The Advocate

It has been a minute since my last post. Lots going on, from various family/personal medical issues to work shtuff to simply being effing exhausted by Lyfe. Y'know how it goes fellow cyberweb dwellers. However, in the midst of these circumstances comes along one pretty nifty happenstance. I am now the Guild Master of my World of Warcraft guild Asgard Warriors, Alliance Faction, Ysera server. Our old GM has, unfortunately, been AFKing, BRBing, and otherwise MIAing for some time lately, resulting in my previous Asst GM duties encompassing keeping a guild alive that is so casual we wear pajamas to the pharmacy. Seriously, we don't raid, we don't PvP, we don't roll dungeons together, or even sit in G-chat shooting the ish. We just co-exist in some sort of amorphous blob of gaming and relative ignorance. But not me! I have been making efforts to step up guild participation... with generally craptastic results. Until recently, when I instigated my generally bloodle...

Because Adult Swim in the early 2000s was so good, so revolutionary, and so unappreciated for its time that one can't help but wanna fanboy dick-ride it into the dust of hearty nostalgia.   I mean, we're talking the magical line-up to end all magical line-ups! We're talking Space Operas, Old Westerns, straight up Street Fighters, Mecha, Samurai epics, Post-apocalyptic Wastelands a la Mad Max, Historical Revisionary pseudo-homoerotic Pedagogy, Crime Thrillers, Nightmarish Acid Trips, Ancient Japan, Cyber Punk, Sci-Fi, Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, Comedy, Dramedy, Romantic Fappery, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Demon Fantasy, Detective Mystery, and fricking Comic Books! And the best part? It was all late night. Meaning after the 'rents were asleep, after the ankle-biters were tucked, and when all the kids were out of the pool. It was a hidden gem amongst an endless cavern of coal in TV land. They even showed special full-length features that you couldn't find anywhere outside of Ja...

Definitely feeling that adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman spinoff character . I can only hope they make equally awesome tie-ins to Constantine as well as other amazeballs comic-book-based stories. I've always been about the sympathetic side to The Devil . Indeed, in Jewish mythology, Satan isn't really all that bad. In fact, he might just be part of the whole plan . Which is kind of how I've always thought of Lucifer Morningstar. Sure, the show may be a procedural crime drama on the surface. It may even be a little banal for The Devil to be all soft-kitty-purr-purr for some rando mortals, but there's a lot there beneath the surface ripening to my liking. More importantly, Tom Ellis is a damned bad (and by bad I mean good, in the most corrupting possible way) Satan. Oh, and that soundtrack. I'm just a sucker for those gut-bucket Blues.

It's not often that in our lil' slice of the sci-fi-fantasy pie you find art echoing life so eloquently, but here we are on the pseudo-eve of a long-awaited Warcraft movie and the plot is feeling... REALLY familiar. Let me breakdown it: the humans of the kingdom of Azeroth are finding their lands being invaded by orcs from a dying world called Draenor. The reason is that a minority of evil orcs have corrupted and ruined the orcs' homeland through the use of dark magics and partnerships with demonic forces. In fact, the portal connecting Draenor to Azeroth is partially the result of these factors. But most of the orcs are just trying to flee the devastation of their homeworld, seeking refuge and succor from a demonic corruption that is actually destroying their very racial identity from a noble, yet brutal community, to a cruel and bloodthirsty horde. Meanwhile, the humans of Azeroth are naturally horrified by these "invaders" to their lands. They are afraid ...

While the closet door is, purportedly, made of all kinds of wood, I've found it to be more often made of felt and ink. Yes, I'm talking about how "teh Gay Agenda" has subversively always been with us in all its awesome glory. (Also, this entire post is probably, generally, mostly, and likely nearly entirely NSFW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.) (My first gay friends) Bert & Ernie were my first, my best, and will probably always stand the test of time as the most influential subconscious idea of who gay people are to me. You say "oh, so and so is gay!" I say, "why the fuck are you gossiping about their sexuality you sick bastard?" And then I think of Bert & Ernie, just singing, laughing, and annoying the ever-loving shit out of each other. Because I have tangents, damn. Let's be honest: there is no way you can look back to Sesame Street and NOT realize that B & E were always the proverbial Adam & Steve for our generation circa 198...

I was probably the only person in my entire high school/town/county that watched this show , courtesy of Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block. And, honestly, the only reason I even ended up watching the show originally was because I routinely stayed up all night grinding Warcraft 2 multiplayer on Bnet. (Of course, being like 14-15 years old makes it somewhat easy to stay up all night and recover like a damned mutant.) Once I got hooked on it, I had my alarm reset so I would wake up at the lovely hour of 5 AM just to catch each new episode, Monday thru Friday. The first incarnation shown on American television was the "Chaotic Century" storyline, which followed Hero Protagonist -- Van Flyheight -- as he roams the semi-post-apocalyptic wasteland of Planet Zi with an amnesiac love interest named Fiona, as well as his zoid, Zeke. (A zoid is basically a sentient fighting robot thing that humans can pilot. They are serious business.) BT Dubs: the Wikipedia page for...

The commodification of nerd culture into the mainstream has brought with it both Jedi... and Sith, among us. In this case, I am speaking of Ernest Cline's "Armada" and Adam Sandler's "Pixels." These are 2 pieces of art -- novel and film, respectively -- that draw upon the rich history of nerdy geekdom in similar stories. However, where one succeeds the other fails. Miserably. Horribly. It wasn't just a setback; it was a goddamn tragedy. In Cline's novel, you're basically getting War Games meets Ender's Game, with a healthy dose of The Last Starfighter and Knights of the Old Republic to boot with smatterings of old-school games like Galaga, etc. The essential premise is that aliens misinterpret our intentions when we sent all those space-probes looking for life and we, in turn, grossly misinterpret their attempts to communicate with us such that a full-scale war breaks out requiring the help of Hero Protagonist in the guise of your pro...