Schlock Mercenary

With the March 8th update we see a return of the uplifted Polar Bear, Captain Landon of J.S.C. Internal Affairs, and I was happy enough with the picture in my head that I laid it out in a manner that would allow for easy conversion to a wallpaper. Within minutes of the strip going live there were people on the Schlock Mercenary Facebook group asking for the wallpaper, so I felt pretty good about my instincts.

With Chappie,Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) delivers a very sweet story about sapience set in a very violent vision of Johannesburg.The film takes some of the usual shortcuts where movies with lots of computer jargon is involved, but even without making allowances for that stuff I had a great time. I don't know how the effects were done, which meant that early on I stopped looking for the line between the practical effects and the digital effects, and just sat back and believed in the robots.One of my favorite aspects of the film was the location shooting and the audience's immersion in South African accents and dialects. Having been to Joberg several times myself, it sounded exactly like I remember it.Chappie comes in #2 for me so far this year, easily clearing my Threshold of Awesome(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

My friend Jim's best-selling book to date, Libriomancer, is on sale for $1.99 at the Amazon Kindle Store. This particular sale looks like it'll end quickly, so if you're interested, jump on it now.

I'm back from a four-day jaunt to Chicago during which Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells and I were able to record a dozen or so episodes of Writing Excuses, including two or three with Wes Chu, and one with a librarian from a local Junior High School. Per Twitter, I could tell when we were done because my talk-brain was empty and my listen-brain was full.

My birthday is coming up, so I thought I'd get you something in order to get me something. Or something like that.We are having a one-week sale, 20% off in honor of the fact that I no longer attempt to lie about being anywhere near 20 years old. Just go to store.schlockmercenary.com and use the code BIRFDAY15. Whatever you put in your cart will be discounted by 20%.

I had a bit of in-universe fun with my friend Alan. The "Planet Mercenary" shopping outlet, which carries all the best weapons and materiel from all the best suppliers in the Schlockiverse now has a logo, and a Twitter feed.

Do you ever have a stray thought that leads to a story seed, and then suddenly there's a whole story there and it's in the way of your day? So you write it as quickly as possible, and move on?

My friend Jonathan "Skippy" Schwartz is Kickstarting the expansion to his super-successful Redshirts card game, and I'll just show you my favorite card now before saying anything else.Redshirts has a great game mechanic. The object is to kill off your own crew members. If they actually succeed in their missions and return healthy, you've clearly done something wrong. It's fun, it's funny, and it's pretty easy to pick up. David Reddick's art is perfect for it, and I've been led to understand that in this expansion I'm not the only creator of things to be garbed in ominous red and sent doomward repeatedly.Check it out, folks.

Kingsman: The Secret Service falls short of "summer blockbuster" status by virtue of more than just its February release. Its R-rating is earned, at least in part, through some spectacularly violent moments whose absence, were they to be edited out for broader audience appeal, would leave the movie bland. For genre fans like me it's way better than the usual February fare, but I can see why 20th Century Fox opted out of a spring or summer release.This film is a rags-to-riches super-spy mashup that nods to its forebears with all the subtlety of an exploding head. So, brief nod, then ASPLODEYGOO! Its core premise is no more or less absurd than the ones found in the usual "save the world" superhero films, and the dastardly plot is a blend of chilling "what if" and brow-lifting "WTF."In short, it's spot-on. If you loved the action scenes in The Matrix trilogy, and have a soft spot for dapper do-gooders for whom "good" means "over the top awesome," you'll enjoy Kingsman: The Secret Service. I did, and as of this writing it's #1 for me for the year.There's still a lot of year left, though. This clears my Threshold of Awesome, but may drop a dozen notches before the year is out.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

I'll be at LTUE this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the Provo Marriott. I'm doing quite a bit of programming, and I'll also have a table there. It's not a huge event, though (between 1500 and 2,000 attendees), so I should be pretty easy to find. That said, here's my schedule:Thursday

It's got some Wachowski-sized holes in its world-building, and it feels too long to sit through, but Jupiter Ascending has some of the very best sci-fi action scenes I've ever had the pleasure to watch. The running, the flying, the shooting, the fighting... all of it hung together in ways that made sense, and the directors luxuriated in slow motion for some of the best bits. If you want to go to the movies to watch people do cool things with toys we don't have, Jupiter Ascending is a good choice.But the plot holes? Ugh. Look, if you decide to see it, I recommend the brain-armor: anytime a non-Earthling says "DNA," pretend they're saying "magical soulprint," because whatever they're talking about has as much in common with actual DNA as pixie dust or midichlorians.To my even-more-critical eye, the film looks like it suffered from a re-shoot, late story edits, and then a throwing up of the hands by the director, who then went on to say "there's no more money and no more time, and the producer is done chasing sunk costs, so we're releasing in February."Have I made it sound like I hated it? No. I loved the baroque BDO visuals, the ship designs, and most especially those action scenes, which bought the rest of the movie for me. I just hope that whoever is out there in Hollywood writing a really GOOD space opera can hit the same level of visual awesome that Jupiter Ascending did.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

Seventh Son was reasonably entertaining, the effects were good, and Jeff Bridges was funny, but ultimately it fell kind of flat for me. I grew increasingly annoyed with Bridges "accent," which sounded exactly like his mouthful of marbles thing from R.I.P.D. The affectation seemed to fit his character, but none of the accents in the film were consistent. To my ear, it sounded like a bunch of people from all over the world were dropped into one medieval fantasy setting, and nobody bothered to bring in a voice coach. It's a bit of a nit-pick, I know, but if it hadn't been for Bridges, I wouldn't have noticed. In short, the seasoned actor broke the movie.Seventh Son played pretty heavily to the medieval fantasy tropes, though I can't speak to the books from which the film was adapted, not having read them. We get the usual Hero's Journey stuff, piles of cliched dialog, and a painful-to-watch young romance.Still, "reasonably entertaining." As February releases go, this one meets expectations pretty squarely.(cross-posted from howardtayler.com)