In Netflix, Marvel trusts

One of the good things about getting snowed in for most of the weekend was that it gave me the opportunity to sit on my ass and do nothing but watch television that I’d started to fall behind on.  But who am I really kidding, snow or no snow, sitting on my ass and doing nothing but watching television was already kind of on my agenda regardless of the weather outside, but it does sound like the snow was a convenient excuse to do such.

Anyway, I took the opportunity to start and finish the entire Punisher series on Netflix.  And much like several of the Marvel properties that preceded it, I have to say that Netflix has once again managed to take a fairly one-dimensional character, and make a watchable and fairly compelling season of television out of it.

I’m not going to pretend like I was a huge Punisher fan, really.  I always thought he was kind of an outlier in the Marvel Universe, since he wasn’t a superhero in the sense of having any powers or abilities, but instead more like an extremely well-armed vigilante with a death wish that actually killed people on a regular basis.  He was loosely separated by only a few degrees from bigger players, with associations to Nick Fury, Matt Murdock and the Kingpin, which puts him in remotely the same neighborhood as Spider-Man and the Avengers, but at the same time, Frank Castle wasn’t the kind of guy we’d expect to see in any major events or crossovers.

Seriously, what would Frank Castle contribute during the Infinity Crusades?  Weapons?  Tony Stark among others has that covered.  Micro’s hacking expertise?  Reed Richards and Ant Man, as well as again Tony Stark, probably have computers way better than Micro’s cache of 486s, much less his downfall when the wifi is unplugged.  I’m pretty sure Thanos with his power over, everything, wouldn’t even notice a trigger-happy psychopath with a glock when Thor and Hulk are trying to flank him.

However, the Punisher beat-em-up arcade game Capcom released in 1993, that used the same old Final Fight engine that 20 other games used was still pretty fun.

The point is, the Punisher was always a property that I thought was really out of place in the Marvel Universe, but he still existed so that storylines of New York-based superheroes could get dark and broody from time to time.

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Writing when it feels like there’s not a lot to write about

Like the subject says, I haven’t really felt like there’s been a lot to write about.  It’s times like these when I sit down and try to clear out all the noise in the world and in my head and just see what happens when I open up a Word doc and just start typing.

Usually, I surf a large variety of news sites, local and worldly to see if anything piques my interest.  Then it devolves into sports sites and op-ed outlets, just to see if there’s anything that triggers any sort of writable tangent.  Failing any of that, it’s the happenings in my own fairly ordinary and nondescript life, wondering if there’s anything worth talking about, or anything I actually want to put something down into writing.

My life, hasn’t been particularly interesting for a while.  My days and weeks consist of the same things often, and I’m occasionally fretting over the fact that I feel like I don’t make enough money which kind of puts a damper on some of my ambitions when it comes to things I want to do, or travels I want to indulge in.  I think about spending habits, spending plans and how to shave down the credit card debt that I’ve built back up throughout the moving process, and it frequently feels like an endless cycle that just chews up time and often doesn’t actually pan out like it should.

Like in my current state, I feel like I’d need like 6-8 months to really wipe out a lot of my debt while not having to starve in the process.  I’m sure that some additional sacrifices could be made to reduce my costs a little further, but it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough to warrant the inconveniences.  But really though, 6-8 months?  That’s literally from half to two-thirds of an entire year.  I’m not getting any younger, and the whole concept of getting older is another can of worms that has been on my mind increasingly these days, and I just feel like if I made more money outright, things might improve for the better, overall.

But then I feel like I’m kind of in a rut where my skillset doesn’t command as much money as I hope it would, and I give a lot of contemplation to my own career.  I really like where I work and the team I’m on and the people I work with, but again, money.  I make enough to pay my mortgage and pay my bills, but with the new house, I’m also paying more for a mortgage than I have before, and it’s still an adjustment knowing how much of a larger percentage of my incoming funds are going right back out the door paying for my property.

And we can’t talk about money and not talk about the correlation with time, and then the endless debate of money versus time.  I certainly value my time, and often times more than money, but at the same time, there are certain things that cannot be accomplished without the need for money.  And then it rotates in this perpetual cycle of feeling like I have enough of either, and then I begin to wonder if I may be bordering on the lines of a slight depression.  Which is a maybe.

It would be nice to just win a substantial lottery.  That just might actually make things improve for the better, contrary to the notions that huge influxes of money have accomplished in ruining several people out there.

But really, I can’t really complain that much about my life in some regards.  My life itself isn’t at all terrible, aside from the fairly minor gripes I have that I’m not unaware that there are worse people out there that would love to have my gripes versus their own more substantial issues.

I think I feel like what drags me down is my empathy for others, to where I always feel like the problems of others become problems for me.  I don’t think it’s untrue either, because there are people out there that are close to me going through some rough patches, and I feel helpless that there’s nothing that either I or anyone else can seemingly do about them, and I empathize for their sadness and grief with my own.  Obviously, I won’t get into the business of others, but they are substantial problems, and I’ve come to the realization of the increasing difficulties of life that come with getting older, and that things just might not get better any time soon for the people all around me.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the shitty cesspool of a world we live in, full of rotten corrupt people, politicians, terrorists and mentally deranged people who somehow all seem to have way too large caches of firearms.

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Stranger Things 2: The Steve Show and the bar for sequels

I just finished watching the second season of Stranger Things, and I’ll try to be as spoiler-free as possible, but to cut straight to the chase, I just wanted to say that it was some of the best television I’ve seen recently, and that I believe that it is the bar in which all sequels should aspire to perform to.

So yeah, I liked it.  No, I loved it.  Stranger Things 2 was fantastic television, and the most astonishing thing about it all, was how seemingly easy the show was executed to where it’s so super easy to enjoy nearly all of the characters, and be engaged and interested in all of the storylines happening concurrently.  The acting is so good throughout the show, and Winona Ryder and David Harbour make their characters just so easy to relate to and empathize for which in turn enhances the experience of watching the show.

But the true MVP of the show would have to be Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, who embarked on the face turn of a century that we haven’t seen since The Rock decided he was done with Vince McMahon and the Corporation before ascending into the cosmos.  It’s truly amazing, because I remember really hating the shit out of Steve in the first season, and hoping he would die or at least get written off the show.  But after the second season, there’s no star that broke through the night and rose to the cream of the crop and broke the glass ceiling and grabbed the brass ring more than Steve did.

I won’t elaborate any further on it since I don’t want to risk giving anything away, but the bottom line is that feel that Steve was the undisputed MVP of Stranger Things 2, and I certainly hope that anyone and everyone who watches it will feel the same way too.

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No, please god no, just no

The word people my ancient age are really beginning to identify as a legit trigger: spinoff.  As in The Karate Kid is filming a spinoff show, starring Ralph Macchio and Billy Zabka, about their fucking kids and their own miserable, post-Karate Kid lives.

This one hurts.  I tolerated Fuller House and Girl Meets World because as much of an old-man stink as I made about their spinoffs, because as much as I actually did watch the shit out of those series, I didn’t really care about them.  Same goes for whatever Roseanne spinoff they’re plotting.

But The Karate Kid?  THE fucking The Karate Kid??  With Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi and Cobra Kai and get him a body bag yyyeeeaahhh??  This one hurts.

This one hurts, really bad.

Why the fuck can’t people just let the classics live out their lives and die peacefully?  Why does some fucking asshole(s) have to dip into nostalgia and dig shit out of their treasured pasts and bring them back into this shitty present time with social media and retards as elected officials and other literal and metaphorical cancers, with weak, convoluted, fan-fiction-caliber storylines and their kids’ perspectives for the promises of paydays?  Why the fuck can’t these actors manage their money or their egos where they don’t feel the need to accept these miserable spinoffs for the sake of their own classic bodies of work?

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Life is boring lately

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as it pertains to my want to write every now and then, it sure doesn’t help when there’s nothing to really talk about outside of sports.  Like really, I comb through news sites, and I try to watch a little bit of news here and there, but on a regular basis, it’s the same old shit that’s being driven further into the ground every single time it comes up, so there’s really nothing particularly interesting to me that gives me any inspiration to really write.

On the local level, the AJC further reinforces the notion that they’re a clown outlet, since the front page of the site has basically turned into the SEC football daily, providing links and news for not just Georgia, but just about every single SEC school’s football programs.  Granted, I guess it sure beats the alternative to the daily shootings, robberies and killings in Southwest Atlanta, but surely, surely, there has to be stuff worth reporting on aside from college football.

National and global news are more of the same crap involving sexual harassment dogpiling, talk of building a wall, and the perpetually constantly rising tensions between the United States and other countries.

Same shit, different day.

It’s no wonder why I always fall back onto sports and wrestling to talk about, because there’s not much else worth writing about that doesn’t just trigger, bother, infuriate or simply annoy.

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HBO’s The Leftovers: wtf did I just watch?

Disclaimer: I will talk about plots and mention potential spoilers, so you’re being warned.

So I just finished watching all of The Leftovers over the last three weeks.  Knee-jerk reactions:

  • What the fuck did I just watch?
  • Way more was unanswered than was answered
  • If any show required a pallet cleanser afterwards, this is it

The thing is, I’m left in this weird position where I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the series as a whole.  Initially, the show starts off pretty compelling and intriguing, an in spite of the cynical and droll nature of the subject matter, I was curious enough to continue watching the show, to see how it transpired.  However, as the series progresses, the show jumps the shark when the cast uproots and moves to Texas, and then DJ Tanner wrestlings when the obvious HBO-mandated key players all go to fucking Australia of all places.

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Writing when I’m not feeling writing

Every now and then, I’ll hit a point where I look at my docket of written things, and feel as if I haven’t written anything in a while, and then I feel anxious because I’m OCD like that and feel like I should be writing at the very least, once a week.

However, admittedly a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been feeling like the world around me is in this stagnant state where on any given point, it feels like the world’s primary topics of discussion are encapsulated in these really small capsules as of late, and it’s like the same things are discussed and rehashed 50,000 times before the next thing that should probably be taking a back seat to larger things emerges and the cycle repeats itself.

Like, for example, it seems like the only things being talked about in the world are:

  • Sexual harassment that stemmed from Harvey Weinstein
  • Gun control that stemmed from the Las Vegas shootings
  • Kneeling during the National Anthem that stemmed from Colin Kaepernick
  • Football

Despite the fact that there are vastly bigger issues in the world currently such as:

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