The Last Jedi Didn't Break Star Wars. It Broke the Fans

"You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view"  -Obi-Wan Kenobi 

Sacrifice and Morals in Avengers: Infinity War

Well, Marvel has finally done it. In the first installment of their grand crossover, they've gathered the main characters from 9 of their 10 character lines, along with at least one supporting character from each one, and put them all in one movie. As icing on the cake, they even managed to hold it all together into one cohesive story.

Doctor Who Audiobooks: Where to start

A couple weeks ago, my British boss and I were talking about the BBC 4 audio player and I commented on how when I had been traveling in the U.K., I heard audiobooks playing on the radio, which is a rarity in the U.S. without special channels. My boss nodded and replied, "Just like there is nothing like a Hollywood movie, there is nothing like a British audio drama."

I mention this because if you are a Doctor Who fan who has not discovered the DW Audio dramas produced by British company, Big Finish, you are missing out. These are fully cast and scored stories with all the elements of an episode except the visuals. And like any good audio story, they do a great job of compensating for that.

Now when you visit their website, you might initially be overwhelmed by the selection and have no idea where you want to start. Fear not, I'm here to help. Here's an overview of what I think are the best spots to enter, based on my own experiences. Your choices will of course hinge on which Doctor or characters you are interested in exploring. The stories mostly add extra adventures to what we already know, but in some cases, they fill in gaping holes in the mythology that fans have long been curious about.

Marvel Saga

Now that a new Infinity War trailer has dropped and we've all had time to watch it a thousand times, I want to make a commentary on the journey taken with these films. The Marvel Cinematic Universe films have been an unprecedented endeavor and success in so many ways, but the one I really want to focus on is the long form storytelling. They have basically told an epic saga usually only seen in books and serialized television shows, only they've done it in bite sized, self-contained films. The entire films series (disregarding TV shows) follows a giant 3 act structure.

For those of you unaware, a 3 act structure is a story telling formula heavily favored by Hollywood and many other creators. If you don't know what it is, I guarantee you've seen it without knowing it. Here's how it goes.

Rising Sun Review

Sometime last year, a gaming acquaintence of mine referred me to the Kickstarter campaign for Rising Sun. I wasn't really sold on the idea of Kickstarter games. I'm very much a try-before-you-buy type guy. The only game I had contributed to at that point was the Sentinels of the Multiverse: OblivAeon campaign, which was a mostly known quantity since it was the final expansion of a game I loved. Still, out of polite curiosity, I checked out the Rising Sun game. I was not prepared for how unspeakable awesome their video was.

Concerning Lightsabers, part 2: Style and Design

As I was playing around with my Kyberlight saber, trying to find the ideal design for dueling, I came to a horrifying realization. All the possible combos follow the same general principles and are essentially different "skins" of the same weapon. Furthermore, that weapon doesn't match the sword style I was trained in. In other words, I had the wrong tool for the job.

I had noticed a varying degree of hilt design when I was shopping for a lightsaber, but I hadn't realized how important those differences are to sword style. My own indecision is what attracted me to Kyberlight in the first place, but those sabers follow a single hilt pattern, with mostly superficial differences with the various parts. Let's take a look at the structure behind Kyberlight's design.

No matter which configuration you make, every Kyberlight saber has an a handgrip located evenly between both ends, an activation switch in the upper half, and a big pommel.

My Journey Into Swordcraft

The Gift 

2017 was very troubled in the political realm, but for me, it was a period of a big change as I dived headfirst into the world of sword sports. Now, with a year of training in kendo, iaido, and a dabbling in a few others, I can say with certainty my life has charted a whole new course.

It started Christmas 2016. Trump's election was over a month behind us and everyone was pretty much past the shock. That said, I was miserable for an entirely different reason. I was struck down by food poisoning; the really bad kind that laid me up for 3 days and ended with a trip to the ER. I managed to regain enough strength by Christmas Day, but it was a rough road getting there. The one upside was I ate very little during that period, so I didn't put on any holiday weight. In fact I lost some to dehydration. 

While opening gifts, I recieved a rather unexpected one from my little sister; an umbrella with a katana handle. I was surprised but still excited at the coolness. Up until then, I had expressed very little interest in Japanese swordsmanship. I had offhandedly mentioned 'samurai' in a game of Mad Libs earlier, and played the Onimusha games in high school, but that was it. The umbrella was one of those gifts that I didn't know I really wanted. You might be thinking, "ah ha that's when you decided to take kendo" but no, not quite. That happened about a week later when New Year's rolled around. 

The katana umbrella

I always make New Years resolutions and they're often very personal and specific. Things like reading particular books, finishing projects, etc. I'd say, optimistically, I have about a 30-40% success rate on fulfilling them. Since weight loss was no longer an immediate issue, for January 2017 I resolved simply to "try more things." I felt I'd fallen into a bit of a rut of spending most of my free time on Netflix binges and video games, so I wanted to branch out a bit. As I considered what things to try, my thoughts returned to the katana umbrella. 

Nitpicky Details in The Last Jedi

This is the second part of my review of The Last Jedi. This focuses on really nitpicky details that kinda bring things down for me. Now you might be rolling your eyes and asking "why can't you just relax and enjoy the film." Well, other movies have not gotten any slack for similar issues. Everyone gave Prometheus crap because the map guy got lost. No one gave Jurassic World a pass when Bryce Dallas Howard ran away from a T-Rex in high heels. Even the iconic A New Hope has never lived down the 12 parsecs line. I do have a certain tolerance for these things. Sometimes you can let them slide, sometimes they bring down the film. In my opinion, both as a Star Wars fan and a storyteller, I can't let them all go. Not only are they numerous, but they make it seem like everyone in the film is an idiot and the only reason the plot moves at all is because someone does something stupid. Anyway, you can decide how much these things bother you. I can't most of them go because they're so inexorably linked to the plot.