Hating Women Characters is OK!

I've been reading some articles recently on I09 and elsewhere about how people hate certain female characters, and how it seems to be the "strong, independent" female characters people hate.  Examples are usually Skylar White from Breaking Bad or Lori Grimes from The Walking Dead.  There's a clear subtext that it's because of sexism, though...

Courage

I mentioned in one of my Marcon posts that "my people", the geeks and nerds of the world, are a strange and often frail stock.  They are often unattractive due to medical issues or simply losing at the genetic lotto.  They often have no fashion sense.  No, wait, that's wrong - they have a DIFFERENT...

The Magical Child trope needs to die for a few decades

It may have started with the second V series, the 1980s sci-fi miniseries that introduced as part of its story line a human/alien hybrid child.  At the end of the second miniseries, the child had "magic powers" and used them to stop the aliens.  This was, for me, the first time I encountered the Magical...

The heroine of The Hunger Games is named Katniss? Really?

I haven't read The Hunger Games books, nor have I seen the movie. I could be all hip and say I read the books when they were originally called The Running Man or The Long Walk by Stephen King, or saw the movie when it was called Battle Royale and was Japanese, but to be...

Why Mass Effect 3’s ending makes me mad

SPOILERS AHEAD.  Seriously, if you want to play any of the Mass Effect games with no spoilers, do not continue to read this post. O.k., you were warned... I just finished Mass Effect 3 this weekend and five minutes afterward I was online looking to see how many other people hated the ending.  I say...

It’s not what kills you, but what you can survive that defines horror

Let's call this the Law of Pain: nothing that outright kills you is as scary as something that leaves you alive in a state that might as well be death. I was watching movies this weekend and playing a little LA Noire (great game, by the way) when I realized something: things that just kill...

Baptism for the dead – this would make a killer horror movie

You may or may not have heard about the controversial ritual that Mormons have been practicing for a while that "baptizes" dead folks by proxy.  The controversy stems from the fact that they were doing this with Holocaust victims, and some folks had a problem with that.  It was mostly taken care of in the...

Some things I’ll never understand about Marvel Comics

I have been an avid reader of Marvel Comics since I was a young boy.  I think the first comic book I ever owned was Spider-Man, and my teenage years were absolutely dominated by a love for all things X (of course, back then that meant X-Men, New Mutants, X-Factor and Excalibur only).   Even...

Refuting the Marshmallow Challenge

Last week, as part of a team-building exercise, my boss had our department do the Marshmallow Challenge.  For those unfamiliar, the Marshmallow Challenge is the most recent in a long line of idiotic business "games" designed to demonstrate some point that most employees readily grasp, but managers seem to be unable to convey without breaking...

A Tale of Two Dexters

It seems fitting that following my comparison of Jack Torrance from The Shining I should move on to another killer (though to be honest, Jack Torrance in the novel/mini-series didn't kill anyone).  Today, therefore, I'm going to take a look at one of my favorite characters and his depiction on screen versus in print.  That's...