Eden Log: This was recommended to me because of my intense love of the movie Pandorum, but man, I just couldn’t do it. It’s too slow, too hard to see. I got bored with it 15 minutes or so in and moved on to…

Up: I finally got around to seeing this, and I’m glad I did. 11 minutes into the movie I had to pause it so I could curl into a ball on my couch and have a good cry. The rest of the movie was accompanied by squeals and peals of laughter. This is, in my opinion, Pixar’s Big Fish, their magnum opus. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to top it? And I do hope that other studios and such catch on to the fact that ye, our elderly are the most interesting people alive and we need more stories about them that aren’t just geriatric comedies.

Juno: Somehow I managed to completely miss this one when it came around. I loved the entirety of it, but I found myself more taken in by Jennifer Garner’s character than anyone else. She did a damn good job of making you feel the longing and desperation of her character, and want her to succeed.

I’ve been using Catch notes up until this week. Their devs really dropped the ball on their latest UI overhaul, and have most likely just lost themselves a customer. The new web app is hideous, and full of features that are completely unnecessary to the solitary note-taker – aka the majority of their userbase. Sacrificing quickly-accessible tags and making the app completely unusable on a 10-inch netbook screen in order to add in facebook-like collaborative “streams” is not acceptable to me. Unless they change it, and soon, they have lost my continued support.

Thanks to Rick Marcks for delivering this piece of undistilled awesome.

(Watermark-free images will likely be available in the future.)

EDIT: I’ve updated the image for a much less overwhelming watermark.

On the road, you smell the rain on the hot asphalt, and the debris as it kicks up and steams against your hot exhaust. Inhaling this mixture while taking a corner at fifty-odd mph is like breathing in deeply while you’re face-deep in your lover’s cunt. The wind and the rain and the changes in pavement are caresses both tender and fingernail-clad. Every tiniest bit of pressure on the handlebars pushes her torward that climax she gets when you come out of a lean and roll hard on the throttle, taking the next straight-away like a solid pounding thrust, her engine screaming an unintelligible mixture of your name and the son of God. You brake, the forks extend, and her legs twitch. She purrs while you sit astride her for a moment, waiting to kick off again into another howling series of leans and thrusts.

Over and over again. Every goddamn day, every goddamn ride is like passionate sex, sometimes smooth and relaxing, sometimes a quickie that is just necessary to relieve stress, sometimes a violent fuck that leaves you aching and breathless four hours later.

This morning, the three members of the Jacketmen Moto Club took our first-ever group ride to work, with Ry leading the way and Kevin holding up the rear. Kevin took the occasion to try out his brand new helmet cam, and here’s the somewhat sped-up video of that ride.

Years later, there’s very little that I recall from its pages, but one bit of it still sticks with me today: customers are more likely to spread the word about an absolutely terrible experience than an absolutely amazing one. Sadly, this is the case today. I’ve recently posted my very first review on Amazon, and it’s pretty negative. It’s about a subject that I love: Dead Space. Particularly, it’s about the atrocious work of animation that is Dead Space: Aftermath.

I’ll spare the details here, and instead just link you to the actual review.

And yes, some spoilers of the first episode follow, so read at your own risk.

The allegory to Dark Angel is pretty heavily established by the end of the first episode. The hero template is almost identical, although gender-swapped. Lyons plays the action hero guy with the bad ass toys, paired with Glau’s role as the sexy super-hacker blogger who exposes fraud and wrong-doing, and guides him through his missions. This is a pretty common trope, in fact, in many shows and stories.¹

As heroes tend to go, The Cape’s origins also aren’t anything new. Betrayed by his best friend, Vince Faraday (the good cop archetype) is framed for a terrible something that he didn’t do, and must now clear his name by getting revenge against the man who wronged him. All the while, he must keep his identity secret, in order to protect his wife and son. To do this, he adopts the persona of his son’s favorite costumed comic book hero, which has the added bonus of impressing the shit out of the kid. It’s one of the most classic origin stories of the vigilante superhero genre, and there’s a reason for this: each and every one of us can identify with this guy. He’s the good-natured everyman that we all consider ourselves to be. His world gets wrongfully obliterated, and like all of us like to believe we would also do, he takes matters into his own hands and fights back. Instead of giving up and crawling into a booze-hole, he goes for the throat of the evil nemesis, damn the obstacles.

He’s not a millionaire playboy with daddy issues. He’s not a super-powered demi-god. He’s not an invincible badass (and even gets costumed his ass thoroughly kicked several times). He’s just a guy who wants his life back. He’s got some help both likely (an anarchist blogger) and less-than likely (a band of circus-themed bank robbers), and one hell of a Big Bad: the most powerful security corporation in the world. And he’s got a damn cool cape that reminds me of The Iron Monkey.

Peter Fleming, played by James Frain (“Franklin the crazy vampire” from season 2 of True Blood), is one of those stereotypical smarmy, wealthy, creepy-faced British villains that everyone loves to lunch in the face (preferably that satisfying nose-crunchy bone-twisting kind of punch). Every line he delivers drips with slime, and I couldn’t get enough. Although there seems to be very little personality difference between the characters of Franklin and Fleming, who cares? He fits wonderfully in this kind of tongue-in-cheek color-noir action story. Every hero needs a villain, and Fleming delivers.

And who doesn’t love Keith David? Almost everything that man touches turns into clever deep-voiced gold. As the hero’s semi-shady mentor “Max Malini,” he fit the bill quite nicely, and his character’s subversion of the “Obi-Wan Moment” was well-played. Malini’s sidekick “ass-kicking little-person” rocks the house, and thankfully never got turned into a midget gag.

Summer Glau plays… well, she plays Summer Glau. Love it, hate it, or remain ambivalent. Truth be told, her character Orwell is the weakest link in this show. My hope is that the show will either give her some interesting character development, or leave her largely in the background. In Dark Angel, we knew about 80% of who Logan was right in the first episode, including witnessing a permanent physical crippling, and the remaining 20% developed in some surprising ways over the rest of the series. In The Cape, we can sum the entirety of our knowledge of Orwell into the following: Nice house, cool car, doesn’t like regular keyboards for some reason, Damn the Man, probably reads books, and Summer Glau.

I do have one specific complaint: wear a mask, dude! Your cape is cool and all, but if you want to fight your enemy hand-to-hand and not get ID’d (a subject mentioned at least a half-dozen times in the first episode), wear a goddamned mask! Even the eponymous comic book character you’re copying clearly wore one, so why the hell don’t you?

Aside from that gripe, I’m impressed. Now let’s hope the rest of the series keeps up this level of pulpy excellence.

Footnotes

¹ Don’t click that link, unless you want to suddenly find yourself having lost hours of your life from following it ever deeper.