blitzkrieg

So I've been playing catch up getting ready for the new season, this meant getting to the last three episodes of last season's Person of Interest. The first episode was kinda meh but boy the last two episodes of the season were so great. So many really great moments and really left the show with one big question mark for the third season's status. Crazy to think of Sarah Shahi going from Fairly Legal to this.

I'd imagine Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, minority hockey players, and black football players playing quarterback in the NFL might have issue with the idea of sports being universal. That said as many of us have said, it's not so much what Miley did, it's what Miley did poorly. If Rihanna came out next year in a tutu and did ballet poorly I'm certain that she would get a backlash from it. But I think it's important to say that the majority of the Miley backlash isn't racially charged and more of a "save the children" reaction. Before the VMAs the media was reacting to Miley exactly the same way, simply about her mentioning "Molly" in the song instead. All the VMAs did was change the subject of the uproar which considering her newest song release was an obviously calculated move. And yes, race and culture are really overrated ideas in 2013 which we probably would all get along better if we spent less time clinging to them.

I think the black/rap/urban thing comes from the constant talk about her twerking, which has been going on for years, but one little white girl does it and it is now trendy. It is kind of like rock music, I've often argued with people that The Isley Brothers are the best rock band of all time. People always look at me and say, "That's not a rock band." It's because as a society we can't even fathom a black band is a rock band despite the fact that rock music was invented by black people. The racism that people feel about her twerking has almost nothing to do with her twerking, it is the fact that her twerking, poorly by the way, is now a topic of conversation. When Luke's dancers were twerking all over the place, not only would MTV never dream of showing it, nobody thought it was worth talking about. Miley Cyrus is to twerking as Christopher Columbus is to America. She didn't discover that shit, there were people doing that shit for years. Well it does seem to be the normal cycle of things. You have a piece of black culture that is then adopted by a subset of white culture which is eventually makes it when into mainstream American culture which results in a backlash by both black and white cultures. That said if Miley had simply done it well or simply left it to backup dancers we'd have a lot shorter thread. Hell if they had simply had Iggy Azalea do the "white girl twerking with black backup dancers twerking" we would have had a totally different conversation. The mainstream media could have simply continued to be outraged over the "Molly" reference instead of moving on to "twerking." In the end "We Can't Stop" isn't a bad song nor is it a bad video. The video is highly derivative but fun, much like Thicke's "Blurred Lines" and "Give It 2 U", and because it's Miley Cyrus gets more airplay than videos in the style it borrows from, which is usually how the mainstream works.

Oh hey this thread is still going on. Am I the only person that really sees Miley as more subverting hipster/party culture than black culture? Really it seems much more a stab at the kind of stuff you'd get from Mad Decent artists than anything you'd get from black/rap/urban culture. If you look at the "We Can't Stop" video it seems like someone found an "indie hip-hop/rap" video blueprint and used it to plan the video.

So I'm thinking it's safe to say that I'm a lot better at the box office list than the RT list.

The VMAs simply aren't about "popular" music, they're about "mainstream" music and right now "popular" and "mainstream" are on two pretty different wavelengths. Kendrick Lamar was on the VMAs and I would say he's popular but at the same time I'm sure lots and lots of people watching the VMAs had no clue who he was. I think we're at the point where Google/YouTube/Vevo/Whatever probably should try introducing their own award show. Maybe Fuse can go in with them on it since all they have at the moment is re-airing the MuchMusic award show. They can try to find a balance between the VMAs and the mtvU Woodie Awards.

Yeah kinda figured that Kick-Ass 2 wasn't going do me any favors.

So the combination of the price drop and display of indie games convinced me to order a Vita. I got the bundle that comes with Unit 13, a year of PSN+, and a 4GB memory card. So first of all I'm wondering what games people would recommend? I have a PS3 but it's been mostly a media player. The only games I've ever played on a regular basis in the last few years were the DJ Hero games. The last game I beat was Arkham Asylum, the last game I played was Infamous 2, and I used to play a lot of turn based JRPGs on my college breaks (Kingdom Hearts, Shadow Hearts, the one with tanks and Valkyries.) And like I said the thing that most influenced my decision was the quirky indie games. Secondly, what would people suggest for an memory card size? I don't think I need to walk around with all my games at once but I'm also not sure how big the games tend toward. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Also if you don't mind digital, Valiant usually has a 99 cent sale every couple weeks featuring certain titles. I imagine they'll probably have one for all the titles when Unity rolls around. They recently had one that had the first chunk of Shadowman and all of the original Shadowman and Eternal Warrior issues. I enjoy the current Valiant stuff to varying degrees but not enough for $3.99 and not enough to spend even $2.99 consistently except for maybe Archer & Armstrong.

Is there really a point to SportsNation now that it isn't the "some guy and a hot blonde" show? I've never watched a full episode but is every episode just them showing clips of stuff?

That's a shot of my queue from March of this year. Shortly after that I ended my disc plan and went streaming only. Netflix really is the movie watchers' gym membership. If you use the disc service a lot and you send them back on a regiular basis than it is great. If not then you might be better off with something like Redbox, assuming that the per a day charge motivates you to watch and return things, or renting from one of the digital movie services that give you a month to start/watch whatever you rent.

The Mighty Thor issues of "Everything Burns" went $1.99 on Comixology so I was finally able to finish reading Gillen's Journey into Mystery and god it's amazing. The combination of all the pieces coming together followed by the punch of the final issue. I suppose reading Your Avengers prior to this somewhat spoiled things but certainly didn't lessen anything. So good, so very good.

I have to say I wasn't surprised of the outcome simply because of the lack of evidence and how the law itself is written. I feel like instead of pushing for a trial where they weren't going like the result and which really wouldn't affect future instances, people should have spent their time drawing attention to the law and putting pressure on politicans to change it.

Spoiler tags are sometimes nice for things like this, just saying.