Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Sex, philosophy and awesome thinking

I don’t really read a lot of non-sequitur comics during my obsessive comic checking archive trawls each week.  I’m much more of a story guy, really, and I like knowing that there is a plan.  Its not that I dislike random comics that are unrelated from the previous day, I just don’t have as much of a reason to visit them without a story to drive my motivations.  And plus, the problem with a regularly updated non-sequitur comics is that it’s increasingly rare when an author can make something that is consistently funny day in and day out.   In fact I whoa shit ice cream truck!!!!

Uh, sorry about that.  First ice cream truck of the summer, you know.  I guess since that irritatingly maddening jingle has completely dropped a pot of ruin all over my sweet, thoughtful introduction paragraph, we’ll just get down to brass tacks.  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, written and drawn by Zach Weiner, is the ONLY non-sequitur comic I check daily.  Why?  Because it’s totally awesome, that’s why.

The Gumball Rally: this one’s for the gearheads

In honor of the greatest spectacle in racing this Sunday and the real-deal Gumball Rally this week I’d like to share with you one of my favorite car movies. Sure there’s Gone in 60 Seconds, Vanishing Point, and that one the kids watch where the cars spin around corners with the wheels on fire…something with an “F” or two, but when it comes to quirky classic fun with beautiful cars nothing beats The Gumball Rally. You can have your Burt Reynolds and I’ll keep my Gary Busey thank you. Cannon Ball Run may have more stars but Gumball has reality. It has style. And it keeps the real race’s moniker. Of course the current iteration is no longer a race, it’s more of a European cultural event for the new money  crowd, but there’s still plenty of great cars.

I was first introduced to this movie at the perfect age of 16, or maybe 17, by a great friend. We got into a lot of trouble bouncing around in his step-dad’s Wrangler and sat around talking cars for hours on end. He’s a Beamer boy through and through and I’m a Porsche man myself so we always had plenty to discuss. We met in the middle with the Mustang. There’s nothing better than fastback. There’s no better car in the world. But while Bullitt may have a great chase scene at the end, The Gumball Rally is just one long car chase.

Dollars and Sense

This is the moment I realized I had played this before.

I thought Fallout 3 was a great game.  I played it for sixty something hours.  I played the main quest through in its entirety.  I spent hours just roaming the countryside looking for interesting things, of which there were many.  I used internet faqs and YouTube videos to find the bobble head dolls so I could get an achievement.  So naturally, when Fallout:  New Vegas was announced, I was psyched.  New adventurers to be had in the fallout universe?  In Las Vegas?  Sign me up!  It was a release day purchase for me.  I played New Vegas a little over an hour on that first night…..and haven’t touched it again since.  So what happened?  I realized something when I turned on the game for the first time and got to the main menu.  The menu was the EXACT same one as Fallout 3.  I was about to play the same game.  The characters were different, the story was different,  I’m not saying there were no changes.  I just realized while staring at the main menu that while I had enjoyed playing Fallout 3 I just wasn’t interested in playing more of the same.  Now this isn’t true for every series.  I’ve played all the Call of Duty’s, all the Assassin’s Creed games, both Bioshocks, both Gears of War, Halo 3 and Halo Reach.  I am not championing myself as too cool for sequels.  They have their place.  I’m just growing concerned that developers might be cashing in, literally most of the time, on brand names at an amazingly high rate recently.  I’m growing even MORE concerned that we, as gamers, only have ourselves to blame.

Terraria: More like Metroidcraft

YEAH!!!!111

Okay, fine, I admit it.  I have an unhealthy addiction to infinite sandbox games.  Plop me down in front of a totally sweet building/digging  world and leave it just open-ended enough to guarantee that there’s no real end to it, and I’ll sink countless hours building imaginary worlds and blowing up as much as the game engine allows.  I’m not sure why this is.  I’m no architect.  I guess I just like that feeling of progress, that you’re actually accomplishing something even though you’re really just placing some pixels on top of more pixels, which is realistically done all the time.

So when Terraria was released on Steam this week, I couldn’t help but pick it up.  Touted as a “2D Minecraft but not,” Terraria focuses more on crafting and exploration than straight up building, offering tons of new content to see, explore, and get pissed off at in your quest for newer and better loot.

“The Book Of Tomorrow” by Cecelia Ahern

Tamara Goodwin is a spoiled little rich brat. A spoiled little rich brat whose father committed suicide over ruined finances, leaving her and her mother to move into nowhere’s-ville Ireland in a small gatehouse attached to the grounds of a ruined castle with her Mom’s brother and sister-in-law while the bank possesses the hundred acre mansion they used to live in and takes Tamara away from the familiarity of the life she had there.

The life she had there.  So much simpler than the life and future she has here.

Kick-Ass: With a name like that who needs the MPAA?

As a man who absolutely hates a spoiler I do love Hollywood’s occasional lean towards misrepresentation in trailers. The promotion I recall for Kick-Ass falls squarely in this realm. The promotion left me with an idea of Kick-Ass as a comedic satire of the  comic book superhero genre involving four ordinary people who team up to become superheroes. It certainly is a satire of the genre, but it’s too clever to be a straight up comedy. In fact there are some tragic elements that lend a lot drama to the story. Kick-Ass take a boldly irreverent approach to the life of a superhero. It’s as though either Mark Millar or Matthew Vaughn deliberately hates comic books. But then I guess I would too if I was force-fed them in the bathroom by the gym everyday at lunch in high school. His doctor kept telling him he’d be more regular with more green in his diet, but the bullies insisted on including the lanterns too.

The Road

I love post apocalyptic stories.  The idea of a world so changed that the way humans have to interact and exist is so different from our own is just interesting.  Gaming has been all over the idea recently, from Fallout 3 and its famed wasteland or even World of Warcraft getting into the act with Cataclysm.  One of my favorite short stories is “I have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (actually most anything by Ellison is great) in which five humans roam a world now ruled by a giant super computer.  Some stories can be action oriented (Mad Max) and some a bit more low key and realistic (Fallout on hardcore mode) but all share the same trait ; desperation.  The Road, a film directed by John Hillcoat and based off the novel by Cormac McCarthy, is another story set in the post apocalyptic United States.  It’s a film that focuses not on the why’s and how’s of an apocalypse, but what a father and his young son have to do to survive.  There is no saving society, there’s really no society left to be saved.  Viggo Mortensen plays “Man” and Kodi Smit-Mcphee (who went on to star in the excellent Let Me In) plays “Boy”.  The fact these characters have no names is telling, there’s no need for them.  Their stated goal is to journey south into warmer climate, but the real goal is merely to survive.  It’s a touching journey between a father and son set against one of the most hopeless settings I’ve ever seen in a film.

The Abominable Charles Christopher: Nature vs. Man

Charles: an island unto himself

There are certain kinds of comics I need to make sure I find before Enosh.  Not the action packed adventure tales or the humorous one liners, no those are all pretty safe.  But when it comes to comics that wrap a detailed plot around a very man-versus-nature theme, I need to make sure I read through them first and post about them on Faceplant, before Enosh has a near fatal attack of short-sighted republicanism that leaves him gasping for breath and dumping barrels of oil into the Atlantic ocean while traveling to the baccarat tournament in Chicago.

The Abominable Charles Christopher, written and drawn by Karl Kerschl, is a somewhat poignant look at the effects humanity has had on nature, and more importantly, on a very peaceful, somewhat confusing sasquatch-thing.  Or maybe it’s a look at what the animals in the forest are up to when we’re not paying attention.  Or maybe it is none of these things and will turn out to be something entirely.  Hell if I know.

“The Bone Yard” by Jefferson Bass

With the success of CSI, NCIS, and Bones- forensic anthropology (aka- “Bone People”) has become a writing meme.  An anthropologist just like Kathy Reichs, Jefferson Bass also writes about the gruesome tales told from a lost, forgotten, and horrifically maimed skeleton. Maybe I’m just jaded from too much of the same thing, but Bass’ book didn’t seem to offer anything different from any of the other hundreds of forensic anthropology stories out there right now.

His main character, Dr. Bill Brockton, isn’t a strong leading man. There’s really nothing about him that sticks with you other than he gets really bored by being behind a desk. So bored, in fact, that he’ll work for free. But there’s not really much of a personality to go with him. He’s just Dr. Brockton, a really good forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee who hates when Floridians start talking crap about his football team.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn: My first foray into Dream Land and I spend all my time in Patch Land

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’ve never played a Kirby game. My only experience with the little pink over-eater was in Gamecube’s Super Smash Bros. And a few rounds of Kirby golf on a ROM. So Kirby expert I am not. In fact, the only reason I picked up Epic Yarn is because I thought the game’s level design was so creative and interesting I simply couldn’t not play it. So imagine my surprise when I learned just how incredibly gay Kirby and his friends are. I have come to the conclusion that Kirby is the toddler version of Mario.  But this makes his game no less fun.