Ironhold

Back on the "what was the last movie you watched" thread, someone pitched an absolute fit about the fact that I'd just seen an R-rated movie, claiming that my having done so was grave enough a sin to call my salvation into question. As I had to explain to this person, I perform many different duties for the newspaper I'm with. I'm the de facto head courier. I'm a stringer. I write a weekly column. And I'm also the movie reviewer. By virtue of my job description, I occasionally have to see R-rated movies. As you can imagine, this person was absolutely beside themselves at this revelation and practically condemned me to the abyss. Thing is, my branch presidency understand that I'm basically playing "canary in the coal mine" every time I step into the theater. It's my job to watch the movie of the week and sound the alert in case the film is just that bad. Thus, if something is awful, then I'll have watched it so others won't. I've actually had people tell me that they prefer my reviews ahead of the reviews from bigger names in the industry because they know I'll be straightforward about such things; I'm not beholden to the Hollywood system, and so I have nothing to lose by being honest. As a result, I have been in a position to expose some of Hollywood's darlings for the trash they were (such as "Gone Girl") while also giving a fair shake to films that Hollywood has written off as inconvenient (such as "Ender's Game"). In that sense, I'd say I earn my money quite honestly.

Back on Tuesday, the weather report was calling for a massive storm. It was supposed to hit the area before 4 AM, at which point things would go all pear-shaped. I figured that if I left for my newspaper route at 11:45 AM, I'd be done by 3:30 and so I would most likely miss the bulk of it. Well, I was right: I got on the road by 11:45 AM, and I was done by 3:30. Too bad the forecast was wrong and the rain started at 2. By 2:30, the wind was gusting so hard that it was actually raining sideways. That's right: the rain was moving horizontally due to the force of the wind. The car I drive is an older model where the windows are cranked by hand, and due to a gremlin I have to step out of the car to roll the windows up or down; I have to keep one hand on the glass and the other on the crank to make sure that nothing slips off the mechanism. As such, I had to have both front windows open the entire time. So there I am, on the top of a hill, with absolute bupkis to protect me from the rain... which is pushing so hard and fast that it's stinging me in the face. You see, it's a residential zone up there, but the road is wide enough to be a main road; this means that the houses on the one side cannot shield me, and there's nothing but a drop-off on the other side. And even though it's at the top of a hill and so should naturally drain on its own, the road was actually designed and laid so poorly that it's not; rather, it's flooding. Fortunately, this place is a house that's for sale. This means that I can pull into the driveway, thereby putting the nose of the car into the rain. With the rain beating against the windshield instead of my face, I can finally collect myself... only to feel water dropping onto my head. Seems that the rain was coming at me so hard that the ceiling of the car got soaked, and so the water is now dripping all over. Fortunately, I chose a vinyl material when I reupholstered, and so a paper towel is enough to resolve it. But the road is a dead end since that development is still under construction, so if I want to get back home I have to brave that road again. That wasn't my first time driving in such hard rain, and so I knew what to do. A less experienced driver, however, would likely have been pulled from the crumpled remains of their vehicle when it was recovered from the bottom of the hill. I actually tried to warn another courier I saw about the dangerous conditions, but they misinterpreted my signal to mean that all was clear. Fortunately, it would appear that they made it out as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/business/media/melissa-harris-perry-walks-off-her-msnbc-show-after-pre-emptions.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry has walked off of her own television show to protest the fact that she's been preempted several times now for election-related coverage. Gee, one would think that "getting preempted" would be a known occupational hazard of working for a 24/7 news network.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/25/mizzou-professor-who-pushed-reporter-away-from-protesters-is-fired/ Click has officially been fired by Mizzou for what she did.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-tech-bro-letter-san-francisco-homeless-20160218-story.html A San Francisco-based tech executive wrote a letter talking about how all of the homeless in the city are a massive buzzkill that he wishes would just go away.

At this point, I don't remember. Suffice to say though, that I've had such a bizarre life most people who don't already know me don't believe it all.

http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Driver-Dies-When-Car-Crashes-Into-Local-Building-Bursts-Into-Flames-204849911.html#storyVideo The building you see here is next door to the building where I work. I was on shift at the time, and so I'm the one who made the initial 9/11 call. The kid was so blasted on alcohol, weed, and Xanax that he probably didn't feel a thing when the impact nearly decapitated him. This is *not* the only time I have had to respond to a drunk-driving accident *or* the only time I've had to run towards a fire to try and save people.

Given the way my life's been going, when I do finally die I doubt that there will be enough left of me to bury.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/02/19/black-lives-matter-meetings/80637498/?AID=10709313&PID=6160939&SID=ikx5so589d010mgr00dth The Nashville chapter of Black Lives Matter is up in arms because they were told they can't discriminate against whites. They were meeting in the Nashville public library until someone complained that the group refused to allow white members. The library workers investigated the situation, and discovered that this was indeed the case. City policy forbids allowing any group that discriminates on the basis of race from meeting in city-owned facilities, and so the chapter was asked to open up to include whites.

With Starship Troopers, what you need to remember is that: 1. The movie started out as an unrelated B-movie script until the studio got the rights to do an adaptation. 2. Director Paul Verhoeven lived through the Nazi occupation of his home country, and so by his own admission he conflated the government outlined in the book with the Nazi regime and so wanted to burn his own movie to the ground rather than participate in something he saw as promoting fascism. Tell your friend that if he wants to talk about it, he should really be looking up the book instead of the movie series.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431617/brown-university-students-social-justice-schoolwork Students at Brown University are upset because their homework assignments are interfering with their social justice activism.

http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/02/19/john-mcafee-ill-hack-san-bernardino-terrorists-iphone John McAfee, the guy who founded the organization which makes McAfee computer products, has offered to break into the phone via "social engineering" (thus supposedly eliminating the need for a back door) providing that the FBI meets his terms. He's also claiming that the reason why the FBI can't do things like this for themselves is because the restrictive culture at the FBI is a major turn-off for the younger, more adventurous computer types who get scouted by others that are willing to cut them some more slack.

Saw "Risen" earlier.

I can't remember the last time the AP has been sent out down here. It's been a good 15+ years at least. Everyone just does their fast offerings in with their normal tithing.

A woman had a snit fit after a man asked whether or not a certain fast-food place offered a military discount; in her eyes, the presence of such a discount means that the military is "privileged".

Right now, one of the most famous Mormon musicians in the world is Brendan Flowers of The Killers. Rather than sell himself as a Mormon musician, he initially sold himself as a musician who just happened to be Mormon.

Thanks. I honestly don't care about my birthday anymore. It's an excuse for a small splurge on myself, but that's about it. Thanks to my job at the newspaper, I usually wind up working on it now anyway. My parents put more focus on it than I do, but that's often because one of my brothers is up with his family and it's an excuse for his kids to have a party.

I'm no longer keen about most holidays or celebrations due to all of the negative associations. In the case of my birthday, I lost a friend a mere two weeks before my birthday one year. Given that my birthday fell on Thanksgiving that year and we had family down for the holiday, the event was even more chaotic that normal and so I didn't have the time I needed.

Back when FASA was still around, Bills was asked to write one of the last official novels. The author bio mentioned where he served his mission. edit - one of the Mechwarrior manuals or companion manuals *does* note that the church still exists at least as late as the 3060s; I haven't kept up with the game's official timeline because of the whole Dark Age nonsense, so I don't know what's gone on from there.

I honestly think it nailed it. The long and short of it is that the 1990s was, in retrospect, a vast wasteland as far as the comic book industry went. Upstart publishers like Image and McFarlane pushed the whole "extreme!" angle with their characters, leading to an ugly mix of questionable artwork, excessive violence, needless sexual content, and pointless obscenities. If it tells you how bad things were, Image's Supreme #4 (which I have a copy of thanks to years of grab-bag purchases of overstock product) includes a sequence where the title character, a Superman knock-off, kills a terrorist in a needlessly graphic fashion. That's what the "extreme!" era was about. Even though most of these issues were garbage, the bigger houses like DC and Marvel were seduced by the high sales numbers and cult success of some of the early characters and so quickly took that angle. It didn't help any that guys like Rob Liefield were doing work for multiple publishers at the time, meaning that the disease spread. By 1993 / 1994, even mainstream non-"extreme!" titles like the licensed G. I. Joe and Transformers titles were forced into line. (Ironically, Dark Horse Comics' G. I. Joe Extreme was far closer to the spirit of the early 1980s Marvel issues of G. I. Joe than the issues from the 1990s.) By the late 1990s, the industry had made a mockery of itself. A few publishers and imprints, such as Archie, Vertigo, and Bongo, had escaped the allure of "extreme". But just about everyone else was falling all over themselves to win an arms race that shouldn't have been run in the first place. That is, everyone else who was still alive; a number of respectable publishers like Comico, Valiant, and Now all perished during the 1990s. It was into this mess that characters like Deadpool, DC's Lobo, and the character Hellboy (mods - he's had two major motion pictures under his name) became famous. Hellboy started out as just another gothic-themed comic book. Deadpool, meanwhile, originally debuted in 1991 as a disposable villain (and has since come to be known as "the only good thing to ever come out of Rob Liefield's head"). But by the late 1990s, the characters (thanks in part to changes in the creative teams) came to evolve in a very unique direction. They, along with the purpose-built Lobo, refused to join the arms race. Instead, they were going to sit on the sidelines and throw peanuts at the competitors. They took the "extreme" content to 11, not in an effort to win the race but in an effort to show how absolutely ridiculous the whole thing was by taking it to its absurd conclusions. This deliberate self-parody, coupled with some incredibly competent writing teams, helped to finally kill the "extreme!" mentality as we knew it while making stars of the characters themselves. The vast majority of the "extreme!" characters have rightfully been forgotten, but these three continue to live on. And they'll continue to live on so long as the writing teams remember to not take them all that seriously.

http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/kanye-west-says-he-s-53-million-debt-asks-mark-n518811?cid=sm_fb Kanye West has announced that he's $53 million in the hole, with at least $16 million of that due to his having to prop up his overpriced line of clothing. He's now asking Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook for money, claiming that he deserves it simply because he's Kanye West.

Right now it's the #2 movie in the nation, with $93 million in box office sales. Deadpool's #1 with $100 million in box office sales.

Also, we have two big films opening up this Friday. The first one is "Risen", which is about the Resurrection from the perspective of the Romans. The second one is "Race", which is about Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics.

http://comicskingdom.com/deflocked/2016-02-14 I think this is what most special snowflakes come down to.

It gets less cool when you realize what sort of garbage I have to sit through some weeks. Mind not being rude and judgmental? FYI, it's quite rare these days to have an openly religious movie reviewer at a secular publication. This puts me in a very unique situation, especially since I'm fully independent of the Hollywood machine. You see, because I'm independent of the machine, I can call films as I see them. If I feel like killing one of Hollywood's darlings, I can. If I want to push a film that Hollywood doesn't want to admit exists, I can. I give people straight-up, agenda-free reviews, often going so far as to provide context for a film that other reviewers don't take the time to learn about themselves. For example, I seem to be the only newspaper-based movie reviewer in the US to have even read an issue of "Deadpool" before the film debuted, let alone have a comprehensive grasp of what happened to the comic book industry during the 1990s and how that fed what Deadpool eventually became. I've had people of all stripes tell me that they listen to me before they listen to almost any other movie reviewer, which is a high honor when you consider that I'm competing with national syndicates like Tribune Media. In the process, I've had the chance to advocate for more family-friendly films and more religious films, in the process exposing multiple movies that tried to present themselves as such when they actually weren't. And for the record, when I first got started I explained the whole situation to the branch presidency. They understand what I'm doing and what is obligated of me, and trust me accordingly. They recognize that I am, in essence, playing "canary in the coal mine" so that others don't get caught by surprise.