June 28, 2013 by

Monster U and Comics

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I saw Monster University earlier this week, and it is great! One thing I particularly found interesting was how they managed to make a great antagonist who isn’t a villain. I’ve seen this in some other movies to a certain extent, such as the Penny’s agent in Bolt or . . . well . . . I can’t think of anyone else, and even he is nothing like Dean Hardscrabble. She isn’t malicious, her actions would be justified in most circumstances and with the possible exceptions of one or two are the correct actions. What makes her the antagonist is her belief that Mike and Sully could never make good students in the scare program, and when she is proven wrong she accepts it graciously. Simply put, she is a likable antagonist.

In case you haven’t already guessed, my faith in Pixar has pretty much been restored. If next year’s “The Good Dinosaur” is as good, I think it will have recovered completely. The only doubts I have left are because Monster U isn’t entirely original, it is a prequel, and I frankly thought the short at the beginning, while good looking, didn’t have nearly as good of a story as, say, “Paperman”.

In other news, it turns out my dad has a bunch of comics in storage, so I will be able to use those for my research.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: Commentary, General, Movie Review, Review
June 24, 2013 by

Fun Research

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Over the weekend I have been checking out various christian web-comics and online samples of real comics. I must say I am impressed with a lot of what is out there, but if I really want to become familiar enough with comics to write them well I need more research. While I won’t be able to this week, next week I intend to visit the library and check out some more comics, both for fun and to conduct some analysis on how to switch from writing for books to this medium. Wow I sound formal.

Oh well.

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: General
June 20, 2013 by

Yesterday: Despicable Me & How to Write Comics

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I forgot to say this yesterday so I will say it now; I saw Despicable Me again, so I will be ready when the sequel comes out.

Also, I finally finished Stan Lee’s “How to Write Comics”. I learned some good things in it, both ideas that would be good regardless of genre and some that are particularly handy for comics that I hadn’t ever thought of. Looking forward to trying them out.

Till next time:

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: General
June 19, 2013 by

Iron Man 3 + Writing When Emotional

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I have two things I want to share today. First, I saw Iron Man 3 today with my dad. I like it better than the second one when I first saw it, although at the moment I still like the first one the best by a little bit. I just wish I hadn’t known so much about the movie ahead of time, it would have made the mystery more interesting to me. By the way, for those of you who have seen it, check out this video; it’s a real laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUYW0JyzydA

On a different note, I had a bit of a scare earlier that upset me, and I actually did some writing to help calm down. Okay, the main reason was because I thought I’d write more realistic emotions while in that state, although no similar circumstances happened in my story this time. Oh well, maybe next time. I did calm down at least.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: General, Movie Review, Review
June 14, 2013 by

New Draft Finished

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I thought you all might want to know that I have finished my latest draft of my short story, after I have it reviewed I’ll know if I can begin the self-publishing process.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: General
June 7, 2013 by

Comic Writing

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I’ve been looking at some of my work, and I can see how easily it could be converted to a script for a comic book. Once I’m done with “The Full Earth Race” I’ll probably try writing them. I already have Stan Lee’s “How to Write Comic Books” after all.

In other news, I have now posted every day this week like I said I would, and I’ve decided that in the future I will have time to make new posts at least once a week, but I can’t promise anything more frequent than that.

Till then,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: General
June 6, 2013 by

Tough to Please

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I’ve been thinking a bit about a tough part about making a story that I’ve discovered as a reader. You want to have characters that the readers care about, but you also sometimes have to have bad things happen to the characters which will upset your readers if the care about them.

For instance, we (the readers) start getting to know the protagonist or protagonists. If the author does his or her job right, we want good things to happen to them, unless they are complete anti-heroes, then we want good things to happen to the antagonist. We want people to like them. We want them to save everyone and themselves. We want them to get the girl (or the guy). However, if they accomplish all these things without any problems, we don’t believe it. It’s too good to be true. If there are some setbacks, it keeps us a bit more entertained but if the ultimate goal is still achieved we have the same problem. After several stories like this we start thinking “These are totally predictable. Can’t I read a story that doesn’t have a completely happy ending?”

Then, lo and behold, we find a story that ends like this and we have mixed feelings. All the other characters hate the protagonist. The evil dictator still rules the world with no possibility for a sequel. The lover dies or marries someone else. So while a part of us likes the fact that we got a more realistic ending, another part of us thinks “Did it have to happen to a character I liked?” The trouble is, if we didn’t like or at least didn’t care about the characters we never would have read to the end in the first place.

I’m honestly not sure what the balancing point is, except to say that something good must happen in the ending of the story, something that says “Even though the protagonists didn’t get a single thing they wanted, it is all okay, because although they wouldn’t have thought so at the beginning of this story things are on the whole better, even if they can’t see exactly how.” In other words, we have to have faith or see the characters have faith that things will work out in the long run.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: Commentary
June 6, 2013 by

The Pseudoscience of: Morph Balls

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Today I will be giving a scientific (sounding) explanation for something that really should be impossible: the morph ball of Samus Aran.

For those of you who don’t know, Samus Aran is the galactic bounty hunter from the Metroid series, and as I understand it the developers of the original decided that having her turn into a ball would be easier than making a crawling animation, and thus the morph ball was born.

The exact size of the morph ball isn’t exactly clear, although in Metroid Prime it can fit in areas of about one meter, so that is the diameter in that game. That same game also states that when the space pirates tried to replicate it the test subjects ended up horribly mangled. So how does Samus do it?

Well, in Metroid Prime when you first (re)gain the morph ball ability you see her curled up in a fetal position and then encased by, well, a ball. So she can fit, and as for the games where the ball appears smaller, she has skin more like ours, while the space pirates seem to be either reptiles or bugs, neither of which have skin as flexible. Combined with some of the crazy things I’ve seen circus performers fit into, and size shouldn’t be too major of a factor.

Where does the ball even come from though, and how does she control it? My theory is that her armor has an outer layer which can reshape itself into the ball form when she curls up. The inside of the outer layer is magnetized allowing Samus to be suspended in a more or less upright position no matter how much spinning the ball does, and all steering takes is a minor shift of her body weight.

Finally, the bombs that can be dropped while in morph ball mode, both the normal and the power variety. You have unlimited of the normal bombs, which implies that they are created from the environment, so I believe she essentially destabilizes the molecules of a small amount of air or other matter, which a few seconds later explodes in a very tiny nuclear explosion. The power bombs are limited in number, so they are probably detached from the ball itself.

Well, I hope this sounds vaguely believable. Who knows, maybe in the future someone will actually make something like this.

Till next time,

Goodbye Intenet!

Filed Under: The Pseudoscience of:
June 5, 2013 by

Monster

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This is a book I purchased a while ago that I have decided to write a short review for. Monster is a novel about a husband and wife, Reed and Rebecca (or Beck as she is usually known as), who are separated during a camping trip when a strange furry creature kidnaps Beck. It then follows the point of view of Reed and some of his friends who are trying to find Beck as well and Beck’s perspective as she tries to make sense of the things that have kidnapped her. Not only do the hunters have to track down the monsters, they also have to deal with people who want to make sure no one sees these creatures and live to tell the tale.

I kind of went back and forth about this book while reading it, in more ways than one. On the one hand, because it is written from a cinematic perspective in most parts it allows for character deaths. Indeed, several times it looks like a character who we’ve been following closely through large parts of the story get killed, and in one case we don’t learn otherwise for a whole chapter. I’ll be honest, when I read that I told myself I would never read anything by this author again, and I might not have even finished it if it weren’t for the fact that the book was almost over and I really wanted to see how it ended, but I changed my mind about Peretti when I found out that person hadn’t died. Of course, other people do die in this book, and there are a lot of scary parts, so I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone not in their late teens at least.

On the more positive side, I really enjoyed the mystery that was involved in this. While it seems obvious at first that the creatures responsible for all the problems are sasquatches, also known as Bigfoots (Bigfeet?), some of the discoveries made start to indicate to the audience and some of the characters that they are actually something else. It is all revealed carefully throughout the story with just enough evidence and just enough doubt to make it enjoyable, right up until the end in which the truth is discovered. I won’t say what  actually happened except to say that neither theory is the full truth.

Another part I found great in this book was how the characters, especially Beck, relate to God. Throughout the story she repeatedly questions why God allowed all these bad things to happen to her, especially when she comes agonizingly close to rescue on several occasions only to be taken away again. In the end though, not only do we see that is they had found and tried to rescue her sooner and in a different manner than what they did in the end then more innocents would have died and several bad guys and monsters would have escaped, they also made her a stronger and braver woman.

Another subject that comes up is evolution, an area I have always had a strong interest in. The story makes several good points about how random mutations really don’t produce the progress needed by the theory. My main problem is that while it is all important for the plot, it still occasionally felt a little forced to me.

So on the whole, I probably will get another book by Frank Peretti some time, and I don’t regret reading this one at all.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: Book Review, Review
June 4, 2013 by

Pixar: Going Down?

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This wasn’t what I originally had been intending to write about, but today’s events have brought this to the forefront of my mind. Today I saw the movie Brave for the first time, and for a variety of reasons, I didn’t like it nearly as much as many of the other works by Pixar. This concerns me a bit, since I had a similar reaction to Cars 2. That is two films in a row that Pixar has made that I personally find below average. Is this a sign of decline from the king of computer animation? Possibly, but it also could be just a lull. After all, Pixar has done so well historically that it could be hard to tell the difference between simple mistakes and actual signs of a long term drop in quality. Also, Disney Animation Studios, which of course is also owned by Disney, have been doing well lately, so if Pixar does start faltering they can bring some people in from there. I’ll have to see Monster University to be sure, and even then, I may still have to see their next original (in other words, not a sequel or prequel) film as well, which for the record is titled “The Good Dinosaur”.

Still, given how awesome Dreamworks has been doing lately, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

Till tomorrow,

Goodbye Internet!

Filed Under: Commentary
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