You want that instant gratification of a knife attack

I done did see Avengers Endgame and Captain Marvel, in that order, and ah geez I sure wish the first big Marvel female superhero flick was a lot better than it was, but I didn't really like the character and the story was a weird mish-mash of tropes from 1980s cinema, only set in the 1990s and with a dreadful soundtrack.  The action scenes are also really flat, too, and some of the superpowered stuff later in the movie just seems nonsensical or perfunctory, like the aliens that fire enough missiles at a planet to raze its surface, but they fire them at the one spot rather than all over the planet at different places.
Avengers Endgame was much better, but I can't really tell you why as it's a movie about time travel and featuring evil doubles and zero new ideas.  I've got this sense that I should be feeling shortchanged by it, but it's the capstone on a decade-long run of good-to-great movies that have seen the superhero genre revitalised into a cultural juggernaut, so you know, I had a generous disposition towards it going in and it failed to annoy me even though I'm pretty sure its "nothing matters" approach to time travel is the height of laziness, not least because after establishing at length that nothing matters, it introduces a character who says actually what you're going to do does matter, and both versions of time travel rules are treated as equally valid.  Eeeeeeeghhhhhh
It delivers on the Big Ass Fights front, and at least one character who I have found utterly, bafflingly popular over the years the franchise has been running its course bought the farm in an underwhelming way, and for that I was quite grateful.  Although this is the second movie in a row where a lady gets chucked off a cliff and the movie compensates with a really contrived lady fight sequence in the CGI finale, which reminded me of those terrible tv shows and movies from the 1990s which thought they were breaking new ground with a lady protagonist doing kung fu on men and they'd introduce the character in a really obnoxious way with like a guitar riff or something while she jumps in from off-screen saying a painfully bad line containing the word "boys"*, even though female action stars were not only a staple of low-budget US action movies for years, but they were even regular draws in conservative territories like mainland China to the point they started importing them.  You do this kind of thing nowadays and apparently it's not cheap and tacky, it's a bold assertion of your creative vision, so basically the "overwrought female badass intro sequence" is the equivalent of having a synth score.
Oh fiddlesticks I'm rambling again - well anyway I did like Endgame but I suspect it was more to do with over a decade's worth of goodwill in the bank more than it was a perfectly acceptable entertainment product.

* which was - oddly enough - how they introduced Spider-Gwen in Into The Spider-Verse, a single duff note in an otherwise great flick.

A lady doesn't use her fists - that's what cars are for

My quest to consume as little media from this century as possible continues with the collected Black Hawk: The Intergalactic Gladiator, a mixed bag of strips collecting all the appearances of the titular character from the Tornado and 2000ad anthologies and their respective annuals and specials.
The first third - reprinting the strips from Tornado - is the most consistent stretch of material, sticking as it does to the military career of the main character as a Nubian inductee to the ranks of the Roman Empire's military during its Western expansion into the British Isles, and it's fine if you like that kind of breathless historical romp, with some great art by the late Alfonso Azpiri.  Just as it gets into its stride, however, the comic in which it appears collapses and is folded into its distant cousin, 2000ad, where the strip drastically changes direction and becomes a story about a star-hopping gladiatorial arena in which all shapes and sizes of alien - drawn by the late great Massimo Belardinelli -  are pitted against each other in battles to the death.  After that, it retools again, only this time gets really weird, with the main character turning into a zombie Conan on a planet inside a black hole which is ruled by Satan.
I know this isn't well thought-of by 2000ad's "real fans", but this was my first go-round and I liked it a lot and even thought the final stretch where it goes completely off the rails was in keeping with the sensibilities of some of the pulp sci-fi I've read from the 1960s-1970s (though I grant you I have not read a lot), particularly the works of Roger Zelazny and Lester Del Ray that I've come across.
Like most Rebellion reprints of 2000ad material at the Judge Dredd Casefiles size/format, the repro loses some of the finer detail on the art and about 1/5th of each page is blank space.  It'd be nice to see this reproduced at something approximating the original size rather than this squashed-down version, such as has been done with Bella At The Bar,  a collection of the first year or so of episodes of the long-running drama series from the UK's Tammy, a comic aimed at 8 year old girls but apparantly written by communists and illustrated in a photorealistic style rather than looking like a cartoon as almost all comics for children now are.  Ha ha yeah just ignore any work in progress screenshots you might come across in this post.
I didn't think I'd like this tosh at all seeing as it doesn't have robots or lasers in it, but you can't stop reading once you get into it: Bella is a budding gymnast in 1970s Britain, so naturally there are few outlets for her talents and she is treated like dirt by her scumbag guardians who look like Biffa Bacon's parents drawn in a more realistic style than usual, and who hand out wallopings just as much as Biffa's mum and dad do.  First they work her like a dog at their window cleaning business, then try to monetise her gymnastic ability by selling her to a burlesque show - YES REALLY - which utterly disgusts her gymnastics coach who blames here for her own predicament and cuts her loose and trust me, by this stage it hasn't even gotten remotely as bad for the main character as it's going to get, because SPOILERS I poop you not, the book's idea of a happy ending is when Bella is literally head-butted into a wheelchair by her evil Soviet gymnastic nemesis and is then wheeled off in the final panel.  Life conspires to kick Bella in the nuts at every opportunity in the best traditions of British children's comics, and it's compelling stuff.
The book's - rather militant and clearly angry - writer Jenny McDade later went on to film and television work, which makes me happy, as the usual career path for female creators in the UK comics industry was either through DC Thompson where they ended up in humor titles which didn't feature creative credits, or they passed through the only other game in town, 2000ad, where they were dismissed by the readership of aging white men and ended up buggering off out of the business altogether despite contributing genuinely interesting strips like Medivac or Tao De Moto that weren't just yet another go-round on the seemingly endless carousel of stories about Nazis In Space or unshaven anti-heroes uncovering a conspiracy.  Artist John Armstrong is great, too, especially the way he draws Bella as someone who just walks about with one of her legs tucked behind her head now and then as one presumably did in the 1970s, or with her bottom lip permanently jutting out to give her depiction a perpetually confused look in response to the constant stream of setbacks she encounters.
Anyway, God knows what contemporary kids would make of this catalogue of misery if they were expected to read it, but thankfully, they'll never have to be traumatised by it as it seems to be marketed exclusively towards those aging white men I mentioned.  Which is a shame, really, as stuff like this might tempt kids away from the likes of Take A Break, That's Life, and Chat!, which - from what I have observed in passing - seem to be the pulp horror magazines of choice for young female readers these days.

Yeah this is just like that but instead of depressing and terrible it's happy and good

Designated Survivor is yet another politics show that gives fantasy solutions to real-world problems, and I found it funny that the show's solution to "fake news" was for the main character to announce that he was going to censor the internet and then he was cheered for this by a bunch of millennials, so if nothing else the show makes no bones about how its writing room is full of aging and reactionary white men, a fact that still escapes the many fans of The West Wing.
Telling the story of Keifer Sutherland's drastic miscasting, Designated Survivor followed the last surviving member of the American government after the rest were killed off by terrorism in a plot setup that likely sounds very familiar to the many fans of King Ralph, but after two seasons, even ABC decided it could do better and canned the show only for it to be picked up by Netflix, who apparently have more money than sense now.  The Netflix-exclusive third season of the show is... surprisingly good.
I mean, it's still utter fluff, of course, there's no chance of it suddenly becoming The Wire at this stage, but there's some interesting things done with the idea of corruption in high office that I haven't seen in other shows, like a direct equivalence being drawn between political and moral compromise, and while he seemed like the last person who should be playing the part in seasons 1 and 2, here Sutherland's air of menace actually helps sell the idea of a man willing to compromise himself to retain power.  He played so toothless and guile-free a character up until now that his turn to the dark side actually carries a bit of weight, and I was surprised after watching one of the earlier episodes to find myself genuinely disappointed in an unconvincing fictional character for the decision they made.  The politics still straw-mans a lot of issues, and socialist ideas are obviously verboten in an American show, but I liked that many of the show's "no easy answers" cop-outs were for once at the expense of characters until now portrayed as Mary Sues*, and that copping out with the kind of resolution you'd expect to see in any US drama is actually something which damages the characters in the eyes of the audience.
Lots of effing and blinding in this season, too - there's one pre-credits sequence that's just Keifer Sutherland taking a dump while doing a Rubiks Cube and then giving up saying "these things are fucking impossible."  More money than sense, I tells you.



* Yes I said Mary Sues uncritically - it doesn't stop being a legitimate critical term just because some Star Wars fans want it removed from the lexicon after internet man-babies used it poorly.

What's so terrible about being beautiful?

Now 20 years old, you likely best know the Matrix as that film made by two trans women about a white male who shuts the heck up for a whole minute and lets a woman and a black man speak to him about their experiences of how the world works and their insights expand the white male's view of his own place in the world and how he has been manipulated by a vast mechanism which profits from his running in place like a hamster in a wheel.  Quite how this got co-opted by a bunch of whiny internet babies to explain why they weren't getting puss because of the shape of black people's skulls is anybody's guess - the internet is weird, you guys.
Did you know the "red pill" in the Matrix is red because estrogen pills were red in 1999?  Taking the red pill is a metaphor for listening to women's experiences, I guess, so now I am very confused what the alt-righters who bang on about feminism going too far are on about.  Agh.  I can't think about this right now, I'll watch the trilogy again and see how it holds up.
Still - 20 years?  Say It Ain't So!

I was also watching The Enemy Within*, a show that clearly has money spent on it but at no point did any of it get spent on an action director and so you have an actual scene where two grown ass men roll about on the floor tugging at each other's jackets while music went DUNDUNDUNDUN and I thought "oh no" but it was okay because after that was over I took a chance on Warrior, a period drama about a Chinese worker doing kung fu on the Irish in the 1870s and billing itself as "based on the writings of Bruce Lee" and it's a HOOT.  Best described as Gangs Of New York, but obviously on a tv budget and with kung fu and loads of swearing and gore and boobies, I'm not so crazy about a show that so willingly embraces anachronism pushing the whole "bisexuality means deviancy" angle, but then I guess you can't have everything.  It's been a while since I watched The Big Boss so can't speak to this being a remake of that, but the trappings seem familiar, and along with Into The Badlands, I'm doing alright for telly that knows how to do a decent action scene, so The Enemy Within ain't as big a drag as it otherwise might be, kind of like how you keep your marriage alive by seeing a 19 year old medical student on the QT.


* Well, I say "watching" but it is more accurate to say "catching up", which of course means I viewed multiple episodes in one sitting, which means okay dammit you have worn me down with your questions questions questions I watched 8 episodes in one go.  I would not recommend the experience.

I just said literally when I meant figuratively, like a crazy person

The culture wheel has turned since Runaways first appeared in comics form in 2002 wielding its open disdain for its own genre like an obnoxious teenager devoid of self-awareness in a bit of meta-commentary from creator Bryan K Vaughan that was sadly lost on the title's vocal online fanbase who - despite reading a superhero comic set in a superhero universe about people with superhero names and superpowers who fought supervillains - would regularly insist that "Runaways is not a superhero comic" even when the writer expressly wrote Spider-Man and Wolverine into the stories.  Runaways is a superhero comic, but part of its gag was that the characters didn't consider themselves superheroes despite doing all the things superheroes did, like fighting supervillains and vampires, traveling in time, battling shape-changing aliens, etc, and you would have to take an incredibly shallow surface reading of the material to not see any of this...
Anyway, the second season of Marvel's Runaways is not very good, which is my polite way of saying it is bad.
A below-average teen show with the word "Marvel's" bolted onto it, it's roughly 95% people talking or shouting at each other and then the other 5% is something happening in CGI or slow motion.  The straightforward originating premise of kids discovering their parents are supervillains so they Run Away from home has been convoluted with unnecessary backstories for characters who worked best as archetypes, an approach that just serves to reinforce that there are no new ideas in play*, and somehow, despite the sometimes-laughable lengths that the makers have gone to in order to divorce the show from anything vaguely superhero-y, the characters often just look outright ridiculous in a way they wouldn't if they were dressed in modern superhero outfits.
The superhero genre has been  rehabilitated since the Runaways comics first landed, and not only have all the things that made it unique since become standard, but we've had 7 years of a tv show about Green Arrow, which has spun off four years of the Flash, three years of Legends of Tomorrow, and will shortly be joined by a Batwoman series that will be showing alongside the third season of Supergirl, while in cinemas, Marvel have to date made 22 films and roughly 30 billion dollars, and spun off Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Agent Carter tv shows.  This would, by any objective evaluation, be the absolute worst time to base a tv show on the idea that superheroes as a concept are stupid and lame - and yet here Runaways comes anyway, peddling its shame at its own genre like Smallville was still a thing.
And what's with the synthwave OST?

It's a genre utilised in evoking the 1980s, but how does that relate to a television show about the post-millennial generation?  I could postulate about how it might be a means to reference the decade that spawned the media which provided the inspiration for the original comics, or suggest that it's a means to channel the post-internet world where all media is available to be consumed at all times and thus genres become meaningless and children pine for the artifacts of cultures that lived and died before they were born but really, I think we all know that's a stretch and it's far more likely it's just a stylistic choice that has no meaning beyond its current and likely fleeting appeal, which is as goo a paradigm for this show as any.  I am implying that Runaways is bad television.
Let's face it, though: if it was good I wouldn't be watching it because I apparently only like dreadful tv.

It does, however, meet the high standards demanded of 13 year old television viewers - by which I mean characters occasionally say the word "hashtag" and the nerd character says something related to Star Wars - but I admire the show's commitment to the rejection of binaries both in its diverse casting, and in its firmly and oft-affirmed belief that the show doesn't have to suck or blow and can, in fact, do both at once.


* Worse still, existing characters from the comics are expanded upon to become what can only be described as racist stereotypes, with the most obvious example being all the black characters having links to gang culture and crime, or the only Asian characters facing off in a martial arts battle, or the only Latino character defeating an opponent by speaking Spanish - and no, I am not making that up.

You have borne your sorrow well. I will not forget you.

8 Mile is a vehicle for the once-popular pop singer Emineminem, and it reminded me of the denouement of Patrice Lecont's Ridicule in which Grégoire Ponceludon denounces the arrogant presumption of the court of Versailles that they are the heirs of Voltaire, as for all their disdain for the illusion of civility and their use of competing insults in lieu of open violence, they do not possess Voltaire's compassion.  Sickened by the decadence and corruption, Ponceludon takes his leave of the court and it is shortly thereafter destroyed in a popular revolution, and while the opulent trappings of American culture serve as a lure for the fame-hungry Emineminem, ultimately they serve only to obscure that the desperate elevation of caustic repartee is but one of many distractions from the crumbling of an empire, Emineminem's Jimmy T Rabbit finding solace and comfort in neither their pursuit nor their acquisition.
Sexual conquests are meaningless, the defeat of social superiors in battles of wits are hollow no matter how the crowd may chant his name, and in his moment of supposed triumph he renounces his victory and alights into the darkness a lonely man as the actor who portrays him mocks the character's existence with a fictionalised recounting of his own rags-to-riches story set to music, all notions of identity and purpose revealed as constructed, empty theater.
In many ways, the "rap battle" culture of 8 Mile's 1995 Detroit is an analogue of the decline of discourse in the West, made as it was in 2002 and prophesying the humor of Family Guy, Brooklyn 99 or Deadpool in that what the audience has been conditioned to crave and expect is not exquisitely-constructed jokes and their punchline payoffs, but to see which unlikeable character can say the most transgressive thing at any given time, a trend seen as admirable and good in the realm of "old" media, but as somehow terrible in the realms of social media where attention is now acknowledged as the only truly viable currency. Objectively speaking, it cannot be said that this is a culture that seeks or rewards worth but which instead needs immediate gratification, and in 8 Mile, the lead character achieves all of his ambitions and indulges all of his immediate desires and is ultimately left unfulfilled, so it feels like we've had adequate warning from history about spectacle, but now instead of heeding it, we make the warning just another part of the distraction and it washes across us, unheeded, as our societies seek immediate rewards in their entertainments and in their politics seek out similar short-term gratification in acts of self harm like electing a racist president or voting to leave a mostly-beneficial cultural union.
Faced with the life of hollow decadence that is his reward, Eminimemem chooses to walk away.  Would that this were an option for the rest of us.

I also watched Arctic, in which Mads Mikkelson encounters a polar bear but they don't have a fight.  I think my feelings on the matter of not having a fist fight with a polar bear have been adequately established over the years, so I will leave it at that.

I don't WANT to go out and have fun

Why yes the flu was terrible and the recovery was somehow even worse, thank you for asking.
Stuffed up in bed unable to put one foot in front of the other for a week or two, I did have time to catch up with my much-neglected gaming habit, however, and in the course of playing Days Gone I sometimes felt that explaining to kids nowadays that we used to have black and white tvs that had screens smaller than the one on their laptop and yet weighed a ton and were huge and bulky and on them we played Jet Set Willy makes us sound like one of the Yorkshiremen from the Monty Python sketch, and yet my takeaway from the underwhelming Days Gone is to think of the technology of the 8-bit era and remember that no matter how laughably clunky and low-resolution it was, you could at least read the flipping text onscreen without a magnifying glass.  TVs have never been bigger and yet somehow onscreen text has never been smaller.


The point I rage-quit this turkey came when I encountered my first "destructible barrier" and how to deal with it was not explained with an in-game tutorial but in tiny, tiny text that flashed onscreen for roughly 3 seconds before disappearing forever, so now I don't know how to deal with that in-game problem unless I load an earlier save, navigate back to that spot, then either sit with my head less than a foot away from my 39 inch smart tv (I usually sit five feet away from it) and hope that this time I can read the instructions when they appear, or I can take a screenshot, quit to the console dashboard, open the capture gallery, look at the screenshot and try to read the instructions there - but even that's not a given method of success because of the PS4's terrible multimedia options that Sony designed it to have on purpose so as to make you use (paid-for) streaming services for media on the console instead of just viewing your existing (already paid-for) media stored on the internal HD, so the PS4's native image viewer doesn't have a zoom function.
And then there's the controls: for some reason you have to hold down buttons instead of just tapping them if you want to do something like pick things up or interact with the environment, which combined with the brief animations results in confusion as to whether or not you've actually done what you wanted to do, which was a feature I didn't like in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which changed the way you looted the environment from the previous game - Assassin's Creed: Origins - from simply hitting the triangle button to holding it down for some (but not all) looting interactions.
Buggy, undertested, possessed of story that is so aggressively banal and uninteresting that it may as well be terrible, and undercooked combat mechanics that just draw your attention to the fact that this isn't The Last Of Us, a game that it clearly wants to be yet whose many strengths Days Gone does not seem to be familiar with, primary among them being The Last Of Us' simple and responsive controls transplanted from a combat game to the then-aging survival horror genre still obsessed with the tank control system developed in the 1990s for games with pre-rendered backgrounds and a fixed camera.  But the most disappointing thing the game fails to transplant from The Last Of Us is a laughably overambitious story director who might have made something of the futility at the heart of the main characters of the game, two ex-bikers who cling desperately to outdated notions of masculinity not because it serves them well in a post-apocalyptic world but because the game story just doesn't have any original ideas or interesting ways to execute what it lifts from other sources - it even has your grizzled biker hero rescuing his girl from rapey rednecks in a flashback.  There is plenty of grist for the mill here, but no-one seems interested in exploring it so the cut scenes - which require lengthy loading times, naturally - just drag on forever and never tell you anything important that you can't glean from the slightly messy story/inventory screens.


Aaaaanyway, this rambling review is basically building up to me saying I did not like this game, but on balance, it was mostly more enjoyable then being bed-ridden... up to a point, and then it wasn't.so I watched Robot Jox on Netflix again instead.