Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I've talked to many of my friends about my complicated relationship with the work of Warren Ellis. His work is primarily what got me into comics as an adult, and I think a lot of it is still brilliant, and people should read it. Also, a little more than a year ago, a number of women came forward to recount their stories of sexual coercion and... misrepresentation? I don't want to make light of it, and my point is not to go in depth on what he did. Let's just say that he used his influence in the comics industry to solicit MANY women into sexual relationships, so much so that they created a website  somanyofus.com  which now has over a hundred people that have logged their histories with him, often times backing up their stories with emails and chat histories. Warren Ellis is a skeezy womanizer, and probably a pretty bad person. So how to view his works, and more specifically their influence on me? Some of my favorite go-tos for people that wanted something short and amazing...

 I've been watching the new Disney Plus shows as they come out, and in the latest episode of Falcon and Winter Soldier, a character is shown, but doesn't even have a name, except in the credits, and was a relation to another character that I didn't even know about, but the implications are that they've revealed another Young Avengers team member. The speed with which they're hinting at and seeding subtle hints into various movies/shows for that roster is interesting, because it makes me think that Marve/Disney is feeling the time crunch of having their actors get too old, or too famous/expensive to keep using as the "Avengers". So who are the Young Avengers? They're a team of teenage superheroes that tend to have some sort of tie to various older superheroes. They were never really an "official" Avengers team, that I know of. As in they didn't ever really have the endorsement of the adult Avengers to run around using their name. There are...

 There was a period of my life where I sank hundreds of hours into the fremium game, Warframe. In it, you pilot any of a number of high tech, armored suits, each with their own unique powers, and with a mix of guns and melee weapons, you hack and shoot your way across the solar system. Warframe does a lot of things very right, it has a very unique and consistent style, such that my friend and I took to calling it "wetsuit space ninjas". Each of the suits of armor, called Warframes have this really rubbery look to them, kind of like dolphin skin, and since none of them show any sign of an interior person, they all kind of half a marine mammal feel to them. Despite putting more than a hundred hours into it, I never really got very far in Warframe, because while it's possible to complete everything solo, it's really meant to be played with groups of 4 players, and I'm just too damned asocial to play with random people on the internet. So I was very interested when Go...

 I don't think there's anyone out there reading this blog that doesn't know me personally, but if there is, here's the context: I lost one of my cats recently. Not just ONE of my three cats, but THE cat. I had him for eight or so years, and he was as much a part of me as anything.  Obviously, I'm sad, I'm depressed, I don't want to do things with my friends, and it takes a lot more effort to get out of bed and go to work in the morning. This is all expected, and natural. Some part of me still insists that I'm somehow weak because it's still so heavily affecting me, and it's almost been a whole week! Of course, this is the irrational asshole in my consciousness, if I could get them to shut up instantly with pure logic, I'd be a much different person. So I have to work through, and argue that bastard back. I'm so used to that process, that it doesn't seem weird anymore, here's the thing that I found weird. I'm gonna say... fifte...

 Technically there's a new X-Men movie in theaters, it's also likely the last one that we'll see not under the banner of Disney's MCU. Initial reviews indicate that it's not very good, and it's had a troubled production history. It also features one of my favorite, possibly hands down favorite, X-characters, who is almost as iconic a member of the New Mutants as you can get. I'm talking about Illyana Rasputin, AKA Magik. Now, before we get into Illyana and what makes her so great, I would like to draw your attention to a more prolific X-Man: This is of course, Piotr Rasputin, Colossus, and Magik's big brother. He's 6'6", 250 pounds of olympic class strongman. Whenever he wants to, he can turn himself into metal, and then he's 7'5", 500 lbs, and one of the physically strongest people on Earth. He's fought and held his own against the Hulk and the Juggernaut (He's also been beaten by them, but so has basically everyone). N...

It's absolutely no secret that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is predominantly white, male, and almost exclusively hetero. I'm not going to do too much of a deep dive into that, because as a hetero white male, I often feel like I lack the context, or voice, to really talk about it, other than to say: "Yes, of course there should be more diversity." It's hardly surprising that the MCU is in such a state, because it reflects the diversity of the Marvel comic universe and the people who make it. The comics are gradually showing a more diverse picture of life, perhaps too gradually, but we still haven't seen any of that hit the big screen. Superhero couples are kind of a weird thing. In the shared universes of the two biggest comics publishers, the editorial staff seems allergic to two things: change, and stability. As such, a superhero that is not created as a character in a relationship, is generally destined to not have much success forming new ones. Superheroes...