Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

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