Cliff Hanger

And just like that, my interest evaporates. I was prepared to put up with a ninety year old Hank and an adaptation of "To Steal an Ant-Man" for one of my favorite writer/directors. Now I'm just pissed that they rearranged all their plans for the character to meet Wright's needs and somebody (don't know who) fucked it up this badly this late.

Hope for a big party and early screening at Dragoncon like the one they did in 2011 (the last two years the show wasn't in season Labor Day weekend, but that year we got to see the new ep between the UK and US airings on a big screen with BBC blessings and Sylvester McCoy on hand.)

Sad to hear that the Harlock CGI film is ass on toast, especially since it's coming to Netflix.

If they're going to include Metal Slug Anthology, which contained no new or enhanced material from the Wii generation, my pick is "Devil's Crush on Virtual Console."

Up to episode 7 of Arrow. Carter Bowen, huh? PLEASE tell me his dad is secretly the Fiddler.

Or Valiant! (Skip Shadowman.)

Amplitude made its funding and will be coming in a little less than a year. I honestly wasn't expecting it to get there with a Kickstarter window of only 18 days, and being a sequel to a game that like ten people bought (although it appears that 9 of them became games journalists, and the other was me).

Big Finish are doing a one-day sale on box sets: Dark Eyes I, UNIT Dominion, Love and War and a couple of Jago and Litefoot singles. I picked up DE, but I'm only through the first season of New Adventures; is the rest necessary, or is it only necessary to know what happens to Lucie at the end of the radio series (on which I've been spoiled)? Super irritated to be three hours' drive from Doctors 5-8 in Houston this weekend and not get to go.

Out of all the indy-indy stuff that was shown for PS4 last year at the big E3 presser, Transistor was what I was most excited about. For some reason, I thought it was still a good six months away. Watch Dogs may have some competition when my replacement console arrives next week.

Bjornson acquitted himself nicely murdering schmucks; he didn't really do any acting, but he wasn't asked to. If nothing else, he probably has a career ahead of him playing monsters who butcher twelve dudes in one fight and then get killed by the hero. Bronn and Tyrion's breakup was a really fun, oddly sweet scene. Very different than in the book where I read more venom from Tyrion and more fuck-off from Bronn.

He seemed legit baffled that Mighty Avengers is my favorite thing he's ever done and called it "a huge pain in the butt to work on", but he was very nice and friendly. When I explained it was one of my favorite Pym stories of all time, he brightened noticeably and said that the Hank arc was by far his favorite thing about it. (which is funny, because to my mind it was always a Hank book with Herc/Cho/Pietro et al. as a supporting cast more than an 'Avengers book.' Which may be why I like it more than he does, in retrospect.)

I am way more excited than I thought to meet Dan Slott tomorrow.

If you only get one and want to keep it to the $3 pile, I would say Spare Parts (5th), Jubilee (6th) or an 8th. Chimes at Midnight is probably the best 8 from that bloc, but I donno how well it plays if you haven't heard Storm Warning, which is good but not remarkable. Maybe Invaders From Mars (written by Gatiss, has Simon Pegg) or Sword of Orion (a fun 80s style Cybermen story). Light at the End is 12 bucks, has all 5 surviving Doctors from the classic era, and I've heard it's very good but I haven't heard it yet. I also haven't heard much at all of 7th Doctor, and neither of the ones I have (Genocide Machine and Master) are what I'd start with.

So despite my initial rage at the premise and the first issue, Avengers Arena won me over pretty hard by the end of it (to the point that I got sick of waiting for issues to go on Unlimited and bought the last 5-6 months). And I really liked Undercover #1. But since then, it's slid for me some, and the new one is no exception. Everything just kind of feels off to me, and I REALLY don't like the way Hopeless is using Helmut Zemo. I know that Brubaker already robbed him of much of his Tbolts-era character development and moral ambiguity, but when he's wearing a Nazi armband with a Z instead of a swastika, that's just sad. It's a sign that he's no longer a bad person doing good things or even a guy behaving amorally for his own benefit or amusement. When you get up there in front of the Not-Nazi Flag, you become a cartoonish BAD GUY and everything you tell the people around you about an opportunity to act for their own benefit instead of facing conscription in the name of the "greater good" rings hollow. Maybe it's supposed to, but I'd much rather see the Zemo who tried to save Captain Marvel's life and then had to hunt him down and kill him because he fucked up the rescue, or even the Zemo who just doesn't give a fuck.

I still really hate the grimmed-up modern version of Barry's origin, with Zoom murdering his mom when he was 12 or whatever. The fact that they used that version (which was pretty much guaranteed since Johns is CCO) is pretty much the ONLY complaint I have with the show. A sick, evil part of me wants to see them do the Dark Riders, if only as a curbstomp in the first five minutes of an episode. Still working my way thru Season 1 of Arrow fairly slowly (got sidetracked by Orphan Black). It's definitely grown on me since the first ep, but by the 'Ollie Gets Arrested, Diggle Plays GA' ep it still hasn't really compelled me yet.

Most of the indie FCBD stuff is now up on Comixology. GO GET ATOMIC ROBO if you haven't already read this year's.

Upon reading about the planned remake of Kickboxer, my first thought was "Has Stan Bush started working on three new versions of 'Never Surrender' to send to the producers yet?" I can be kind of a dick sometimes.

That's exactly what he's doing. I want a poster of this on my wall, dammit.

Speaking as someone who had DARS (Texas disability and rehab admin, for non Texans) fill out my app FOR ME, I can tell you that nobody gets it at first. Basically they deny you twice, then the third time it goes to a hearing and you bring a lawyer. You bring a lawyer, you win. You don't and you lose. Find a disability lawyer who works for a portion of back payment, nail them to the wall.

My PS4 BLOD'd. Shame I won't get it back before my copy of Watch_Dogs arrives, but at least I will get it back. Meantime, I have Arkham Origins and >Macross 30 to occupy me

Fuck you to proponents of "people-first terminology." I am not a "person living with partial blindness", I am a blind man. (I used to say 'legally blind', but the explanation given me by instructors and people who've been around the block more than me, as to why the 'legally' qualifier does more harm than good makes a shit ton more sense than people-first stupidity). Somehow, while I had heard the results of this ("people with disabilities" rather than "disabled people") I had no idea this was a capital-letters THING until today. Speaking as a person living with partial blindness, a person living with major depression and a person living with a certification to teach English in the state of Texas (at least til the end of May) I want to beat the people who came up with this shit with a hammer, cast them into the street and laugh at their injuries when they are hit by cars. I am not a person living with visual disabilities, I am a goddamn blind person. (insert the 'legally' if you so desire. It doesn't offend me, but it offends people I respect more than the people-first people.) I am not a person living with depression, I am not a person living with trichotllomania and I am not a person living with phenomenal irritation at the concept of having to carefully and ungrammatically structure my sentences to avoid offending the non-disabled who want to be offended on my behalf. I am a blind, depressed person whose disabilities, mental issues and other non-standard experiences make up maybe 20% of who I am. And fuck you for telling me that I'm not allowed to put that 20% first if I think it will grease the social wheels and make it easier for people to deal with me and my shit without treating me as an invalid or a crazy person who needs constant supervision. (Sorry, can you tell I learned a new phrase from conversing with someone who THINKS they have my best interests at heart but doesn't? I will freely admit to being filled with irrational rage.)

Oh shit.

After 16 years of having a pull list consistently no matter where I lived or how little money I had, I went digital-only in 2012. (I would've done it in 2010 when Longview, TX's only comics shop closed down, but instead I tried and failed to survive off Hastings and mail order until I moved to Austin the following spring since same-day digital wasn't a thing yet.) My list is significantly smaller than it was ten years ago, but I still spend about $75/month just keeping up with Atomic Robo, the Transformers books, the half of Valiant that I read and the 4-5 Marvel books I still follow (though I'm pruning a lot of Marvel as arcs end; pretty soon I'll be down to Daredevil, X-Factor, Avengers Undercover and wherever Hank Pym ends up now that AvAI is dead). Every once in a while I swear I'm going to cut back to being 30 days behind to save money, but something always comes out that I jump on to read at lunch or on the bus and I end up catching up on everything. I also keep swearing I'm going to buy more non-cape, creator owned stuff, but aside from new Bagge or Dorkin I always end up waiting for a big sale. (I still need to get Buddy Buys a Dump) I also subscribe to Marvel Unlimited, which is the main reason I'm not buying *more* Marvel books. If other publishers did something similar at a similar price ($70/yr) I'd probably sign up for those too. (Hell, I was a charter subscriber to Crossgen's Comics On the Web) I generally find well-produced digital WAY easier to read than print, since most of my print finds itself under a CCTV enlarger anyway. The problem is that so much of it is poorly transferred, guided view tends to suck on almost any non-Comixology platform and a lot of what I'd really like to get has fallen into rights holes or just generally has a potential reissue audience of one. And since the bigs are so reluctant to offer bundle pricing on long-past back issues, that $2 an issue of LSH would cost me is the same as a back issue of Saga or Revival or whatever other Image book I keep meaning to close my gap on. ETA: The history thing! First comic I ever remember getting was a Casper when I was 4. I don't remember anything about the comic, just that it had Casper on the cover. Transformers was the first thing I ever bought two months in a row, when I was 9 or so, and I was an irregular reader for the next decade. I'd go to the grocery store until they stopped carrying comics, then Waldenbooks or Hastings later, and if I saw an issue of Quasar or Guardians of the Galaxy or X-Factor I'd buy it. My first attempt at being a weekly customer was in August of 96; I bought three books, all of which ended up being the final chapters of stories (Karl Kesel and Cary Nord's Mr. Hyde story in Daredevil, "Race Against Time" in Flash and the Emerald Vi saga in LSH). It's weird, but I think getting the last chapters of those stories before the first did a lot to hook me in a way that getting on the ground floor might not have. I was at worst a monthly supporter of the shop wherever I happened to be, and weekly when bus routes, work, etc. permitted it, until digital finally got to the point where I could no longer justify a 50-minute bus ride each way twice a month to get from the ass end of Austin to 51st.

Original Sin #1 was decent, but it had one infuriating conclusion jumped to.

It was later in the book (the next to last scene of the 3rd book, actually) and it was not remotely so casual. IIRC (don't have my copy handy) Lysa is having a total shrieking meltdown for reasons best not elaborated on here, and starts screaming about all the things she did for Petyr, including murdering her husband and telling Cat the Lannisters did it. It makes much more sense in that context; she's throwing it in his face and the prospect that someone who shouldn't hear might doesn't even come up, nor does it matter that he already knows everything she's saying.