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Another classic is Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, but I didn't include it this time because it wasn't on the streaming site where I'd found all these gems.

How long ago do you think the Marvel Studios folks settled on “Endgame” for the title? I only ask because I like to think they all had a panic when the Taylor Swift song with the same title came out. When was that? Three years ago? I’m not actually going to look it up. Imagine if both the Endgame trailer and the “Endgame” music video had released the same day. How awkward would that have been? For them. It would have been funny for us.

Is that enough rambling? I think it’s plenty of rambling. It’s time to move on.

Spoiler warnings for . . . pretty much the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Except for the tv series, since they’re still getting the shaft when it comes to cameos. Due to a typo I just made, I think I just accidentally discovered the name of the MCU OFU: “Marvel Cinematic University.” Okay. I’ll start for real now. I’m sorry.

I barely know where to start. I have a page of rambly notes, that are somewhat in chronological order, but not entirely. To begin with the first scene . . . oh boy. The instant it opened with Hawkeye’s family, I knew exactly when it was taking place, and what was about to happen. The suspense and lack of soundtrack brought me right back to that tight-chested feeling of dread I had during the end sequence of Avengers: Infinity War. The way Hawkeye’s family disappeared made it such an awful experience for him, because he never actually saw them go, and the three who over by the barbecue apparently all went close together, because none of them saw each other disappearing, and didn’t call out to him. Even worse, since he was under house arrest like Ant-Man, he probably had one of those tracking devices on his ankle, too, and couldn’t actually leave, either to find out what was going on, or to check on any of his other loved ones. The whole sequence was just heartbreaking.

It was interesting seeing Iron Man and Nebula interacting. They’re such an odd pair to have been left together after the snap, and neither is really the type to make quick friends. I liked that Nebula started out the little paper football game being her typical competitive self, but relaxed over time. I feel like a lot of Nebula’s development as a more caring person happened off screen while she was on that ship with Tony, as she seems legitimately upset that he’s dying as the oxygen runs out, and has a tender moment with Rocket Raccoon right after leaving the ship, even though she hadn’t really bonded with Rocket before then.

After the enmity I’ve felt towards Thanos since the end of A:IW, it was weird seeing Thanos so weak and domestic when the heroes track him down on . . . um, farm planet. I still don’t feel any sympathy towards him for how viciously Thor and the others took him out, mind you. Dude still killed half the galaxy. It kind of shows how little there ultimately is to him. I mean, he was a strong dude, yeah, but he had his one horrific ambition, and once that was done, there really wasn’t anything left to him, and he just let himself waste away.

I’m really amused with the placement of Captain Marvel just before Endgame, because it made it look like Captain Marvel was going to be taking charge and dealing with all the problems. But then, Endgame hits and she’s barely in it: rescues the Benatar (admittedly important), and then rolls up during the final battle to accomplish basically nothing, then get swatted by two punches from Thanos and knocked out. I love it when the filmmakers mess with us like that!

And even better: the reason Captain Marvel isn’t the problem solver is because Ant-Man is instead! Yay! (Side note: tried to talk Mom into seeing Endgame with us, since she had come to see Ant-Man and the Wasp with us, but all the blue alien people turned her off too much.) I loved that one of the more comic relief characters from the franchise is the main plot driver this time. I still can’t believe his “escape” from the Quantum realm was such a lame thing, though. A rat just happened to walk across the console? Wow.

New Asgard is a sad thing to see. Even though the two older Thor movies weren’t as popular as Ragnarok, I had actually liked having a high fantasy corner to the MCU. Looks like that’s gone for good now. Although there was one cool gold building being built in the middle of the town, so maybe we’ll at least get the visuals one day. Glad to have Valkyrie back again.

Ooookay, Hawkeye is officially scary now. They pretty much turned him into Punisher for this movie, which feels like such a gross departure from his previous personality . . . But I guess I understand why. I can’t exactly argue with taking out gangs, especially considering the state the world must be in at that point.

Actually, on that point: this might sound like a weird complaint, but I feel like they actually made the sets too empty in those early scenes. Half of everyone is gone, but the streets and such look more like 90% are gone. There should be some people still milling around, and using those fishing boats, and taking the now-vacant garbage collection jobs. Maybe they wasted too much budget on cameos, and didn’t have any money left to hire background extras. That was a joke, but now that I think about it . . .

I do not like Professor Hulk. He’s a little too far inside the uncanny valley. Either stick to Ruffalo’s human face, or Hulk’s animalistic face. I don’t like that pale in-between look he’s sporting now. I know it’s maybe disrespectful to Banner’s character arc, but I rather hope things go back to normal again in a later movie.

All right, into the meat of it! I love how they set up the rules of time travel here, because it allows all kinds of playing around in past scenes without destroying the timeline we’ve been enjoying up until now. It was cool seeing so many characters from the past I never thought we would get again! We got last words from Frigga, Carter, Howard Stark and the Ancient One. We also got unwelcome last appearances from Rumlow, Sitwell and Pierce. I’m somewhat convinced Natalie Portman wasn’t really on set for this, because the only scenes with her either had her facing away from the camera, or had no interaction with anyone but the CGI raccoon. Oh well. Thor should have been paired with Darci instead anyway. Thor/Darci OTP! It was good seeing Loki have one last mischief time at the expense of the main characters, even though it was back when he was evil.

I super-hate that we lost Black Widow. I understand, out of that character pair, why the writers wanted Hawkeye to return to his family, and that Natasha was pretty big on the self-loathing in this film. I do also like the reciprocation of Natasha being the one to save Clint’s life this time, just as he elected to recruit her instead of kill her at their initial meeting. But Black Widow was cooler than Hawkeye, fight me. (And my brother adds, “And ain’t nobody like a mohawk.”)

Out of the handful of non-snap deaths that occurred in A:IW, Gamora was the one to return. I would have preferred Loki myself. Also, it’s really not the Gamora we know, because even though she was already mid-rebellion against Thanos, this Gamora doesn’t have all the character development she got from spending time with the other Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s kind of cool and unexpected that Nebula has taken on the same sort of role Gamora did previously, though minus the Star-Lord romance. Also, I got weird looks for this at work, but I’m glad Vision didn’t come back, because I don’t like creepy human/robot romances. (My brother agrees with this one.)

Before I start on the final battle, I’m going to list things I wanted to see, but didn’t:
-Ghost, Sharon Carter, the older Ant-Man and Wasp, Abomination, and Captain Marvel’s cat in the final fight (Abomination is a bad guy, but it’s not like he would want the world to end)
-Rocket Raccoon meeting a regular raccoon
-Captain America and Red Skull having a heart-to-heart on Vormir
-TV show-only characters? It would have been easy enough to have them in the background of the final fight without every audience member needing to know them. I know we got Jarvis, but . . . he’s not a super-hero.

Thanos’s new plan . . . holy crap. I think this finally solidifies the truth of his abject sociopathy. Everything he’s done has ultimately been for his own feelings of grandiose . . . ness. Apparently there’s no noun form of “grandiose.” Once he finds out that his future self’s plan succeeded, but people still hated it and what he had done, he changes tactics and basically says, “Well I’ll just make my own universe that respects me for the big important person that I am!” I also found it weird, when the dusting is undone by Hulk, that the sign the filmmakers used to show that it worked was to have birds return to the trees outside. I thought when Thanos removed half of life, he was only targeting sapient life, not animals! Animals are resources, too, so the fact that he wiped half of them out is another sign that his speeches about resource distribution were bullcrap. He just wanted to do something big and important, and be worshipped for it. I hate him even more now.

Back in A:IW, I felt like the . . . four Thanos generals, the night guard or whatever, felt weirdly superfluous. In a movie built on uniting familiar characters, they were introduced and killed off within the storyline, so they felt really extraneous and unnecessary. But seeing them return out of the past, now that I’m familiar with them seemed to give them more mass as an actual, known presence, and they felt more threatening than they did before as a result.

Okay. Big. Return. Team-Up. Battle. On both sides even, since Thanos brings back the Chitauri and Sakaarans from past movies, too. I don’t think I can even describe how triumphant it felt when every film’s protagonists arrived together, especially since it was the first real confirmation we had that the dusted characters had indeed returned. Most particularly, I was excited to finally see Stark and Potts fighting side-by-side with Potts in her own suit, something I’ve been wanting to see ever since her utter smack-down of Killian in Iron Man 3. I also love that the directors’ response to the whining about the three-woman team-up in A:IW for being “pandering” is to double-down and say “ALL THE FEMALE PROTAGONISTS TEAM UP NOW YES HERE IS YOUR PANDERING.” All that being said, this entire fight is ultimately inferior to the fight in A:IW because there’s just way to much happening on the screen, and the human eye just can’t track everything that’s happening. I later read that the entire Ravager clan from the Guardians of the Galaxy series was in the fight, and neither my brother nor I even saw them.

Iron Man and Captain America are both out? That’s bold. They’ve been the faces of this series for most of the run. I can see now why Tony was so important that Doctor Strange gave up the Time Stone to save him; no one else had a suit that be modified on the fly to fit the Infinity Stones. I love that Thanos’s comeuppance is in the form of the same death he gave out to so many others, but what an excruciating end for Tony! And I hate that Pepper and their daughter have lost their husband/father now, after all the time he dedicated to them. As for Captain America . . . I’m glad he wasn’t killed off, and it’s sweet that he found a way to live out his life with Agent Carter, but it also still feels weird that one of the most diligent and dedicated superheroes in the series left that way. The again, I suppose he still had to deal with the HYDRA cell in his new timeline’s S.H.I.E.L.D., and prepare the world for Thanos and all the other problems he knows are coming down the line.

—doctorlit, still wondering the most important question: Why is Gamora?

“Hey Hulk, can we take a spoiler?” “Hey Hulk, can we take a spoiler?” “Hey Hulk, can we take a spoiler?” “Hey Hulk, can we take a spoiler?”

People seem to guess that I'm a lot older than I actually am online.

Which is a bit of a shame compared to real life, where I've got a baby face. :P

Also, holy moly, you're only a year older than me? That is... a little strange to see. ._.

I turned 22 today.

*blinks*

Sheesh. It gets weirder every year to think I joined as a little bitty 16 year old.

The Don't **** in the Woods has a sequel due out soon.

I am not making those titles up, Jaboody Dubs did riffs on them and everything.

I will not even hint that there is any kind of tension between Skater and Leo, except the regular kind that results in them snapping at each other.
- I will most certainly not insist there is. Because there isn’t.
— Seriously, I will not push them on this. They’ll get mad, and then Skater might lose control of his powers and sap the PPC of every joule of thermal energy or drive everyone OOC or something. Or just do a joint attack with Leo.
——I will also not do this because their author might intervene, and then I’m really in for it.

I will not add to Skater’s frustration if he’s having a perfectly canonical angst attack. We don’t need a repeat of the Time Dilation Incident.

I will not recreate Loss. Ever.

No, it’s not a Jojo’s reference.

Skater/unidentified age/boy/has floppy dog ears about same color as hair instead of regular ears/blonde, white/sometimes has mental breakdowns/self-insert/used to be Gary Stu/can make plotholes/traveled the multiverse before joining the PPC/brought an agent to the PPC before he even joined/human/wears sunglasses with rounded square lenses/has a lot of flashbacks

There’s a lot of Exact Words (TM) going on here, reply to me for explanations

"Mysterious Hatchet Sponsor"

• Aliens, magnets, 42, a wizard did it, and quantum are heretofore unacceptable answers to any question. Even if they would be correct.
  
  - I will not argue with any pregnant PPC agent. Most of them are a little homicidal to begin with.
  -- I will not mock the food cravings of any pregnant PPC agent, even if they are super weird or gross.
  
  - I am not allowed to break down a wall of my RC and claim it was "remodeling." My spurious work request was already turned down by Building Maintenance, and they will not be amused when they have to clean up my mess.
  -- If I hurt myself doing amateur construction work, I have no one to blame but myself.
  
  - Hatchets are strictly forbidden in the PPC Hunger Games. If I am the Mysterious Hatchet Sponsor, I will stop sending them already, for the love of Glod.
  
  (BTW, does anyone know if/when we're getting the next PPC Hunger Games?)
  
  ~Neshomeh

* I must not ask Agent Ix about their "furry little problem"
** Or "that time of the month"
** Charlotte can still kick my butt
*** I will not insinuate that Charlotte can't kick my butt anymore because she's no longer a skarklepire

**Especially not with Sue-colored ribbons.
***Sue-colored garter stockings are right out.

So, I'm sick in bed with strep throat (yuck), which means I've had a lot of time to watch TV. This is fortunate, because while I can list off quite a few things I'd rather be doing, I don't really have the stamina to do much else right now.

So I've watched/finished three animes. And now I'm going to tell all of you about it. Why? because they were good shows! Also, I am bored.

First off, I finally finished the first season of Log Horizon. And if you have not seen Log Horizon, you should totally go watch Log Horizon, because it is great. Easily the best of the three shows I've seen recently.

For those of you who are unaware, the best way to describe Log Horizon is "Sword Art Online done right": It's a show about a bunch of people who get trapped inside an MMO and can't get home, which is a concept that has been so overdone that I'm not surprised if you're falling asleep just listening to me describe it. However, Log Horizon really stands about from every other show in this genre by being smarter, more interesting, and just flat-out better.

First off, the show tosses out the tired "If you die in the game you die in real life" trope, and all the players can respawn at any time, just like back when it was a game. This means that combat is de-emphasized because the stakes are lowered, and pushes the show from being a pure action series to being more of a character or political drama. Which is really what it is. It also creates an interesting power dynamic because for once, NPCs actually appear. Only now that our protagonists have entered the game, those NPCs are sentient people with their own thoughts and feelings. And they can die. In fact, they're a heck of a lot more human than our fearless immortal protagonists. That's interesting. And once again, it pushes the show into being more thoughtful than its contemporaries. It's telling that this a show that starts with an action scene and ends with a sequence where one of the characters is making infinitely more of an impact on the world... by filing paperwork particularly well.

The show's other real advantage (aside from a likeable, memorable cast, good world-building, and an actually unique setting) is the fact that it was written by someone who very clearly has actually played MMOs and cares about them. This is a show where there's an entire arc dedicated to teaching a bunch of new players about the fundamentals of MMO combat (healer, tank, DPS, managing aggro, etc) because that actually matters because this is a real MMO. Well, not actually real, but it feels real, like something people would actually play. That's a big deal.

==

The theme of an author profoundly caring about the subject matter also comes up in the next anime I'm going to talk about, High Score Girl. A show I found on Netflix that looked interesting. It's a romance story about a game-obsessed boy who slowly develops a relationship with a girl who appears to be his total opposite but shares his passion for games. It's honestly a pretty standard romance in a lot of ways, but I still really enjoyed watching these characters grow and develop, and the whole show is just... charming. It's as much a romance as it is a tribute to Saturdays wasted in front of a console, days after school dumping quarters into arcade machines, and the friendships and rivalries that would spring up out of that, all set right in the middle of the 90's fighting game boom. And it is really clear that the author was as in love with the games in this story as the characters are. Which is fitting, because this is very much a story, in the broader strokes, about passion. About doing the things you love, even when it doesn't make sense, not because you think it will make things better, but because you love doing them. I'd highly recommend it, especially to anyone who ever burned an afternoon at an arcade (I have, when I was very young. I wish I could again...).

==

And the final show I watched was Amagi Brilliant Park. Which... oh boy. This is a show about a high-school student who ends up getting hired (read: forced at gunpoint) to save a failing amusement park where all the mascots are real magical creatures. And it is just as gloriously insane as that premise makes it sound. Our protagonist is an unabashed egotist (so naturally the author named him after Kanye West—yes, really), his second-in-command's solution to every problem is to shoot it (and she can literally pull guns out of thin air), the park's actual head is perpetually 14 years old, and her uncle is an alcoholic teddy-bear/mouse...thing in a bowler hat with a proclivity for beating up guests that get too mouthy. And that's just maybe a tenth of the main cast: this show has way too many characters and it's great and I love it.

So yeah, I think that's everything. Feel free to plug whatever else or talk about things.

We have aliens who approach the same goals we do but from a radically different perspective. The Gods Themselves is the example I already gave of this, but I think I have an even better one.

Lizardmen.

Yes, they're everywhere and have been done too many different ways to count, but I'm specifically talking about D&D Lizardfolk right now. Lizardfolk generally get hit with the Proud Warrior Race stick, and D&D kind of does that, but it also actually borrows from science in that they are, literally and metaphorically, cold-blooded. That is to say, they don't feel emotions the same way we do, and don't have to same level of emotional response to things, certainly not in the same way. Rather than going in the Spock direction however, they rely more on instinct than a human would: it's just that those instincts are colder and stranger to us than our own. This is hard to write or act out, but in the hands of a skilled roleplayer, the result can feel disconcertingly alien (SilentThunder has actually been doing an excellent job of roleplaying one in the Discord's D&D campaign, and I can recall at least on particularly disturbing flourish at one point that highlighted how inhuman the character was).

In general, taking inspiration from nature is probably a good idea, because life is weirder than anything I can imagine. There are multiple species that practice cannibalism as part of their lifecycles (see: praying mantis): what kind of perspective would they have on life and death? The Anglerfish is another, equally bizarre thing. And yes, I know I'm focusing on reproduction, but that's because it's the easiest part of animal behavior to get information on from the internet. Perhaps Doctorlit would have more insight...

Also, dunno if this actually counts as a horror movie, but Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is still funny.

~Neshomeh

In his book Anvil of Stars, the human characters meet up with a species they call the Brothers. Each one is sort of like a large centipede (terribly creepy at first!), but their bodies are composed of a number of smaller sub-organisms, sentient but non-sapient on their own, that combine to form the "individual," so to speak. They struggle a bit with concepts like singular pronouns, and always refer to themselves as "I/we". A big part of their communication is olfactory, and the odors they give off don't always have the kinds of associations we humans might expect, which is fun. They're ultimately very relatable, though, once you get over the "eek!" factor. I really love these guys, and I'm not doing them justice here.

As a side-note, the humans in that book are a little alien themselves, since they've all grown up on an alien spacecraft that has honed them for a single purpose, which is to hunt down and destroy the race of Killers that wiped out the Earth and a bunch of other planets besides. (The Brothers are on the same mission.) It's a little bit Ender's Game, but Bear acknowledges that space is really, really big, and they're essentially tracking the Killers back through eons, and they might not ever find where they came from; or if they do, they might be long dead already.

Anyway, the culture the kids form among themselves is unique and pretty interesting, drawn on half-remembered childhood stories and images of Earth. Their leader is the Pan, and they call themselves Lost Boys and Wendys. They organize themselves into families such as Trees and Birds, with each kid having their own byname that fits their family along with their given name. Martin Spruce is our protagonist; Rose Sequoia is another I recall. Expression of sexuality (they're physically adults at the time of the story) is much less rigid.

TL;DR, Anvil of Stars is cool, go read it.

~Neshomeh

These are probably all going to be about my agents, and may or may not make sense depending on unfinished missions I swear I'm working on that.


*I will not call Agent Chenille a "combat bunny". It only happened once, and making a horse-sized rabbit with knives angry at me is painful.

*I will not trick Chenille into eating potatoes.
**Nor offer him carrots. Just because he likes them doesn't mean he isn't annoyed by how often it happens.

*I will not touch Chenille's Beaststone.

*Raiding RC 1118 for food is a Bad Idea.

*I will not call either Agent Chenille or Agent Merula a furry.

*Merula is not indecisive, no matter how many times she dyes her hair.

*Insinuating that Merula should "blow" anything ends in wind magic in my face and a trip to Medical.

*I will not touch Merula's gloves.

*Merula is not "as dense as a shonen protagonist".

*Just because Merula's last name is inspired by velveteen rabbits does not make her a rabbit.
**Nor that she has any traits that insinuates.
***Neither does Chenille, despite the fact that he can be a rabbit when he wants.

*I will not locked Chenille and Merula in a room and tell them to "get on with it already".

But I'll only ask one: if you have a freakin' possessed shark in your movie, why the hell wouldn't you focus on it? It's a shark! That's possessed! What more do you need? (I'm always up for killer nuns and blonde vampires otherwise, but sorry, the possessed shark wins this round for me.)
Ah, the beauty of B-movies.

The most terrifying, awe-inspiring horror movie oracles ever... fortune cookies.

I speculate it's easier to put together something properly weird and unusual when you don't need to actually show and play it to people. You can just try and use words to push folks imaginations into roughly similar spaces.

One example that might sort of work on film are the Tines from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, who're dog-like beings where the sapient people are made of four or five individual beings who synchronize together with ultrasonic waves and who aren't individually sapient. This leads to interesting (and plot-relevant) abilities like the ability for a Tine to swap out parts of themself.

And then you have a book like Embassytown, which features the Hosts, who're aliens that, for reasons that were either not specified or that I can't remember, have a language where you're always saying two words at once. Some aspect of how this setup interacts with their brains stops them from lying or using things like metaphors. Interspecies relations rely on genetically engineered twins who can more or less speak this language, since regular human languages don't cross the species barrier. (And then things get weird and plot happens.)

Anyway, these're some examples I could think of right now. Might come back with more later.