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NEWS AND VIEWS - AUGUST 2018
WRITING NEWS Earlier today I finished up the outline for the next Signalverse novel, which is called Champions Weekly. This one's about a reporter, Ally, who is trying to find out whatever happened to the Signal City Flare, a little-known superhero who seemingly went missing about a year ago. I intend to start writing it in September. It's probably not going to be a very long novel (maybe about as long as Orchid) so I'm guessing I'll have it written by the end of the year (no promises, though). Nothing else going on, really, writing-wise, but here's a nice, albeit brief, review of The White Ribbon Runs the Red Lights, which I came upon about a week ago. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING Still working my way through Persona 5. This month, though, I also started playing Octopath Traveler, for the Switch, which has been wonderful so far. It's good old-fashioned RPG goodness, for the most part, and visually, the game is like a glimpse into an alternate universe, where the Final Fantasy series evolved by building on Final Fantasy VI's look and feel, rather than Final Fantasy VII's. And this is right up my alley. I've never liked Final Fantasy VII, incidentally. I didn't find the characters all that appealing, and the plot was an unintelligible, paranoid, Evangelion-inspired head-scratcher (not helped by the fact that several important scenes in the game -- flashbacks which explain a great deal about Cloud's past -- are basically hidden from the player). And I had a bad personal experience with the game as well: the first time I played it, I had a memory card fail on me just after I left Midgar for the first time. So I had to replay the first twenty hours of the game. And then, during this second playthrough, the memory card failed on me again (this kind of thing happened pretty regularly with third-party PS1 memory cards back in the day). I dutifully started up a third playthrough, but playing through the opening three times over just a few days killed my fanboy enthusiasm -- the more I played it, the more apparent the game's weaknesses became -- and I never really got over it. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING Read three books this month: Ross Macdonald's Black Money, a hard-boiled Lew Archer novel which I really enjoyed (but I've enjoyed all of the Lew Archer novels I've read so far, so...yeah), a non-fiction book about the San Francisco underworld (The Barbary Coast, by Herbert Asbury), and Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled, an unconventional sort of modern fantasy, by Frank J. Fleming. I'm going to give Fleming's book three stars, out of five. It started out okay, but it never really came together for me, all the way; most of the characters were forgettable, the ending was disappointing, and the "playful" romantic banter between Terrance and Shannon was so cringey that it actually made me...cringe. But it was a good, honest effort to do something new and fun with the genre (most fantasy takes itself way too seriously) and I appreciated that aspect of it. * * * * * * * * AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR; DEADPOOL 2 I watched these this month; here's some thoughts. Avengers: Infinity War: This was a big, bodacious movie, full of surprises, and overall I thought it came together pretty well. The Russo brothers, who directed this thing (they also directed Civil War) have a knack for assembling/juggling very large casts; there were dozens of characters in this movie and I didn't feel like any of them got short shrift (off the top of my head: Thanos, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, Bruce Banner/the Hulk, Dr. Strange, Wong, Iron Man, Pepper Potts, Spider-Man, Captain America, War Machine, the Falcon, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Winter Soldier, Black Panther, and six Guardians of the Galaxy all appear in this movie; about the only characters who don't appear are Ant-Man and Hawkeye). The single biggest problem with the movie was the fact that it was two and a half hours long. They almost needed this length, to handle all these characters/subplots, but that's just way too long for a movie, for any movie. Another problem: you really need to be up to speed on the MCU for this one to make any sense. I was thinking about showing this movie to my folks, but I'd have to get them through the Guradians of the Galaxy sequel, probably Spider-Man: Homecoming, definitely Dr. Strange, Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther to get them caught up, and most of those movies are mediocre at best. And personally I can't imagine sitting through the whole thing again. There were several other things about the movie that bugged me as well -- Iron Man's armor being practically magical now, Spider-Man's dumb new suit, Black Panther's sister coming across as being smarter than Bruce Banner, the Captain Marvel tease at the end (I think Captain Marvel is stupid) -- but whatever; this movie was a big fat fan letter to the MCU fans, and I'm certainly looking forward to finding out what happens in the sequel. Deadpool 2: Meh. Not bad, but not as good as the first movie. * * * * * * * *
BH
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