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Late Night Rant: The Greatest Justice League Unlimited Episode

by Kaitlyn on February 28, 2013

Grudge Match: The finest the JLU ever had to offer to me at 4 in the morning to inspire a tumblr rant reposted here.

here’s why:

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The episodes starts out with some hair pulling between Huntress and Black Canary in Bludhaven(there’s a small cameo appearance from Nightwing if you pay attention). The pair are pretty evenly matched in their lack in the strength department and the altercation kinda fizzles out. The mediocrity of the duo is important for later on in the episode.

Huntress and Black Canary are eventually captured by Roulette (not important) and forced to fight as a team against a brainwashed and set-to-kill Hawkgirl and Vixen. You’re made to feel all impressed that H & BC could take down the more meta meta-humans, and to be honest, they deserve it. It was dope.

With the brainwashing devices destroyed, you, as the viewer, sit back and prepare for what should be the wrap up of what has been a decent episode of JLU. Ladies kick some bad guy ass, Huntress and Black Canary hug it out, everybody feels good….

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But then you see Wonder Woman slowly rise up from the ground.

Now, I’ve never been truly impressed with Diana as a character or concept (before the New 52 anyway) but trust me, your mouth just drops. You reflect for a moment on the previous fight and realize that what you were actually watching was a bunch of girls braiding hair and hitting eachother in the ass with pillows. Not unentertaining, but holy fuck, Wonder Woman is going to rock each and everyone of their shits.

The best part is that the other chicks are totally on the same page. They slowly back away before Huntress and Black Canary just peace in a cloud of smoke. They want legit no parts of this shit show, which leaves Hawkgirl and Vixen to get their spines kicked right out of their bodies for a few minutes.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Obviously Black Canary and Huntress run off to do some heroics more at their speed and destroy the mind controlling device the instant before Wonder Woman would have smashed Hawkgirl’s and Vixen’s heads together.

Not that I needed to see her do that, but it should be noted that both heads would have been powder. Better than powder actually. They would have been liquified into grape jelly. That’s right. I’m saying Wonder Woman would have hit them so fucking hard for just an instant their molecular structure would have turned into that of a grape, just so that a moment later they could be grape jelly.

The best best part is, once Wonder Woman comes out of her daze she glares at the heads of Hawkgirl and Vixen and tells them they better explain what happened. She’s holding her bruised and bloodied best friends by the scruff of their necks, but those bitches better explain themselves. 

Perfection.

Kaitlyn D

@deadrabbit92

Staff-writer

Sometimes I feel like my brain isn’t as active when I am playing a video game. I could be grinding for the hundredth time in Persona 3, or shooting at a lot of things and watching them turn to red pieces of guts and blood (or sunshine and bunnies if I turned on the gore filter). There are games that allow for zoning out, but then there are games like Portal that challenge me to think and problem solve. Puzzle games have often been overshadowed by much more “fun” games. It’s hard to show people how going from one room to the next solving puzzles is just as fun as shooting at your friends or going treasure hunting in the jungle. Antichamber is a game where you discover the “fun” of playing a puzzle game is finding out how to get to the next room.

From the beginning, Antichamber is set up as a simple game, with settings and controls laid out on a wall in front of you. Everything about the art style screams simplicity: almost everything is in either black or white, or uses basic, bright colors as a way to set the tone, and there isn’t any music playing in the background. Sound effects pepper the levels, from a rainstorm pounding away overhead, to the sounds of a summer night, with crickets chirping and grass swaying in the wind. Each level gives off a certain vibe, and those feelings can change based on how you interact with the level. One of the puzzles involves falling down a very large shaft, and before you fall you can hear the rain and thunder as you interact with the level. Once you jump down, the thunder and rain get louder, the volume increases and the rain intensifies until it peaks, with a giant crack of lighting and the sound of thunder roaring as you hit the floor. I was astounded at how simply moving around in this labyrinth of rooms can enthrall me as much as Antichamber did. It is so amazing to play a simplistic puzzle game that can put me on the edge of my seat while trying to just move from one room to the next. What makes this game even more astounding is that it can do all of this without a narrative.

Every game has to have a narrative of some kind. Many games focus on the narrative, as it is the main vessel for conveying themes and emotions to the player. Antichamber takes all of that and says “Who needs a narrative?” Aside from small pictures and abstract sentences that really only give the vaguest of clues, there isn’t a narrative in Antichamber. There is a nice flow of the pictures that you find as they show off a kind of slideshow as you find more of them, but for the most part, the game does away with any kind of story or plot and instead just puts you in front of a puzzle and says “Here you go, problem solve.” I think it is the best idea in the entire game. Without having to worry about the framework of a narrative, or trying to find a way to fit the puzzles to a certain theme within a story, Antichamber is refined into its best possible form. And it conveys that overall sense of simplicity so well I was constantly thinking and re-thinking about Antichamber even after I finished the game. It gave me a slight lab-rat vibe as there wasn’t any context to why I was solving the puzzles, but after the first few chambers, I realized that I didn’t care about the context because the puzzles themselves were so much fun. Antichamber takes simple controls and complex puzzles and makes a masterpiece of a puzzle game, while challenging you to re-think much of what you assume about games overall.

From the first chamber, I was thrown off about how I thought this game might progress. In it, I spawned on one side of a very large chasm with what looked like a next room on the other side. Floating above in large block letters was the word jump. So I obviously jumped, assuming that something would happen to allow me to cross what looked like an impassable distance. I fell down and surprisingly didn’t die. I was led to the next level at the bottom of the chasm with a small picture and a simple statement “Failing to succeed does not mean failing to progress.” I was stunned and excited, realizing that this was not going to be as simple or as straightforward as I first assumed. Antichamber constantly tricks you into changing the rules in your head that have been built up by years of similar concepts that span hundreds of games. It is a fantastic experience trying to expect anything and still not realizing how to progress, until something clicks in your mind and you realize how simple it is after the fact. Antichamber is very unique in that the simple concepts introduced in the beginning are the same concepts that are used throughout the entire game, and all of the difficulty, variety, and fun come from changes or modifications on those simple concepts.

The first chunk of chambers involves simply moving through various puzzles discovering some of the basic concepts of the game. Then, once you receive your “gun”, things evolve and grow more complex. While the contraption acquired is best described as a gun, it’s mostly just something that you use to pick up and place the colored blocks that start appearing in later levels. Once you start interacting with the blocks, you unlock further levels and discover different rooms and how they are all connected. Some rooms are stand-alone, where you are given a set number of blocks, or are limited in where you can go, and other rooms are connected together, where bringing materials with you grants access to rooms otherwise locked or inaccessible. As the game progresses new functions are added by acquiring a new “gun” sporting a new color, and different mechanics are introduced. Things like false walls and floors or backtracking to find a different room than before are all smaller parts of a bigger experience. And despite each of these aspects that add layers of difficulty, and sometimes confusion, the same basic principles and ideas that made you question everything in the beginning of the game are never changed or grow too complex.

Puzzle games aren’t something people actively look for when browsing for a new game to play. I’m sure everyone has heard of Portal or plays a few puzzle games on their phone, but it’s not like there is a new Puzzle game released by Activision every year like Call of Duty. I’m quite thankful of this fact, for it is Antichamber’s uniqueness that adds to the long list of reasons why anyone and everyone should pick this game up. If you have a PC and can run Steam on it, buy this game. It is that good. I recommend this game wholeheartedly and without reservation, because it has been one of the most fun, challenging, maddening, and interesting games I have played in recent times.

In honor of the Oscars this Sunday, I decided this week to dig up a sunny vintage film to chase away the blues on this wet dreary day. The choice? 1958’s Cary Grant and Sophia Loren’s romantic comedy-drama vehicle Houseboat which was Oscar®-nominated for Best Original Story and Screenplay!

Filmed in color, the film begins with a largely estranged father Tom Winters (Cary Grant) coming from Europe where he conducts business to collect his three children from their Aunt Carolyn’s plush manor on the Chesapeake after the death of his wife, her sister, in an automobile accident. He had been separated from his wife for some time, and had largely been absent from his child’s lives for some three to four years. Since their mother’s death the children have each been exhibiting particular behaviors; David the eldest (played by Paul Petersen who has an uncanny resemblance to Cary Grant) has developed kleptomaniac inclinations, the middle child Elizabeth can’t sleep at night, and the youngest, seven year old Robert has become incredibly sullen, stubborn and developed a liking to playing the harmonica. His proclamation of “I hate everybody. I hate everybody in the whole wide world” in the opening scene while twirling around is both incredibly funny, but also rather heartbreaking.

It is Robert who is truly the most important of all the children; the catalyst in that he runs away from their father after he takes them to Washington DC, and in an attempt to amuse them, takes them to a symphony concert. Robert hides on a row-boat following the concert where Loren’s Cinzia, , the spoiled daughter of that night’s featured conductor subsequently steals to get away from her overbearing and overprotective father. Robert comes out of hiding. While sullen, Robert still hasn’t lost his boyishness and the two shortly become friends and Cinzia eventually returns Robert to his father. Robert wants her to stay as their maid. Tom asks her to be his children’s maid or governess and she rejects the offer, only to return the next morning to accept.

Super endearing. She steals his pizza.

Super endearing. She steals his pizza.

The titular houseboat doesn’t appear until forty minutes into the movie; the family is meant to move into their Aunt Carolyn’s former guest house which was supposed to be moved to a new lot, but it subsequently gets crushed by a train. The inept mover responsible for its destruction, Angelo, offers them the use of the houseboat and that’s where the comedy antics and true love story start to form. The fact the titular plot-device arrives so late in the film is an intriguing decision but one really doesn’t notice its late arrival since the movie is so breezy the pacing doesn’t particularly feel like its been that long.

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Yeah stop your tractor right on the train tracks. Nice move Angelo.

The movie is charming watching both the severely tanned Loren and  Cary Grant (rather aged and wrinkled) banter and spat with great chemistry and Loren’s natural magnetism. There is no wonder Cary Grant was head over heels in love with her in real life. Compared to modern family and romantic comedy films the film is restrained never quite reaching exaggerated levels of slapstick and bawdiness that one may be used to, but the resulting tone is consistent and butter smooth. While mainly full of fluffy wish fulfillment and what could be seen as upper middle class  1%er “white people problems”  the film does have a very realistic side concerning family, trauma and how a parents actions affect children and the mending of that bond. Even the richer Aunt Carolyn is unlucky in love, estranged from her own absent husband whom she does proceed to divorce and her stifled and ultimately unrequited affections for her brother-in-law Tom. The children; David, Elizabeth and Robert are all rather well cast; they look like they could be Cary Grant’s children and while mouthy in that 1950’s child actor way, they don’t appear too artificial unlike other films of the period and are more realistically caustic and have moments of pretty sharp clarity and an honest manner.

Loren is beautiful and charismatic as Cinzia and is amazing with the children. Her relationship with Robert, whom she calls affectionately Roberto is perhaps the true “romance” of the movie, if you can call it that. One forgets Loren was so young in the movie; she and her character where both twenty-two years old. For the modern viewer Cinzia’s dress and composure may seem much older than that, mainly due to societal shifts; girls today are allowed to act much younger and dress much younger and more casual than they were in the 1950’s. By the time you were twenty-two you were certainly firmly an adult.

She's twenty-two. Classy. Classy.

She’s twenty-two. Classy. Classy. But domestically inept.

Regardless if you enjoy refined comedy and romantic comedies or prefer a more kid-friendly family film,  you will surely enjoy this film as it can fit the bill for either demographic; it is warm, summery, quirky and charming especially for those who live on the East Coast and know what summers on the Chesapeake and on the Atlantic bays and coasts are like. For those who live land locked; this is a great escapist romp through the Maryland and Virginia maritime. It is perfect for a hot summer evening or like tonight, a cold and dreary one, as it can be either refreshing or utterly warming. Highly recommended! è bello!

Max Eber
Staff Writer/The Doctor
max@ihogeek.com
Twitter: @maxlikescomics

For those of you unaware, Michael Bay has cast the role of April O’Neil in his upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, where the namesake characters will not actually be teenagers or mutants as far as we can tell.  But, one hoped, he would accurately and responsibly cast the role of O’Neil, a formative heroine for many young women of my generation.

Instead, he cast Megan Fox.

Allow me to respond in the most rational and calm manner possible:

MICHAEL-BAY_510x317

FUCK YOU MICHAEL BAY!  FUCK YOU SO HARD MICHAEL BAY!  YOU DOUCHEBAG LOOKING FUCKER!  FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!

Megan_Fox_Wallpaper_HD

FUCK YOU, MEGAN FOX!  FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU!  DIDN’T YOU CALL THIS GUY “HITLER” ONCE AND NOW YOU’RE MAKING ANOTHER FUCKING MOVIE TOGETHER?  FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU, MEGAN FOX!

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ONCE AGAIN: FUCK YOU MICHAEL BAY.  HERE, LET ME PUT MY FEELINGS ABOUT THIS INTO A FORM YOU WILL FUCKING UNDERSTAND, MICHAEL BAY:

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FUCK YOU, FUCK YOUR EXPLOSIONS, FUCK MEGAN FOX, FUCK YOUR “ALIEN” NINJA TURTLES, FUCK EVERY FUCKING PIECE OF MEDIA YOU FUCKING GET NEAR, FUCK YOU MICHAEL FUCKING BAY.

–Ashly is an IHO Geek writer and FUCK YOU MICHAEL BAY FUCKING FUCK FUCK MICHAEL BAY on Twitter at @newageamazon

 

We’ve had a great couple years at the movies, so why not give some props to the evil-doers that gave us the best thrills and chills while we wait on Thanos? No reason why not. So here we go:

10) Marissa Wiegler–Hanna (2011)

In this great movie no one saw, Cate Blanchett kills it while trying to kill a young 15 year-old  mountain girl. To be unfair to Wiegler, Hanna was experimented on as a child and torn away from her mother in order to become a super soldier. Who wouldn’t want to put a bullet in the annoyingly sympathetic girl? Wiegler is an interesting villain. We don’t get to know much about her, yet we know we hate her. Joe Write as a director does a great job ing making the environment so heady and over-stimulating so that the characters don’t have to be that over the top or fleshed out. Instead of rendering Wiegler boring and under-used, our senses overload with the chaos in the set ups of the scenes and which frames one crazed and great villainess.

9) Andrew Detmer –Chronicle (2012)

Some high school outcasts happen upon super powers and come out (web)swinging…and some unfortunately (and perhaps more understandably), don’t. An entitled thirst for revenge paired with ultimate power corrupt almost absolutely, especially in lost souls who, after years of cruelty and less-than-stable home-lives, ain’t that mentally sound to begin with. Whether you thought Andrew’s villainous fall was yawningly predictable or artfully done, you still have to give props to his car-crushing monologue that managed to almost pulse with pain, insanity, and horror. Chronicle proved that you don’t need a $200 million budget to create movie bad-guy-magic.

Evil Most Foul: Yeah, that car crushing thing paired with the rant about apex predators.

8) Raoul Silva-Skyfall (2012)

Frighteningly blonde and deliciously evil, Javier Bardem gave a magnificent performance as an ex-secret agent with some  M-issues. Basically, Silva was fucking nuts and had it in for Bond’s nuts in more ways than one in what is probably the best Bond film of Craig’s run. Silva, however, is the best Bond villain in a long, long time. The dude has it all: genius plots and plans, creepy accent, unsettling disfigurement, and ultimately some deserved sympathy from the audience due to his poor choice in surrogate mother-figures. It’s totally fun to suspend any and all sense of reality with Silva for two hours right up to the beautiful, bloody end.

Evil Most Foul: Killing Severine

7) Dr. Josef Heiter– The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2010)

Half Doctor Frankenstein…half fetish video director, Heiter was the highlight of the gross-out film, unless you’re really in to watching people forcefully ingest shit. I loved his tasteful (it’s hard to use that word in a sentence talking about this movie) homage to the fantastic mad scientists of the cinematic past. Heiter truly is the modern, yet somehow believable crazed science-guy of this decade. While the film flies the banner of “100% medically accurate,” Doctor Heiter almost passes as a believable fiend you could meet on the side of the road in Germany. Let’s never go to Germany.

Evil Most Foul: Gee, I don’t know….maybe that bit about sewing three people ass-to-mouth.

6)Ravenna- Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

Ravenna’s oozing wickedness turned what would have been a very mediocre film into something damn near watchable. Sure a lot of her props were props (director Rupert Sanders did some banging work with special effects), but underneath was a performance filled with desperation, jealousy, and cold-blooded hate. Ok, scratch that last one. While some villains are perfectly evil, the best are dynamic with depth and a sad tale of their own. We glimpse Ravenna’s less-than-happy beginnings with enough time to exchange some feels before losing ourselves again in her beautifully rendered magics and bulging scary eyeballs. Hey look, Ma, made it through this whole thing without a Kristen Stewart joke.

Evil Most Foul: Killing the young rebel while leaving his father to tell the tale.

5)Calvin J. Candi- Django Unchained (2012)

There was a whole lot of movie evil in 2012, but this mother fucker might have all the other baddies beat. He was the dragon that kept  fiery-watch over the imprisoned princess at the top of the tower, so you know we had to hate him. He was also incestuous, obnoxious, and oh yeah… he owned a bunch of slaves and delighted in making them fight to the death. Candi had a seemingly endless need to watch our heroes, Django and Dr. Shultz, squirm in his bloody fist. Mistaaaaake. Candi wouldn’t be half the villain he was if he hadn’t been so perfectly played by DiCaprio. Never have I wanted to see a bastard get his so bad, though it may have been the accent.

Evil Most Foul: Probably the crazy rant about eugenics over what may have otherwise been a pleasant dessert.

4) Loki- Thor (2011), Avengers(2012)

He may be the most beloved villain of all time which means sometimes I think he’s more cuddly than diabolical. Still, despite Hiddle’s dreamy eyes, nose, ears, and everything, he did try to dominate the human race under his opera-glasses of will. Powered with more one-liners than actual powers in The Avengers, Loki’s jaw dropping exchange with Black Widow reminded me just how damn evil he really is and almost made me forget the Hiddleston within. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again, the greatest villains are as complex as they are heinous, and Loki’s got feels out the yang. With a frost giant for a dad and a family chip on his shoulder heavier than Mjolnir, he was destined to be bad and we are oh so glad he was.

Evil Most Foul: Most definitely belting that red shirt with his staff before removing the good gentleman’s eyeball. Was he  or was he not rocking the most fiendish scarf this side of the rainbow bridge?

3) The Joker– The Dark Knight (2008)

Ok, so maybe the clown prince of crime has gotten bumped down on the list from the top spot because of a certain recent DC storyline that I ended up not being so pleased with. Joker’s been done a thousand ways and been around for a bajillion years, but there was something more than special about Ledger’s take on the character. He wasn’t more insane or more funny, or more cruel than every Joker before him, yet there was something down right nasty in Nolan’s big bad. He fit so perfectly in this universe as the realistic foil to Batman’s preparation and vigilance  He has no plan, no great sceme. He doesn’t want to takeover and rule Gotham, and ultimately his point is pointless, yet he still exits the stage laughing.

Evil Most Foul: Blowing Rachel Dawes to little bits.

2) Lord Voldemort- Harry Potter Franchise 

Many of the Harry Potter movies have their positives and their sucks, but one thing that deserves recognition is the awesome portrayal of the Dark Lord throughout all the films that he deigned to show up in. Flat-faced and murderous, Voldemort cared for no one but himself and in the quest for all power, was ultimately felled by his own fear of death and weakness. Many things make Voldemort the near perfect villain: Creepy face, evil magical powers, chilling laugh, diabolical name, but it is in his defeat that we see why he’s managed to out-bad all the rest: his downfall was designed to teach us all a lesson of love, hope, and friendship. He wasn’t defeated by a bomb or a knock-out battle really. In the end it was only the anthesis of evil that could end his terror, so logically he must be the very locus of evil.

Evil Most Foul: Hugging it out with Malfoy.

1) Hans Landa- Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Magical baddies are cute, but villains made up from the not so distant past that are so freaking evil that an entire theater bursts in to uncontrollable applause when the heroes take them out? Such is the power of Nazis, man. There is nothing that will deliver assuredly in the villain department as a Nazi on the warpath for the mass elimination of an entire race. However, instead of the crazed Jew-hunting maniac that we’re used to, Landa is subtle and therefor much more disgusting. His temper is almost non-existence and unlike all of the other entries on this list, I really don’t think insane can be applied to his particular kind of evil. This is a man who hunts down humans for a living. He’s good at it, he enjoys it, and by the time we meet him, he has wrapped his own legend around himself like a theater cape. It’s not enough to perform his job successfully or even mercilessly. There must be pageantry; there must be a show in which he is the star, puppet-master, and soul audience member. Landa wins this little non-competition based on an imagined poll that I didn’t take, but we should all know to be true: Watching that swastika carved in to his face was the most satisfying comeuppance to any villain ever.

Evil Most Foul: Of Milk and Au Revoir Soshanna!

Kaitlyn D

@deadrabbit92

Staff-writer

With news of the PS4 comes the inevitable flood of tech demos, processing power specs, controller pictures, and everyone’s opinion on whether it will suck or not.  But what I cared about most was the new gameplay footage of Destiny and Watch Dogs.  Even though they will be multi-platform, Sony’s press conference gave me all I needed.

First off is Destiny, the new game franchise being launched by Bungie.  If you don’t know what games Bungie made you probably live under a rock that lives in the shadow of a larger rock.  Having passed off the torch of their previous franchise to 343 Industries, Bungie is now undertaking what I have dreamt of for years.  A MMO with the graphical and precision content of a triple A console game.   Plus, It’s in the form of a first-person shooter.  Dudes…. I am going to own at this game.

Please enter the url to a YouTube video.

Promising multiple classes (including a “sorcerer”), quests that can be played with friends (in fact you can ONLY play the game when online), and no monthly subscription fees I am sold.  I would kill you to play this game.

And then there is Watch Dogs, a new franchise being started by Ubisoft.  Think Assassins Creed meets The Matrix with a sprinkle of Grand Theft Auto.  Yeah.

It’s easier for you to just watch this game in action rather than me explain the fine details.  And once again… I would kill you to play this game.

Please enter the url to a YouTube video.

Did anything from Sony’s press conference (and announcement of PS4) peak your interest?

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Archive for February, 2013

        
 
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It’s Shameless Self-Promotion Day, or How to Present at an Academic Conference

February 12, 2013
I've been promoting my Kickstarter all Month; now here's a little insight into what Max and I will be DOING at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and how you, too, can enter the glamorous world of esoteric academia!
by Sub-Cultured
 
Protected: Master Debaters – Episode 10 – Which Spider-Man Reigns Supreme?
March 26, 2020
by Sub-Cultured
READ STORY