Ideas Buzzing

It’s been a weird time in Seattle. Building in the background is the ongoing financial crisis (when can we declare a moratorium on the phrase, “in this financial climate”?), and an ongoing gang war between some South Seattle and Central Seattle gangs. Shootings have become frequent, some within blocks of our home. Then came two full weeks of snowy, city paralyzing weather, followed by flooding. This flooding was serious enough to close off all major land routes into the region and disrupted supply chains.

Piercing
Pain was comparable to the novocain injection during wisdom teeth removal (by the way, if the injections to prevent the ‘actual’ pain hurt that much, how painful must the tooth removal be?)
The piercer had a very professional and mellow affect. He was exactly the sort of person I hoped for.
The bleeding seems to have stopped; I don’t see any other oozing; so far, so good! It’s still tender, though.
My perspective on bacteria has changed; I’m very aware of cleanliness when it comes to the area near my piercing now. I don’t want an infection!

D&D 4th Edition Character Concept – built around chain weapon (flail) which has ‘reach’ property. I’m thinking warlord, to focus on keeping control of adversaries, preferably staying out of melee range, and adding entanglement, if possible. There must be entanglement rules in there somewhere.
The idea is inspired by the Uncanny X-Men comic from 20 yearsish ago when the Reavers ambushed Wolverine in Australia. They defeated him by staying at range with bolos and chain weapons. This concept may work better with a fighter. I plan to get the Martial Powers book soon to help sort it out and to give me new, fun ideas. I see that Clerics also have the ability to push baddies around, and have some advantages with flails. It occurs to me that there are probably several workable characters behind this concept.

Jazz Singer – the old version – shot when blackface was normal! Interesting how the version from the 80’s with Neil Diamond had its own, very different blackface scene.

Iron Man

I loved Iron Man. Jon Favreau gets how to direct the character, the visuals were excellent, the script was strong, the villains made sense and held together logically.

I have a few minor quibbles:

1) I would have dialed back the Tony Stark / Pepper Potts (played well by Gwynneth Paltrow) romantic tension just a little bit. Overall I liked it.

2) There's no way that any battle tank in production would be able to hit a target flying through the air at the speed that Iron Man was travelling. Tanks are designed to blow up slow moving, truck sized ground targets, not fast moving, human sized air targets. On the other hand, I liked that the .50 cal knocked the early Iron suit around.

3) The cute house robots went a bit too far. Ugh. I liked the automation of his mansion, however, and a certain amount of cute robotics is tolerable. It was that last bit when one handed his power-heart thing to him that i'm complaining about.

4) The film Tony Stark and Iron Man seemed based primarily on the 616 version, while Nick Fury was very much an Ultimate Universe adaptation. This doesn't really bother me, I feel compelled to play my uber-comic geek card on this vague discontinuity.

Again, these are minor complaints. For every one of these, there are at least 10 things done perfectly.

Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider is a pretty good movie. It captures comic book action/horror even better than comics usually do.