  The Comedian
C.  Silk Spectre
D.  Nite Owl





























And now the answers:
B, D, C, A, D, A, C, B, D, C, A (D is also acceptable), A, D, B, D, C, B, D, D, D

Monday, October 26, 2015

The Secret Science of Trailers

Last Monday the world was obsessed with the new Star Wars trailer.  For the most part it followed the trend of modern movie trailers by providing a hodge-podge of images interlaced with dialogue.  This style of trailer is pretty much everywhere these days and most of the time it leaves me wondering, "What the fuck is this movie about?"  I especially remember the trailer for the new Jennifer Lawrence drama Joy; it followed that format with just a bunch of random images and dialogue and I still can't tell you what the fuck the movie is about.

Yet you know they wouldn't do it this way if it weren't effective at least some of the time.  I think I finally cracked the code--if there was a code that needed cracking.

But to take a trip down memory lane, if you ever watch TCM they sometimes show the really old movie trailers, which were vastly different.  They might show a scene or two and a lot of times they'd overlay some text like, "This movie has thrills!  And chills!"  Gradually trailers began incorporating voiceover, until the 70s and 80s where you had that deep-voiced guy saying, "In a world..."

Starting in the 90s that changed to our modern style.  No longer do you have the voiceover guy.  Instead you get random snippets of images and dialogue, sometimes with text flying at you.  It's to the point now where pretty much everything from action movies to dramas to kid's movies do it.  It'd be nice if YouTube links worked here, but just go to YouTube or anywhere else and look up movie trailers and you'll see it for yourself.

As I said, I think I cracked the code for why they do this.  And again it's probably common sense.  Basically the idea is to play in to our obsessive culture by giving us a puzzle and letting us try to reassemble it.  You give us a bunch of little snippets in no particular order and we all sit around on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, etc trying to unravel what it means and how the pieces fit together.  They basically use us then as carriers to spread the virus here, there, and everywhere across the Interwebs. 

Yet sometimes they're really evil about these and actually put stuff in that doesn't make the final cut of the film or even splice dialogue from different points together.  Remember when one of the first Age of Ultron trailers came out and there was a shot of some lady in a cave or something?  People went crazy trying to figure out who she was.  Who was she?  Nobody!  That scene wasn't in the movie and Josh Whedon claimed it was just stock footage tossed in there.  In the trailer for The Gambler Mark Wahlberg says, "If you don't have the magic...don't bother!"  When I watched the movie in the theater I realized the parts before and after the ellipsis were actually two different lines from two different parts.

I'm not sure how many people watch book trailers, but maybe authors need to find a way to do something similar.  Put a bunch of jumbled-up shit out there and let people whip themselves into a frenzy trying to piece it together.  I'm not sure yet how to do it but maybe someone with better skills at video editing can put something together.

I know it's oh so hard to read blogs on Tuesdays [eye roll] but tomorrow's a special trivia challenge!

Friday, October 23, 2015

Halloween Costume Ideas From the Sims!

Halloween is next Saturday.   If you're a girl or know a girl, here's some sexy costume ideas from Sims 4 creations I've made.  As Offutt says, click to embiggen the pictures.

Attack on Titan

Sexy Maid

Dominatrix

Naughty Schoolgirl

Goth Girl

Naughty Librarian

Sexy Nurse

Wonder Woman

Sexy Cop

Belly Dancer

Mermaid (No one has made a fish tail yet)

Stewardess

Arr, Pirate

Victorian Madam

Princess

Orange is the New Black

Jungle Girl

Spacelady

Sexy Space Captain

Sexy Science Officer

Cheerleader

Witch
Stacey Chance (for lazy girls)
And some less inspired choices for guys:
Redneck

Hipster

The Martian

Space Captain

Science Nerd

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Gratuitous Star Wars Force Awakens Trailer Post

Shamelessly pandering for page views now!

So as you probably know the final trailer for Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens came out Monday night during Monday Night Football.  Which for people like Michael Offutt is the only reason to ever watch football.  My British buddy Neil Vogler was bummed the trailer didn't leak earlier, which was a surprise to me as they usually do but I guess after the Avengers 2 one leaked earlier in the year they probably made sure to put it on total lockdown.

So here are some thoughts I had, some of which I Tweeted, not that you read my Tweets or even know I have a Twitter account.  (I have 3 actually.)

1.  John Boyega's Finn is the Luke Skywalker.  It's not only because he gets a blue lightsaber.  From what we saw in the trailer he pretty much sounds like what would have happened to Luke if Uncle Owen had let him go to the Imperial Academy, or really what happened to Luke's friend Biggs, in that he is part of the Empire (First Order, whatever) but gets disillusioned, jumps ship, and then hooks up with the "Resistance."  And somewhere meets Luke and/or Leia to get a lightsaber and fight Kylo Ren.  Which brings up:

2.  Kylo Ren and his buddies are Sith cosplayers.  So basically this dude finds Darth Vader's mask and decides that he's going to dress like Darth and build himself a dorky red lightsaber.  And he has some buddies who have sticks and shit.  They're basically like the Goth kids in high school grown up--and with a lightsaber.

3.  The girl is the kid from Star Wars Rebels--only, you know, a girl.  I have no idea what the female character's name is and I only know the actress is Daisy Somethingorother.  I don't think she's really been in anything important until now.  Anyway, in the trailer we see her scrambling around inside that crashed Star Destroyer from the first trailer.  The whole scavenger thing makes me think of the kid on Disney's Star Wars Rebels, Ezra or whatever.  I'm sure she finds something important, like plans for the new Death Star or Starkiller or whatever was on the new poster.

4.  The Luke Skywalker "mystery" doesn't matter.  So far we haven't seen Luke in the trailers or on the poster, which has fans in a tizzy.  You know what?  Big whoop.  This is classic JJ Abrams.  Remember for Star Trek Into Darkness where he wouldn't say Benedict Cumberbatch was Khan even though everyone in the fucking world knew he was Khan?  And then guess what?  Yeah, he was Khan.  This is the same deal.  It's just Abrams and company trying to work fans up.  Obviously Luke is going to be the Obi-Wan.  If it turns out otherwise I'd really shocked.  But just don't worry about it, people.

5.  It's appropriate Han Solo was the one telling the new kids the Force is real since in Star Wars Episode IV he was the one who said it was a hokey religion.  So now it's come full circle.

6.  This hype is unbearable.  Am I the only one who remembers 1999?  How everyone was going nuts over The Phantom Menace before it was out?  It's all the same shit again with the rampant merchandising machine and people swarming to buy tickets and stuff.  Everyone's saying to themselves, hey this time around we get geriatric versions of our childhood favorites!  And George Lucas isn't involved!  Yup, that makes it a lot better...not really.  As they say in Fanboys when they're finally sitting down to watch Phantom Menace:  What if it sucks?  It'll probably crush your souls.

7.  What happened to the Episode #s?  Seriously, you notice in the posters and that they don't refer to it as Episode VII?  Is this because of the failure of the prequels?  Maybe they thought the whole "Episode" thing was too closely linked to that while the original three movies didn't include Episodes in the titles originally.

There you go.  Now to kick back and watch my page view numbers skyrocket.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Video Review 10/19/15

So here are some things I watched recently, probably none of which you've ever heard of.  But since you haven't, I decided I'll include where I watched it so you might be able to find it.  Of course that might be subject to change.  For HBO movies check HBO Go or your cable provider's on demand service.

Cop Car:  I heard of this movie in large part because it helped land the director the next Spider-Man movie.  It definitely has a Coen Brothers vibe established in movies like Fargo, Blood Simple, etc.  There's the same mixture of horrific violence and deadpan black humor.  It all starts when two little boys find a cop car in the woods.  They decide to take it for a joyride.  Unfortunately for them, the owner of that cop car is the sheriff, who was using the car to transport a couple of bodies.  Needless to say he doesn't take kindly to his car being stolen.  Oh, and one of those bodies isn't dead.  So while it starts innocently, it soon takes dark turns.  The only thing I didn't like is the end kind of leaves something unresolved. (4/5) (Redbox)

Tomorrowland:  I might have gone to see this in theaters but never got around to it.  Anyway, it's the movie based on the old Disneyland attraction.  What I like about the movie is how it questions our increasingly bleak worldview.  I mean when the most popular books, movies, and TV shows are all featuring apocalyptic and dystopian scenarios it's hard to believe in optimism. Where's that can-do spirit that was so pervasive in Star Trek?  Or in the earlier days of science-fiction?  The movie is good then at reminding us that we should try to solve problems instead of whining about them.  This was something good about The Martian too, in how everyone banded together instead of arguing and finger-pointing like what happens after every school shooting.  Anyway, the irony is the movie itself features an apocalyptic/dystopian plot in that the guy running Tomorrowland thinks we all need to die.  I'll admit I didn't pay attention through the whole movie, which was kind of a problem.  Something shallow is that the girl playing the teenager who teams up with George Clooney looked like she was thirty.  The intro got a little annoying too in "let's start here" "no, let's start here."  Just start somewhere!  Anyway, it was OK and if you really like old-timey sci-fi then it's fun for that too.  Probably a good thing Disney bought Star Wars for the scenes in the old toy shop where they have lots of Star Wars props.  (2.5/5) (Redbox)

Air:  If you ever read Wool by Hugh Howey, this is kinda like that.  There's a missile silo in which there are a bunch of frozen bodies who will eventually get up to repopulate the devastated Earth.  Taking care of those frozen bodies is the job of Bauer (Norman Reedus aka Daryl of the Walking Dead) and Cartwright (Djimon Honsou of Guardians of the Galaxy, Gladiator, and of course Amistad).  They wake up every six months or so to make sure the place is still functioning.  Except this time something goes wrong when Cartwright's chamber malfunctions.  Searching for spare parts leads them to shocking revelations about the world around them and their mission.  That in turn sets them against each other.  It's decent, though probably a little too slow for most people. (2.5/5) (Redbox)

The Canyons:  I watched this mostly because I read an article on what a pain in the ass Lindsey Lohan was when they were making it.  The movie itself is a bunch of stuff in search of a real story.  Basically there are two couples (and another chick) and everyone is sleeping with everyone and spying on everyone.  Interspersed in this are images of closed movie theaters--for some reason.  Sure the characters were involved in making a movie (though we never get to that) but otherwise I guess the idea was to illustrate the faded glory of Hollywood.  There's plenty of nudity (both genders), which helps pad the blow a little. (2/5) (Netflix)

Burying the Ex:  It's like Every Romantic Comedy meets Death Becomes Her.  Chekov from the Star Trek reboot works in a Halloween novelty shop when a "Satan Genie" shows up.  His annoying environmentalist girlfriend inadvertently wishes they could be together forever, so when she gets hit by a bus, she comes back to life.  Though only after Chekov has found a sorta of hot milk shake shop owner (because in movies something like that exists) who is a lot less annoying.  That puts new meaning to "it's complicated" for relationship statuses, right?  It was entertaining and not entirely predictable and pretty short too at just under 90 minutes. (2.5/5) (Netflix)

Bad Night:  This is an action comedy that's based on a case of mistaken identity.  Two teenage girls on a field trip get mistaken by a professional driver who's supposed to pick up two mysterious women who are art thieves.  Meanwhile the art thieves get picked up by the Uber driver the teenage girls hired.  So naturally mayhem ensues.  It's nothing special but it's funny especially if you liked 80s movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Adventures in Babysitting.  BTW, 80s movie alum Molly Ringwald has a cameo. (2.5) (Netflix)

License to Drive:  Speaking of 80s movies, this was a crappy one featuring the two Coreys (Haim and Feldman).  I think it's Haim who's a kid trying to get his license but fails to do so.  He swipes his grandpa's Caddy to impress the hot chick.  At the time maybe it was pretty risque with all the underage drinking; the hot chick guzzles champagne until she passes out and then somehow Corey has to get her home.  (He doesn't go Bill Cosby on her because this isn't that kind of movie.)  Some lame mayhem ensues. (1/5) (HBO)

Coffee Town:  This movie hits close to home as it's about a guy (Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) who spends most of his time at a coffee shop using his computer.  He's some kind of Internet person not a writer, but still it's kind of the same thing.  Of course his struggles are exaggerated from real life.  I mean I've never met a barista who actually gave a shit about customers sitting around all day.  Maybe if you looked homeless and smelled really bad, but ordinary people they could care less if you're there five minutes or five hours.  Because, well, baristas are not the most dedicated lot.  Sometimes they've all gone out on a smoke break or to chat and left me completely alone in the store.  Anyway, another good reason for him to go to the coffee shop is the hot girl (Adrienne Panicki) who shows up every day for coffee.  So when the coffee shop is going to become a bistro like a TGI Friday's, the guy has to take action to prevent his life from being destroyed.  Which he does by staging a robbery one night, though since is a comedy things don't really go well.  It was good, though the end was a little random. (3/5) (HBO)

Kill Me Three Times:  Simon Pegg is an assassin in Australia who's supposed to spy on some chick with an abusive boyfriend who wants her dead but some dentist and his assistant also want to kill the same chick...none of this made sense.  This is one of those movies where the filmmaker clearly wanted to be Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino but isn't.  The jumbled up timeline only makes the plot murky and it's really not that interesting to start with.  Pretty much a waste of Simon Pegg, but I guess he got a vacation to Australia out of it. (1/5) (Netflix)

Hyde Park on Hudson:  As far as biopics go for better or worse you really need to have a point of view.  Otherwise you get something like this, which is basically saying, "Here's some stuff that happened."  It's basically the bastard offspring of Warm Springs and The King's Speech as it deals with FDR and a visit by the stuttering king of England.  And FDR sorta having an affair with his 5th or 6th cousin, which isn't that gross since he married his 1st or 2nd cousin I think.  And he was sorta having an affair with his assistant too but when they got to any sex it was so dark and there was glare on my screen so that I couldn't see anything--which is probably for the best.  The whole thing was lifeless with too much useless voiceover.  And Bill Murray as FDR?  Not buying it. Go watch the other two movies I mentioned instead. (1/5) (HBO)

Secretary:  Long before 50 Shades of Grey was even a Twilight fanfic, there was this movie.  It is pretty much the same concept.  A girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) goes to work as a secretary for a lawyer named Edward Grey (James Spader, before he got fat and bald).  When he finds out she has a thing for cutting and/or burning herself, they start doing kind of kinky things.  Surprisingly, there's not much nudity until the end.  It's like it waits until the end to bring out the big guns.  Anyway, it was OK and perhaps the secret origin of that lame other series. (2.5/5) (HBO)

Hide & Seek:  There are a couple of other movies with this title but this is the 2005 horror movie with Robert de Niro as the father of Dakota Fanning, who sees the aftermath of her mom's suicide and then goes catatonic for a while.  They move to upstate New York, where she starts doing weird things at the behest of someone named "Charlie."  But is Charlie an imaginary friend or something else?  Well I'd love to tell you how it ended but presumably with a few minutes left to go the channel I was watching it on went to commercial and never came back!  They started an episode of Friends instead; I guess they figured no one cared at 4am.  Anyway by that point the movie had gone all The Shining, though I'm not sure if there was another twist or not. It was OK, though hard to buy de Niro at that point as a little girl's father.  (2.5/5) (Amazon Instant Video)

Kill the Messenger:  This is the based on a true story movie of the San Jose reporter (Jeremy Renner) who exposed the CIA working with Central American warlords to get crack into the inner cities of America.  While at first the story makes the reporter a hero, soon the Powers That Be start besmirching his good name.  It's mildly interesting, though the most interesting fact is at the end, where it mentions that the reporter died IRL from two gunshots--it was called a suicide.  Maybe it's possible to shoot yourself twice, but I doubt it. (2/5) (HBO)

Survivor:  This one slipped through the cracks as I watched it a few weeks ago.  Anyway, there's a terrorist attack but Mila Jokanvich survives and tries to hunt down Pierce Brosnan, the guy responsible, while everyone thinks she did it.  It was pretty boring and lame, one of those that makes me sad Pierce Brosnan is having to go the Nic Cage route now.  (2/5) (Netflix)

The Skulls:  Yale has a secret society called the Skull and Bones but I guess for legal reasons they shortened it to the Skulls in this.  That guy from Fringe is a blue collar kid whose rowing prowess gets him an invite to join the Skulls.  Except his friend (the only black kid at Yale) is a nosy journalist who tries to expose the secrets of the Skulls and is killed, maybe by the late Paul Walker.  Or maybe it was the guy from Coach or the guy from CSI--the original one.  I didn't fall asleep but the next day I couldn't really remember how it ended.  Something about a duel.  (2/5) (Crackle)

The Skulls II:  By contrast I fell asleep on three different occasions while trying to watch this.  I think that's all you need to know. (0/5) (Crackle)

The Skulls III:  I keep trying to finish watching this but Crackle keeps kicking me out halfway through.  It is slightly better in that this time they have a girl trying to join the Skulls--until they frame her for murder.  I finally did watch the end and it was OK but not great. (2/5) (Crackle)

Alexander:  I know how much Tony Laplume loves this because OMG, Colin Farrell!  Anyway, the theatrical version reappeared on Netflix so I decided to watch it.  It reminds me of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy and two other books on Alexander.  I "read" them in my car last fall while traveling and they nearly put me to sleep.  The movie was not really any better.  It's a lavish production with a couple of decent battle scenes, though it mostly focuses on his fucked-up relationship with his mom (Angelina Jolie), strained relations with his dad (Val Kilmer), and the homoerotic relationship with his buddy (Jared Leto).  The latter I think is not toned down as much in the director's cut version.  The old man narrating scenes with Anthony Hopkins were pretty corny and there are way too many speeches.  And really could Colin Farrell have toned down the Irish accent a wee bit?  Alexander the Great really deserves a great movie, which this isn't. (2/5) (Netflix)

Angel of Death:  Written by Ed Brubaker, the comic book scribe behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Gotham Central (among others), this is a largely inert movie about a female assassin who is stabbed in the brain during an assignment gone wrong.  But hey, she gets better!  Sort of.  Then for reasons I didn't really understand she goes on a rampage against her handlers.  With how short this was (about 80 minutes) and the fairly low production values I wondered if it was one of those that was actually supposed to be a pilot for a TV series.  I certainly wouldn't want to watch any more of it since the main character has the charisma of a boiled turnip--and that was before she got stabbed in the brain. (1/5) (Crackle)

Hackers:  This was like someone in the 90s wanted to make a lame, soon-to-be dated movie about computers to give War Games a run for its money.  Watching it 20 years later it is so terrible on so many levels:  the totally dated computer technology, the awful clothes, Anjelina Jolie's terrible Vulcan haircut, Matthew Lillard's entire being...This was just suck incarnate.  It's really hard to make a movie about computers that doesn't suck because like writing, watching someone tap on a keyboard is pretty boring.  At least throw in cool gunfights and naked Halle Berry like Swordfish.  (1/5) (Netflix)

The Warriors:  I'd heard of this movie but finally got around to watching it.  It's pretty goofy in that it's about all these New York games, each one with some kind of stupid outfits.  Like one wears baseball uniforms and another looks like mimes and another wears roller skates and overalls.  (Seriously?  It was the 70s I guess.)  This guy who wanted to be like the MLK of New York gangs gets shot and the eponymous Warriors are accused.  (This was before he could find out that even if you have 60,000 kids with knives and baseball bats it wouldn't do much good against say the National Guard with machine guns and tanks at their disposal, which is who would be brought in if the gangs united and tried to take over the city.)  They have to try to get from Brooklyn to Coney Island.  Which they probably could have done if they'd taken off their stupid vests and gone incognito, but nah we can't do that.  As lame as I thought West Side Story was, it's less corny than this. (1/5) (Netflix)

Super Mansion:  There's a slightly interesting story behind this Crackle series.  Originally the pilot was created for Adult Swim as part of a contest where like Amazon has done they air a bunch of pilots and people vote for which ones they like and maybe that pilot gets picked up.  The pilot titled "Ubermansion" actually did win the competition but was never developed on Adult Swim for whatever reason, but now it has found a home on Crackle.  Basically the show revolves around a team of superheroes led by Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston, aka Walter White), who is basically like Superman if Superman had aged normally since 1938.  There's also American Ranger, who is pretty much Captain America only he's married to the same woman as when he was frozen so she's like 90 while he's young; he also has a lot of trouble with today's more politically correct world.  Black Saturn is like Batman, specifically Will Arnett's Batman in The LEGO Movie.  Cooch is an annoying feline who's like Rocket Raccoon without the guns.  Jewbot is a robot who discovered his Jewish roots.  And Brad is...Brad.  Since the creators of the show also did Adult Swim's Robot Chicken it uses the same stop-motion animation.  It's nice that it's pretty much the length of a normal TV show not 11 minutes like Adult Swim shows.  Gives it more time to develop stories.  New episodes are added every Thursday, which is kind of annoying; I'd rather they did like Netflix and just put them all on at once. (3/5) (Crackle)

The Great Bikini Bowling Bash:  This is one of those "adult programs" HBO shows after midnight.  As you might expect it's about slutty chicks who try to save their bowling alley by staging a bowling contest.  Except they need to raise $3 million and as you'd expect such an idea raises a paltry $5,000, so they challenge the local bowling champion (who is a professional) to a bowling off for the money to save the alley.  Seriously though no bowling alley is worth $3 million; most of the bowling alleys in my neck of the woods have closed down.  Of course it's all really just an excuse for gratuitous sex scenes.  There's the traditional girl-on-guy.  Then there are a couple of girl-on-girl.  And even a guy-on-two girls.  Sometimes I have to wonder how much of that works in real life.  Does a girl jiggling another girl's butt really do anything for either of them?  The funniest part is one of the sex scenes is to a knock-off of Santana's smooth and then later another is set to a rip-off of the Mortal Kombat theme.  Anyway, I don't suppose there's much of a point in rating this. (HBO)

Friday, October 16, 2015

Time Junkie by Nigel Mitchell

Maybe a little over a month ago Nigel Mitchell gave me the chance to read his latest book, Time Junkie.  Unlike most of his other books, this one isn't really a comedy.  There's actually some pretty serious stuff going on.

In this book there's a drug called "krono" that lets people go back in time.  The more you use the drug the farther back you go and the longer you stay there.  Seventeen-year-old Tim takes the drug at a party one night and becomes the eponymous Time Junkie.  What he really wants is to go back in time to when his mother died in a car accident and find a way to save her.  Along the way he does what probably most of us would do, which is to buy a lottery ticket, but that doesn't really work out.

Anyway, like I said there's some serious stuff going on.  A lot of the book is about the cycles of abuse and addiction, which we see through Tim's journey through time and how his life unravels in the present.

The book is about time travel and yet avoids most of the cliche aspects in time travel stories.  And there's not all the creepy stuff of The Time Traveler's Wife either like meeting his girlfriend when she's six and he's an adult.  So big props for that.

Today is the release day for the book, which was only 99 cents.  It's worth a lot more than that, so why don't you go show some support of a great indie author and buy this?  I mean come on there's no creepy gender swapping or anything like my stories, so what are you afraid of?  Do it!!!  Now!!!

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Writing Wednesday: No Magnetic Pull: The Failure of Reader Magnets

Over a month ago I talked about how I tried to employ the strategies of this Reader Magnets book I read about marketing with an email newsletter.  The author claimed it was easy but in my blog entry I relate the struggles of setting up the website, getting permafree books, and setting up the newsletter itself.  It was anything but easy.

Anyway, after over a month I can now declare it to be a failure.  I really got nothing out of it and actually it has probably cost me money in buying a domain name and not releasing a book that probably could have been earning some money instead of giving it away to people for free if they signed up for the newsletter.

I'm not saying the author is a liar because I'm sure it worked for him.  I'm just saying I couldn't duplicate that success.  The first thing is I could not get people to even sign up for the newsletter.  At most I had 23.  Then when I did send out a newsletter, less than half of those people would even OPEN it.  I'm not sure if they signed up with fake email addresses or they just deleted the newsletter or it got filtered as spam but seriously less than half ever opened it.

The sad thing is according to MailChimp's stats, this is way above normal.  The normal open rate is 25% for "artists" and the click on rate (for clicking on links in the email I guess) is a pathetic 2.5%.  Which is fine when you're emailing 20,000 people but not good with far smaller numbers.

So obviously I never got the big spike in sales the author claims happened after he sent a newsletter.  I mean at most I might have 11 sales, right?  There was really no difference in sales whatsoever.

The thing is I put the ad for the free book everywhere I could.  I put it at the front of the books, put it on the Eric Filler website, and put it on the Planet 99 Publishing Website.  In addition to the six permafree books, I started using the KDP Select to give away more recent books for 5 days at a time.  I mean I pretty much did everything I could.  I think especially with the ad in the books people just skip over it without reading or maybe Amazon even skips over it when people open the book.

It also failed to do what I really wanted, which was to create an actual fan base.  I mean I was hoping I could bring together people who could then review my books instead of just that obnoxious 1% who has to hate on them for one reason or another.  This shows just what kind of "fan base" I have, which is to say none at all.

So yeah it was basically a failure for me on every level.  I'm thinking it might be easier for authors who have mainstream books.  The guy who wrote that book writes detective thrillers that are possibly more popular than gender swap erotica books--unless I were to write one.  Because of that I'm not saying you shouldn't give it a try, but it just didn't work out for me.  I'll probably leave the permafree books free because they weren't selling anything anyway and since I paid for the domain name I might as well keep that around too for a while.  The book I was using as my carrot or hook or whatever I'll just put up for sale and maybe make a few more bucks off of it.

There you go.  Now you know.  And knowing is half the battle!

Monday, October 12, 2015

The Martian is Easily Ridley Scott's Best Film Since Gladiator.

My post last week was how in an apocalyptic crisis most of us would be useless.  You know who wouldn't be useless?  Mark Watney, aka Matt Damon's character in The Martian.  I mean, he grows freaking potatoes on Mars.  Potatoes on Mars!  This is after he survives being left for dead and performs surgery on himself in a way reminiscent of Prometheus.  At least no alien baby jumped out of him.  The surgery and potatoes are only a couple of the clever things he does to survive for pretty much a whole Earth year on Mars.  There's lots of other stuff, including pimping out his rover to fetch the old Pathfinder probe to use to contact NASA.

Most of those NASA guys would similarly be good in a crisis.  They're basically like Scotty and other engineers on Star Trek.  I'm not sure in real life if they could do all that stuff, but they did get Tom Hanks back from the moon in Apollo 13.

When I say this is Ridley Scott's best film since Gladiator, I'm not kidding, although I did really like Matchstick Men.  Post-Gladiator he's mostly just done historical epics like Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, and Exodus Gods & Kings.  He also did Prometheus as mentioned and the thing they have in common is they were all money losers.  He was really in Wachowski & Shamaylan territory where you start wondering:  How does this guy keep getting work?  Unfortunately now he'll go back to making shitty Alien prequels and historical movies.

I think what really helped Scott this time around was getting rid of a couple of his frequent collaborators.  I mean if he had cast his buddy Russell Crowe instead of Matt Damon it would have just been an interminable bore.  Crowe's a good actor but likable he really isn't.  Damon is able to make his character funny and likable, so you're rooting for him to survive.  Not using Hans Zimmer for the music probably didn't make a huge difference, but it's good to help get the director out of his comfort zone, aka rut.

The obvious comparison to make is to Gravity, which similarly was a space disaster movie.  The timeline for this is a lot longer as it is pretty much an Earth year (or slightly longer) instead of a single day.  But in both cases the survivor has to use pluck and science in order survive--along with some help from the Chinese.

At almost 2 1/2 hours it gets a little long and yet there's really more I wish could have been done, like maybe show Watney's parents and/or any friends on Earth.  Similarly we don't know that much about his comrades on the Mars mission.  It's kind of like a war movie where you only get a basic character sketch for each one.

Still, it was a lot of fun and a definite must for lovers of somewhat factual science-fiction.  Though as with Gravity, I don't see much sequel potential.  It'd be as unbelievable as Home Alone 2.

One of those funny GIFs someone posted on my Facebook feed was about how in so many movies the government has to expend huge expense and resources to find Matt Damon:  Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and now The Martian.  Plus think of all the time, resources, and expense used to apprehend him in the Bourne movies and The Departed.

Anyway, I can definitely say I got my money's worth, but that's not really fair since I used a free pass--you'd know why if you remember my Ant-Man review.  Speaking of, I told you in that review that Michael Pena could do better material--ie, this.

So there you go, four paws up from the Grumpy Bulldog.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Insecure Writer: Where's the Love?

When I started this blog in 2012 I got on a schedule of posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I've pretty much kept that up, except last fall when I was posting every day for a while.  Anyway, I'm not sure what happened, but starting in September all the sudden it's like no one read the Friday entry anymore.  I mean for 3 weeks I have a combined 1 comment.  I don't really understand that because again this blog has a set schedule and has pretty much had that for a long time.

So maybe you can help me figure out what the deal is.  It made me a pretty grumpy bulldog (more so) because there seemed no logical basis for it.  I mean do people not like brief movie reviews?  And it's not like I stopped reading the blogs of other people, not even when Tony Laplume tried to move his on me, but that's a whole other ball of WTF.

On another front recently I had a couple of "reviewers" not like books because "the story was a cliche."  To which I sneer and say, "Who do you think invented the cliche, bitch?"  OK, maybe Virginia Woolf.  Or maybe going back to the ancient Greeks, who were pretty messed up and had gods who turned people into all kinds of stuff.  But anyway, I've been writing gender swap books for 4 years, way before it was cool.  The ones in question were over a year old too, so it's likely the "not cliche" ones they read actually came after mine.  It's an extreme example, but it's like if I review a Beatles album and say it's been done a million times.

Besides that I'm like the freaking Baskin-Robbins of that stuff.  I mean my original Transformed series has 15 different flavors and even the stories in those take on different genres and concepts.  One of the ones in question features a story where a guy finds a magic ring that turns him into a female superhero with a talking rabbit sidekick.  You seriously want me to think there's like a shit ton of other stories like that out there?  Go ahead and find one.  My latest one is kind of like a Raymond Chandler mystery with a detective who has been gender swapped and is investigating the gender swapping (and later murder) of someone else.  How many other books are doing that?!

Coming Soon:  Another "cliche" story!


There was someone else who gave me a good star rating on a couple of books, but his "reviews" were all:  I would have done this, I would have done that, etc.  Well, why don't you?  And there was never a reason given for why he would do the things he would do, so I don't see how any of the changes would actually improve the stories in question.

Recently I rewatched an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" from last season where Dennis, the would-be Lothario, finds out that women are rating him badly online.  (And now there's the real-life version of that site with Peeple.)  He gets increasingly desperate to improve his ratings until it pretty much drives him insane.  That's how I feel when it comes to book reviews most of the time.  But at least I own my insecurity, right? 

Monday, October 5, 2015

When the Apocalypse Hits, Most of Us Are Useless


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A couple of weeks ago I read this old sci-fi book The Disappearance by Philip Wylie.  It has a decent high concept:  one day in February at 4:05pm all the women disappear.  Actually it's like two universes are created, one where the women disappear and one where the men disappear.  (A similar idea was used more successfully in the comic book series Y the Last Man.)

The idea then is how the men cope vs. how the women cope.  Male society goes on pretty much the same except for a brief nuclear war that destroys Chicago and San Francisco and poisons Portland.  By contrast the female society basically turns to a Third World, with little electricity, technology, food, or clean water.  A cholera epidemic basically closes down Florida.  This is after most of the cities burn down because there's no one to fight fires--this was 1951.

There's a lot of rampant sexism on display, especially when the author talks about how women basically let men spoil them.  Ha ha ha.  As if women were the ones who were responsible for their domination by males.  So basically it's their own fault that their society went to shit.

To highlight this, the first American government of women is a bunch of bimbos who spend days debating what they should wear.  Because there are no capable political women like say Eleanor Roosevelt.  [eye roll]  The main female character works for them briefly as a translator when Russian women show up threatening war, until they're swayed by the bounties of American capitalism.  But she quits that and helping to organize relief in her hometown of Miami to stay home and mend dresses.  Because that other stuff is hard and she doesn't want people to think she's a lesbian or something. [more eye rolling]

Obvious sexism aside, it got me thinking that in any crisis most people of any stripe are useless.  I mean sure I'm a man but I have an accounting degree.  If there's a terrorist attack or nuclear war or zombie apocalypse what can I really contribute?  If the economy breaks down and there's no money, who needs accountants?  Or stockbrokers, ad execs, lawyers, or pretty much anyone in business?  Basically only people who have military/first responder experience, vocational training (like welding, machining, power plant operating, mining, etc.), or farming experience would really be much use in rebuilding the world.  The rest of us, male and female, will just stumble around living off the remains.  A man with a particular set of skills like Liam Neeson in Taken could pretty much take over the world.

So when the shit hits the fan, will you have any use to the remnants of society or not?  Probably not.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Super Squad v 2.0 for Windows

One day while goofing around on the Sims 4, I decided to make "rebooted" versions of the Super Squad from my Girl Power book.  I say "rebooted" because obviously I don't have all the same things on the Sims 4 as the Sims 3.  I don't have the same superhero costumes or masks or capes, so I made do with what I had.  You can see the differences for yourself.

I didn't have a "boob panel" so I kind of did the opposite.  The Sims 3 version should have had a skirt.

I think the Sims 4 version is a lot better--except the lacy mask.

The Sims 4 one has an X-Men movie look to it.

I didn't have a black hood and again the lacy mask looks silly.
Which ones do you like the best and/or least?

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