The Column
Motto: IRON FIIIST
I changed the layout to the Column. This is how it looks now. I guess that’s all there is to say about that.
In 18 days the Life Tracker will turn 4 years old. My earliest data are dated 04/22/2013. That doesn’t mean I’ll have 4x365+1forleapyears = 1461 day’s worth of data, unfortunately. It used to be that if I missed a single day, I had to nuke the entire week’s data. That happened something like 35 times during those 4 years, so my extensive journal only has just shy of 1200 days in it. Regardless - it’s pretty INSERTWORDHERE* that I’m still doing this after so long.
*INSERTWORDHERE - pick any of the following: cool, sad, impressive, boring.
I imagine I’ll write more about the Life Tracker after it’s 4-year-iversary, but now it’s time to talk about Marvel stuff.
Iron Fist was pretty bad. I didn’t want to write this because I just talked about MCU lows a few Columns ago, but because I’m such a fan/Marvel apologist I feel obligated to share my review…
It kinda sucked.
1. The main character is a moron. At first it’s a bit endearing & you understand it. He was basically abandoned as a kid and grew up on his own far away in a land where life is very very different… but you’d think they’d teach him basic logic, self-restraint, and discipline. It becomes clear after episode 5 or 6 that he’s not changing. He’s just going to act like a dumb kid for the entire series (spoilers: he does).
2. Much of the dialog didn’t feel like stuff people would actually say in real life.
3. The action scenes were not all that great. They would have been good maybe 5 to 10 years ago, but there’s been a resurgence of fight scenes where you can actually tell what’s happening lately (see: John Wick, or even Marvel/Netflix’s own Daredevil). This really fell short. Not saying it was all bad - it just failed to deliver a showcase of who was supposed to be one of THE best fighters in all of Marvel lore.
4. The show sets up a very interesting backstory. It sets you up to think they’ll pay it off… then it ends with two red lights. If you watch it you’ll know what I mean.
5. The trailer for the show committed TWO of my Top 5 Deadly Sins for movie trailers… it showed the best effect in the whole show & the action scene at the finale of the series, which set you up to believe the whole thing will be like that.
6. Integration with the MCU as a whole felt simultaneously forced and sparing. The references that get made & characters that show up feel like they don’t belong… while OTHER characters who seem like they would make more sense never show up to begin with. Luke Cage was bad with this, too.
7. The setup for next season came out of left field - and not in the good way. Suddenly someone does something that’s completely out of character with who they were all season, and the reason the story gave them was so weak I already forgot what it was. The ending was almost as bad as Agent Carter, season 2 - whose cliffhanger will never be resolved.
All that said, I still have high hopes for The Defenders, where Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist come together to fight Sigourney Weaver.
Reddit did a really cool thing, and in doing so restored a little of my faith in the people of the site, the people of the internet, and to some extent people in general.
On April Fool’s Day a few days back, http://www.reddit.com/r/place became a thing. /r/place started off as a blank, white, 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel canvas. Anyone whose Reddit account existed on 3/31/2017 was allowed to change the color of ONE of those 1 million pixels one time every five minutes to any of 16 possible colors. Pixels previously written could be overwritten with a new color. Trying to make anything happen 1 pixel at a time is maddening. Made worse by the fact that the pixels you made red would be turned green by some other Redditor you don’t know in some far away land.
The whole thing was an experiment. Just to see what would happen. Would it be pure chaos? Or would some order come to exist? Well, as you’ve probably already seen - it wound up being a bit of both:
That image looks like craziness… but if you start looking at the hundreds individual details, they tell hundreds of little stories. Battles between ideas. Compromises. It’s a lot easier to appreciate what this became if you had a hand in making it. I contributed about a dozen red pixels. The majority of which were overwritten by other people, trying to destroy that which the group I came from had created. So seeing the sorts of things people were able to do with this simply amazes me.
People are pretty incredible.
If you’ve got some time, you should watch a least a minute of this video:
Top 5: Deadly Trailer Sins
5. Showing the best stunt, special effect, or telling the best joke
4. Showing basically ANYTHING from the 3rd act - I like trailers that are restricted almost wholly to the movie’s 1st act
3. BWHAAAAAMMM
2. Revealing some piece of information the movie treats like a twist
1. Trailers that make you feel like you just saw the whole movie
Top 5: Worst Entries into the MCU (Updated)
5. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Season 1 episodes 1-10
4. Thor: The Dark World
3. Luke Cage
(big dropoff between 3 and 4)
2. Agent Carter - Season 2
1. Iron Fist
Quote:
“If this was not a Marvel show, you’d have turned it off a while ago.”
- Melissa, who was right -