Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I'm only four episodes into the Punisher series, but I have some strong thoughts already. It's my least well liked of the Marvel Netflix series, which is honestly surprising, because I hated Iron Fist. I don't think it's a worse show than Iron Fist, but I enjoy it less. The Punisher has always had a unique status in the Marvel universe. He's a glorified serial killer, among all of the many vigilantes in comics, he's the only one I can think of that employs lethal force consistently, and yet is still treated as a hero. The man who got me back into comics as an adult was a big time Punisher fan, and even he agreed, he doesn't really fit as the hero of a story. In the comic universe, why haven't Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, any of the big time heroes put a stop to him? There's some kind of weird implicit acceptance that it's okay for him to kill people as long as their "bad people". My friend had always talked about how a good

I finally fired up the third Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning Returns. The more I think about it, mechanically and thematically, the FFXIII trilogy is really weird.  In the first game, you play a bunch of guys (Lightning among them, but despite being the first character and on the cover of the box, she's not really the main character) that have been charged by ineffable AI machine gods to do some vague task. It ends up being that they're trying to use you to break out of their programming that forces them to maintain humanity. If they don't complete their task, they become zombies, if they do complete their task, they turn to crystal until the machines decide to let them go. In the second game, Lightning was turned to crystal, but she somehow gets recruited to protect time, and is off fighting this huge war, and so she recruits some more people to jump around to different times and places trying to correct things that have been thrown off because of her big war. Not re

So, I finally watched the most recent Transformers movie. If you want to know my opinions on the movie franchise, and this movie in particular, it can be summarized thusly: The first Transformers movie was a fun, stupid action movie, but pretty good, each sequel I have progressively lowered my expectations, and been disappointed every time. I could write two separate posts on the movie series. One detailing what's stupid about them, and the other talking about how it's just not for fans of any of the toys or fiction. This is not either of those, this is a post about Megatron's arm cannon. Before we get into the movies, Megatron has transformed into a lot of things throughout the years, and had a lot of looks. The one thing that's been almost completely constant is that he always has a big ass gun on his arm, or occasionally his shoulder, and even more constant than where the gun is placed, is how the gun fires. In a way, it's been more consistent than any other

I've never been the biggest fan of Star Wars. I certainly like most of the movies, and the idea of the universe, I've just never considered myself a super fan. I've been playing the table top RPG Edge of the Empire, as well as reading the latest comics, so I've found myself thinking about the universe a lot lately. Things are weird in the universe, especially in the original trilogy, technology is pretty contemporary to what they had in the 70s. There are exceptions, of course, like significantly cheaper and more reliable robotics along with advanced AI to drive them, cheap and easy space travel including FTL, blasters and light sabers. At the same time, many things are incredibly low tech by our standards. They just don't seem to have an concept of computer networking, let alone wireless networking. Anytime a droid wants to access data from another system, it has to make a physical connection. A friend of mine likes to point out that it's ridiculous that the

I've been re-reading the Exiles comic book series, it's a fun romp through alternate versions of the Marvel universe. It even stars, for the most part, versions of iconic characters with a twist. We've got a version of Mimic that became a good guy, and eventually lead the X-Men and joined the Avengers. Thunderbird that not only didn't die alongside the first X-Men team, but was turned into Apocalypse's horseman of war. Heather Hudson became Alpha Flight's Sasquatch through a gamma ray experiment. It's all great fun, they hop around between alternate realities trying to fix things that got messed up. Psylocke (from the core universe) shows up in the very last couple of plot arcs, and she reads like total fan fiction. She's invisible to the the sensors of the interdimensional hub that lets the Exiles be Exiles, she's unique among every other Elizabeth Braddock in the multiverse. She's a scary ninja lady that enjoys going up against the likes of S

This is a strange thought that I've been mulling over for a while. Before I get into it, I want to recount a conversation I had with a friend that let me realize how differently fans can perceive properties. So, the conversation had to deal with the decision to have Sulu be gay in the new Star Trek movies. George Takei had stated that he was opposed to the idea, on the grounds that it was a disservice to the character, because it would mean that Sulu had been closeted. A friend of mine had suggested that Takei was opposed to the idea because he was still in the mindset of the times (apologies if I didn't summarize their argument perfectly, we were both drinking on a river). My theory was that if you think of Star Trek as an existing universe, the movies take place in the same universe, albeit after being diverted from the original timeline just before the birth of Captain Kirk. If you buy into that, then you're saying that Sulu's sexuality was changed by the differen