Walking Dead

Walking Dead

Season 6 (second half) premiered last night so that was a cue for me to write about my favorite show on TV. It looks like the ratings have slipped from the #1 scripted show in the U.S. to somewhere in the top five. It is still the only top scripted show that will take on Sunday night football which is why it is probably not the #1 rated show; nothing can compete with the NFL and win. Still, I think AMC has a good strategy: start a show about the zombie apocalypse around Halloween and finish before Christmas, then start the second half of the season the week after the Superbowl. And of course as soon as the second half of the season ends, Game of Thrones starts in the same timeslot (currently, that's my second favorite show).

In case you don't know, the Walking Dead is about the aftermath of the illness turning all dead and infected people into zombies. The writing agrees with Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes that Mankind is essentially evil. The zombies are not the monsters, they are merely a force of nature that must be endured, the same as a hurricane or drought. It is the remaining humans that are the monsters (see first picture, "Fight the dead, Fear the living"). Normal people have lost their way after the fall of civilization. The weak become the strong and the outcasts become heroes. Like in season one where the doctors had given up or left to save themselves, while gang members took over an Atlanta hospice to take care of the elderly.

Time and time again, the show demonstrates that, in this world, all hope is lost. There is no safety in the cities, the farms, fortified locations, communities, or anywhere else. There is always someone to take everything you have.

There are many characters and the show loves to kill them off as much as introduce them.

Michonne and her "pet walkers"

The Governor and his zombie head trophies

Interestingly enough, it looks like the former battered-wife, Carol has the highest body count of any of the main characters. Not the most zombies, but the most people. Since the Governor was killed and Carol's sacking of Terminus she'll have the most kills until Negan gets introduced as a character. It is about time for another "bad guy".


This is a good action/horror show that is actually tamed down compared to the graphic novels. I'm looking forward to the new episodes and then Game of Thrones. Comparing the two shows, even though Game of Thrones is ultra-violent, I'd say Walking Dead has much more violence and none of the sex. I guess that is America's style compared to Europe's:  more violence, less sex.


We'll see what happens next. Spoiler alert:

CowboyStudio Photography Tent

CowboyStudio Photography Tent


I guess my new hobby is selling stuff on eBay. I'll probably post more on that some other time. Of course the key to selling things on the internet is pictures! I was having issues with glare, background noise (visually), lighting, and set up. My previous method for pictures was to photograph them on a white piece of foam board. It wasn't the best and I would have to crop every photo to make the background uniform because the board wasn't big enough to take a photo at the angle I wanted without seeing some other part of the house.

Someone saw the troubles I was having and got me the CowboyStudio Photography tent. It also came in a kit with lights and stands but for double the price. Instead, I got two, $10 workshop lights from Wal-Mart and some bulbs from the garage to finish my kit.

OK, you can see that there were some lighting issues to work out at first. The photos of the notecards were taken with incandescent lighting and the photo of the keychain was taken with florescent lighting but I was playing with the height and angle of the lighting. I retook the shots when I felt the lighting was right.



I also tried to iron out the wrinkles from the nylon background but not all of them came out. I didn't want to set the iron too hot and burn my background before I could even use it. So far, the photography tent is working well, even with a point and shoot camera or cell phone camera.

To do:  take out the wrinkles in the background and I need to figure out how to do an overhead shot with this tent.

DeadPool

DEADPOOL


 




So Deadpool opened at the movie theaters this weekend much to the delight of teenage boys across the English-speaking world (it was banned in China). Of course I went to see it and of course I wore a comic book t-shirt. I took advantage of having Friday off and saw it during the day before the teenagers came.


This isn't a movie review, but I liked it. Comparing it to recent movies, it was better than Spectre but not as good as Star Wars VII, I still haven't seen The Revenant so I can't make that comparison. Although a better comparison would be Ant-Man to Deadpool. Both star comedians as super-heroes but have vastly different styles of humor. So Deadpool would be more like a South Park style super hero movie versus the other, family friendly Marvel movies. It took Ryan Reynolds producing to get a movie where Ryan Reynolds could be as disgusting and sarcastic as he wanted to be.


Apparently all of the teenagers showed up for this one too because it broke the record for best opening over the President's Day weekend and best opening for an R-rated movie beating out Matrix Reloaded which had the previous record.

Regrets:
Yes, as it relates to Deadpool, I remember seeing the comic where he first appeared, New Mutants 98, on the rack at the store in 1991. Around that time, I had bought New Mutants 96 and 100 but not 98. The price was $1.00 back then and today it would have been worth $200-500 depending on how well I kept it. Instead, I'm sure I bought some sort of Spider-Man, Punisher, Ghost Rider, or X-Men book instead with my $1.00. But when you are a kid, you have to make those choices. Who knows, maybe I spent it at the arcade.


Update:
OK, I just checked releases for February 1991. I think I ended up getting Amazing Spider-Man 344 which was the first appearance of Cletus Cassidy who became Carnage, so I didn't completely waste my $1.00....but I think I also got a Web of Spider-Man and a Ghost Rider (doh!). I should have also gotten Silver Surfer 46 for the build up towards the Infinity Gauntlet series. I'm looking forward to that movie too.

Gaming

Video Games

 

OK, so what do I do in some of my free time? Once or twice a week, usually on days off, after the day is over I will play video games. I’m a console gamer and I have a Playstation 4 right now. Since 2008 I’ve only played first-person shooter games. We had a Wii when that came out but I haven’t played it much since. I don’t have a lot of free time to switch between games and I only play multi-player against live opponents so I stick with first-person shooter games. I also don’t like playing with friends in “parties” or with clans because there is too much idle time waiting on other people to get ready or schedule time to play. I only have a short period of time each week to play so I won’t wait for anyone else to get ready. I just jump in the online shooter frag-fest as a lone wolf. I also have no time for the campaign portion of the first-person shooter games unless the internet goes out, so I play multi-player exclusively.

I had been loyal to the Call of Duty games since World at War released in 2008. That was the first game that I played against live competition. That is when I really got into Call of Duty. Also included in that game was Nacht Der Untoten AKA Nazi Zombies which created an entirely new kind of survival game craze and, I think, had a lot to do with the rise of zombie-everything in pop culture movies, TV, comics, games, art, etc. (just like vampires in the 1990s).

 

Of course by 2008 everyone was getting a little tired of the World War II shooter games especially with the recent release of Modern Warfare. I liked the Modern Warfare games too. Now every first-person shooter game is coming out with some sort of ray gun or futuristic pulse cannon set in the future. I must be too old for these games now. I liked the older games because they were grounded in history. I’ve held or shot an M1 Garand, Thompson, M-4, M-16, AK-47, and other types of weapons used in those games. Now, they use the same coding for an AK-47 but put a different skin on it to make it look like a ray gun and make a battery pack for it instead of a magazine. OK, I can live with that and pretend to be in the future. What killed it for me was Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. I hate the exo suit and refused to play in anything but classic mode where the exo didn’t work. I suppose all of the jumping around and flying suits are the future of games. I hate it. I stopped playing multiplayer altogether and just played the newest version of Zombies that came with the game starring John Malkovich, Bill Paxton and crew.

 

So 2015 comes and there were a lot of choices. 

Star Wars: Battlefront

 

I went with Battlefront. I always like anything Star Wars and Call of Duty was becoming too complicated. There was way too much in each phase of the game for a casual player like me. I got Battlefront as my 2016 game to play. Apparently it was designed for intermediate players or as another game to play for most people. What it lacks in complication, it has in graphics. There isn’t another game that can compete with the graphics. In nearly every map, there is an entire story going on in the background.

I wanted Battlefront because it wasn’t just a first-person shooter game, but had the aircraft dog-fight modes as well. I’ve been looking for a good spaceship game since the all-time classic X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter back in the days before we had the internet to play on. Battlefront has no killstreaks which I have gotten used to now. I am free to run around and not worry about staying alive for one more kill before I can get a reward. The guns fire lasers but it still feels normal because we have seen those guns/blasters since Star Wars came out. The guns are weak though. The one-shot kill weapons are cumbersome and most every gun takes three hits to take someone down. I do like the Walker Assault mode which I play more than anything. I like being able to fly aircraft, play as infantry, operate armored cavalry, or play as a special character in each match. Walker Assault is also a better objective game than what other shooter games have because it combines a variety of objective based game modes into one huge game.

The last DLC for Battlefront comes out in early 2017 and I imagine that the next Star Wars Battlefront will be out in late 2017. That one should be even better and take it one level up. It is good now, it just needs a little more.