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This past week, I saw The Avengers: Infinity War. I was also home sick and decided to re-watch Justice League. Minor spoilers of these and other Marvel and DC movies are sprinkled throughout, but nothing major.

It was Justice League that inspired this blog post. A generally held belief is that people are still waiting for the disappointing Marvel movie, while people are still waiting for the DC film that doesn’t disappoint. I think I’ve figured out a few reasons for the disparity. As a quick sidebar, I’ll admit my bias for being a bit more of a DC fan. Sure, ‘feature film’ isn’t their strongest medium, but virtually every TV series they’ve done in the past three decades, animated and acted, have been pretty solid. Also, while Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequels are excellent games, the only Marvel games I can think of that were any good were their Street Fighter clones – nothing that had its own story to tell.

I am certain that the biggest challenge faced by both The Avengers and The Justice League is the same: they need a villain powerful enough to require more than one superhero to resolve the conflict, and a circumstance dire enough to warrant it. A villain that powerful, however, is nearly impossible to create without devolving into a one-note, insatiably power hungry, god-like being threatening the entire planet. There is basically no other story line which supports the heroes working together in such a manner.

A multi-superhero movie wouldn’t work if they were a villain like Khan. His appeal is the fact that he made the audience second guess whether there was some merit to his cause. Interesting as Khan was (and still is), Iron Man would make quick work of him. It’s similarly impossible to go for the unsettling nuance of a villain like Norman Bates. What made Bates such a memorable antagonist was the fact that he wasn’t some larger-than-life monster, it was precisely that he was so ordinary. That sort of nuance is unsettling when they are the antagonist of an equally ordinary person, but Norman Bates would not have enough time to creep everybody out before Wonder Woman took him out. Even a villain like Darth Vader, the textbook definition for “ominous” or “imposing”, would be a tough sell as an antagonist for The Hulk or J’onn J’onzz; there’s no possibility for a showdown to go his way. Thus, we are left with Thanos, or Steppenwolf, or some other villain who is equally impossible to assign any other personality quality than “more powerful than any two superheroes fighting them”. Any such quality would be subsumed by that power – a power that inherently isn’t human or held by a being that can be any real sort of reflection on the human condition.

As another quick aside, the last point, I believe, is amongst the reasons why Batman villains are as good as they are. Scarecrow’s power is to use people’s deepest fears as a weapon. Two-Face embodies internal conflict. Catwoman’s motivations are primarily self-serving but she’s helped Batman in isolated instances. The Joker is, essentially, Batman’s antithesis and turns Batman’s own moral code against him. An ensemble of enemies who are themselves relatable in conjunction with a flawed protagonist makes an excellent basis for a story, and the lack of one is what makes a superhero movie devolve into “two dudes punch each other until the movie decides one of them actually harms the recipient”.

So, why does DC have this problem more so than Marvel? I think there are a few reasons. First and foremost, I think DC’s biggest challenge is Superman. His laundry list of powers make him a team on his own, and thus no room for internal struggle or conflict – or, conversely, a need for teamwork. A fight between anybody and Superman has no stakes because his only weakness is a hard-to-find substance only billionaires seem to possess. It would have been particularly interesting if Superman’s weakness was something more common, like aluminum – easy enough for him to avoid, but suddenly evens the score as “the thing that can kill Superman costs $20 at Target”. Since it’s not, DC’s first hurdle is far higher – a being Superman can’t beat by himself. This multiplies the motivation and personality problems, because “more power for no reason” or “he’s just evil, okay?” is about the only way to justify an attack requiring more than Superman to resolve.

Second, One of the major issues with superhero groups is the classic question of “who watches the watchmen?”. Marvel handled this with Captain America: Civil War. This movie’s pitfall was that each side seemed to have its adherents split down the middle for the sake of keeping the things evenly matched during the fight scene. It would have been more interesting to have spent more time having the motives of each individual explored and explained, but at some level I’ll need to concede that Marvel’s 12 Angry Men would have a far more limited audience. DC tried tried to tackle the same theme with Batman v. Superman, and it was not nearly as well received. A major part of it was because of the almost nonsensical setup to the fight, along with the fact that the fight could have easily been avoided in a thirty second conversation where Superman just explained what was going on. However, I submit that even with that situation handled differently, the story still wouldn’t have held up. Batman isn’t well known for his unwavering accountability to commissioner Gordon, so for him to be the one having an issue with Superman’s lack of oversight is hypocritical and nonsensical.

Finally, I think there are the “less tangibles”. A few bullet-time shots can add some artistic flair, but over half of the slow motion shots in Justice League were pointless. I think director Zack Snyder uses hard lighting in excess as well. Using heavy contrast in lighting can illustrate a darker mood, but having 2/3 of the movie done that way is enough overkill to leave viewers with a sense of despair that Marvel’s brighter colors help avoid. While Marvel did the single-superhero stories well, DC only seemed to have solid success with Wonder Woman; only she and Superman had a standalone movie prior to Justice League. In practice, this meant that The Avengers could spend more time on the standalone story, while the first half of Justice League was the summarized origin story of The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg (and, dealing with the, ehm, “Superman Situation”).

I’ll close with this – DC truly shined in their early 2000s animated series Justice League: Unlimited. They did this by making it primarily a compendium of smaller stories. In most cases, one or two superheroes would address a particular foe or circumstance, rather than the Justice League battling in concert every time. These stories were excellent in their depth and complexity precisely because they avoided “the world almost ending on a weekly basis”. There were so many great episodes and scenes that I feel it’s a great counterargument to the Marvel movies – the series was done in such a way that it’s near impossible to retell its stories in a movie format.

Me:

Leave the crock pot on before work, setting a reminder with Siri to turn it off later. Attempt to VPN home, but find yourself able to do so on your laptop, but not on your phone. Meanwhile, the app which controls the smart plug into which the crock pot is plugged, only runs on the phone. Attempt to configure the VPN on the phone, spend time copy/pasting blocks of text to overcome OpenVPN errors in the Android app. Finally get to the point where the error received indicates that only “dev tun” mode works, rather than the “dev tap” mode the router currently uses. Attempt to change via SSH and lose laptop connectivity. Restore laptop connectivity, only to realize that it’s not meaningfully possible to reconfigure the VPN mode without the webUI, which isn’t accessible over the VPN. Download BlueStacks and the Android app, reconfigure the network stack to send traffic out the VPN interface, and finally get the crock pot turned off.

Everyone else:

Call next door neighbor who has a key.

It has taken me 13 weeks to finally get enough time to finish the game…but I finally did. I wanted to complete the game before writing a review. There is no shortage of reviews to be found, including the usual angry folks. So, I’ll provide one more to the mix, just because.

A whole lot of the criticism thrown at the game has at least some merit. The first hour is confusing if you’re coming straight from replaying the last game. I ultimately grew to like (and depend on) the jump mechanic, but the initial key bindings were terrible. I didn’t run into nearly as many bugs as other players have, though I’m sure a decent amount of that had to do with the fact that by time I’d finished the game, there were three or four patches to fix them. Once I got used to the “profile” system, I consider it far superior to the “pick your class at the beginning of the game, and you can’t change it later, even though you’re not entirely sure which one you like because you haven’t started playing yet” paradigm of the others. Conversely, it did take quite a while to deal with the “three abilities at a time, you can’t expand them, but you can have four sets of ‘favorites'” method of ability management.

I think one of the fundamental problems with Andromeda was that it was clearly an attempt to embrace the ‘open world’ style of game that made Skyrim so popular, giving players the ability to ‘go wherever, do whatever’, but on a planetary scale. I agree that ME1’s ‘drive around a square mile to find some random debris at best’ wasn’t the most fun thing ever (and against which, MEA’s planetary exploring was much better), but the handful of sections that involved linear missions seemed fewer and far between. ME3 was more linear than the first two, admittedly, but there’s always been the freedom to choose the order in which missions are played. I think the sandbox design took away from the ability to write a good story. I would argue that this change caused the tepid reception. More so than the bugs or facial animations, I believe the single biggest reason MEA got the tepid response it did had more to do with the open world setup and endless number of fetch quests that was a massive departure from the more balanced, story-driven level sets that were present in the original trilogy. Even at that, the planets visited were straight out of Star Wars. I visited totally-not-Hoth, totally-not-Dagobah, and four totally-not-Tatooine planets. They weren’t outright terrible, and to be fair the Remnant sections were interesting and had a nice balance, but the requirement to do a mountain of fetch quests on half a dozen planets leads me to be of the persuasion that there should be some differences on more than two planets. Then again, the “drive around and flail for the one mineral deposit you actually need” was no picnic; I was shocked to find that they somehow managed to make resource mining even more tedious than ME2.

The draw to the original Mass Effect trilogy was primarily the story and characters. In the original, we got to watch Liara go from adorkable adolescent scientist to the Shadow Broker, from barely using her biotics to being formidable and confident. Tali went from a young woman on a pilgrimage who joined the crew out of convenience, to a loyal squadmate who would follow Shepard anywhere…almost. Mordin went from a strict scientist who saw existence through a microscope and a spreadsheet, (spoiler warning) to someone who would sacrifice his own life to atone for his crime (well, unless you’re a complete jerk). There’s a reason I bought a friend of mine this T-shirt as a graduation gift, and the Honest Trailer sums Garrus up well when calling him “the best alien bro since Chewbacca”, and it’s moments like these. Jack went from a rage-fueled ball of anger to a teacher who cares deeply about her students. I could go on and add Thane, Wrex, EDI, Legion, Samara, and a dozen others, but I don’t have time to come up with all the Youtube links. To be fair, I will at least concede that most of those comparisons involved at least two games’ worth of character development, if not three.

The characters of the original series clearly had personality and development. While Peebee was a highlight this time around and Cora had backstory that was at least somewhat interesting, I thought the rest of my squadmates were generally bland. Jaal was okay, but primarily because of his role of being de facto ambassador; virtually any other Angaran could have stood in his place. Vetra was the most stoic Turian with a paint-by-numbers loyalty mission. Gil wasn’t half bad, but I couldn’t take him anywhere, and Liam? He was so annoying, I nearly shot him myself. Drack had some humorous banter with Peebee while driving around, but if it wasn’t acting exactly like Wrex, he was complaining about getting old. My sibling spent the whole game in the med bay and was generally a plot device for a forced sense of stakes, rather than someone I’d actually like to spend time with.

The other direct comparison I’ll make is in the decisions and how they worked. 90% of the dialogue choices seemed to change the immediate follow-up line, but the response after that clearly was written to be addressed no matter which option was chosen. I didn’t seem to get a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ reception for choosing one response over another. The Paragon/Renegade mechanic may have been a bit limited to continue, but it didn’t seem like there was any similar method of aggregating a personality. The original games gave different side missions and characters interacted with you differently depending on where you landed on the paragon/renegade scale. While virtually every player of the original game remembers the agonizing decision of whether to save Ashley or Kaiden, and whether or not to save the Rachni Queen, later about what to do about the heretic Geth. Later still players got to decide whether to save the Geth or Quarians, though the highlight of my gameplay was being able to make peace. I remember two decisions that were even close. One of those decisions seemed like a forced attempt to implement such a choice, while the other was more nuanced, but primarily political posturing. 

While I’ve spent the majority of this review berating it in one way or another, there were some things I absolutely did like about it. The Nomad solved literally every complaint that had ever been made about the Mako. Once I got used to the combat changes, it was overall an improvement. I didn’t like having to micromanage my rare resources, but it was definitely nice to be able to build whatever guns I wanted, rather than saving up all my credits and trying to remember which merchant sold the one I wanted. I can carry two sniper rifles and two shotguns if I want?!? Awesome! My squadmates actually participated in combat, the Kett enemies were varied and responded to different tactics, and though the story wasn’t well-developed, I thought the rebellion subplot added a point of conflict that made sense under the circumstances and was a great idea. The Angara were a cultured species, with a well-developed history and great interactions. I was expecting to meet more, but if they were only going to do one, they did it right. The ending was excellent, in that it was a good length, had great interaction with the different groups interacted with during the game, felt satisfying, and had an excellent epilogue.

Overall, I’d give the game a 6/10. It wasn’t a bad game overall, I felt that my interest was basically held, and I think there’s room for its sequel to advance the story and redeem the shortcomings. I do, however, think it will take far longer for me to have the desire to replay it, as I tend to do with the original trilogy every 18 months or so.

One last thing: the origin story of leaving the Milky Way should have been a part of the initial exposition, not hidden behind finding dozens of maguffins over the course of the game.

So, I had a little time to kill tonight, and I decided to walk around TJ-Maxx for a few minutes. I have gift card that needs to get used, and a little retail therapy wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.

TJ-Maxx is a store where you can go and purchase clothes from designer brands (albeit from last season or less-than-trendy colors), fragrances, Bluetooth speakers, olive oil, hair care products, small furniture, yoga mats, beard trimmers, dried apricots, children’s books, wine glasses, carry-on luggage, chocolate, knockoff Swiss Army knives, a small charcoal barbecue grill, low-grade jewelry, and boutique hand soap. 

Now, before you get all upset because you can buy all those things at Target, the difference is that Target is intended to have a wide range of items, and you can reasonably expect to find a specific item in stock, with a specific spot on the shelf, and have that item ordered if they’re out of stock. At TJ-Maxx (and its cousins, Marshall’s and Ross), it’s either in stock, or it’s not…but it’s not like Big Lots or other liquidation stores where they’ll stock basically-whatever ends up on the truck. There’s no guarantee *what* olive oil will be on the shelf, but there will be olive oil. If you like a children’s book, get it, because it’s going to be a trip to Amazon to get it if it’s gone by the next time you get there.

On the one hand, I’m having trouble imagining the episode of Shark Tank where someone pitched the idea of the set of items described above and having it work. On the other hand, apparently TJ Maxx has less trouble getting foot traffic than Macy’s does, and with half the overhead of Nordstrom, each individual sale is more profitable.

Ultimately, I don’t think it would be wisdom for me to tell them to cease carrying chocolate.

I miss Steven Moffat.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll explain what my issue is with this season: It’s basically been one story in Mad Lib form, repeated all season so far. (spoiler warning)

The Doctor and Billy come across a situation where people are mysteriously disappearing/dying. The Doctor goes to investigate. Not much more progress is made for the next 10-15 minutes, just primarily suspense-building. Then, someone introduced earlier in the episode is taken, and The Doctor goes into “aw hell no!” mode…only to find out that the antagonist isn’t malicious. The Doctor explains what the situation is, brokers some variant of a peaceful coexistence, and he leaves. 

I’m fully aware that the preceding paragraph could readily describe a nontrivial number of prior episodes, even a number of ones written by Moffat. However, this season feels like it’s the British, live-action Scooby Doo. I’m pretty sure that, if I were so inclined, I could fit most of these seasons’ episodes into a half-hour format and lose very little in terms of plot. To be fair, this is well-blazed trail, and I will give Mike Bartlett credit in that he isn’t leaning on the magic wand Sonic Screwdriver to get out of every jam, which is greatly appreciated as it really did become a magic wand for a little while there.

Moffat got plenty of heat for the plot holes in the larger arcs, as well as overusing the Weeping Angels, two points which I can’t completely disagree with. However, I still remember the amazing a-HA! moment at the end of “The Wedding of River Song” that gave incredible context the season opener, or the scene at the beginning of “Asylum of the Daleks” when The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are in a room of hundreds of Daleks, assuming it’s the end for them, and one dalek says “save…us”. Admittedly just as much a testament to Karen Gillan’s skill as an actress, I’ll never forget Amy’s memorable, “Raggedy Man, I remember you, and you are LATE TO MY WEDDING!“. There are those who are not a fan of the controversial episode “Blink”, but I submit that a single episode being sufficiently iconic to invoke a debate, without being a part of a greater arc or extended holiday episode, is a position held by maybe two or three others. Finally, was there ever an episode with Vastra, Jenny, and Strax that wasn’t amusing? No. No, there was not.

Maybe Mike just needs to find his stride, and to be fair, I am comparing Moffat’s greatest hits here -it takes skill to take an episode with the name and premise of “Let’s Kill Hitler” and make it so thoroughly forgettable. Bartlett has a small body of work thus far and has a lot of land mines to avoid, which he’s doing pretty well so far. Perhaps Mike is front-loading the lesser episodes because the back half of the season is going to be the best one ever. Either way, I’ll still watch the current season, though my research for this blog post reminded me that I need to go back and watch season 6 again.

I’m trying to keep at least a monthly cadence with blog entries. I’d like it to be more often, but one of the tenets I have with respect to blogging is that I don’t want to blog for blogging sake. I want a topic to write about, I want it to be informative and interesting, and I don’t want it to be about anything incredibly personal, and I’m actually trying to stay away from the first/fourth/fifth amendment stuff, since I figure you’ve all read my thoughts on those topics already, and either agree with me, disagree, or don’t care. This limits my topics just a bit.

I do what I can to stay on the lookout for topics to write about, but few make the cut. The brightest of the bunch was that a nostalgia wave that hit recently brought me to re-watch the music video for Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 pop hit If You Had My Love. It looks different now – half of me wants to rag on that voyeur guy for watching her on the ‘security’ cameras in the bathroom…but the other half of me wonders why they needed half a dozen cameras for the same hallway, and why would Jennifer have a security system installed that was connected to the internet and streaming on her website, visible from the first “Internet Search” link…I mean, it really doesn’t make much sense. Also, I was a bit saddened that the minute-ish uptempo interlude never ended up being its own song.

In other news, I had someone ask me why a particular organization to whom I provide technical services was using Microsoft instead of Google. Putting my distrust of Google aside (not that Microsoft is much better in this respect), I was hard pressed to come up with a place where Google’s G-Suite offering offered any measurable advantage…though the one problem we are running into is the ability to use shared calendars on mobile devices, and that’s becoming a problem.

I’ve wondered how people end up with this massive amount of apps on their phone. I’ve got maybe two dozen, and half are platform utilities like file managers and root-based applications. Nothing in the top charts appeals to me, and I don’t even know what people search for to end up with this bottomless well of apps. Then again, perhaps I’m a weirdo for going to m.cnn.com in a web browser rather than downloading an app for it. On the flip side, I don’t get any advertising in the form of push notifications. Is it superior? I don’t know.

I was at Dave and Busters this past weekend, and tried explaining Spaceplex to a 15-year-old. This must be what getting old feels like.

I avoided the 2016 election as a topic here, and that stance is generally holding true in 2017. There’s already hundreds of millions of articles written on the topic. I’ll be praying for President Trump and the people with whom he surrounds himself.

Timeless is my favorite new series of the 2016 season. I do wish they would have saved the ‘Rittenhouse’ arc for season 2 though.

Those are the majors. Let’s see how long it takes for me to find a ‘real’ topic to write about.

I’m guessing that most of you won’t be reading this for quite some time. See, apparently the strategy of ‘letting your domain lapse and re-buying it’ isn’t a good one, because ‘waiting it out’ isn’t the 30-day-or-so wait I thought it would be. Apparently, Verisign holds on to domains for quite some time after they expire, only allowing me to re-purchase it for several hundred dollars until its ‘release’. Now, to be fair, HostISO was willing to purchase the domain on my behalf and let it sit long enough to transfer, an offer for which I turned them down…but I have definitely learned that Hostgator has it right…and basically everyone else is a bad idea. Resultantly, I’m writing these as a result of a manually-edited hosts file, rather than having squared away my domain woes, which I cannot wait to resolve.

There has been so much going on, and yet I sit here, uncertain what to blog about. I guess I’ll start with the technical – one of the clients at work has put me amidst some uncharted territory. While I usually use the excellent Turnkey Linux project to perform one-off tasks and run self-hosted, browser-based software, I am finding myself in a place which requires Virtualmin, since I need to handle multiple subdomains. Since Virtualmin doesn’t play too well with TKL, I’m doing my first ever web server from scratch with Debian. It’s been quite a learning process. Similarly, while I haven’t been able to get my copy at home working the way I want, the excellent Teampass project is working well at my job, replacing our prior system that had a one-at-a-time thing going on that got in the way with obnoxious frequency. I’m also keeping an eye on Open365. It seems to fit the bill for my collaborative spreadsheet needs described a while back, but its docker-based install process is a bit smoother on paper than it ends up being in practice. I’m sure it’ll improve in the coming releases.

At the church where I do technical things, there’s lots of things coming soon, though there’s a whole lot of moving and shaking I’m hoping to get done in the summer months. I end up with an incredible number of questions regarding what I should do next, and implementation is its own set of challenges I look forward to tackling, though we’re all of a similar mindset that trying to get everything in place before our November meeting is ambitious, to say the least. I really think it is doable, but I must remember to consistently ask myself whether it’s doable because it’s what I think is best and I’m looking for God’s green light, or if it’s truly the direction in which I’m supposed to be going.

At a personal level, I’ve been dealing with a greater need for ‘adulting’; it’s becoming pretty clear that my desire to grow up at a child was woefully misplaced. I hate coming home because ‘coming home’ invariably means ‘dishes and laundry’. I miss the other life stages.

Pretty much, this…

Relevant: