Warm Bodies: Leave your science at the door

Get your shotguns and hugs ready!

Zombies!  Nothing is a more surefire sign of the apocalypse than reanimated corpses, with the possible exception mushroom clouds and Mad Max style spiky armor.  There are a few rules to follow when you find yourself up against the walking dead: aim for the head, find a defensible position before night falls, and keep moving to avoid running out of supplies.  Warm Bodies, written and directed by Johnathon Levine, wants us to add another rule to this plan:  Hug them. Talk with them. Include them in your life.  Discover, together, what it truly means to love.

… I think I’ll stick with the shotgun and the sure fire plan of running away screaming like a little girl, but whatever floats your boat.

Gnomoria: Dwarves not included

THINGS HAPPEN.

There have been some definite challenges to rebooting Faceplant!  The first and foremost of these problems has been due to what the outside world refers to as “Windows 8.1” which can’t seem to understand why anyone would want to use MS Paint ever, so they hid it away into the bowels of the operating system and made it impossible to search for it.  Since MS Paint is basically my number one tool for cropping and editing pictures, searching for it became a thing.  Also about Windows 8.1:  Why did they feel the need to put an operating system obviously meant for a touchscreen tablet on, say, anything other than a fucking touchscreen tablet?

Strangely, that rant actually sums up my feels about the thing I’m reviewing this week pretty well.

La Mulana: THOU ART TINY.

This doesn’t seem too bad. What’s it going to do, blink at me?

La Mulana is not your friend.

Let’s just get that out of the way right now.  If you had any illusions that this charming, quirky little 2D platformer actually felt something for you, now’s the time to let them go.  La Mulana isn’t friendly.  It doesn’t feel remorse.  And God knows, it definitely doesn’t pity you.  What it does, however, is find new and efficient ways to stab you, electrocute you, kill you, trap you in a hellish murderpit, and drown you. That is, it will do these things when you actually figure out what the hell it is that you’re supposed to be doing, and where you’re supposed to be doing it.

Let me tell you a story, son

THE LOST CITY OF FACEPLANT! Okay fine, it’s called Petra or whatever, according to flyicarusfly.com

Once upon a time there was a website.  It was a pretty alright, all things considered, frequently updated by three nerdy, slightly hyperactive young men by the names of Enosh, Elrood and Tophat.  The point of this website was to review entertaining things, what so the wide world of the internet would never again have to search through miles of shit in order to find those ever elusive gems of brilliance.

Oh hello.

Wow. What’s been going on here lately? The place looks like a ghost town. No new content for over a week is a record I’d hoped we’d never achieve, but here we are. For my part I broke a bone near my elbow in a work related incident about a week and a half ago which has made typing difficult. In fact I was surprised by how many activities require the ability to twist or move my arm in such a way that it affects my elbow. Good news is I will have a short post tomorrow.

I am sick

HEY CUZ.

So hey.

Hey.

Here’s the deal.

I am not feeling so hot.  It’s nothing major, I’m sure.  Just a general case of the blahs that is making it difficult to think and makes me take legendary naps.  Yet, somehow, I find myself inexorably drawn back to Faceplant.  Routine has reared its ugly head.  I have to write an article because this is just what Tophat does on Sunday evenings.  I feel like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, a sick feeling in my gut as I know that it is time to watch Price is Right but there are no TVs around me anywhere.  Uh oh.  7 p.m.  Time to write Faceplant.  Uh oh.  7:01.  UH OH.

Gaming on the Go: I Smell an iPhony

Like many forms of technology I have developed a seriously pendulant love-hate relationship with smartphones. On the one hand all I ever wanted was a cellphone that made high quality phone calls. On the other the thought of the entirety of the internet in the palm of my hand is a temptation I cannot resist. So I got a refurbished iPhone a while back. The trouble with owning a smartphone is you will eventually start loading it up with games, which forces me to question whether or not these games can in any way be comparable to those on my Xbox or PC. At first glance the answer seems to be an obvious no, but you have to boil down the concept of gaming to really look at what phone games have to offer.

Madman: Stare into the infinite with a 1950s flair

So, it turns out that my post about the team of cybernetic pets WE3  and their quest for freedom was marginally more popular than I thought it would be.  Is…  this something that you guys like?  Do you want more reviews of honest to god print comics?  Do…  you want me to do that?  If I knew how to post polls on this site, I would do such things.  As it stands, uh…  blink once for yes and twice for no.

While you do that, I’m going to go ahead and start reviewing Michael Allred’s Madman comics.  This is a series my brother got me for Christmas one year, and last month, a good two years after I came into possession of vol. 1 and 2, I finally buckled down and picked up vol. 3  And then, you know, I read them.  Madman, if you’re coming into the game late, is a comic series that started in the 1990s featuring a modern-day Frankenstein (oh man you are going to hear THE BEST pun in like a few paragraphs.  Just you wait) in his quest to date his swell girlfriend and avoid the group of jerky street beatniks that seem to be all over Snap City.  The only problem?  INFINITY.

Louie

Have you watched Louie?  I’ve seen the first two seasons thanks to the magic of Netflix, but nobody else I know has.  I hear it discussed as a critical darling and the numbers say it’s doing well.  I must be hanging out with the wrong people, because Louie is one of the more fascinating shows on television.  It’s the brainchild of comedian Louis C.K and it I don’t think anything show more perfectly captures the vision of its creator than Louie.

In defense of the violence

There are better things that I’d rather be arguing about.  That’s the sentiment I feel every single time some random jerk with a gun flies off the handle starts shooting people while shouting comic book quotes.  Every time, it seems like emphasis is placed on what could have been done to prevent a tragedy.  Should we limit guns?  Are comics and video games too violent?  What about movies and TV shows?  What happened to the good old days where no one used guns except for the hunting of deer, only during approved government established hunting times?  What is our government going to do to stop this from happening again?

The intent of this article is not to trivialize the recent events in Aurora, Colorado.  My prayers and deepest condolences go out to all of the victims and their families.  My point is to talk about the violence we see in movies and comics and games each year, in a desperate bid for us to start placing the blame for these horrors on the individuals that cause them, and not on the usual scapegoats.