What? A Blog!?!

I Thought I'd be long Dead...

2008-11-07T09:33:00.002-05:00

...Before I ever saw this in my life time.

My cynicism about race in america is pretty legendary amongst people who know me.

I agrued with co-workers, friends and family about Obama's chances. I think the beginning of the turning point for me was during the primaries when he won Iowa. I was like "...THE FUCK? Isnt Iowa pretty much wall to wall white folk? and they voted for him?"

It was well into the actual race that Kyle noticed that I was really focusing on TV whenever "that brown man in the suit" was on. I explained to him that that brown man might be the first brown president of the United States if he wins the election. Kyle was like "there's never been a brown president before?" I was like "Nope". Kyle was like "I hope he wins"

I was like "Me too, buddy. Me too"

That was when I was realized that I was fully on board. My little brown boy is going to grow up in a world that when I tell him that in America he can be ANYTHING that he wants to be, I won't be lying to him.

I'm 37 years old this past September and for the first time in my entire adult life, I REALLY and HONESTLY feel like I'm part of this country. I dont know how long it's going to last because I feel like there are already people trying to piss in my corn flakes, but FUCK EM. They can't take this feeling away from me. And they really can't diminish the feeling of hope that everyone who voted for Obama has given to all of the brown children out there (especially the males).

Even if Obama drops the ball, this election has done something miraculous. People are going to look at this achievement and see that anything is possible for us. ANYTHING.

Iron Man was actually Good!?!

2008-05-23T12:49:00.003-04:00

Color me surprised. Now I always thought that the casting of Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark was excellent casting but was very leery of Jon Faverau as director. Aside from bits and pieces of Zathura there's nothing in his resume that screams BIG ACTION SET PIECE. Turns out that it was a non-issue. Iron Man is great simply because of the performances, particularly the LEAD performance by RDjr.

Just like how Patrick Steward will be the definitive Professor X, or how Mark Hammill is the definitive Joker or CHristopher Reeve will always be the definitve Superman?

Robert Downey Jr. IS IRON MAN.

From the opening bit in the Humvee with the soldiers ("Well you actually have excellent bone structure there. I'm having a hard time not looking at you now. Is that weird?") to the scene where he's walking around his lab blasting things out of frustration and slowly realizes that he has the means to take out his frustrations on the the actual people who are making him frustrated, he is awesome as Tony Stark.

Jeff Bridges exudes a a creeping menace as Obidiah Stane and only screams at someone once in the entire film but when he does it's to good semi-comic effect. He epitimizes the direction where Stark was headed before his life altering event.

Gweneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts was the biggest surprise for me as I usually find her annoying but here she was the perfect romantic and comic foil for Stark. Usually dont find her attractive much less sexy but here I could see why someone could.

My favorite part of the movie had nothing to do with armor or blasting but with the interplay between Stark and his longtime friend James Rhodes played by Terrance Howard. There's a bit early on where Stark is late for a flight and Rhodes has been waiting two hours for Stark to show up. ON the flight Stark is just trying to get Rhodes to relax and Rhodes thwarts Starks gentle nudging at every turn. There's a cut to a scene later on to what looks like a darkened club with Ghostface Killa from the WU-Tang (who also calls himself...wait for it, TONY STARKS) blasting over the speakers and video screen. Tony and Rhodey are sitting on a couch drinks in hand and Rhodey seems considerably less stressed. It isnt until you see the stewardess start dancing and a Retractable POLE come out of the floor that you realize that THEYRE STILL ON THE PLANE. I could not stop laughing for at least a minute and realized that they nailed hedonistic Stark personally.

ONLY that d00d would be living that large to have hot ass stewardesses and a FUCKING RETRACTABLE STRIP CLUB POLE on his jet.

NERD RYHME SKILLZ

2007-12-17T19:43:00.001-05:00

I like hip-hop. I like D&D.
The following rhyme was inspired by a thread on the NerdNYC.com boards. The rhymes on that
particular thread are a little more innocent in nature than this one. But keeping in line with one of my favorite MC's
MF DOOM I though this one needed a little edge to it.

There a few D&D references as well as one from the movie CONAN THE BARBARIAN.
Also I just want to add that this creative output (*snicker* yeah right..) was partially inspired when a freind of mine just flat out called me a nerd. She meant it in jest, but it got me thinking about how many comic book and sci-fi references are peppered in alot of indie and underground hip-hop tracks. Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus has tons of them. El-P at one point delcares that "He sees through pussies, like the Invisible woman..."

And MF DOOM emulates, you guessed it, my favorite Marvel Comics Villain DR. DOOM.

I'm just sayin'...

Anyway, those who are familiar with RPG's will get alot of the references and those who arent won't. I guess one day I'll
clarify for those who don't get it. Also Shin is a reference to my handle on a lot of the boards I frequent, Shinhakkaider.
The name itself is taken from an older sentai show Kikaider. Hakkaider is the name of one of the villains of the piece. Many years later a (pretty awful) live action movie was made based around the villain called Mechanical Violator Hakkaider. The spelling I used for the name is different, with me adding an extra K in for effect (what effect? I have no idea..). Hakaider means "destruction" so I added Shin ('New") as a prefix which now stood for New Destruction.

Yeah, it's pretty silly. But then again most sentai or anime names from the 70's and 80's sound really cool in the original language but the translations can be a bit wacky.

And with that, on with the show.

Aw shucks!! It's Shin, what the fuck?
A black D00d into D&D?
Super-hero games keep my heart warm (Except for V&V)
Robotech & Rifts are wack. CRAPTASTIC!!
Anyone who says different can get thier ass kicked. Powergaming bastids, couldnt find a story game with both hands, a torch and a 10' pole.
Eh, yo! Kill that orc and dont forget my gold, bro.
Mace swinging, undead turning, cleric from way back.
My patron deity declares that I speak the truth.
In fact here's a truth you can count on:
Always bet on black!!
Wack ass DM's need to get thier back broke,
"He in pain, yo," Take a toke of this Black Lotus smoke (It's Stygian! The Best!)
I'm Shin, straight up CE, fuck the rest!!

I'm Back.

2007-09-13T13:29:00.000-04:00

The summer months have been pretty hectic. Between our move to Kew Gardens, Pam (the spousal unit) finishing school and other assorted shenanigans it's been busy. Also settling down in the new diggs hasn't been what you call smooth. Getting used to the neighborhood as well as the proximity of the LIRR to our apartment has been a chore. The good news is that the new apt is decidedly cooler on the hot days than our old apt. The bad news is that while utilities are included in our rent they charge you for every AC that you put in. So right now there's only one AC in the apt and that's in our bedroom. Kyle isnt really effected by the heat all that much but when we think that it's too hot he comes into our room and sleeps with us (which he looooooves by the way).

The neighborhood is nice and it's a bit of walk to the subway but it's not that bad. At least in the summer it isnt, in the winter it might be a different story. Also my neighborhood is the neighborhood where the infamous Kitty Genovese case took place. Although Kew Gardens seems to be generally safer neighborhood now.

BRICK

2007-06-13T09:02:00.000-04:00

"Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them've actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."

I actually stumbled into a screening pass for BRICK over a year ago, but it was on a night that Pam was in class and I didn't know enough about it to put myself out over it so I let it drift. A few months later I Netflixed it and it's become one of my favorite new movies. In my mind it's a new classic of well done film noir. I own a copy of THE MALTESE FALCON on DVD that I just put on when I want to watch a movie but cant really decide what I want to watch. I know that if I pop in Sam Spade, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Casper Guttman and company I wont be disappointed. I think that Brick will be another choice in the "old reliable" category. Which is funny because they are both very similar movies and not because they both involve hard boiled detectives and if you've seen Brick, while Brendan isn't actually a detective per se, he's unexpectedly resilient for so slight of a kid and extremely canny. If there's another character that comes to mind that reminds me of it's a younger version of Tom Regan, Gabriel Byrne's character from MILLER'S CROSSING.

Having seen The Maltese Falcon plenty of times I see where Brick is taking it's cues from (Brick: Honk your horn 4 times, long, short, long short. Maltese Falcon: Ring the bell 4 times: long, short, long, short) but it's also the fact that the main characters are kids and their suburban environment, namely the high school acts as an analogue for the city where this type of story would normally take place. Despite those two points the script and the characters come off well, if you're a pedant who can't get past the fact that these teens are talking like they just walked off of the pages of a Dashiell Hammet book then dont bother showing up, but once you get past that there are so many nuggets of goodness in this movie you'll be hard pressed to resist a second and third viewing.

Friday Night, Zombies and Teen Supers...

2007-05-16T13:03:00.000-04:00

A couple of Friday nights ago I went out. Now when I was a little younger me going out on a friday night would mean me going to some sort of club or lounge to dance, but since Kyle was born I havent really been out a whole lot on a Friday nights unless I was taking in a movie or something.

This particular Friday as I left the apt around 10:00pm Kyle asked me where I was going because it was dark out and he really wasnt used to seeing me get dressed to leave the house this late. I told him that I was going to a book signing, he was like "OK".
"Comic books?" Yes, I replied. To which he just kinda smiled and said "OK" and went off to bed.

So yes, once again another nerd related event. To promote Free Comic Book day, my local comic book shop Jim Hanley's Universe had a 11:00 - 1:00am signing by creator Robert Kirkman. For the uninitated, Kirkman has done something that I believe that very few comic book writers would have been able to do, and that's get me interested and invested in a comic book about a zombie apocolypse. The comic book in question is called, THE WALKING DEAD. It has fleshed out characters, flesh eating zombies and a really effective use of the serial format by way of some great cliffhangers. I actually read the singles in the store but I pick up all of the trades when they come out (theyre up to number six right now). This book, next to Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo and Kurt Busiek's Astro City is one of my favorite comics out there today. Which is a little weird because my favorite genre in comics is superheroes, but only one of my favorite books Astro City, has superheroes in it.
Which leads me to the other book that Kirkman is known for INVINCIBLE. Basically, it's about the teenaged son of possibly the worlds most powerful super-hero right when he discovers that he too has superpowers and starts his superheroing career. It sounds like a simple enough premise, but part way through Kirkman throws some curveballs in there that make you go: "DAAAAAAAAMN.." I picked up the INVINCIBLE Complete Omnibus while I was there for the signing and of course had Kirkman sign it. He asked if I had ever read INVINCIBLE before to which I'd said no. He responed, holding the Omnibus (which is a huge hardcover book that costs $125) "this is a big leap of faith for you isnt it?" To which I responded, "yeah but I'd heard good things about it and if it's even a fraction as good as the WALKING DEAD, it'll be worth it". That got a smile out of him and he signed my book. I shook his hand said thanks and keep up the good work and moved on.

That long, huh?

2007-04-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

I was 5 years old when I discovered Star Wars.

Before that I liked Starsky & Hutch and SWAT but really as with most little boys it was the cars and guns in those shows that I liked. But one evening in May of 1977 changed all of that forever.

I remember sitting under my parents huge dinner table playing with some toy or another while they were watching the channel 7 evening news (with Bill Butell and Roger Grimsby) and Joel Siegel came on and was talking about something called Star Wars and talking about a galaxy far, far away or some such crap.
It was when the clip played that my attention was completly caught. It was the part where the Millenium Falcon had just escaped from the Death Star and was being attacked by a small group of Tie Fighters. Han and Luke were manning the gun turrets and were trying to shoot the Ties down.

It was the most incredible thing that I'd ever seen in my life. (I was five and hadn''t seen my first pair of female breasts yet so don't hold this against me...)

I only mention all of this now because I noticed that lately cable has been running the Star Wars movies (all of them) back to back and with some frequency. I wondered why until one day I was checking a calendar for what day the release date for Spider-Man 3 fell on when it suddenly hit me.

May 2007.

May 1977.

30 years.

The 30th anniversary of Star Wars.

Damn I feel old.

My own 5 year old was introduced to Star Wars when he was 3. He used to sit on my lap while I played LucasArts Jedi Outcast, then it's sequel, Jedi Academy and finally Bioware's Kinghts of the Old Republic, all on my PC. He likes Star Wars, but he LOVES Lightsabers. The boy has 3 of them, the extendable plastic kind. For his first Halloween costume he was a Jedi Knight. I think its the flashing lights and the sound of them when the clash together. Everytime there's a lightsaber fight he runs to go get his lightsaber and starts mimicking the movements on the TV as well as making the associated noises.

My love for Star Wars has waxed and waned over the last 30 years. I'm also one of the few Star Wars fans who understand that the prequel films weren't aimed at me or people my age (well maybe Revenge of the Sith, it's the only one of the three that felt like a real SW movie) they were aimed at, well my son. He absolutely loved The Phantom Menace. He laughed at all of the stuff that I thought was silly and stupid and overall he enjoyed it as a kid would enjoy it. Kinda like I enjoyed Star Wars way back when. Because face it, in the end Star Wars isn't high art and the only really good, solid Star Wars film is, IMHO, The Empire Strikes Back.

Still, as I watched Empire the other day, the first time in a long time, I noticed something, parts that were my favorite when I was 9 -10 aren't my favorite parts now. I mean when I was a kid I loved all of the training stuff with Luke and Yoda, the mushy romantic crap with Leia and Han on the Falcon was cool but I could have done without it. My all time favorite part when I was a kid, the climactic duel between Luke and Vader on Bespin, is no longer the thing I love the most. I still like it, but for my money the best part of the Empire has to be when Han is about to be put into the carbonite and Chewbacca is like "NO, thatsnotgonnahappent" and starts hurling Stormtroopers to and fro. Finally, Han calms him down and tells him that he has to look after Leia. There's a moment where Leia and Han look at each other just before they kiss that says everything thats needed to be said about how they feel about each other, at that point the actual kiss is just a formality. But the awesome part comes right when they're getting ready to put 'ol Han on ice:

Leia : I love you.

Han: I know.

Best response to "I Love You" in any movie. EVER.

I'd venture that not a lot of guys could pull that off in real life and seem that cool, but you believe that Han would say something like that and totally pull it off. We understand that this is who Han is tho' ,that he was written with this smug self assuredness and it's an understanding of character that was lacking in the prequels (Obi-wan and Palpatine aside, for their lack of screen time, these were the two characters I felt we got to know the best).

Anyway I've rambled on too long about Star Wars, Happy 30th to a part of my childhood that I don't think will ever, ever go away...

Like a Little Kid.

2007-03-21T12:30:00.000-04:00

Not to geek out too much, but I met Stan Lee.

When I mentioned this to my wife, It was as if I said I'm met some random mope off of the street. She had no idea, but when I said that Stan Lee was the guy who co-created Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four, she was like "OooooooH" Still didnt know who I was talking about but she recognized the names of those characters.

So It's not like I got to hang out with the old d00d, I was on line to get a book signed by him took a few pictures and when I got up there I said something corny like "It's nice to meet you, thanks for creating Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibilty are words to like by" or something like that. He smiled nodded and said thank you and I moved on. It was a short exchange but you could tell that he appreciated the comment. Watching him interact with people you can tell he LIKES his fans and doesnt hold them in contempt like a few other creators I could name. Now granted there are a great number of comic book fans who deserve the contempt, but the typical comic fan is actually pretty normal and Stan treated everyone who approached him with enthusiasm and respect, which made me feel good to be a comic book fan. For me meeting him was like a baseball fan meeting Cal Ripkin Jr or Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth. I don't get nervous around famous people, but I did feel the butterflies a little bit. I felt like a little kid...and that was a good thing.

New!!! With MIDDLE FINGER ACTION!!!

2007-03-21T08:51:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so before I get back to talking about the NYC Comic-Con, I got into some trouble the other day for sticking my middle finger up at someone at my job. Yes, I know it was wrong and felt bad about it almost as soon as I did it, but this woman triggered a bit a of a flash fire of rage that I responded so quickly.

Basically, this woman, this carribean born black woman made a comment about black men in general. It was a combination of the context of what she was saying and the almost venomous inflection of her tone that triggered my response. Basically she was making a reference to the fact that when black men are in interracial relationships they take the scraps from the other races and that basically we have no standards. That's not what she said verbatim but that was the jist of it.

Now I'm not in an interracial relationship. I'm married to a black woman, a smart lovely, driven good hearted black woman. But I have dated outside my race in the past. In fact I have a preference for latinas, pretty much everyone who knows me at least a little knows this. I've dated exactly one white girl and probably will never do so again. Not because of the particular girl, but mostly because of the hassle of having to deal with a bunch of ignorant fuckwits outside of the actual relationship. It made her uncomfortable and to a certain extent made me uncomfortable as well as occasionally hopping mad. None of these women that I dated in my past were what I considered scraps. But still it was a sentiment about black men that she'd stated before in my presence and on this day it set me off and she recieved the middle finger for her trouble.

It was at that point that she threatened me with going down to HR and reporting me. I told her go ahead as long as she told them what was said to set me off, be my guest. She walked off in a huff and eventually went to HR. It became a THING that I'll try to detail a little later on, but in a nutshell, we both agreed that what she said was wrong and my reaction was wrong. For a while it seemed that it was my reaction that was going to be considered the more wrong (which honestly was going to piss me off more than the inciting incident) but that wasnt the case and our HR person was very down to earth and real (while still being the consumate professional) about hearing both sides, which incidentally involved a reshaping of the actual inciting comment from the woman, but that's niether here or there at this point.

Except that it makes her a big frakkin' liar, but WHATEVER.

Anyway, I promised not to do it again and apologies were made via Proxy of course, and that's that.

Next time... more cool comic-con stuff!!

Or not.

Over one year later...

2007-03-01T12:59:00.001-05:00

Anyway, I just attended the 2nd NYC Comic-Con at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center over the weekend. Needless to say I'm pretty tired but all in all it was a better con than the one that was held last year. Everytime I go to one of these, I say to myself that it's going to be the last one and I'm getting too old for this sort of thing, but I usually end up at one sooner or later. I find this odd because as much as I like my hobbies I really have a large amount of contempt for my fellow fans. It doesnt matter whether its RPG's or comic books thanks to the internerd I get to see more of these people speak thier minds under almost total anonymity, and 80% of the time they come off like cynical, bitter fanboys, usually sexist, occaisionally racist, mostly stupid. Especially on places like Newsrama, which is a comics site. For RPG's, it's RPGnet for crass behavior and for gronard bitterness and RPG pedantry it's ENworld.org. Of course every now and then it's worth going to these places becasue they are good places to find out about things that you wouldnt normally find elsewhere, but my GOD, the nitpickyness and the utter stupidity of some of the people.

I really need to remove those places from my bookmarks, but they keep callin' me...

I'll post more pictures from the con when I can. For now I'll just post my picture with the cheerleader from Heroes, Hayden Panettiere. She seemed personable, really sweet and obviously cute (yeah she really does look that cute in person). She's also, really young. I think that she's 17, so any impure thoughts were followed by severe guilt and a mental image of me roasting in the hottest fires of HELL.
It's a strange little picture as I'd been at the con since 5am (that's a story in itself) and the picture was taken at the end of the day (around 7:30pm). I was afraid to get too close to her because I thought that I might stink. I gotta say though, that compared to some of the test subjects walking around the con that day (I'm looking at you cat-piss man, who sat next to me on the floor near the Dabel Brothers booth...JESUS CHRISTMAS man. BARS OF SOAP. USE THEM.) I probably smelt like roses...

Like I said, more pictures later...

First Post...

2006-01-31T22:29:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to do this for a while, even before it got trendy but as it goes real life often gets in the way and the blog got pushed by the wayside in lieu of child rearing, job stress and marital life.

But here we are finally. The spousal unit and the spawn are in bed fast asleep and the apt is quiet. As much as I love them both I live for this time of the night. I'm dog tired and plan on getting some reading done for my Project Management course at Baruch.

But of course, as usual I'm gonna fall asleep and wake up at 1:30am with a stiff neck and a thin film of drool coming out of my mouth.

Where'd the time go...