Guernica was asking for it.

This weekend I watched Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida, a lean and visually gorgeous (but not ostentatious) road-movie of sorts that successfully serves not only as a nuanced character drama but also as a reflection on the unhealed wounds and unspoken traumas of Poland's post-war experience and their impact on the national…

Yeah this show was, charitably, mediocre but I'll hand it to them that the fight scene between Hundred Eyes and Sidao in particular was legitimately pretty damn great.

It resides firmly in the realm of "O-K" overall but I will say that it does improve some over the course of its run.

Don't worry, it wasn't just incompetence, the Kims have killed at least a hundred thousand people in internment camps and purges! And let's not forget the festival of joy that was the Korean war.

The show also has a real "show don't tell" problem when it comes to Marco's actual worth to the Khan. We're told repeatedly that he can 'paint pictures with his words' and has a keen sense of insight and yet whenever we get a scene of Kublai asking his opinion on anything, Marco's response basically amounts to "seemed…

I had a dream last night involving zebra giraffes, zebra giraffes!

Terrifying but also adorable.

With the last few weeks dominated mostly by grad school application business and other more pressing matters I'd largely been taking a light approach to pop-culture, but with things now slowed down a bit once more I returned this weekend to the film side of things.

Yeah, one quickly realizes it's all the little things, supply, recon, infantry that tend to make or break your in a match.

To use the scientific barometer established by AVC's own feature with Teti's mom; my own mom, a theater and musical fan, declared it "flat" and "pretty bad".

Sometimes, you just have to play what's fun.

My main issue with Dishonored, which I did like nevertheless, is that if you were going for a non-lethal playthrough like I was, you really didn't ever get to use any interesting powers like those that the game lined up on the offensive side.

Wargame Red Dragon: I'm slowly learning but still moderately bad at this particular RTS. There's a whole lot of nuance required in this game to really be effective at all online, but it is quite satisfying once you figure out how to do so and playing in the larger 10v10 matches takes some of the edge off.

That bastard stole my job at the space laser factory.

I want John Madden to become an announcer for a Smash Brothers match.

Rich Evans is a national treasure.

Thanks man.

I was having a few really good weeks but then of course, per the usual up and down of things, all it took was one reading one wrong news article last week and I got a pretty nasty panic attack and am now muddling through a generally anxious week.

I do actually believe a lot of FC3 was intended from the outset as satire, all the elements are there, it's just written much too poorly and clumsily to be effective from a storytelling perspective.