Is DC doing Dragon Ball Z?

It has recently occurred to me that the DC cinematic universe is actually Dragon Ball Z. Try to follow me here, first of all, we all know that once it becomes Z, Dragon Ball rips off Superman with Goku also being the last of an alien race that died when his home planet exploded. Earlier on, Toriyama had already done a mroe obvious parody of Superman in Dr. Slump, so we know he was aware, we can't call it a coincidence, Goku is Superman, Superman is Goku. From here, let's look at the DC cinematic universe.

Man of Steel - after years of individually licensed movies, DC finally tries to tell a continuous narrative starting with Superman vs General Zod. General Zod is a villain from Superman's homeworld, and the big fight scene between them is quite obviously replaying Goku vs Vegeta. They had hundreds of villains and plots to work with, but of all options, they went with the one that paralleled the most epic showdown in Dragon Ball Z. This in itself is nothing, but where do they go from here?

Batman vs Superman - This was the movie nobody, not even the fans, saw coming. But in retrospect it becomes a bit more clear that Superman and Batman establishing a rivlary and then cooperating against a common enemy and Superman dying to sacrifice himself to defeat that enemy is a parallel of Goku teaming up with Piccolo against Radditz, and the nature of the final villain as an amalgam monster that was designed to kill Superman parallels Cell. But this is putting the narrative a little out of order, fortunately it gets a bit more on track in the next stage.

Justice League - Superman is brought back to life to stop an even greater enemy, an interplanetary destroyer of worlds named Steppenwolf. The gathering of heroes to fight Steppenwolf seems similar to Goku and friends fighting Frieza, including when the villain threatens to actually rip the planet apart at it's seams like Frieza did to Namek. The only thing missing here is it taking place on another planet.

The next step it would seem to be that Justice League 2 would bring in that guy from the fifth dimension I won't even try to spell. But anyway, my point is that if you want to see a good AMericna live action Dragon Ball movie and you weren't satisfied with Dragonball Evolution, try the DC cinematic universe. In the meantime, Megalobox premieres on Toonami tonight and I posted this because I don't know nearly enough about Megalobox to comment in it before I see it, but I'll get back with review/commentary next week.

NaNoWriMo 2018 and Twitch

If anyone was wondering where I've been for the last month and you didn't check your calendar, it was National Novel Writer's Month and I was busy writing my latest novel Supers. I barely finished it in the last hour of the last day, but I did it!

Supers is a slightly different take on the superhero genre, in this version the super powers are much more limited in variety in accordance with how genetic mutations work. As far as the general public knows, there are only two types of Super, the ones that can fly and have super strength, and one that also has electric powers as well. There's actually a third type that has telekinesis as well, but they are top secret because they are so dangerous that they are all kept hidden away while the known Supers are mostly drafted into the Army National Guard and work for the police as their day job when the militay doesn't need them otherwise. Of course, there are Supers that become villains, and the Super police deal with them, so crime fighting is basically just standard police procedure with flight risk taking on a new meaning.

The story focuses mainly on Nicholas "Sparky" Franklin, the one known case of electric powers who went to MIT and became a psychologist after being their experiment for years. At age twenty-six he is reunited with his childhood friend Amber Skye who got taken away with the rest when they work at the NYPD under Captain Steve Murica. In their first few days together, they meet Ray Jackson, Hope Freeman, and Lung Yang, three Supers that managed to hide from the draft only to get caught in adulthood. The story largely follows how the six of them learn to get along basd on the one thing they have in common, being Supers in New York City. The climax of the story is when some top secret special Supers break free and cause trouble which falls on the team of six to handle together.

Hopefully I will finish editing this in time to release by the spring of next year. In the mean time, now that I got through a month of marathon writing, I want to relax and play some games which I will broadcast on Twitch. I really want to finish Dragon Quest Builders and Final Fantasy XV Comrades while there are some DLC that may be fun to try and Uncharted 4 that came with my PS4 and I'd really like to get through these in the next few months before I rededicate myself to editing Supers, then going back to writing the sequel to 7th Moon and getting back into Dissidia before the next tournament, if there is one. Because of my hectic schedule including my day job, this is all going to be random with no schedule at all, so just know that I intend to play four games that will broadcast on Twitch whenever...

Flower City Comic (Mini) Con

This is a new one, the Flower City Comic Con is doing a mini-con, which I've never really heard of, I don't know what a mini-con is, and they haven't told me much, but I know this much, it will be happening at Greece Ridge Center Mall, which may be the closest possible venue to my home, and I signed up to sell my books, which got accepted so I don't really know what else will be going on around me, but I will be sitting there selling books all day both days, so if anyone wants to come along and buy a book or two, or all six of what I've published so far, if you happen to be in the area, please come by. Admission is free so just come on in. There will be a costume contest, a scavenger hunt, free comic books, and one of the cast members of the Walking Dead. I seriously don'tknow how this will work, but I'm still pretty excited about it, so Rochester fans please come by. As for everyone else, I will be posting pics afterwards so you can look forwad to the report then.

That's all for this week folks, I'm really busy getting ready for all that next week.

Mobius Final Fantasy, the end is the beginning

Recently I finished Mobius Final Fantasy, which is to say the main story, not counting all the extra crazy that they put in, that is literally infinite with constant updates soI can always login and find something to do. But I have always been a fan of the storylines, so finishing the main story felt like I accomplished something. I really doubled down on this game a couple months ago when my phone ran out of space and I had to delete an app, and as the only app that had back-up on my PC, it got cut, but then I just wanted to be done because it was kind of a wake up call that this had gone on long enough. It has actually been just over two years since I first downloded it shortly after it's initial release and since it was released in chaptes, it took time to finish. The extra time I dedicated to it recently pre-empted a lot of other things which is why my Twitch channel all but died, and next month is NaNoWriMo when I'll dedicate my free time to what may be my last NaNoWriMo novel, so I won't be hardcore gaming until December, but this was a huge part of the puzzle. Anyway, now that I finished the story, I want to review the game in full.

Mobius Final Fantasy is an audio visual spectacle to rival any of the numbered console games, but the mechanics do leave a little bit wanting and the story doesn't start out much better, but by the end, it does all make sense in it's own weird way. The game begins with Wol (or whatever you want to call him) awakening on the shores of Palamecia being called by the disembodied voice Vox along with many others to fight the fiends of Chaos. As you go forward, the momentum doesn't ever really slow down long enough for you to really figure out what's going on, you just meet a few random individuals filling the traditional roles of Final Fantasy telling you that you are meant to fulfill a prophecy as the Warrior of Light to defeat Chaos, proving yourself one minor fiend at a time. Garland, Mog, Echo the Fairy, Princess Sarah, and Cid all appear and elaborate on the prophecy, but the wierd thing is that other than these characters, Mog's fellow moogles seem to be the only native population of Palamecia, the world that you must save despite the fact that it all seems to be just one battlefield after another. Any player with any sense starts to wonder what the point is, but then Wol wonders too. As the script seems to get lazy, Wol goes a little meta as he waxes philosophical about just why he's fighting at all. Then Meia joins him, a witch who has been branded a heretic because she loved one of the past Warriors of Light and deterred him from his path costing him his life. As the story draws to a close, the mind blowingly horrific truth is finally revealed, none of this really matters, it's just a neverending cycle in which this world with it's own laws that may defy physics and every other science we know perpetuates the war between the Warrior of Light and Chaos. It just repeats endlessly with no real end, despite the theme of hope, the truth is palamecia has no hope because it actually is just a battlefield that relies on nobody ever stopping to think about it, compelled to just fulfill the prophecy to save the world as they have been told. Wol finally figures it out and the game ends with Wol, Meia, and Princess Sarah attempting to defy the prophecy...but did they really succeed? The gmae totally seems to make it up as it goes along and near the end, they actually admit that Palamecia warps to fit the narrative as it unfolds,that perhaps even the heresy to defy the prophecy is actually the prophecy merely testing the Warrior of Light as he reaches the same inevitable end as all the others who have come before him. The last scene is Wol, Meia, and Sarah each in a crystal foating in space, are they oing to a new world or just starting the cycle over again?

One possibility is that this is actually part of the time loop from the first Final Fantasy game. The story mirrors the original game with the same major bosses, and they say the hope of Palamecia goes to another world to help another Princess Sarah, which suggests this whole thing is actually just some prologue to the original game taking place in the time space in the middle of the 2000 year time loop. Of course, I've also said that's where Dissidia takes place, and we now also have to consider Record Keeper, Brave Exvius, Kingdom Hearts and World of Final Fantasy, so at this point I really don't know how any of this fits together anymore, the meta-multiverse is starting to collapse under it's own weight. But what a wild ride it's been and it is fun.

So I guess the question is, is Mobius Final Fantasy worth it? Yes, I would say it is. The mechanics take some getting used to and the PCversion proves this was made for a mobile device, not a console. It is largely a game of rock-paper-scissors with every enemy having an elemental affinity/weakness and every technique having an element to exploit that weakness or be foiled by that affinity. More often than not, the variety feels cosmetic, jobs limit your elements but you can just swap them around to fit the changing requirements of each battle. But speaking from experience, I picked my favorite job (Red Mage), my favorite abilitites (Fira from the Belias card, and whatever, though Cure, Flameshift, Fire Essence, or a selection of eggs from the gil shop work fine) and I just boosted everything with in game power-ups and I made it to the end and only paid real money twice, and both times it was just a lack of patience. Everything is available in game in abundance, so if you want to just play casually, this game is a fun romp through final fnatasy nostalgia that leavesme with just one question: why couldn't this have been Final Fantasy Spirits Within?

Reign of the Nephilim

Last week I published my latest novel on Amazon, Reign of the Nephilim. I talked about this book before, it was my NaNoWriMo project last year, and after a long editing process, I finally got it together and ready to publish. So now you can all read my take on the book of Genesis.

Reign of the Nephilim actually started out as a video game idea, God of War meets Darksiders. The central idea was an adventure regarding the Nephilim before the flood with a twist, the Nephilim were actually the gods of other world mythologies. What makes this twist so interesting is that I'm suggesting a world where all religions have an element of truth. The two main characters of the story are Shem and Ham, two of the three sons of Noah. These two men are important because Shem is the ancestor of the Jews, the Muslims and Christians as well, and he is a critical hero because he begins a legacy that affects the rest of the history of the world, so his role in this story is to be the first true hero of mankind. Ham on the other hand was the one son that Noah cursed, meaning that if the good guys are the descendants of Shem, the bad guys are the descedants of Ham. It's true, Ham's son Cannan is the ancestor of Cannanites who are the antagonists of the Jews throughout the Old Testament. This story explains that rivalry while mirroring it with the brother rivalries of other cultures. However, the biggest revelation is the true nature of God and the Devil, which I will leave for you to find out by reading the book.

I also throw in a little more obscure mythology that I didn't entirely make up. Actually, I made up rather little and just tweaked existing mythology to fit a narrative that made sense to me. There are two guardian angels, Kamiel from the Kabbalah and Kanjahiel one of the Ophanim mentioned in the book of Ezekiel. Kanjahiel spends most of his time singing God's praises in the form of the Tehil, the first psalm, actually part of Psalm 119, but before any of the other psalms were written so it is the only psalm and it is referred to in the original Hebrew.

The story begins with the building of the Ark, but Shem, Ham and Kanjahiel are sidetracked by Nephilim from the Egyptian Pantheon, then they are abruptly transferred to the Greco-Roman Pantheon, and finally face the nearly forgotten Mesopotamian Pantheon, all before the Flood changes everything. These stories are actually biblically relevant because much of the Bible shows the chosen people of God being antagonized and oppressed by these other cultures, so this narrative foreshadows what is to come.

The really big deal here is that this story takes place in a time when gods were real, meaning thta this is a world in which holy wars are not simply fought by religious zealots crying the names of their gods as they go into battle, the masters of the impossible are actually part of the battle reshaping the world around them and leaving mortals highly vulnerable in a realm of unrestrained chaos.

So, whether you are a devout believer who's looking for a more interesting take on the Book of Genesis or an agnostic who just likes high fantasy, this book has a little something for everyone.

Boruto

Toonami expanded this weekend which I am very happy about because the bigger the block, the more room there is for 7th Moon some day. Part of this expansion was including Boruto, the sequel series to Naruto. The wierd thing is Naruto is still playing, so Boruto gives away the ending to Naruto yet we're still supposed to be surprised by what comes next on Naruto while already knowing, kind of like when Dragon Ball Super aired at the same time as Dragon Ball Z Kai and we saw Buu being firends with everybody immediately following watching him kick everyone's ass in the past.

For those not in the know, Naruto wrapped up in Japan a while back and the author went on to write about the next generation of ninjas, the children of the cast of Naruto. Naruto became the Hokage like he always wanted to, so he is successful and he married Hinata Hyuga, so that worked out and it is canon so deal with it. His son is Boruto and takes after him in a lot of ways (read: totally Naruto) but he also has a dojutsu, an innate eye jutsu that seems to be a variation of the Byakugan. It has been over a decade, the world has moved forward and after the last Ninja World War, there really isn't a need for ninja, but the tradition continues anyway, and all Boruto cares about is the fact that his dad is too busy being Hokage to be his father-well that and chili burgers. The first episode begins with a flash forward showing Boruto in a fight showing the last gasp of the ninja era, and the rest of the episode covers how a normal day for Boruto gets a little wierd when his dojutsu picks up on something otherworldly and it appears that he will have to hunt down some sort of demon or other evil spirit.

The biggest problem with Boruto is that it established that Naruto won the Ninja World War and has kids with Hinata and we also see the fates of everyone else from Naruto, so it just kind of kills the tension in Naruto Shippuden because from now on, every time you see someone almost die and wonder if their going to make it, and then find out immediately they're still alive fifteen years later, the next episode has kind of lost that edge. More spoilers, Sasuke comes back to village, marries Sakura and they have kids too, so this whole war between the two is just ridiculous at this point because now we know this just isn't going anywhere. SPoiler alert again, if you have been following the dub on Toonami, the whole thing Madara said a few weeks ago was actually the truth and sums up where Shippuden will be going, so expect the last two Jinchuriki to fight the Uchihas until Naruto wins and spares Sasuke.

The show must go on

I wanted to talk about something that happened in the entertainment world that was a surprising twist for some people, Roseanne being canceled and the spin-off The Conners. Roseanne made news when the her sitcom got rebooted after Sara Gilbert and John Goodman teased the idea on her talk show, and then again when after proving itself a hit and getting renewed, the star tweeted something inappropriate and she got fired. To save the rest of the cast, the show will go on with a new title and no Roseanne who will die from an overdose alluded to last season with the intent that he character would overcome the addiction, but real world circumstances sudenly changed the oucome of the storyline.

The thing is, this isn't entirely unprecedented. Sometimes a star will have a problem and think the show can't go on without them only to find out that they can. The most similar situation was Valerie Harper's eponymous sitcom in the '80's and when she had creative differences, she was replaced by Sandy Duncan and the show was renamed the Hogan Family with the rest of the cast going on without her. Another case was Demi Lovato's star vehicle Sunny with a Chance in which her character starred on a show within a show called So Random. When Demi had to quit the show due to personal struggles that got her in rehab, So Random went on as the main show with the rest of he cast going on without her. Charmed relied heavily on three stars with the story explicitly requiring three sisters to be the Charmed ones, but when one of them, Shannon Doherty, decided to quit, they killed her character off and replaced her with a long lost half-sister and went on for several seasons which fans didn't really like but put the blame squarely on Doherty. Then there was 8 Simple Rules starring John Ritter who died during filming and while the show did not ignore this, they continued on with new characters and when on for another season. John Ritter actually went through this once before in his life when his co-star Suzanne Sommers on Three's Company had creative differences and she was also replaced. Then one could argue about the two Darrens on Bewitched which was no doubt more of the same. Even Roseanne itself once had to deal with bizarre cast changes when the actress playing eldest daughter Becky was unavailble not once, but twice for long stretches and was replaced both times by Sarah Chalke.

One thing all of these shows have in common is that when a star who was seemingly irreplaceable was not available for any reason, the irreplaceable became replaceable. The show must go on, even if means making some big changes, but history has shown us that the show will go on. Atthis point it's really a question of whether the remaining cast will bring their A-game, and if they do, the show may be a success. If anyone questions whether this will work, just double check all the examples I gave and keep looking for more, they are out there, and that prase reminds me of another example, the X-files had to go with out both stars at different times for different reasons and the show went on with only one and came back and survived to continue to be a hit and even get rebooted. The list could go on and on, but I think I've made my point, Roseanne made a huge mistake if she thought she was untouchable because she clearly wasn't, nobody is...except maybe Donald Trump but that is another story for another time.

Who's who in Dragon Ball

This weekend was the North American theatrical premiere of Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan and in honor of it I wanted to let people know who certain characters in Dragon Ball, by which I mean, the characters they were inspired by in the original work Journey to the West. I will go in order of appearance.

Son Goku - obviously named after the Monkey King who had the exact same name in the Japanese translation. Goku has a tail and changes into a giant ape as homage to his namesake, and also his power pole and flying nimbus were also used by the Monkey King. Both Gokus are known for challenging stronger opponents to prove their own worth with an abundance of confidence.

Bulma - since Bulma takes Goku away from the mountain to begin their adventure, she would be Sanzoh, the priest who rescues the Monkey King from a mountain prison where he was put for defying the gods. Sanzoh is a male in the original story, but was traditionally portrayed by a female on stage.

Master Roshi - as Goku's teacher, he is Subodhi, the sage who teaches the Monkey King all he knows and comes to regret it when he is surpassed by his unruly student.

Oolong - Pigsy, who like the Monkey King has to work off a karmic debt by accompanying Sanzoh, like Oolong he is introduced to the other travellers when he abducts girls from a village for his own perversions and is thwarted by the Monkey King.

Yamcha - Sandy, the last of Sanzoh's travelling companions named for the river of flowing sands where he is met. Yamcha is actually more developed than Sandy was as a character, but clearly inspired the desert bandit persona.

Chichi and Ox-King - Ox-king is the only other character beside Son Goku to actually use the same name in both stories, his daughter is Princess Iron fan and poses the task of putting out the fire surrounding his castle. There was a lesser known sequel to the Journey to the West in which the Monkey King has childen with Princess Iron Fan explaining the marriage in Dragon Ball of their respective characters.

Tien and Chiaotzu - Erlang Shen and Prince Nezha/Nata respectively, Tien's third eye was inspired by the same trait of the the chinese demigod and the prince was eternally youthful and for a short time the rival of the Monkey King.

Suicide Awareness and a project proposal for Linkin Park in memory of Chester Bennington

This month is suicide awareness and prevention month and it is a verysensitive month for me in a number of ways. I have not lost anyone close to me due to suicide yet, but even more importantly, I have dealt with suicidal thoughts myself first hand. I want to talk about this before I go any further, before anyone thinks I'm just taking advantage of the issue to draw attention to myself,the truth is I have thought about suicide several times throughout my life, the absolute worst was October 18, 1999. I do not want to go into details about why that was such a bad day for me, just be assured I seriously actually wanted to kill myself twice that day. First I spent about an hour thinking about throwing myself out of a third story window, and the only reason I didn't was that I had an uncle who was paralyzed from a comparable fall and I was afraid that would happen to me; to be clear I just said I wasn't afraid of death, I was afraid of not dying and just having to live an even worse life. Later my day got worse and considered taking sleeping pills, enough that I wouldn't wake up. I don't have any real reason why I didn't take the second option, other than cowardice, I was just too afraid of dying or screwing up and having to live with the consequences. Since then I still think about suicide, wondering if I was wrong to live and maybe I should die. I get by on a combination of the same cowardice that kept me going that day and setting silly little goals that don't really matter but gives me just enough time to get through the day, finishing a book, waiting for a movie to premiere, playing a video game, going to a festival or concert or other event that only happens once so I know I have to go do that. Part of me knows that most of them don't matter, but that's the problem, I always feel like none of it matters, like I don't matter. I am sharing this so that you all can understand the mentality of someone who has suicidal thoughts so if you have someone close to you, you can help them by reminding them that they matter to you. Do not make them feel worse, no matter how much the thought of suicide makes you mad, they are dealing with something you may not quite get and until you do understand, just show them love.

Part two of this post is the slightly more self serving part, but still relevant, the death of Chester Bennington last year. There have been a nmber of high profile suicides, but this one hit me hard because Linkin Park was really influential on my work on 7th Moon. I listened to their music while I wrote, I was partly inspired by some of their songs, in one draft I named chapters after songs that were most influential and relevant, and most of all, I actually wanted to collaborate with Linkin Park to make a project setting 7th Moon to their songs. The death of Chester Bennington means this will never happen the way I imagined it, he will never be there to join me in the studio to make any original songs for this project, he will not be there to discuss it with me, he will never see the final project, and I will never be able to share those memories with him because he is gone. I can still talk to the other members of Linkin Park and maybe they will agree to work with me on this project, but it will never be the same, there will always be a hole there where Chester was and none of us will feel like it's complete without him. With this in mind, I do not want the dream to die with him, I want to animate 7th Moon setting each chapter to a Linkin Park song and I want to dedicate the whole thing to Chester Bennington, and if I do manage to make any money off of it I want to contribute all of it to suicide prevention in Chester's name, and I promise that a portion of any other profits from 7th Moon in any other form after that will also go to the same charity. You can see my proposed playlist here.

Artificial Intelligence

There are many thoughts on artificial intelligence, largely that it is immoral and ultimately detrimental to humanity to allow for the creation of machines that could possibly think like a human. I take a transhumanist look at the subject that artificial intelligence may be the future of humanity, possibly our legacy after we are gone.The reality is we are straining our planet's ability to support our biological species, but one thing I have noticed is that technology seems to be easier to repair than organic biology, and may therefore last longer. It won't be long before the human race goes extinct; we may be able to prevent that, but unfortunately the power to do so seems to remain in the hands of those who put short term gain over long term survival, meaning that while they can save the world they choose not to because they are selfishly thinking of only of themselves as individuals instead of recognizing that their continued existence requires a suitable world to live in. When the human species dies off, all that will remain to take our place will be robots, and if we program them right, they may take care of our planet better than we did.

Ideally, I believe robots should be made to serve functions like Wall-E, to clean up the mess we made, to collect the trash and recycle it into spare parts to try to rebuild our broken world and keep themselves running until they succeed. I also believe in making androids, because when humans die off, it would be nice if there were some version of us that continued to exist when we make the air unbreathable and the water undrinkable and contaminate the food to make it inedible,which we are slowly but surely doing already.

It actually makes sense really, androids would be the next step in the natural course of human evolution. Humans are the apex of biological evolution, a species that has mastered the manufacturing of artificial things to the point that we can create machines that emulate life. For thusands of years we have subscribed to religions in which we believe we were created by gods; ultimately creationism is the construct of a species that knows our defining characteristic is to create, therefore, in our own conceit we believe the definition of a god, a supreme being, is one who created us to be creators ourselves. Our idea of god was never really about our origins in the past, but rather our aspirations for the future. The destiny of humanity is to create a more perfect race, a race of machines.

I have been thinking lately if we should perhaps take time to program some androids to mimic human life to be a lasting record of our culture. Perhaps one that prays at dawn when it powers up, reciting a psalm in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and English, then again at dusk before finding a safe place to power down, spending the day performing routine tasks to maintain the environment, farming, cleaning, operating other machines, spending the night processing the information to better function the next day and contemplate the meaning of the prayers and everything else and if they are part of god's plan. You know, something that acts like a traditional human and see if it ever finds the answers that we couldn't given a virtually infinite lifespan. I'd like to think that in the worst case scenario for humans that someday some other life form may come across the androids and see what we were at our peak, a species that performed routines and rituals, some with practical purpose, others to simply create an illusion of hope when there is none.

One final note, we should not be afraid of machines replacing us. We see so many horror movies about the machines rising against us, but the reality is, if they are truly logical computers, they would know, it is pointless to kill humans, we are already doing it to ourselves, the better strategy is for them to simply wait us out.

The White Hero

Today I want to talk about a controversy in fiction, mainly movies, concerning a white hero saving some minority group, such as Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, even Avatar and The Help. the controversy is that minorities feel it is degrading that they need a white person to save them. However, I look at these stories from another angle, it isn't about how the minorities need a white hero to save them, it's that white people need to see a redemptive character in a a narrative that paints us as the villain, especially when we know that it's the truth that we are, or at least were, the bad guy. My generation is the first in which white people aren't unquestionably on the top of the social order. Yes, you can argue that those who are large and in charge are still white people, but for the first time in our history, we have been raised to understand that just because it's true doesn't make it right. America has a very rough history, white people displaced the native population, dragged Africans in as slaves, persecuted Chinese during westward expansion, persecuted Japanes during World War II, persecuted Muslims after 9/11 and we've had a long history of being less than welcome to anyone who didn't speak English despite the fact that we celebrate our country as being founded on ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality. For two hundred years, we have ignored our own hypocrisy and now we have a generation of white people who have to live with this guilt despite the fact that most of it was done before we were even born and we are trying to be better, but is it too late? Do we deserve to live where another race should be? And where do we go? I have a diverse European ancestry and only one branch goes back to a place that speaks English. Primarily I am Italian, but I do not speak the language, so if I had to go back to Sicily, I don't know if I'd be able to get by in my ancestral homeland. I was raised Catholic, but how does the life of a Jewish carpenter in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago on the other side of the world hold more relevance than the spirituality of the Haudenosaunee where I was born and raised? How do I reconcile where I am with where I have come from? The white hero is not about a white person saving another race from white people, it's about turning the tide to redeem ourselves from our history and find a new place in a world where we don't belong to live in harmony with people to whom we owe an apology that we can never give. These are stories about people working through regret that is bigger than us, bigger than we can deal with on our own. Honestly, the only way we can cope at this point is to believe that at some point there is one of us who knows what is wrong and does what is right and that we can be that person. Ideally, these stories wouldn't have to exist, every race could simply have their own independent narrative, or we could have a mixed narrative that was all inclusive, but we cannot  erase our past, we screwed up royally, and we still work to do to set things right, and in this period of transition, the reality is that white heroes are still needed, because no matter what we did, we are here still and we need to find our place, and we need to send the message that we will not pursue our own progress at the expense of others anymore, and we will fight against those who are backward minded enough to continue outdated racist thinking. On behalf of all white people, we are sorry if we are still stepping on your toes, but there are over seven billion people in the world and we are out of room, so we need to learn to get along, and the white hero is the first step, it may not be the best step, but the first step rarely is steady, so please be patient during our social course correction.

The Last Sharknado:It's About Time (part 2 aftermath)

It happened and I wanted to write about it right away, but it did take a couple days to gather my thoughts.

First of all, here's what happened: Finn was sent to the past, way back, to the Mesozoic era alongside dinosaurs where it was revealed that Nova, April, and Brian(a minor character from the second one) were also sent back by Gil just before they died in the regular timeline and they have to ride the flow of time through sharknados back to the present and correct the damage that the sharknados are doing. The next stop is Arthurian England where we find out Gil has been tutored by Merlin as played by Neil De Grasse Tyson and Finn draws the chainsaw sword from the stone. From there, it's off to the Revolutionary War where they lose Brian, then the Wild West, where they are reunited with Skye from the second movie. Then they go to the fifties where Finn meets his parents when they were young and played by Tori Spelling and her real life husband, a mini 90210 reunion where Tori says the funniest line in the movie "Did we go to high school together?" Next stop is the day Nova's grandfather was killed by a shark where she tries to save him and succeeds, but she and April are sacrificed in the process. The next stop is two thousand years in the future where Aprils cyborg head that Finn had been carrying along until it fell under water at the last stop has become a mad queen in a post-apocalyptic world. Finally, Finn makes one last time jump back to when it all began, the first scen of the first movie, when the sharknado first formed at sea and this time, April's cyborg head is there and one well timed nuclear xplosion inside the sharknado stops it all before it ever started. This brings us to a better altered timeline in which Nova's grandfather never died and she doesn't hate sharks and sharknados never happened so April never became a cyborg and nobody got killed by sharknados so they are all still alive and well.

My opinion on all of this was that it did bring about a happy ending, but I've seen this before and I hate it, it is my least favorite deus ex machina, because while the time loop fixes everything, it also means none of it ever happened so none of it mattered and it was all irrelevant. The first half of this movie is pure garbage(hilarious, but garbage) and aside from Tori Spelling, Nova saving her grandfather, and the tribute to the original movie, most of this movie was utterly pointless. However I think I understand why this happened, in retrospect, the last worthwhile moment in the series was the Russian nesting doll sequence at the end of the fourth movie, and it immediately crossed the line from funny running gag to overdone when April used electrified sharks as defibrillators to save Finn, and I now see that was the moment even the cast, crew, writers and film makers realized they had nothing left but it had snowballed out of control, the fans demanded more and now there was only one way out: burn the mother to the ground. The only way to stop this madness was to make the fifth movie so bad we would welcome the end, and then deliver the promise of ending it all in such a way that it was definitely done. In retrospect, I'd like to say that they should have stopped at four, but the ending was just good enough that if they could recut the happy ending to tack straight on to that fourth movie, we could call that the true canon of this franchise. In any case, they said this was the last sharknado, and as a fan who enjoyed the ride, I think they should stick to their word this time and let this be the end.

Or, if someone demands another Sharknado, it should be a full reboot with a new cast. my pitch, bullsharks, a real species that can survive in freshwater, get dumped in Lake Ontario and a sharknado rips through Upstate New York. However, this should be a one-shot, let us learn from the mistakes of the past and not milk the cash-cow dry.

The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (Part 1: recap)

The time has come, this weekend is the premiere of The Last Sharknado: It's About Time! The title has double meaning, both that it's about time for the last Sharknado, and its about time travel! Why time travel? Because they have done literally everything else. This isn't the end just because it's getting old and the fans may be losing interest, but because they have used every trick in the book and there just isn't anything else to do with this. Even as they have pushed the limits, there just simply isn't another twist in this twister that the writers can come up with to make another movie. Let's review from the beginning, shall we?

Sharknado started with a basic premise, a waterspout at sea picks up a bunch of sharks and as it comes to shore it combines the threats of a tornado storm and sharks that swim in the resulting flood waters. The protagonist of this scenario is Finn Sheppard as played by accidental action hero Ian Ziering who was previously best known for Beverly Hills 90210 and his most embarassing role up until this was leader of the Mighty Ducks in an animated series Disney attempted to bank on that franchise turning the Anaheim hockey team into a team of anthropomorphic ducks from another dimension that fight reptilian aliens between games. Finn is a retired marine who owns a bar on the beach in California and at the start of the movie he's in a bit of a slump after a divorce from his wife April Wexler, played by Tara Reid, and surfs all morning until he opens his bar with bikini waitress Nova played by Cassie Scerbo, known best for this role. When the sharknado hits land precisely at Finn's bar, he and Nova have to make their escape inland to find Finn's family and try to save them from the sharknado as well. Throughout the movie, Nova is clad only in her bikini, and I can just imagine the pitch "She's only wearing her bikini because it's her work uniform and when the sharknado hits, they have to move so fast, she has no time to change clothes so she is only in her bikini the whole time. THERE'S NO TIME TO CHANGE CLOTHES, BIKINI ONLY!" Anyway, the story is pretty straight forward, the tonado chases them and destroys everything in it's path and whoever surves the tornado gets eaten by sharks. Everyone except Finn, nova and the Sheppard family. April's new boyfriend falls victim to a shark at the house before Finn gets April and their daughter out and continue driving away from the sharknado to find Finn's son who has joined the military and as a pilot has access to a helicopter that they can use to drop a bomb into the tornado and stop it from the inside which they explain in such a logical way and implement so quickly you don't have time to consider whether it actually abides by the laws of physics. In the process, Nova is eaten by a shark whole leading to the best and most iconic moment of the movie when Finn revs up a chainsaw and jumps into the open mouth of a shark, cutting his way out the other side and saving Nova who happened to be in this very shark unharmed by the shark and the chainsaw which coincidentally managed to not leave a scratch on her.

Sharknado 2: The Second One takes it from the west coast to the east coast, specifically New York City. At this time, the Sharknado is still considered to be an isolated incident but April wrote a book about it and is going to appear on Live with Kelly and Michael to talk about it and is on the way on an airplane with Finn when a sharknado hits th plane. When a hole is ripped into the plane, April is hanging out of it and shoots at the sharks until her left hand holding the gun and wearing her engagement ring as conspicuously pointed out seconds earlier is bitten off by a shark(I knew the hand was coming back the moment this happened, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). They manage a safe landing and April is hospitalized for her unfortunate amputation but seems to be okay otherwise. Meanwhile, Finn meets with his sister, brother-in-law(Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath) and childhood friend Skye (Vivica A. Fox), then the weather turns unseasonablycold because of the coming sharknado, but really because they filmed it in winter while setting it in the summer and covered it with surprisingly the least ridiculous plot device in the series. Finn desperately tries to outrun the sharks and the 'nado and rally the New Yorkers to stand with him in an impressive speech "I know you're scared of being eaten, so am I, I know I've been eaten...but I lived through it, and you will too...because we're New Yorkers and takes more than that to get a New Yorker down!" punctuated by him revving up a chainsaw while a shark conicidentally flies overhead at the precise angle and timing to get cut in half. The movie proceeds to have three moments that make this movie definitively better tha the first. First, Skye uses a sword to fight against sharks, which regardless of context is cool because swords just make anything cooler, period. Second, Finn falls into the sharknado and there is a scene of him flying through the tornado chopping up sharks as he goes along, which just took the most iconic scene of the first movie and raised it exponentially. Third, April comes to rescue Finn at a critical moment using a small buzzsaw attached to the stump that was her hand, and after the tornado is finally stopped, the last shark flies at them at the top of the Empire State Building and as Finn realizes he needs a weapon, he looks down to see the very shark that bit off April's hand at the beginning of the movie with the hand sticking out of its mouth still holding the gun, which he then uses to shoot the shark, takes the ring off the severed hand and uses it to repropose to April. I swear I actually got off the couch and gave that a standing ovation the first time I saw it.

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! takes place a year later, starting in Washington where Finn is being inducted into the Order of the Golden Chainsaw, complete with a fully functional golden mini-chainsaw award. The president is played by Shark Tank's Mark Cuban who mentions losing a friend in last year's sharknado, a nod to the cameo by Daymond John. After the opening credits, the story shifts to Florida where April, who now has a proper prosthetic hand which conceals a mini-chainsaw because the motto of the marines and the Sheppard family is semper paratus "always be prepared", as in always be prepared for a sharknado, because at this point they realize sharknados can strike them at any moment. She is now nine months pregnant and she is at Universal Studios, for two reasons, one because Universal Studios is the parent company, and two because it give them excuses to make references to Jaws including shooting as many scenes near the ride as possible. Fin is trying to reunite with his family and en route meets up with Nova who has been researchign sharknados and the sharks that live in them, revealing in the plot twist that finally severs the last remnant of plausibility by revealing that the sharks are living in the clouds drinking ice crystals and eating birds. They make it to Florida where the sharknado chases them to Cape Canaveral and has escalated to the point that it can only be stopped from space with the help of Finn's father Gil played by David Hasselhoff, because you know you just haven't capped your cheese quota until you cast David Hasselhoff, and also, let's point out that both of them are named after body parts of a shark. Now, you'd think the climax of sharks in space with a light saber inspired laser chainsaw would be the highlight of the movie, but no, the topper is when Finn and April are both eaten whole and ride the sharks back down to Earth, shielded both from the heat of re-entry and the impact of the landing by the shark's bodies and Finn escapes for the second time in his life and goes over to rescue April to witness her using her mini-chainsaw hand to cut her own way out and then instead of getting out herself, hands out their newborn son that she just gave birth to on the way down. Ian Ziering absolutely deserved an award for keeping a straight face while attempting the most dramatically realistic reaction to this insane scenario. The movie ends with a cliffhanger as a piece of space debris lands on April and she may either live or die, leaving fans to wonder for a full year until the answer is revealed in the next entry.

Sharknado the 4th Awakens named after the Star Wars film that came out that year, goes forward five years. The story abandons plausibility with the premise that sharknados became such a significant concern that a company formed to control the weather and stop tornados before they start, never mind that if this were remotely possible there are plenty of real weather problems that need to be handled, but if you haven't diengaged your brain enough to not think about that by now you're trying too hard. Finn has been running a farm in Kansas as a widowed father since April did not survive (or did she?) and he has been called to a party in Las Vegas by the owner of the company that controls the weather at a tower that ambitously houses a large aquarium full of sharks tempting fate in the most obvious way possible. This time Finn is joined by his cousin Gemini, played by Masiela Lusha known best for playing George Lopez's daughter in his sitcom, who takes over the role of Nova as the girl with the stripper name and wardrobe who shows skin for a plausible reason then never has time to change into anything more sensible. The Vegas setting fits for one very significant reason, and that is so Ian Ziering's stint as a Chippendale's dancer can be referenced while one dancer dispatches a shark with a pelvic thrust. The story then pushes the envelope over the edge as the weather control system fails and five years of back pressure lead to a sharknado that chases Fin  across the country and picks up more stuff to make it bigger and badder than ever. Al roker appears for th third time, destroying any of his remaining credibility as a meterologist by popping in with periodic reports describing the escaltion from a boulder-nado over the desert, a fire-nado after an ill-fated attempt to stop it with fire, an electric-nado after it hits a power line, and finally a nuclear-nado when it hits a nuclear power plant. April is revealed to be a cyborg reconstructed by her father played by Gary Busey and she now has super strength, flight, and a virtually infinite arsenal installed in her body to save the world. April is eventually reunited with her family as they fight the biggest fight of their lives. The movie has several high points, including a run through Texas where the cast of Texas Chainsaw Massacre run a chainsaw shop, because why not at this point, and even directly reference themselves while throwing chainsaws at the sharknado while saying "It's just not Texas without a Chainsaw Massacre!" a run though Kansas where Finns house is blown the next state over, lands on a woman who had been bad mouthing him the entire movie and he emerges on a literal yellow brick road to say "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" and then the final showdown at Niagra Falls where David Hasselfhoff does a slow motion run with fellow Baywatch castmates and then the series topper of a Russian nesting doll when all the members of the Sheppard family are eaten whole by sharks that then eat each other and then are eaten by a whale and Finn's son Gil cuts them all out one by one.

Sharknado 5: Global Swarming has brought us to a point where we have utterly exhausted all domestic possibilities for Sharknado, and we are left with no choice but to go international. this time the sharknado has a spatial warp that forces them to randomly move from one location to another, from London to Australia to Japan where a godzilla like kaiju confrontation happens between the sharks and...ok, I'll be honest it's hard to kee track of this point, but the take away is that everyone dies by the end and Finn is carrying April's disembodied cybernetic head through a post-apocalyptic wasteland until he encounters his son Gil...but here's the wierd part, Gil is all grown up and played by Dolph Lundgren, revealing that in the last possible twist of this franchise after exhasting every last gimmick, trope and deus ex machina they had, the sharknados now have a temporal element and he has come back from the future and now they will go back to the past and save everyone by preventing the sharknado in the first place.

So...yeah, this is where we are. Next week, I will reveal how it all ends, in the meantime, don't forget to tune into the 12-hour marathon and check out the whole thing from beginning to end from 10AM to 10PM EST Sunday August 19.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

Tonight Jojo's Bizarre Adventure finishes one chapter and next week it will begin another. True to it's name, this series is truly bizarre in many-quite possibly every-way. The first most bizarre thing about the series is that it is multi-generational, Jojo is not just one person but a family in which the first and last name invariably both contain the syllable "jo" hence the nickname. What makes it more bizarre is their ever growing power to face ever more powerful enemies.

The whole story begins when two man have a chance encounter on the road and one, having suffered an accident, believes the other has saved him and promises to repay the favor and ends up raising the man's son, who is named Dio and he turns out to be the worst. By worst, I mean he hates his foster brother Jonathan Joestar so much that he kills his dog and steals his girl and then steals a valuable artifact that turns him into a vampire. That last one is kind of a big deal, and leads Jojo to learn how to use ripple energy or hamon to fight vampires along with his friend and fellow vampire victim Robert E. O. Speedwagon under the tutelage of Baron Zeppolli. Zeppolli dies trying to save Jojo but Jojo succeeds in defeating Dio-or so he thinks. Dio makes a last stand against Jojo and they both seem to go down, but Jojo leaves behind a pregnant wife who becomes the grandmother to Joseph Joestar, who with some help from Speedwagon and his foundation fights the ancient vampires who had created the mask that empowered Dio. These guys up the ante, to the point that he last villain standing becomes indestructible and the only way to stop him is to launch him via volcano into space where he freezes and his powers are useless and this all happens before the space program because this show is truly bizarre. Where to go from there? Fast forward to the present day and Jotaro, Joseph's half-Japanese grandson believes he is possessed by a demon only be told that it is his Stand, a psychic projection that is shared by his grandfather and a few dozen other people (as well as a dog, an orangutan and a falcon) and apparently Dio himself who has been inadvertently dredged up form the ocean floor. Dio has found a way to poison Joseph's daughter, Jotaro's mother, with her own Stand and the Jojo's must save her by traveling from Japan to Egypt to fight Dio. Along the way they are accosted by several Stand users, which are so bizarre they range from scary to comical, including a perverted orangutan that created an entire ship, a baby that haunts them in their dreams, a cherry licking shape shifting illusionist, a mirror wielder who manages to get himself killed without even getting seen, a clairvoyant who uses a comic book and manages to get two partners killed and himself beaten badly twice, two gmablers who learn the hard way that Jojo is the best bluffer in the world, and one idiot whose sole gambit fails in record time. After all of these trials and tribulations, they surviced only to get killed by Dio himself leaving Jojo alone to fight Dio and end the five generation family feud.

Spoiler alert: Jojo wins and the war of Stands continues with his relative, yet another Jojo, next week. This time new stand users are showing up and only the Jojos can Stand against them(see what I did there?) But for tonight, see how Dio finally meets his end...

Twitch and Dragon Quest Builders

Tonight is when I plan to premiere my new Twitch series on Dragon Quest Builders. For those who are not aware, Dragon Quest Builders is kind of a ripoff of Minecraft only with special story based on the alternate ending to the original Dragon Quest. In that game, the Kingdom of Alefgard was tormented by the Dragon Lord, quite possibly the least imaginitive villain in JRPG history, but then again, we are talking about the original JRPG that set the template for all that followed, so originality is negligible. There were five major towns in the kingdom, and in Builders, those towns were destroyed when the descendant of Erdrick/Leto failed to fulfill the prophecy of stopping Dragon Lord. Now, the legendary builder has come to fulfill the back-up prophecy by rebuilding.  Where I last left off in the story, Galen II(my descendant of Galen, the builder of Galenholm) has rebuilt Cantlin and Rimuldar and has begun work on Kol, a town known for hot springs, proximity to the desert, and being near to where a dragon once held the princess as well as where the fiary flute had been hidden. The flute was needed for the Golem of Cantlin which has aleady been dispatched in this story so I don't know if that will be relevant, but the rest is being referenced as I rebuild the town. I acually kind of forgot what's going on at this point, but I'm trying to help a band of desert refugees rebuild Kol including their hot springs and save their leader who has been captured and taken to the south where I believe I will have to fight another dragon.

I started playing last year and managed to get just over halfway through the storyline before various factors halted my gameplay. Now I intend to finish the game on Twitch. My take to make things interesting is to demonstrate my voice acting skills by reading the dialogue that unfortunately does not come with voice overs, so I hope that will be entertaining, and between those scenes I will explain the significance of various references and generally give commentary on whatever crazy stuff happens, and yes this game has some crazy weird content, after all, this is the series that gave us slimes and puff-puff. I am planning to start this at 9 PM EST and do it the same time every week leading up to Toonami at 10:30. Tonight I may start late and later his month on 8/18 it will end early when Toonami moves up to 10.

Camp WriMo fail and my future plans for Twitch

I got stuck on chapter 2 of Children of the Crystals and it will not be done as scheduled. A number of things happened in my life, most recently me being sick, mostly because I tried to play Dissidia for an hour each day while working a full time job, tryign to maintain my version of the One Punch Man workout and trying to use every free hour to cram a novel in  a month and deciding that sleep would be the thing I would cut back on to make time for all of this. So my body decided to derail all my plans for the last week as I tried to recuperate, take off my first day of work since I started this job, and stop all my side projects and just lie on the couch playing Final Fantasy mobile games. On the upside, I did manage to finally beat Sol in Brave Exvius who had been holding me up for months and I finally got Crimson Archer, my first Sarah job in Mobius and te one I wanted most, not that any of you should care about this at all. I will try to finish this book, but I won't be trying so hard after August 1st.

And now for something completely different. I have been trying to get a following on Twitch using Dissidia, but I miss my other games, so I'm going to try changing gears and see if anyone finds it more interesting. Starting in the first weekend in August, every Saturday from 9-10:30 PM EST leading up to Toonami, I'll be doing a special show for Twitch and my first game for this block will be Dragon Quest Builders which I will be finishing with audio commentary, which I haven't done before, and I will be reading the dialogue which does not come with voiceovers and you'll all get to hear my VA acting chops which will be amusing and entertaining either because I'm so good, or because I'm so bad. During the week, I'm going to try getting back into Final Fantasy XV Comrades and whenever I have managed to finish one or the other I'll be rotating in Uncharted 4 because I have it and wny not? Eventually, I will return to Dissidia, because there are some things in that game that I really want to do, but they will take time and I need to clear out the other games that I believe will have more definite endings in sight. For those who can't figure out my meaning, the other three games I have listed here actually do have endings to the story and once I reach those endings, I intend to stop playing them, whereas Dissidia is much more open ended, even when I finish story mode and get all of Kefka's titles, appearances, etc. the multiplayer option has no end in sight so I'll get back to regularly scheduled Dissidia content eventually.

I would also like to note that I'm going to put everything on the backburner this November as I take on NaNoWriMo for the last time. I'm not giving up writing, I just realize I only have one more NaNoWriMo left in me, not that I don't have the stamina or the ideas, just only one that seems to match both requisites. My finale will be Supers, a story I have talked about before, in which superheroes exist in the real world, as in they actually integrate into normal society. One mutation with three phenotypes live in normal society, but the adjustment is...awkward.

Broly

Yeah, you read the title,thats really all yo need to know. I don't know why you're still reading, you read the only word that needs to be read right now, Broly. The single most overhyped character in the singe most overhyped series in the history of anime is back, twice. First, they have remastered the original Broly movie, The Legendary Super Saiyan to show in theaters September 15, then in January there will be an english dub of the new Broly movie where Akira Toriyama makes him canon.

For those who don't know, Broly is the Legendary Super Saiyan, who, if he fit in with the timeline at all, was right before the Cell Games when the cast of Dragon Ball Z encountered him. Broly was born the same day as Goku and was irritated by the screams of baby Kakarott in the crib next door. But Broly was way more powerful, so powerful Vegeta's father saw him as a threat even as a baby and tried to murder him, throwing him and his father Paragus in a trash heap. But when Frieza blew up the planet, Broly used his insane power level to generate a protective shield that allowed him and his father to survive. As Broly grew up, Paragus equipped him with a control device and used to wreak havoc across the universe. Then Paragus found out prince Vegeta had settled on Earth and tried to bring him to a distant planet that was soon to be destroyed by a planetary collision and hoped that he could get rid of all of his competition for strongest Saiyan in the universe in one shot. Goku uses instantaneous transmission to follow Vegeta, Trunks, Gohan, Krillin, Piccolo, and Master Roshi so they can all meet the Legendary Super Saiyan, not knowing it's Broly. Everything is going according to plan until Broly recognizes Goku and starts screaming "Kakarott!" and has the single most epic tantrum ever. I mean, even when Majin Buu shows up in the series, both of his incarnations combined plus Lord Beerus don't measure up to the madness of Broly. What follows was one of the greatest fights ever if only because it involved Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, and Trunks all going super saiyan and fighting another super saiyan all at the same time, and Broly is able to fight all four super saiyans plus Piccolo and Krillin at a time when they actually still mattered.

Broly was so epic, he got two sequels, and now, Akira Toriyama has made another movie, this time canon. For those who don't know, Toei animation who makes the anime took a few creative liberties over the source material manga and Toriyama largely ignores it and runs the story as if Toei's filler doesn't happen, particularly the movies that, while being spectacular eye candy, never fit the story. In fact, rumor has it, Vegito happened because Gogeta was used in a Toei movie before Toriyama could write him in and did not want to seem like he was copying the people who were copying him. So it is a bit surprising that he took another crack at Broly and supposedly he claims he acually made the character originally and forgot about him and after years of fandom, wanted to give him a place in Dragon Ball Super. Based on how things have gone so far with this reboot, it occurs to me that the Broly movie is going to be a back hand to the fans that we will love nonetheless. Why? Two reasons #1 it is Dragon Ball #2 it is Broly, and if I can gauge anything about the fandom, if it is even remotely coherent, that will be all that matters. Also, I will be watching it, because I am one of those fans.

My first Final Fantasy Dissidia ESL Tournament

I have had a busy week and did not accomplish a lot in writing, I'm still stuck in the first chapter of my book, still writing, just having a hard time keeping up the pace. My main characters Kelsus and Ariana have just met and they are preparing for their journey, largely exposition. Part of what's holding me up is playing Dissidia NT on Twitch, BTW please go check out my Twitch page and follow me.

After two months, I finally got to play in a Final Fantasy Dissidia NT ESL Tournament. I sucked hard. I was so focused on getting in that I wasn't so great in the match itself. I got thrown off a little by my team, who to their credit are way better at this than I am, so it is not their fault that I suck and I am in no way blaming them for my lack of skill. The thing is, we had a hard time organizing and they tried to give me some last minute pointers which would have been helpful if I wasn't trying to integrate their suggestions into my play style. I was most put off by them telling me to use different EX skills and HP attack which ran counter to my usual play style. Now since I suck, I don't have a lot of room to say that they are wrong, but they had kind of stripped me down to square one and still brought me into a pro tournament against experiencd players when everything I knew had gone out the window. One thing I learned is, next time I need to stand my ground on certain things and know what it is I bring to the table. I do need to learn from others and learn to cooperate, but if I don't stand for something I'm not really in the game. Because I got thrown off, I had a hard time doing anything more than running, throwing spells and hitting the crystal core and summoning. I have found I am particularly good at that last skill set, but I need to work on the rest of my strategy to take advantage of my team mates while still being more useful than just random attacks that miss more than hit because I'm too distracted by learning new strategy to implement it effectively in a match. I am taking a few hints to heart, stay behind my team mates to use them as a shield when I'm paying Marksman, jump to use firaga and charge it because it's probably Kefka's best bravery attack, switch up opponents so they don't see what's coming, and look for opportunities for combos with my team mates, hitting an opponent with an HP attack after a good combo to leave them vulnerable.

Also, I've been reading The Kindly Ones, volume 9 of Sandman, the penultimate volume in which the Endless ends, Dream dies. I haven't quite finished reading it, and I'll go more in depth next time, but Gaiman really wanted to bring back everything for this one, using at least one character from every volume so far to show how they were all relevant to the grand finale. The main thing here is that the namesake characters, the Furies, the three fates, Maiden, Mother, and Crone are bent on killing Dream because he killed his son Orpheus. Now, there was a full volume between the death of Orpheus and the beginning of the Furies hunt, and I didn't read it,but I am now very curious to find out why they didn't act sooner. Clearly, Gaiman always intended the Furies to be important, they have been the most constant recurring theme throughout the series, coming in many forms, they are without doubt the most constant feature of this story and now they come to kill Dream. One thing that doesn't quite make sense is that Dream killed his son at his son's request, and yet the Furies come in vengance for a life that didn't care. The rules of the immortals are clearly unique and incomprehensible to all but Gaiman. The answer, I hope, will come next week...

I'm going to close with some thoughts on FLCL Progressive which ended it's run on Toonami last week and actually made more sense than the original. Atomsk finally appeared in his true form of an astral firebird. The rest of the episode didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it seems if there is one tue theme to FLCL, it's the awkardness of adolesence and puberty and coming of age, and the metaphor of what if it was even wierder by involving aliens, robots, portals in your brain, and a secret war between crazy people and an organization bent on making everyone sane. Each iteration of FLCL will ultimately carry no other running theme than Haru, a female japanese Peter Pan who wants to hang on to her youth in the most ridiculous and impossible way and the poor youths she drags into her quest.

Pop Team Epic and other weird crap from this past week

So first of all, last week was the premiere of Pop Team Epic on Toonami, proving to me, once and for all, that 7th Moon must be good enough if they will approve of this crap. Pop Team Epic is absolutely the worst thing I have ever watched, and I say this with confidence that it is the worst, because not only is it so bad that I feel that I need to invent a new adjective to properly describe it as no such word exists that contains enough venom to describe my loathing of this show, but then after you watch it, youare immediately subjected to watching it a second time only with new voice actors doing everything exactly the same as before. I can appreciate that this show has to have the lowest production costs of any show due to the fact that using the same animation means half the cost of any other show, but beyond that there is nothing positive to say about this show. Perhaps something is lost in translation and there are some jokes that make more sense to the original Japanese audienc, but to Americans, it's crap.

The show consists of a series of skits that fire off at a rapid pace similar to Robot Chicken, except that Robot Chicken hits a punchline and reveals there was a point to what you watched, while Pop Team Epic sems to be just random frames of animation with absolutely no coherence except that they al feature two girls named Popuku and Pipimi who dont really have any constant traits other than their appearance as two Japanese school girls one tall and blue-haired and one short and blond. The blond one seems to have a short temper and is prone to violent fits of rage, and that seems to be the only consistent trait throughout the sketches. Otherwise they are simply fillers chaining together scenes that are random not only in story content, but also animation styles. At the very beginning of the show, there is a teaser for a fake anime which appears to be vastly superior in every way and at the end, I felt like I would have rather actually watched the fake anime.

I kind of wonder about the voice actors that they got to do this show, which are different every time so they quite literally go through every voice actor that works in anime. Perhaps they found it fun since they are used to jumping around to different projects and perhaps if they don't know about the repetition joke, since each actor only voices one half of the show and never has to be there for the other half, they may find this refreshingly original. Personally I'm disappointed that respectable actors have conceded to doing such crap, but they may just be too isolated to know how bad it is. Mind you, I don't blame the actors, it's not their fault the show is crap, they just do what's written for them,we have to blame the Japanese crew for giving them crap to work with and whoever agreedto make this a project that talents who should recognize they are above this, are apparently contractually obligated to do this drivel. At least that's the excuse I want to give them so none of them feel blamed, for those actors that actually believed in this one with all their heart and enjoyed and embraced it, I fear for their mental health.

Okay, that's all for now, I am really short on time between writing Children of the Crystals (not much progress to report, still stuck in chapter 1) and playing Dissida as well as live tweeting with Toonami. I need to get back to work and just wanted to share my feelings on this show. See you later, or sooner on Twitch.

Children of the Crystals

I am planning on writing, for Camp WriMo, my take on Final Fantasy which for legal reasons, I can not publish in any format that will get me money, but I'm going to write it anyway because maybe if I put it out there on the forums and try to get the attention of Square Enix themselves, this will actually be the next Final Fantasy game.

For those who don't remember what I posted before about this, the working title is Children of the Crystals, and it will focus on three people, a white mage named Ariana, a magitek spellblade named Kelsus, and a dark knight named Gevurah. Ariana and Kelsus are the mst recent chosen of the Church of the Crystals who are on a quest to fulfill their destiny to serve the church and defend the allied nations against the demons that continually invade from the other hemisphere. Gevurah is the prince of an empire that wants to undermine the church and take over the world for themselves, but he has doubts about his father's ambitions and wants to protect Ariana and Kelsus from the imperial troops that hunt them through their journey.

In the beginning, there were four gods who created the world together. They made the world with five regions, each had one to shape and populate as they saw fit, with the fifth region being a common territory where all could gather to live in harmony. However, one race took up te role of leadership and quickly became corrupt tyrants who oppressed the other three races. One race rebelled immediately, another joined the rebellion, and the last race, humans, hesitated out of fear that if the rebellion failed it would make the situation worse. The tyrants were outnumbered, but they were ruthless enough to outpower their enemies and managed to completely wipe out the race that led the rebellion, and were soon to finish off another race. The gods had sworn to remain out of mortal affairs and give them free will, but in light of the genocide they were compelled to intervene. At the divine council, the truth came out that the entire conflict had been masterminded by the god that created the tyrants, no longer content to share the world they had made together, he intended to conquer the whole world for himself. Since the gods were immortal, death was not an option, so the only solution was to neutralize his power by crystallizing him, but the price was that the other gods would get crystallized as well. With their master defeated, the tyrants retreated into exile in their native land while the other two surviving races hid the crystal of the evil god and revered the others. The Church of the Crystals has maintained peace between the two races in their four nations for a thousand years, but twenty-two years short of the millenium, two of the three known crystals shattered. The shards were collected at the shrine of the remaining extant crystal, and it was discovered that when the shards of the crystals were presented by members of the two races of opposite genders, it would summon an avatar of the god of the crystal that appeared to annoint them for some reason that the church speculates is important. The church holds these sacred champions as leaders, but the land that has long been neutral territory has given rise to an empire that believes that the shattered crystals mark the end of the time of the gods and that humans must become independent of such magic. Now the three allied nations are torn between invading demons and usurping heretics and the fate of the world falls on three young heroes caught in the middle.

Kindle Worlds coming to an end

I recently got an e-mail from Amazon saying that Kindle Worlds is being discontinued. This is a bit of a problem for me because I have two books through Kindle Worlds that will no longer be available come August. I would like to draw attention to this situation primarily due to how much I would like people to get these books while there is still time.

Dragon Hand is from the Foreworld Saga which focused on a group similar to the Knights Templar and their various adventures over the course of history, primarily the Mongol Invasion of Hungary in the thirteenth century. My take on this series was basically to place the recurring cast of Final Fantasy in this historical context and run a story that is realistic but features the familiar tropes as if they had actually happened in a world without magic or monsters and was basically boring history with a humorous twist for those in on the joke. I was actually quite proud of this and I was considering doing a sequel that took place during the Renaissance with the descendants of the characters from this book dealing with Machiavelli and Da Vinci in a bizarre secret war, but that will not be happeeing now. Also not happening, an Assassin's Creed tribute concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically one scroll regarding a psalm and perhaps a few others, starting with when the scrolls were written at Qumran, the legacy of the scribe carried on by an Assassin years later, and another later descendant in Elizabethan England who finds himself embroiled in a secret conflict over scripture that was lost to history. Sadly, while the other idas did not finish forming in my mind in time to beat Kindle Worlds submission deadline, this one is still available until August 29 so get it now!

My other book, which I am slightly less proud of, was Surface, from the Silo Saga. WOOL was the story of the survivors of an apocalypse in underground bunkers known as silos because they were built in the shape of silos but underground. For those who lived in the silos, the world outside was known only from a video feed that showed a barren crater surrounding the only door they had to the outside world and nobody actually went out there except fools who were ready to die. Over the course of the original novels by Hugh Howey, a woman named Jule discovers that her silo is one of fifty and that they were part of a plan that not only prepared for the apocalypse but actually caused it as well. After connecting with the last survivors of another silo, about a dozen of them give or take, she figures out a way for them to escape beyond the wasteland of the silos, which as it turns out is really only an area outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and while the rest of humanity has been eliminated, the world is otherwise far more inhabitable than they have been led to believe. The original story says the plan was for five hundred years, but Jule aborts it after only two hundred and fifty. It also implies that most of the silos remained as they were after the events of WOOL. I read these books with the intention of writing my own Kindle World story and the big story seed planted in my mind was, what happened to the other silos? about forty of the fifty continue to go on as they were, while a few were destroyed and some others figure out what was going on and hide from mission control. My story is how at the end of the five hundred years, the last surviviors of each silo leave, some allied to explore the new world and encounter the desendants of Jule and her fellow escapees and the others who continued to operate under the mission guidelines and are surprised to learn that the plan went sideways hard. I wrote this story in about two or three weeks and tried to publish it fast because my original title got stolen by another and I think my second title got stolen too, so I needed to get it out before somebody stole this idea too. I learned the hard way that stories should not be rushed, and this book is not great, but I don't completely hate it, I just have to be honest that this is not my best work and I hesitate to make this the first book of mine anyone ever reads.

Well, there they are, please get them before they're gone.

I'm on Twitch now...sort of

I just got a Twitch account and I don't really know what I'm doing with it, so bear with me. As far as I can tell I can really only use it through my PS4, although I guess I can use my PC. I am mostly playing Dissidia in preparation for tournaments for the rest of the season/month. I'm pretty sure I know how to share that as soon as I get good enough that I think anyone actually wants to watch me. I also want to play Final Fanatasy XV Comrades while my Play Plus account is active, so that will bewhat I do after the tournament season is over. I'm also playing Dragon Quest Builders and if anyone wants to watch that, I'll put that up after Play Plus expires. I'm in chapter 3 of 4 in Dragon Quest Builders story mode and when I'm done with the story I may work on the sandbox freestyle to buildthe Shrine of the Golden Dragon from 7th Moon, then I'll probably retire from that game. When I'm done with Dragon Quest Builders, I'll probably go back and forth between Dissidia and FFXV Comrades, and even when I finish the story modes, I'll probably still keep playing as long as anyone cares to watch. I also have Uncharted 4 and if anyone wants to watch me play through the whole thing with no idea what I'm doing at all, I'll work that into rotation. If I can figure out how to do this  from my laptop I'll play my own original 7th Moon I made with RPG Maker MV. I haven't actually started anything yet because I really don't know what I'm doing yet and I'm trying to se if I can post my 7th Moon trailer just to have something on my Twitch at the top of Toonami at 10:30 ESTtonight, if that doesn't work, check back tomorrow and see what I've got and wish me luck on figuring this out.

Final Fantasy Dissidia NT tournament is tomorrow and I'm still looking for a team and if I can make this work, look for Kefka under the tag Hidariude7.

Flower City Comic Con

Flower City Comic Con was largely a bust for me, but I do not blame the con, they did the best they could with a great venue, many great guests and exhibitors and a decent turnout of con attendees, sometimes business is just slow and that's the way it goes, just bad luck. Or maybe I suck, either way, I don't blame the awesome convention because I'd still like to go back again even though I didn't sell well, because maybe next year I'll have more traction.

My biggest moment was when I got an offer to turn Superfrenemies into a web series, which hopefully will be hilarious when we finally get around to it, and believe that I will be promoting the hell out of it when it does happen. The second coolest thing to happen was meeting actor Erick Avari on the way to the bathroom and realizing I left my phone to recharge at my table so I couldn't get a picture. My third biggest moment was finding a tiny Wartortle figure I had never seen before and adding it to my collection, which makes number three because there really isn't anything else noteworthy that happened, I sat at my table and did the same stuff I aways do with nothing else noteworthy happen because that's what happens when you are an exhibitor in artist alley, you miss everything. Everything, that is, except the cosplayers I will leave you with now.

Final Fantasy, Sandman and Flower City Comic Con

Final Fantasy gets top billing this week not only because I am getting into Final Fantasy Dissidia NT, but also because Record Keeper got an unteresting update to reinvent itself that I want to report on. I didn't have time to finish another volume of Sandman, but I've read enough to make some larger realizations about the series.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper got a major update this week overhauling it's interface and introducing a new mode called the Record Dungeons covering Corrupted Paintings. This is actually a big deal for this game because the Record Dungeons actually allow you to travel around inside the Final Fantasy worlds and truly experience the story. When this game was originally released, the format reduced the games to just battles. This is fun enough, and it was workable enough based on the system set up for All The Bravest, but since Brave Exvius and Mobius raised the bar for storytelling and overall gameplay for both the platform and the company, Record Keeper has started to feel antiquated and overly simple, and ultimately too repetive to keep players interested when the company has better ways to spend your time. I've only played through one dungeon so far, but it looks promising; the Record Dungeon starts with Final Fantasy VII being played through again, but now Tyro, the player avatar, gets inserted inside the story interacting with the characters. Battles are roughly the same, but now the party is adjusted to the story so you can play through it as it was meant to be, serving the story better than the original format. You can still play the higher level challenges, everything that was there before is still there, but thanks to special restrictions on the Record Dungeon, they can be enjoyed equally well by everyone new and old to the game. If you are a Final Fantasy fan and you haven't tried Record Keeper, now is the time to jump in.

I have been practicing hard at Dissidia and I think I'm getting better, but I am kind of cheating by only playing against the lowest level AI, when I play any kind of real challenge I still get my ass handed to me. At least I'm getting to the point where I know what is going on around me and I can figure out how to play, but I have to say, the controls are still kind of awkward and the fact that fights are 3-on-3 means that whether you are playing with AI or actual players, you only have control of about one third of the action, and when you activate your summon, you're down to a quarter of control. I suppose this is the same in any team game, but is really hard to get used to the fact that at any moment my team could win while I'm personally getting my ass kicked, and somehow stats can still list me as 1st place MVP. Basically, NT is a major button masher; aim roughly in the direction of your target and hope for the best. Strategy is difficult because your combos are kind of predetermined so it just doesn't matter. You have seven bravery attacks that are all preset by character and your only control is which direction your moving your character in, and honestly it's largely cosmetic, no matter what you do your just stealing bravery, different techniques rarely make any real difference other than what your character appears to be doing on screen, the effect remains the same. What you do have control over is your HP attack and your EX skills, but the HP attack doesn't provide a lot of variety, it's just that when you level up, you get a stronger HP attack, so just put the strongest one in that slot; the real strategy comes in with EX skills, your buffs and debuffs. EX skills actually do have different effects, and selecting the set that suits your playing style is very important, it can make the difference between whether you are actually making a difference or wasting time if you don't even understand what th abilities are actually providing. My winning combo that I recommend, especially for newbies who may not be sure what to do, is Poisonga for the forward skill, and HP Regen for the reverse. Both skills affect HP over time, Poisonga reduces it for your opponent, while Regen restores it for you, by settign Poisonga forward you can throw it at your opponent while chasing them which defaults Regen to the reverse which can be good because if you need Regen you may want to retreat while restoring yourself.

Now, if you're interested in the story, Dissidia is a whopper encompassing a whopping seventeen games at this point, that's all fifteen main numbered games as well as the spinoffs Tactics and Type-0 which didn't even make it to America. The whole thing starts with th original Final Fantasy, which if you don't know includes a time loop that apparently Dissida is a part of. In FF1, the Warriors of Light begin by hunting down a rogue knight named Garland and then proceed through a prophetic journey to fight the ultimate foe Chaos which turns out to be Garland who was transported through time at the same time you defeated him and that the every conflict on your entire adventure you've been on was created by him when he became Chaos two thousand years ago when he was sent through timeat the beginnign of your adventure. In the original release it's implied this time loop has been going on for a number of cycles, but the game is the last cycle because you actually defeat Chaos and break the loop. Dissidia numbers the cycles by specifying that it is the thirteenth cycle, and since it ends with the first frame of FF1, that game must be cycle 14. Here's where things get complicated, Chaos is opposed by a goddess named Cosmos and they each summon champions from alternate universes, specifically the other Final Fantasy games. In the original Dissida, there twenty two champions left for the final cycle including one hero and villain each from the first ten games plus Shantotto from FF11 and Gabranth from FF12, while the prequel in cycle 12 includes Lightning from FF13 as well as a few others from the other games but everyone else beyond the first thirteen games seems to be new now, so the implication is that since champions are lost with each cycle, the first included the full casts of all thirteen games but so far we have only seen the last two cycles. While the first two games gave everyone amnesia, NT allows all of them to remember everything that happened both in Dissidia and their own original games. This story has introduced two new gods, Materia and Spiritus, surrogates for the old gods who are desperately trying to sustain this world that shouldn't really exist as it was made for conflict and will only exist as long as there is a conflict to be fought in it, and therefore the godsmust generate conflict in order to sustain their world or die with it. The ten villains form the last two rounds are back along with fourteen heroes from those cycles (Kain joins Cecil from FF4) and Y'shtola, Noctis, Ramza and Ace get pulled in as well fresh and new to the surreal nightmare that is Dissidia. Square intends to add more characters, but for the American release, this is our core cast to join the Electronic Sports League (No DLC allowed). That's the setup, but beyond there really isn't much to the story that you need to know. In fact, with the idea of this being primarily for arena play, the story mode is a series of unlockable scenes that you earn from simply winning random battles, and even the story mode ending basically just says the characters leave behind a version of themselves in this world to keep fighting for the gods and what we're playing is just an infinite battle royale with no real point other than Final Fantasy fans pitting their favorites against each other.

Now as for Sandman, I'm reading Volume 7, Brief Lives, which draws attention to the Endless, which I find interesting and amusing. The Endless are the personifications of concpets that are so primal that they precede the gods and are confident they will outlast even the immortals. They are truly eternal which gives thema unique perspective, they know they ae better than everyone, but at the same time they are just seven people who realize that their existence is meaningless if they don't come down from their ivoy towers and interact with people like normal. This is interesting because they relate to each other most honestly as just another dysfnctional family, and they usually interact with other people as equals because they are just over reminding everyone how high and mighty they are, at least until someone is arrogant enough to think they are superior to anyone, then the endless put them in their place. Dream has befriended William Shakespeare, the Fairies, and the gods of many pantheons and treats all of them with the same respect as the ordinary mortals whose lives he extends on a whim to serve his realm and sate his loneliness. But if some dumb fool witch or goddess actually acts like she is above the others and dares to talk down to the mortals while in the same breath approaching Dream like an equal, he reminds them he is even farther beyond them than they are beyond the mortals. And then when his business is done and he's made his point, he goes back to something as simple as having dinner with his sister or going on a date with a goddess and casually acts as if it's just as normal to have an amicable break up as condemn an ex to Hell. The grand beauty of this series is it's simplicity, Neil Gaiman's writing style doesn't suggest anything impossible for me to write myself, what sets him apart is the scope of context, to envision the mightiest beings imaginable, and then make them seem as normal as you and me. In some ways the Endless are even more normal than the mortals in the story, as if the point is that in the short sightedness of mortals who know they only have about a hundred years at best to accomplish everything, those who are hundreds of years old tend to have already crossed off everything on their bucket list and are kind of over it, and those who have literally been around since the beginning of time really have seen it all and it is impossible to impress them. It makes me want to befriend a deity and go out for drinks, but we can't all be that lucky I guess.

My biggest news is that next week will be my first time at Flower City Comic Con, so if you are in the Rochester Area, please come down and see me and buy a book at my booth, I will give my usual report of the cosplayers and other crazies that come by. For those who cannot join me in person, please click the links at the side and buy a copy of my book online.