Category: Reading

Don’t Watch Hemlock Grove

Throughout April, The Wife and I watched a show called The Killing on Netflix. It is an excellent crime drama with a fun twist: the entire two-season run focuses on a single case. My initial thought was that stretching one investigation over 20-something episodes would make the show too slow and repetitive, but I was so wrong. There were no filler episodes; each one offered something pertinent to either the case or character development. It wasn’t perfect but god damn if that thing did not have me absolutely hooked by the end. And the ending! Oh, that ending. Powerful, powerful stuff.

So after that, I was thirsting for something similar. I have never been big on the television crime drama, but The Killing left a very good taste in my mouth. So when Netflix started advertising for their upcoming exclusive series called Hemlock Grove, my interest was piqued. Here, take a look at the description pilfered directly from Netflix:

When the mangled corpse of a local teenager is discovered, rumor and suspicion spread like a plague through Hemlock Grove. As dark secrets bubble to the surface, everyone becomes a suspect in the hunt for a monster that may be hiding in plain sight.

Hey! That sounds exactly like what I’m looking for! Seriously, if you replace ‘Hemlock Grove’ with ‘Seatlle’ that could (very) loosely describe The Killing as well. If only I could go back to a couple weeks ago and tell my past self that no, oh sweet crepes no, it is not what you’re looking for.

 

The Netflix poster/cover thing for Hemlock Grove is a hand protruding from the mouth of a wolf. I figured that it was more symbolic than anything, especially since the O in Hemlock is stylized as a snake eating it’s own tail, as in the Ouroboros symbol. So, “okay,” I thought, “this seems fairly deep and rooted in some sort of mythology so I am so in.”

Yeah, it didn’t turn out that way. I won’t spoil too much, but Hemlock Grove is kinda like what would happen if Twilight took off the kid gloves. So it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess, but at least it’s an awful, stupid, confusing mess that shows boobs pretty often.

Basically what goes down is that this chick gets killed -disemboweled “snatch-first”- and two teenage loners decide that they want to investigate the murder. One (Roman) is a rich pretty boy who’s got a blood fetish and can do the Jedi mind trick. The other (Peter) is a Gypsy that just moved into town and people just assume that he’s a werewolf for no real reason. Apparently there is some sort of vague enmity between their families (this is only barely touched upon in the final episode) but they bond pretty quickly. Which becomes somewhat problematic for the viewer.

The chemistry between these two is one of the more aggravating parts of the show. Roman has his way with all the ladies and Peter develops a pretty serious relationship with a girl throughout the series, but they are so impossibly gay for each other it hurts. I don’t know if maybe it was written that way on purpose or the actors just don’t understand body language, but they are constantly giving each other the look and spouting off gay innuendo but nothing ever comes of it. There is so much more unresolved crap in this show, but the sexual tension between these two is thick enough to bludgeon someone to death and if the two of them had just admitted their true feelings and gotten their queer on, I’d have been satisfied enough to not demand my thirteen hours back.

The very, very worst part is that the best, most sympathetic character, Roman’s sister Shelley, ends up just being a deus ex machina. It is infuriating and whyyyyyy do we not spend more time getting to know Shelley? All she is over the course of the series is the sheltered girl who’s pretty much Frankenstein’s monster less the neck bolts and sometimes she glows blue for no well-defined reason. I don’t really know about that last one, I fell asleep during the episode where I’m guessing that maybe they explained her backstory. But rather than have her slow growth towards independence mean anything, it just turns her into a big ol’ plot device out of nowhere. It is infuriating.

As for the other unresolved crap.. well, I guess the show answers the main questions, those being “who is eating all these vaginas?” and “why is someone eating all these vaginas?” but not a single one of the character arcs comes to a satisfying conclusion. Every member of Peter’s family has some sort of supernatural quirk about them, but not a one of them gets any real explanation. His mom sort of gets some backstory at the end, but even that isn’t enough to explain really anything at all outside of why she’s so damn frigid. It really confuses more than it enlightens. I guess the best way to explain it is that the show tries to frantically wrap up a handful of loose ends in the last episode rather than let the resolutions work themselves out naturally over the course of the series. It would make a much better payoff to have some sort of revelation during or at the end of each episode, rather than just adding a bunch more questions onto the pile. You know, like LOST. LOST was pretty great.

Side note: There is also a cubic buttload of fantasy terminology that is used but never even given context, nevermind outright explained. So if the words Upir and Vargulf and Ouroboros don’t mean anything to you (and they probably don’t unless you’re some kinda goth douche), you might want to keep your smartphone next to you while watching. You know, so you can Google some of the wacky fantasy garbage. Actually, Ouroboros is friggin everywhere in the show, but isn’t really all that meaningful in the context of the show. It sort of represents one character’s major development (at the very end), and is also the name for a big science project that we never learn a damn thing about. HEMLOCK GROOOOVE!! *fist shaking*

I suppose the “silver lining” here is that Hemlock Grove is based on a book, which is the first in a trilogy. So maybe some day its insanity will all work itself out, but really, that’s not the point. The point is that this first season of the Hemlock Grove TV show is deeply disappointing outside of some pretty gnarly gore effects. I guess two or three of the characters could have been pretty likeable too if they had gotten anything resembling real character development but oh well. Mostly every character who isn’t Roman or Peter or Shelley is a straight-up douchebag or a babbling idiot (sometimes both!), so why should I even care?

 

TLDR: Don’t waste your time on Hemlock Grove. Read a plot synopsis or something if you’ve got a burning desire to know what it’s about. Hopefully the writer will add some supplemental information, because that’s the only way any of this garbage is going to make sense.

100% completion

I bought the final issue of Nintendo Power this week, and began flipping through it an hour ago. You know how they say that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes? Well, I had a feeling that I can only describe like that: going through the pages, looking at the features on the history of Nintendo Power, scanning the included poster that features the cover of every issue, it was like looking back through a summary of my entire life. It was beautiful and chilling at the same time.

Is it sad that I can trace my life through a series of 285 magazines? I haven’t even read them all, but you could pick almost any point in my life and I could tell you what I was reading about in Nintendo Power at that time, within roughly two months. I haven’t been a subscriber for a few years now, but I always made a point to pick up an issue every few months for the sake of tradition, if nothing else. the worst part of it all is that a couple years ago I actually offloaded my entire NP collection, and now that the nostalgia bug is biting, it’s killing me that I don’t have them to go back to and reminisce with. I’d kill for a complete set, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it would be the same if it wasn’t my collection. Sure, pretty much every issue I had before volume 92 (Yes, I know that specifically. It’s the Shadows of the Empire issue. I got the Dash Rendar cover.) was in tatters, but I guess that’s part of what made them so special to me, weird as it may be. All the articles would be the same, but it just wouldn’t be the same. You know what I mean?

And now that I’m thinking about it, I actually have Amazon open in another tab, seeing how much people are charging for their old issues. As long as you’re not looking for mint copies, the average asking price seems to be around $3, which would cost me roughly… $855. Before Shipping. Yeah, I need to get away from Amazon. Now. Not to mention the time it would take to order each one individually… Also issue #1 doesn’t go for any less than $200. Drat. I certainly don’t have that kind of cash.

Anyway, reading this magazine has simultaneously made me sad and filled me with warm fuzzies. I kind of hate nostalgia because it affects me so strongly. I’m going to be mopey about the loss of Nintendo Power for weeks now. The worst part is that recent Nintendo Power hasn’t really been the Nintendo Power that I grew up with. It’s a completely different magazine than it was even midway through its run, but I still loved it dearly. Checking the mail every single day when a new month rolled around. Absorbing each and every word printed between the covers -twice- the day it finally arrived. Reading that three-part Secret of Mana feature over and over and over again. Poring over the maps and strategies so that I knew games inside and out before even playing them. There are a handful of games to this day that I’ve never played but vividly remember because I soaked in so much information about them via the pages of Nintendo Power. It was a huge part of my childhood life, but I suppose all good things have to come to an end eventually.

I’m just glad that they did up one final Nester comic for the last issue. It’s the best sendoff the magazine could have hoped for.

NaNoFailMo

So there’s a very slim chance that you’ve noticed that I haven’t blogged at all in the month of November. 90% of that is because I have nothing to blog about. Most days I go home from work, have dinner with my wife, and then play Skyrim or Pokémon White 2 until sleeping time. It’s a simple existence, and one that I wouldn’t give up, but it doesn’t lend itself too well to writing.

The other thing that’s keeping me from blogging is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, if you need it spelled out. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s a “contest” that challenges everyone who signs up to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I signed up on a whim this year, and currently… well, here’s a printscreen of my statistics page.

Yup, we’re just about halfway through the month and I’ve barely even started. I only even have any words at all because yesterday I decided to slap some words down on a page so that at least I could say I tried.

The truth of it all is that I don’t have anything to write about. I had a story idea before I started, but the more I think about it, the stupider it seems and the more I hate it. Anything else I even try to get off the ground ends up being derivative and boring. I don’t really want to write a novel, I just liked toying with the idea that I could.

So how does this tie into blogging? Mostly because every time I open WordPress I feel the guilty pangs, reminding me that if I’m writing, it should be my novel. Then I decide I don’t want to do that and navigate far, far away from WordPress.

That said, maybe things will pick up in December.

A post full of thoughts in no logical order

Wow, its been a while since my last post. Not a record by far, but almost two weeks is a long time in the current TE era. I’ve been pretty good about slapping something up every few days for some time now, even if it’s just a dumb photo that I found entertaining for a few fleeting moments.

In an effort to start getting though my gigantic backlog of books – Wait what? Books? Yes books. I have a lot of them, but I haven’t read most of them. Anyway, I’ve decided I want to read more, so this week I’ve been making an honest effort to always have a book with me on the bus. Whether I’ll keep going once I’ve finished my current book, I don’t know, but here’s hoping!

The lack of blogging around these parts can be attributed mostly entirely to Pokémon White 2. Obviously. I blame Game Freak for working in a rather extensive achievement system. For every objective you clear, you’re presented with a medal, and when you get so many medals, you get a rank up. It’s not actually deeper than Xbox achievements or PS3 trophies, but the fact that the game makes such a big deal out of the medals makes them that much more appealing to collect. Too bad some of the requirements are completely ludicrous. Check out the list here.

I’ve been working on a big new post over the last little while. I think it’s going to end up being this month’s article, if just to fill the hole. Unfortunately, it is about video games. But it’s a little different in that it’s something of a history lesson with a little review packaged in for those interested. I don’t know. It’s not something I care about enough to link to on my Facebook page or anything, but it’ll have to do.

I’ve been reading Monster Planet this week, the last of a trilogy whose first two parts I’ve already talked about at length. I said that I thought Island and Nation would make great movies, because both of them are pretty briskly-paced and feature a fairly original take on the zombie genre. However, Planet takes it up to eleven and goes into full-blown crazypants video game territory. Now, instead of the occasional smart zombie who can control the mindless masses of undead, there is a whole cadre of liches, each with a unique magic power. It’s gotten kinda ridiculous, but I’m already two-and-a-third books deep, might as well git ‘r done. Full write-up coming soon!

Speaking of spooky things and video games, I’ve begun playing Silent Hill 2 again to half-assedly get into the spirit of Halloween. I thought I was going to do it right this time, playing alone in the dark, but I messed that up. Since I’m playing the HD Collection edition, my experience is being totally controlled by achievements, and as such my current playthrough has been paired with some extensive map-making and step-by-step instructions on how to get through the game as quickly as possible. At the very least, by the time I’m done with it, I’ll have become a master of the game.

I borrowed my brother’s copy of Cubivore to round out my October gaming palette. While the camera is awful and the overall experience is a little shallower than I’d hoped, I think it’s good enough to slake my thirst for Tokyo Jungle. For now.

Have you watched the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon yet? It’s fairly good! Not quite as good as the new TMNT comic series, but it’s definitely worth watching. I will admit that I’m a little disappointed that its demographic skews considerably younger than the 2003 TMNT series. I blame Nickelodeon. Though I suppose the best way to revive a franchise is to make sure it’s what all the li’l kids want for Christmas. A world where Turtles are plastered on every damn thing again would be a world I’d love to live in.

Xbox Minecraft got a big update recently, which is enticing. The price didn’t get cut though, so I’m still not buyin’ it.

I’m bad at getting into the Halloween spirit. I haven’t watched a single cheesy 80’s slasher flick yet. I feel like I’m failing pretty hardcore as a nerd. The Wife is forcing me to take her to Paranormal Activity 4 this weekend though, so I guess that’s at least one “scary” movie for the season. I just have trouble committing myself to 90-120 minutes of uninterrupted watching.

I don’t have nearly as much trouble watching TV or Let’s Play videos. Over the last two weeks I have watched both seasons of Better Off Ted, most of Arrested Development‘s second season, and Brickroad’s Metal Gear LP. Ted is… well, it’s okay. I enjoyed it as much as I did because it co-stars Portia de Rossi and Andrea Anders, both of whom I find very funny. The list of actresses (or even actors, it’s not a sexist thing) I really like is pretty short, but those two are definitely on it. It should be obvious that I much prefer comediennes to “serious” actresses. I also love the way de Rossi pronounces the word “anything.”

I don’t think there’s anything else relevant I can say so that I can add another tag to this post.

Oh, wait! New Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate trailer? Oh Hells yes!

Ryan ANGRY!

I was casually skimming the Globe and Mail at work yesterday, when I saw a tagline that had “Sherlock Holmes” and “mommy porn” in the same sentence. I needed to read whatever caused that. Frankly, I was also a little surprised that the universe hadn’t been ripped asunder by such a contrast of ideas.

What I found was this article. What a horrid, horrid thing. If you don’t want to read it, the idea is that some jerkoff is plugging sex scenes into classic literature. Yeah, take a moment to digest that, and then come join me in finding and lynching this dude and whoever is funding him.

This is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. And the worst part is that the article’s author defends this abhorrent practice. He justifies it by suggesting that all throughout history we’ve re-writeen stories to better suit our needs. Yes, Disney retooled The Little Mermaid so that kids could enjoy it. They did that because the original is a horrifying and gruesome story. They pretty much changed it entirely. They made it accessible. What Total E-Bound is doing here would be like if Disney had just stuck a song and dance number into the original Little Mermaid. Shoehorning something into a piece of work that it doesn’t belong in is not something to be championed. Nevermind the fact that this butthole is turning Sherlock Holmes gay. Stop changing established characters! It’s not that I even have an issue with gayness in general, it’s just if I’m reading a Sherlock Holmes story and he starts spankin’ it to thoughts of Watson, I’m going to stop reading Sherlock Holmes.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the article’s author suggests that it’s okay because fan fiction has been doing it for decades. Well, I guess then that these books will just be discredited and the “author” of the sex content derided. I’m sorry, but nobody takes fan fiction seriously, and everybody makes fun of fan fiction writers (with the possible exception of other fanfic writers). Did you just completely miss the internet?

If you want to sell classic literature to a new audience, market it to that audience. Don’t smut it up in hopes of enticing the lowest common denominator. I’ve never read Jane Eyre, but Sherlock Holmes stories are intelligent and exciting enough to stand on their own. The series didn’t need homoerotic fantasies to become a classic, it damn well doesn’t need them to maintain that status.

Also, anyone who uses the term “mommy porn” without any hint of irony or sarcasm needs to be smacked. Hard.

(It does delight me to some extent that The Wife is even more pissed off about this than I am. Being that she’s a huge bookworm, I shouldn’t have been surprised.)

Mass Review Time – Honeymoon Edition

Internet, I have a problem. I’m addicted to Fargo.

Maybe it’s not so bad as addiction, but the summer trip south to Fargo has become a tradition that I can surely not break free of. I need it. I need it so bad that I managed to convince my now-wife that it’s where we should spend our honeymoon. So maybe it is bordering on addiction. I’m not a psychiatrist, I don’t know these things. Surely there’s a better way I could have started this article.

As usual, the trip was mostly to get away, relax, and just be together for a few days. And from what I’m told, that’s mostly what a honeymoon is about too. So to that end the voyage was perfectly successful. Of course we also spent a buttload of money. Like, way more money than we were even allowed to spend while down there. By some random stroke of luck, the amount you’re allowed to spend when crossing the border increased on the day we came home, so we didn’t have to pay duty on what we spent over the previous limit. It’s the first time crossing the border was a truly pleasant experience.

To that end, I should note that this is by no means a complete list of things I bought in the States. I’ve obviously excluded anything The Wife bought, because this website is about me me me me me and God forbid I give anyone else more than a passing mention. I also spend a bit on a few little house things and some clothes that I don’t feel are nearly interesting enough to write about. On that note, let’s take a look at exactly what I judge to be “interesting.”

Continue reading Mass Review Time – Honeymoon Edition

Terrible Lizard Nosferatu

Do you remember -it’s been almost ten years now- how when I started this website I was really really into X-Entertainment? Like, that’s the reason I started doing this thing in the first place? Well I was. It seems like just the other week I was staying up all night long reading about Pokémon episodes and mantis shrimp. Oh, those were good times. And then Matt stopped writing articles and started blogging. Which is exactly what I did. Only I stopped reading X-E all the time long before I turned blog, so that likeness was unintentional. I think. It’s been a long time.

Anyway, Matt’s abandoned X-E, leaving the site up for savvy scavengers to poke through in an attmpt to find the stuff from the good ol’ days. But he’s not out of the game yet. No, in fact he just launched a new website that is pretty much what X-E was about six years ago. It’s called Dinosaur Dracula and it is fantastic. Mostly fantastic. It’s still pretty blog-heavy, but at least he’s still writing full features. Sometimes there are video blogs too. I’ve only watched one of the vlogs, but… ouch. Matt’s genius seems to be exclusive to written work. Apparently those were A Thing on X-E too, but since I stopped reading X-E at all around late 2007, I never saw a one of them.

I’m looking forward to following DinoDrac in the future, but it really makes me wish that Matt would go back (or pay someone else to go back) and put all the old X-E stuff into a neat little database so that I could read the old articles again and mabye sift through the more substantial stuff I missed. Of course, I no longer have empty weeks that I can use to just browse through one man’s thoughts on Batman cereal and McDonald’s placemats, so it’s really pipe dream any way you look at it. Ah, how I miss being unemployed.

Anyway, don’t go thinking that I’mma be starting up a new site that’s re-focused on features too. At least not yet. I’m still working on this WordPress thing. As much as I miss having custom page layouts for every article and being really excited about each an every terrible thing I published, I like it the way things are now. It may be a slightly different delivery system, but the idea is the same: sharing the things I like with the internet (and sometimes the things I don’t like).

What I’m really trying to get around to saying here is: go check out Dinosaur Dracula. It’s like nostalgia about nostalgia, and I can really dig on that.

Zombie-esque

I finished reading Monster Nation a while ago. I’ve got to say that while I didn’t really get into it right away, it did a really good job of picking up steam as it went on. It’s not a huge book, so it’s a little sad that it took me the better part of a month to get through. But you know, video games.

Anyway, it’s a super awesome zombie novel, and a prequel to Monster Island, which I read years and years ago. Being that it belongs in the same series, it explores the initial outbreak of what is referred to as The Epidemic. It also takes a different view on the thing that differentiated Island from most other zombie media: people who manage to retain their minds after zombification.

The series explains the ability to be dead but not a zombie by keeping the characters in question hooked up to machines that keep oxygen pumping to their brains. Gary, the not-zombie from Island, was a med student who hooked himself up to a ventilator and then jumped into a tub filled with ice. Nilla, Nation‘s sort-of-zombie, stumbled into an oxygen bar and put a mask on after she was bitten. The second scenario seems a little less likely to have worked, but whatever. They’re zombie novels, I’m not going to pick at what’s medically plausible and what isn’t.

I’ll summarize before the spoiler line, just so nobody has to venture in to read my full impressions: I enjoyed Monster Nation at least as much as its forebear. Maybe even more. I’ve said it to everyone I’ve ever told about these books: They need to be turned into movies! For the hundreds of crappy zombie movies that get made every year, don’t we deserve at least two (probably) exceptional ones?

SPOILER ZONE! Don’t go any farther if you’re actually interested in reading these books.

Okay, back to my previous train of thought…

They may not been seen as such, but the real main characters of these books are the zombie-esque characters. Gary and Nilla are handled very differently, and as such are two entirely unique, compelling characters that share the same unfortunate condition. Gary gets pissed off when he gets shot by one of Island‘s protagonists and uses dark zombie magic to lead the braindead zombies and become their zombie emperor. Nilla, though she suffers just as much, tries her damnedest to stay on the side of humanity. Of course, she ends up waffling a bit, but who wouldn’t? People hate you, and you have awesome zombie powers. Are you really not going to eat a few of ’em? Anyway, the ending leaves her story open, so I’m hoping she gets picked back up in Monster Planet, the final book in the trilogy. Nilla is a much cooler and more complex character than any of the others in Nation. Plus, she’s the only major character that survives. Well… sort of.

Both novels deal with magical stuff, and I read most of the second half of Island with a cocked eyebrow (Telepathic Scottish bog mummy. ‘Nuff said), it all kinda came together once Nation finally reveals the source of The Epidemic. In the end it was just a dude trying to save his dying wife from cancer by essentially tearing a huge gash in the world’s life force reservoir. Turns out the road to Hell on Earth really is paved with good intentions. I really like when stories use the “to save a loved one” plot device, because it’s absolutely something I can sympathize with. No, I’ve never had to watch someone I love die, but I’m pretty sure that in that such a situation I’d do everything in my power to save them. I’m terrible at coping with loss, and I could definitely see myself ripping space-time (or whatever) a new one if I were placed in the situation presented. I am the crazy dude who would sacrifice the world for one woman.

It’s a tragic ending. You’ve got this one man, who brought about the destruction of the world just to save his wife, and he wasn’t even really able to do that. Yes, he kept her alive, but at the cost of turning her into a horrifying tumour beast. Not much of an existence. And then Nilla… Well, that part I don’t want to spoil. Let’s just say she gets a little angry when she learns that it is physically impossible to save the world.