Thursday, July 3, 2014

The Magic of the Movies

  Opening with a story. You're standing outside a magic shop. There's a man there who's showing off tricks to people. You get closer and notice that he has a deck of cards in his hand. He flips through them, showing that it's a perfectly normal deck, then has a little girl tell him where to stop and let's her take her card. She proudly shows off an ace of diamonds to the little crowd and slips it back into the deck. The man swiftly takes the deck, puts it in the girls hand  and snaps his fingers, and tells the girl to look through it. The girl gasps and drops the cards , spilling the deck.on the ground. You look over and see that almost ever card there is an ace of diamonds.
    I'd like not to view myself as a negative person. I guess we all like to see ourselves as positive, but after a visit from my brother, I've come to notice it more. I like to critique. A lot. I like to deconstruct what people like and see why they like it, and whether or not that's a good reason to like it. But what constitutes a good reason. I try to go into it with good intentions (don't go waste money on this movie, it's 80% likely to be total crap) but at the time I feel like a kill joy and even if my hunch is right, the person won't want to admit that that negativity was justified.
       Now, this is in the end my problem. It's not anyone elses issues to work out. Although I accredit it to watching a huge amount of critics that are usually quite snarky, they aren't ruining people's fun. I am. Yahtzee Croshaw isn't the one who no one wants to show a trailer to at work for fear of what he'll say. Because Yahtzee works from home.
   Although it's cliche, Iife's too short. Life's too short to keep harping on everyone else, and it's too short to worry about $10 at the movies. I don't want to keep vreaking things down, I just want to have fun. I feel like it's ages since I've watched something and just watched it, instead of looking at how they made it, what went on behind the scenes, be it movies, video games, or a TV show.
     I haven't lost myself in a world in what seems like forever. In the years of collecting facts about productions and game design, I've made it almost impossible to sink into a world. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life looking at things like this.
      Closing with a story. You're standing outside of a magic shop. A man stands outside doing tricks. You watch as the he pulls out a completely normal deck of cards, then riffles through them. You know that he's holding a Svengali deck and that the rest of the crowd is fooled. You see him flip through it in such a way that you don't notice all the duplicates. You know exactly how it's done, and you can appreciate the skill it takes,but  you'll never be as impressed as that little girl.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Kandor

     I love superhero comic books. I feel like I need to say that before I go any further, but I love them for everything they are. I love the high flying super heroes, the melodrama, and everything else. Well almost everything.

   Lets talk about Kandor. Kandor is a city in the Superman comics that was stolen from Krypton and shrunk down to the size of a bottle. Superman recovered it from the supervillian Brainiac, and since then he hasn't figured out a way to get the city back to normal size, and this is where the problem is.
   With superheroes, nothing is off limits. Just about everything has been figured out and is possible, and because of this, Kandor doesn't make sense. Nothing should be impossible for you, especially something as simple (for superheroes) as making something bigger than it is. Kandor is a symbol of Superman's failure, it's a humanizing factor that he's alone in the world, and the only surviving members of his race are tiny and vulnerable. The future of an entire race hedges on Superman figuring out this problem, and he can't do it. It's meant to show us that the Man of Steel isn't all powerful, he's not omniscient, he's vulnerable like the rest of us.
     All of this would be perfect if it wasn't for the fact that it's so easily solvable. Because the answer's so obvious, it breaks suspension of disbelief to have it left unsolved, but to solve the puzzle is to remove Kandor's purpose. Kandor doesn't function as a symbol if you make it bigger, it's just another place, another plot point. A couple of times in the comics they did make Kandor full sized, but it ended up as you would expect, important for a few issues, then gone and never spoken of again. It breaks the immersion of the story to leave it in, and it makes the city pointless if you solve it. Just something to think about.