NN4B Volumes 1 & 2 On Sale for Holiday Season

NN4B Volumes 1 & 2 On Sale
Hello, Bushido readers! Our printed volumes 1 & 2 are currently available on sale at the Hivemill webstore for the remainder of the holiday season. Each book is lovingly and tenderly hand signed by Joe and Alex. At last you have the opportunity to read NN4B the way it was meant to be experienced (after we spent many hours formatting it for print)!! Now GO, buy books! LET THE LEGEND COME BACK TO LIFE!

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So I bought into the hype and got a Microsoft Surface Book. Heck, I had it on preorder! But now I’m returning it. For those of you not in the know, here’s a nice video of what the Surface Book is, essentially a high end tablet/laptop hybrid. I’d had aspirations of it becoming me primary mobile digital art tool. I currently have a bare bones refurbished Asus tablet for on the go art, but it is a years old machine that can’t even run the latest version of Photoshop smoothly, and only has a 32 GB internal hard drive (24GBs of which are taken up by its Windows 7 OS). So I was/am in the market for a new portable art device. The problem is, the Surface Book does not feel like a Wacom device. I have a Cintiq as my primary digital art tool, plugged into my desktop. It’s wonderful, and drawing on it feels very natural. When I got the Surface Book on Monday, my initial impression was “yeah, i can use this to art!” But after trying to draw the current comic page, I became acutely aware of an issues that I’d had with a previous non-Wacom device, the Yiynova MSP19 (which I had accidentally purchased at one point when I’d meant to get the much better MSP19U a couple of years back).

Basically, the pressure sensitivity for the Surface Book seems to be directly tied to the amount of force applied to the pen. Maybe there is more to the tech, I wouldn’t doubt it, but when I put the tip of the Surface Book’s pen on the screen, and wiggle it back and forth without applying any direct pressure, it does not make a mark. Comparatively, if I took a regular 2B pencil and put it on paper and wiggled it back and forth, it would leave a light line. This sounds like a minor thing. After all, who doesn’t apply pressure to a pencil when they draw? But I draw with a lot of light, rapid marks. I found that often the beginnings and ends of my marks wouldn’t even appear, leaving a truncated line as I drew, or some strokes wouldn’t appear at all. When it came to inking, it was even more frustrating because I had to significantly slow down how quickly I worked, consciously thinking about where I wanted each ink mark to begin and end and to apply the necessary pressure. I visited the parents’ for Thanksgiving, but when I came home, after having struggled all weekend with drawing a single comic page on the Surface Book, I knocked the inking out in under four hours on the Cintiq. The difference in pressure responsiveness was like night and day.

Any time I try a digital drawing device that is not specifically Wacom technology, it trips me up pretty bad. The Surface Book itself is a powerful machine, durable and light weight and it looks good, but it’s expensive and if you can’t use it as an art device, you might as well spend the money to just get an even beefier laptop, or a really nice tablet. I’ve never used Windows 10 before, but it’s a pretty slick looking OS, barring the occasional glitch or crashed program, which is frustrating for a supposedly top of the line device.

So would I recommend the Surface Book? I honestly really wanted to love the thing, it seemed like the kind of dream device that could act like a portable version of my desktop. But I can’t draw on the thing like I can on my Cintiq or on paper, and it bums me the heck out. I’ve troubleshot every possible solution, and looked online for other people complaining about this issue. It seems as though very few others have this same problem with the Surface Book’s pen pressure, so maybe the problem is specific to me. But for any other artist feeling like dropping a pretty penny on that shiny new Surface Book, this has been my word of caution!

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I’m pretty sure Ricardo’s just pretending to be angry as an excuse to run away. Or maybe he is really angry. You can never tell with that guy.

I finally got around to watching Daredevil on Netflix, and it’s pretty much my favorite live action Marvel thingy to date. Well, I was pretty disappointed in the second half of the last episode. Let’s just say the ‘final showdown’ felt weak and anticlimactic, and also Matt looks way cooler in his black ninja outfit than his dumb red superhero outfit. But that will not dampen my eagerness for Season 2! And I’m sure I’ll be jumping into that Jessica Jones series right away, which, apparently, is also quite good. Netflix is pretty great, guys!

Also, the greatness of Netflix’s Daredevil got me thinking about their 2014 big budget low fantasy epic. Confession time, I liked Marco Polo quite a bit, even though it was tropey as heck and full of eye-rolling cliches. But it was a lot of my favorite tropes! It had some of the same problems as Game of Thrones, like those rather juvenile sexposition scenes that prioritize objectivity over characterization for female characters, without the positives of a extremely memorable characters. The titular Marco Polo is the epitome of ‘bland white guy’. At least Kublai Kahn is super rad. Also, Hundred Eyes the blind Taoist Wushu master, so great (but I have a bias there). I appreciated that the series actually had a very appropriately mixed race cast for the story, unlike the majority of big budget Hollywood productions. It also had such great fight scenes! Supposedly, Marco Polo was a financial bomb for Netflix and I figured I’d likely never get a season 2. But I’ve also read that Netflix ordered another 10 episode season, although there’s no other information beyond that.

But I got off topic! Netflix’s Daredevil = Great. Everyone already knows it, I’m just adding my thoughts to the masses.

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Ricardo ain’t goin’ nowhere without his guns!

I’m kind of a James Bond lover. I can’t say I’m a super fan or anything, but I likely have an above average knowledge of the franchise. The reason I bring it up is becase I saw Spectre a couple days ago, and now I’m gonna rant about it!

It was disappointing. Spectre has this problem where it still wants to be a Daniel Craig Bond film, with all its gritty realism, while also being a silly Sean Connery Bond film, with the impossibly polite yet evil Spectre organization and the hilariously grudge-driven Blofeld. I mean, I don’t dislike Spectre or Blofeld, I love ’em! But the film started to fall apart for me when Bond walked into a Spectre meeting full of well dressed bad guys and overheard the evil organization discussing their prostitution and drug trafficking rings like as if it was a dull executive board meeting. For all the previous Craig films’ efforts to keep the bad guys in the realm of possibility (or as possible as Bond villains can get), Spectre is too much of a cartoon concept to work in the Craig Bond universe, or at least in the very Connery-era manner it was portrayed here.

The movie is also TOO LONG. It keeps wanting to slow down to a crawl and let Bond angst out stoically while someone psychoanalyzes him. That stuff worked in the other Craig films because they were all about deconstructing the Bond character archetype. It was the sort of thing the series needed to become relevant again, I suppose, but in a movie where the bad guy sends butlers to drive you to his secret desert lair and serve you wine while he shows you his personal museum, the idea of a frank look at the murder/sex machine that is 007 feels rather out of place. If they’d cut down all the mopey scenes, the film could’ve been under two hours instead of the 2.5 hour slog it is.

The action scenes are also a kind of dull in comparison to the last three films. There’s a particularly unspectacular car chase in which Bond drives in a straight line ahead of a single henchman in a following car. It’s just one guy, Bond! And your car is a lot more advanced and such. Could you think of no other way to escape than to eject just before driving into a wall and losing your vehicle? Usually when Bond loses his cool car, it’s because the odds are slightly less in his favor.

A lot of reviews I’ve seen have loved the opening sequence during Mexico’s Day of the Dead parade, and although that beginning action sequence is pretty much the best in the movie, it doesn’t feel nearly as tense or exciting as the opening of Skyfall. It’s also notable that even though Bond blows up a building and a helicopter lands in the middle of the parade, those people just keeping parading like it’s no big! The same thing could be said for Bond’s fight on a train later in the film. Did no employee think to stop the train or call the authorities when a huge brawl and gun fight broke out? The world around Bond seems surprisingly unphased by his destructive antics this time around.

There was also a lot of talk about Monica Bellucci being a bond girl this time around. I was like “what, the nearly 50 year old Daniel Craig pairing up with a girl that’s not half his age? How progressive for a Bond film!” And then he paired up with some girl half his age anyway and it was a little weird. Bellucci was only in it long enough to get seduced and then abandoned, about five minutes. She didn’t get killed, at least! Normally every woman that sleeps with the Craig Bond DIES, he is the black widow of James Bonds.

And then there’s the continuity. I was curious how this version of Blofeld somehow created the events of the previous films and caused ‘all of Bond’s pain’. Well, I have no idea, because it’s never explained! Blofeld simply claims he did it so there. It’s also weird how much they reference Casino Royale because, I mean, wasn’t Skyfall a sort of soft reboot? In Casino Royale, Bond’s a brand new agent, Quantum of Solace (which is hilariously ignored) is a direct sequel. Then Skyfall comes along and Bond is old and washed up. Was there a huge time skip? Normally I wouldn’t have to think about it because Bond films have such loose canon connections anyway, but with Spectre, I have to take note of the discrepancies and now it’s just confusing!

On the plus side, I did like that Q, Moneypenny, and M all got to be actual characters involved in the story this time. It felt like Bond really had a team. Granted, the last two Mission Impossible films did the same thing WAY BETTER. In fact, Spectre felt like a less fun version of MI:5. I mean, you could argue that the Craig era Bond films have been wildly derivative of whatever movie is currently popular, but at least that James Bond coat of paint gave them their unique identity. But Spectre just isn’t really doing it for me this time, it’s derivative while failing to sell me on the James Bond charm.

I didn’t hate Spectre, it was watchable. But it committed the one sin that a Bond film must avoid at all costs. It was boooooorrrrrring.

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OH GODS WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN? Even if those children are whiny heirs to feudal lords.

Usually I have some social media tidbit to rant on about, but nothing stands out in the immediate. I’m still playing MGSV (73% completion and counting, also that link is hilarious, M for language). I also tried the Overwatch closed Beta, and I’ll bet that game is super fun for people who like multiplayer shooter/moba hybrids! Turns out I do not, though, despite being very drawn to the colorful characters and great art direction. My experience with the game can be summed up as ‘spawn, run to the front lines, die immediately, repeat’. I suppose I just need to Git Gud, but that likely requires far more time than I’m willing to put in!

I’m also rewatching Star Trek TNG and Cosmos (2014), and I’m an episode behind on The Flash and Arrow, which have both been quite entertaining so far this season, even though I still find myself face palming at the cheesey dialog every few minutes.

So that’s my current media intake! Not all that much,  I guess. I definitely need to get to the theater to see Spectre. I refuse to acknowledge the middling review scores so I can be disappointed on my own terms!

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Well this situation is just getting more and more uncomplicated by the second!

Um, Star Wars rant incoming I’M SORRY!

So I enjoy Star Wars Rebels, but oh man, is it hard to feel like the Empire is much of a threat in the series! Obviously from a narrative point of view, the Empire needs to be at least one step behind the main cast so that they can keep being rebels, but whenever the Empire catches up to them, which has been frequently, they escape again pretty darn easily and it kind of cheapens the drama of fighting a huge galactic super power. In the films, even when the Rebels are winning, they’re bleeding casualties like nobody’s business, and it feels like a real struggle. To be fair, I did love the ‘Siege of Lothal‘ two parter where Vader takes a crack at the main cast. They still escape, but the small rebel fleet supporting them takes a serious beating, and it feels like a major loss and a narrow escape, unlike the most recent episode. In ‘Always Two There Are‘, Ezra, Sabine, and Zeb get ambushed by TWO Sith Inquisitors. Although it is revealed that the Inquisitor from season 1 was their leader, these two are still played up as super intimidating. In the end, though, the Inquisitors do a hilariously sloppy job of securing their prisoners and blunder into an obvious escape plan setup, allowing Ezra and company to just kind of get away without much effort. Yet after their escape, Ezra, Zeb, and Sabine act exasperated, as if escaping from the Inquisitors was as harrowing an experience as escaping from Vader. No it wasn’t, guys! You made the inquisitors look like total chumps, and have, for the time being, at least, robbed this season’s big bads of any intimidation points they’d built up!

Normally I’d just let it slide, but Rebels is making a bad habit of this type of scenario. I think what these big confrontations are hurting for are some casualties, even temporary ones! If the inquisitors had heavily damaged the rebel’s ship as they’d escaped, or if they’d taken one of the main cast out of commission, and the following episode would require our protagonists to seek medical treatment or mechanical support, then at least it would feel like the rebels couldn’t just run into an Inquisitor without incurring some losses. I still dig Star Wars Rebels, and I look forward to each episode. I just really want to LOVE Rebels, but its inability to hold on to the tension between its most dramatic scenes kind of bums me out!

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