Oh Jesus just kill me

Allergies are so fucking bad
bad
bad
I'm praying for the release of death at this point.
Anyway let's read a blog that deconstructs comic book movies.

Many thoughts, in no particular order. Lots of niggly logistical complaints, but I am not unhappy, except for a couple of issues endemic to Hollywood film-making.

Who

cares

here's my thoughts on the movie (because my opinion will be more concise and probably less douchey)

competent action movie. Won't waste your time. Some of the better fight choreography I've seen if you're enough of a fag to care about that sort of thing. Don't see it in 3D because the 3D is so shallow you won't even know it's 3D in half the scenes.

I am getting too old or too sentimental to accept with equanimity the casual way in which this movie, like so many others, shows me the horrible deaths of thousands of people uninvolved in the action of the film. Especially when it's the actions of the supposed heroes that lead, directly or indirectly, to those deaths. Was everyone in the Triskellion or on the helicarriers deserving of being crushed or burned to death in that catastrophic collapse at the end of the film? I rather doubt it. This leads me to wonder about the easy way in which volume of casualties is equated with seriousness of purpose in popular film. I can't actually accept that, and I wish that someone in Hollywood would begin to challenge that equation. 

Who cares?

Firstly if they hadn't blown up the helicarriers (which are basically flying doom fortresses) then half of humanity would have died.

So your options are a few thousand or a couple billion.

Which will you pick?  

Also as I recall it the movie depicted the doom fortresses exploding harmlessly over the ocean surrounding DC.

You know.

The ocean around DC.

The landlocked city of DC.

2. It was pleasant to hear some gasps from the audience when the Winter Soldier's identity was revealed: that was nice, and proof that even open secrets aren't always all that open.

Errr, that was a plot twist?
I thought that was dramatic irony where the audience was supposed to know but Captain America wasn't.

I guess people are really that retarded.

3. Lots of familiar faces, but the unexpected ones gave me more pleasure because unexpected. So, bravo Danny Pudi and Jenny Agutter. (Danny Pudi! I flapped my hands at that point.) Pity that wasn't actually Agutter's character taking down the Hydra folks in the conference room: I had a moment of sheer glee before Natasha revealed herself. Why couldn't an older woman have been involved in the storyline in such a powerful way?

Why couldn't a politician pushing about 75 pirouette kick 5 burly special force types into unconsciousness?

I know we're on about feminism on Dreamwidth but I think Scarlett Johansson being able to take even one special forces dude down is a bit of a stretch.

She's like a 100 pound woman versus a 220 pound brainwashed killing machine.

She doesn't even have a super power as far as I can tell.

But a 75 year old woman apparently the same size with no special training?
Sorry, not happening.

I can't even suspend disbelief in a super hero movie to believe that.

4. I liked the subtext about PTSD, which was not very subtextual, and the recognition that women soldiers were fighting overseas as well. I also liked the recognition of the Rescue Squadrons, even if Sam Wilson's team didn't actually use helicopters to perform their rescues.

"the subtext that wasn't very subtextual" was a topic directly covered by the movie. The term "PTSD" even came up like 5 times.

That's not so much a subtext as a scene in the movie.

I mean we couldn't very well have a movie called Captain America and not cover how much the soldiers of the US military are suffering so America can suck down more oil.

I mean fight terror.

I mean look for weapons of mass destruction.

I mean free desert people from themselves.

5. I liked Sam Wilson, although I couldn't figure out how his suit worked (are the wings controlled by thought? How could he shoot a gun while flying?). But I would have liked to see him have more of his own agenda: he was positioned pretty much entirely as a sidekick, and it would have been nice to see him question or argue some points with Steve.

Wow you're right. The man with the fucking hover pack is really unrealistic.

 9. There were the usual violations of physics inherent in such a movie: both Steve and more normal human beings flying through the air, falling from great heights, evading flying bullets, and being knocked against hard surfaces without apparent injury.

You're bothered Steve (CAPTAIN AMERICA) could fall from great heights with no injury?
He's a fucking super soldier. What'd you expect?

So you want to see a 75 year old politician defeat Navy SEALS in hand to hand combat but a super soldier surviving a 30 foot drop is too much?
Are you out of your fucking mind?

And other violations of plausibility: like the presence of a major military installation under the Potomac. My bureaucratic heart quailed at the thought of the reaction of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service to the construction, operation, and destruction of the Triskellion and Project Insight. But clearly this is an alternate universe where such things are easily ignored. (Although actually filming at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was inspired.)

Oh so that's the body of water the carriers crashed over.

See?
No humans harmed.

Also yes, that's the movie I want to see in a movie called "Captain America: The Winter Soldier": a bureaucratic nightmare fight between all the different branches of the Virginia local government.

Brilliant.

10. I'm bothered that Nick Fury ever thought Project Insight was a good idea. Is this a universe in which The Minority Report was never made? It's one thing to believe that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty for the greater good; it's another entirely to sign on to preemptive murder from on-high because someone might someday be a threat. That's ludicrous, and I'm baffled that even a HYDRA-tainted funding/contracting/construction process didn't get any pushback from anyone in an oversight position. It's not like multi-billion-dollar projects don't get a lot of review...

IT WAS A COMMENTARY ON AMERICA'S USE OF DRONES AND THE THREAT TO USE THEM ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE YOU FUCKING TWAT.

How fucking thick are you? This was not a complex narrative.

How did you not recognize the giant, unmanned flying robots as a stand in for the UNMANNED FLYING ROBOTS IN THE REAL WORLD

11. The idea that Tony's experience in The Avengers gave him ideas for propulsion systems that could have been designed, tested, constructed, and integrated into the helicarriers in less than 2 years is one that would be reasonable only to someone with no experience in federal contracting and engineering. Heh.

Yeah because a movie involving a dream team involving a super soldier, a Norse god and fucking Iron Man really should contain federal government red tape, and lots of it.

12. laurashapiro and I both chortled at the idea that computer banks from the 1970s could ever be used for the purpose to which they were put in this movie--among other reasons, the magnetic tape on all those spools would have long since crumbled into uselessness. (And they would have gone up like torches when the missile hit.) And the amount of memory in that room probably equalled no more than that on my Android phone... But then, it's the movies, where all tech is nonsensical and basically magic.

...

Yeah.

That's the obvious thing to note in that scene.

reel to reel machines from the 70s would have had crumbling tape.

Not that, you know, they were used to STORE THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF A NAZI SCIENTIST or anything.

13. Speaking of phones, if SHIELD was so comprehensively compromised, and all networks were being searched for evidence of Steve and Natasha, how did Natasha get her phone to work, to track down the file?

... She owns her own iPhone?

This is the woman who can hack into government files using a display kiosk at an Apple Store. I think she's probably clever enough to keep a throw away backup phone not snooped out by the SHIELD network.

This was by no means a masterpiece of storytelling but your criticisms are knit-picky enough even if they were right which, as I think I'm demonstrating, they're not.

What I didn't like (aside from the mostly-petty bits above): too many fight scenes, too long. Too many civilian/bystander deaths, and too much destruction in general--seriously, you can ramp up drama without having everything blow up.

Are you complaining about action in a comic book movie?
Are you fucking crazy?

I don't give a shit about comic books because I'm not 14.

I don't care about feminism or whatever shit you normally whine about.

I liked it. I thought it was an enjoyable and effective (notice I didn't say good) movie.

Like many of y'all, I'm severely disappointed in this week's Agents of SHIELD episode, which for the SG-1 folks I will merely describe as a rehash of "Hathor". Gender essentialist, heteronormative, rapey, predictable, cliche'd, stupidly plotted, and DULL.

Oh my God not gender essentialist!
I don't even know what that means.

So I was poking about in my LJ archives and found an old post, and decided it was time to revisit it:

What's the last book you read that just made you squee? Just filled you with joy in the way that you didn't want it to end?

I've never squeed in my life because I'm not a massive crying vagina but the last book that I enjoyed was The Unremembered Empire by Dan Abnett.

What I'll be reading next:
Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad

Oh, good Christ.

Hey, remember that triumph of the human imagination, The Odyssey?
Ever wonder what Odysseus' wife spent her life doing while Odysseus was off having adventures and nailing sorceresses on the side and pissing off Poseidon?

NO?
WELL GUESS WHO GETS TO EAT SHIT, THEN?

Also for a book that's supposedly feminist (I've covered how not feminist Margaret Atwood is in the past) I don't think the book has particularly good things to say about either gender.

Apparently all women are vicious backstabbers and manipulators and all men are basically thuggish, lying brutes with penis envy of any man who they perceive might have a bigger dick than them.

I'm not saying this is necessarily inaccurate of the human condition but for a woman held as a saint in the feminist circle this isn't exactly the ideas I'd expect to be espoused.

 Fortunately for her, Atwood herself says she doesn't consider it a feminist book. Just a book with a female protagonist.

So at least she's not guilty of writing bad feminist stories.

She's just guilty of writing bad stories.

Why is it bad, in light of it not being a feminist book?
Well, much like the Star Wars prequels, it's a story that didn't need told.

Who cares what Penelope did during the 20 years Odysseus was absent?
Homer pretty much covers it. She raised Telemachus and spent the rest of her time trying not to get forced into marriage by a bunch of freeloading suitors.

Which she succeeds at doing and then Odysseus murders all the suitors with an axe.

Great story.

This blog has just devolved into her linking me shit to read.

I have enough people linking me shit to watch and read in an average day. I don't need help on this front.

John Scalzi attempts to define the advantages of being a straight white male in western society without using the "P" word. The comments are... well, they're better than they would have been three years ago. (But that's not saying much.)(On later revisiting, no, they're not good at all, since apparently the post got linked by some MRA site. EW. Happily, Scalzi is wielding the Mallet of Loving Correction with some authority.)

Oh I remember that.

Wherein John Scalzi talks down to me for 10 minutes and doesn't know how video games work so his analogy falls apart right out of the gate.
Great job otherwise.

Basically he says being a white man is like playing a video game on the easiest difficulty setting.

Which makes about as much sense as you think it does.

I'm moving to South Korea in 1 month. Will being a white man be easy mode there?
Can I bitch like a ponce then or is it still easy mode?

Logically, being in South Korea, an industrialized, wealthy, high tech society filled 99% with ethnic Koreans being Korean would be easy mode.

Or would it?

How can you quantify a life based on difficulty settings?
When I was student teaching at the shitty high school I student taught at my life was on basically the highest difficulty it'd ever been on.

For me that was like Dante Must Die mode.

Does that make it easier or harder than a starving African's life?

Can't really say, can you? I doubt, if we were suddenly thrown into each others' situations Freaky Friday style, we'd endure in either setting.

Is a life one consistent difficulty?
There was a white girl who, despite dealing with what I am sure was the incredible oppression of the patriarchy on a daily basis, went to the best high school in the county to student teach.

Was she on hard mode then?

Oh but hang on a second. This analogy is becoming dangerous for the white girls on tumblr who espouse this garbage because lo and behold we, the student teaching class, divided ourselves more or less along how good the school you went to was. So for all our privilege checking professors supposed non-racism it was basically the white kids in the front and the black kids plus me in the back.

So now I'm in regular contact with this black chick.

She was in a school as bad as mine.

Surely her life at that moment was hard mode.
Bad school.

She was black which as we've established in our pussy sensitivity is an intense social disadvantage because of racism aaaand she's a woman so therefore grappling with patriarchy.

In that situation, by John Scalzi's august logic, her life would truly be hard mode such that whatever little issue the spoiled white cunt teaching other spoiled white cunts should shrivel away into irrelevance.

But that's not really how life or, more accurately, our perception of life works, does it?

When you're a spoiled white cunt student teaching at Northern High the worst thing you can imagine from a class is getting some sass about a cellphone being confiscated. You cannot fathom what dealing with a PCP-induced psychotic rage episode is like.

Does that make me better for having endured it, though?
Well yes it does, actually.

But was I playing on easy mode and she on hard mode in that long, long, long, nightmarish 8 months?

If the answer is yes I was then the only logical conclusion is white women are therefore playing on mostly easy and have nothing whatever to complain about either because clearly if "life difficulty" is just an escalating combination of color and gender then white women have it second easiest.
You know I hardly think playing Civ 5 on chieftain instead of settler when there's warlord, prince, king, emperor, immortal and deity ahead of it is worth bragging about or martyring yourself over.

The only RPG I can claim to have played in any detail was first Diablo and then Diablo II, some years back. (I'm no good at FPSs, they make me motion-sick.) So I read The Mary Sue's rundown on the female characters in the upcoming Diablo III with some interest.

Oh boy.

Stay Awhile and Listen: Diablo III’s Female Character Models Are A Step In The Right Direction

YOU MEAN MASCULINE AND CLAD IN TOO MUCH ARMOR?
BECAUSE BOY I SURE NOTICED.

If you’ve never seen an armor set disparity like this in WoW, that’s because the female armor has improved considerably throughout the expansions. Midriffs and hot pants were common when I first started playing back in 2006, but by the time I quit three years later, most armor sets were identical between genders. Blizzard, it seemed, was finally taking their female players into account.

Japan still isn't giving a fuck so just stick to Japanese MMOs if you want waifus I suppose.
You know who is currently attempting to set gender relations back 30 years, though?
Korea.
You can literally see nipple in some of the armor in Tera.
Not that I was complaining but all right, calm down, Tera developers.

So while it’s too early to say how Diablo III will measure up, the female character models shown thus far have me feeling very encouraged. For starters, they are all wearing plausible armor. Their stomachs are covered. The only one who looks a bit waifish is the Wizard, which makes sense, and even she looks like she can tear it up. But the best of the bunch, in my opinion, is the Barbarian. She’s broad-shouldered. She’s buff. She’s got big, muscular thighs, which is exactly what you need if you’re going to be swinging an axe all day. And before you scoff at her bare legs, take note of what her male counterpart is wearing.

There's a bizarre amount of puritanism running through modern feminism too.
What if a woman doesn't want to dress in a burqa?
Also why does the wizard being waifish "make sense"?
Is it because she's Asian?
FUCKING
RACISM.
The monk and the demon hunter are pretty waifish, too, why not include them?
Is it because they're Russian and a stupid scene/emo slut, respectively?
Actually the witch doctor is pretty waifish, too, but it's hard to tell because of her poor posture.
In fact the only character powerfully built is the barbarian which if we're talking about not-overly sexualized I'm going to argue she is because despite having powerfully built thighs and midsection she also has swaying hips.
She's clearly some body builder fetishist's spank fodder.
I know she wasn't out at the time of the writing but the crusader is just a tall, blonde Aryan with huge tits. Clearly an unrealistic expectation for women players to aspire to.
Because, you know, when I play a video game I aspire to be the character.  Not just pick one that looks neato.
None of them are fat. None of them are ugly.
Also let's discuss briefly how hypocritical this bullshit is.
Here's my demon hunter.

Not a single inch of exposed skin.
But what is prominently on display:
form-fitting armor where her generous tits are well noticed.
Impractically tall high heels in a bitchy "I'm in charge" kinda pose--
for all the supposed genderlessness this article bangs on about that is clearly still a thin, attractive woman under all that.
Just as long as no skin is exposed.
So really feminism is on par with extremist Islam in terms of gender relations.
Good work, everyone.
In fact I can argue in many ways the above character is more exciting than one in skimpy armor because this leave much more to the imagination than otherwise.
For a jaded internet warrior sometimes having clothes on is more exciting than whatever the latest extreme form of porno that's popular at that second.
Also there's another, practical consideration in all this: the point of Diablo 3 is to slowly amass better gear as you go.
It's hard to make essentially nude armor seem better than the last set of essentially nude armor so they just heap plates on top of plates until, well, your waifu looks like a mismatch of armor from about 10 wildly different aesthetics like the above.
Really the thing that has me most perplexed is now armor comes dyed by default so you're better off just buying 100 of those dye remover potions and scrubbing any armor you think you'll keep for a while.
But before level 70 everything is replaced with such regularity you might as well not bother. So your character is just a constant kaleidoscope of gayly colored spikes and sloping, baroque plating.
Anyway wow, fuck.
This was a blog filled to the brim with bullshit. I'm going to sleep.