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.

Savages

Savages is a crazy movie.  It has drugs, sex, but no rock and roll.  The rock and roll is replaced by a totally out of place upbeat ringtone.  It has the young nerdy guy who played the lead in Kick Ass play a buffed out professional weed scientist.  (The movie doesn’t call him that, but I like how it sounds).  It has Blake Lively again proving she’s a real actress by pretending to get really high and really vulnerable (it’s just like The Town!).  This film was directed by Oliver Stone, so going in, I think we all knew it was going to be crazy.  The real question then is:  Is it a good film?  Uuuhh….it is, kind of?