snarkotron - Tumblr blog

[snarkotron]

Sex and the City Re-watch Recap : Four Women and a Funeral

Sex and the City Re-watch Recap : Four Women and a Funeral

Funeral time. Fashion funeral time. Carrie and Charlotte think that a simple black dress will be appropriate, but Samantha’s outfit by the deceased who was a designer turns out to be much more chic. This is where we really see Samantha’s occupation come to play. Her eyes glitter with avarice at the PR opportunities. Charlotte has an opportunity of her own when her borrowed hat blows into a…

[snarkotron]

Amazon's The Wheel of Time

Amazon’s The Wheel of Time

Television series come and go. There are always beginnings but not always endings to a television series. A wifi signal pierced the air through the mountains, finding its way to my router. It streamed a collage of images to my television through my Roku’s Amazon Prime Video app. It was a beginning. And it made me nervous. I first read The Wheel of Time series starting almost twenty years ago…

[snarkotron]

Sex and the City Re-watch Recap: Politically Erect

Sex and the City Re-watch Recap: Politically Erect

And Carrie has hit the campaign trail with pre-Mad Men silver fox and just as suave if not as obviously sleazy Bill Kelley. She’s not really good at it, preferring to avoid putting pinholes in her Halston rather that wearing the pro-Kelley pin that the handsome campaign manager keeps pushing. Style over support? Their nights of intimacy seem to be going well, though. Meanwhile Miranda continues…

[snarkotron]

The Massive Effect of a Gay Shepard Playthrough

The Massive Effect of a Gay Shepard Playthrough

It’s here, and you didn’t need a Prothean beacon to tell you about it. Several years ago I attempted to play through the Mass Effect series with my morally acrobatic but overall paragon Femshep. By the time I got to the third game I began to have this sinking feeling that something wasn’t right. No, it wasn’t the fact that her lips were more than slightly and comically pronounced as if she got…

[snarkotron]

Does Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet" Break Backs?

Does Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” Break Backs?

Once I was old enough, I spent my summer breaks at home instead of having to go to a day care. My parents both worked, so I wound up spending many of those days home alone. While I did have chores that needed doing and friends that I could see, most of my day was spent doing whatever I liked, and it was my first taste of independence.   One summer day while flipping through channels, I came…

[snarkotron]

How I Got to Elite: Dangerous

Steam informed me recently that a game on my wish list was on sale. I don’t add items to that list often, but there are a few I forget are there. I checked it out and found that it was Elite: Dangerous. I didn’t know much about it off the top of my head, but investigating the store page reminded me of the appeal. Open world. Milky Way galaxy recreation. Massive scale. MMO. Flight simulator. So I…

[snarkotron]

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Retrospective

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Retrospective

So there’s a new Batman film on the horizon, if you haven’t heard. It’s the new Zack Snyder flick that follows up his mediocre Superman reboot, and pits two acclaimed heroes against each other. On the heels of the previous trilogy of Batman films by Christopher Nolan, this seems gimmicky and crude. In Nolan’s films we got to see Bruce Wayne explore what it takes to become Batman. This delving…

[snarkotron]

Just Jeb! (2016)

[snarkotron]

Katya Hammered and Sickled My Heart to Pieces

Since first viewing Rupaul’s Drag Race, I have become voraciously engaged with the show. It’s a sad truth that a reality television show has done this to me, but I have no qualms about this. Unlike other shows of this nature, Drag Race doesn’t exploit its subjects, and in fact it does a lot to elevate drag queens, who have long been the mascots and sometimes scapegoats of the gay community, to a…

[snarkotron]

New City

My boyfriend booted up Sim City the other day and started building a new city from scratch. As he did so, he saw they I was watching and sheepishly said, “I never come up with names for my cities. I always leave them named ‘New City’.  I’m not that creative.”

He frowned at his perceived awkwardness and started laying roads and power plants and zones and pipes.

So I said, “There was an ancient…

[snarkotron]

Ninety 90's Songs: Canadian K.D.'s Constant Craving#52

Ninety 90's Songs: Canadian K.D.'s Constant Craving

Oh, the nineties. After the fun, excessive decade of the 80’s which featured innovation stacked on top the also over the top decade of the seventies, things became more subdued. Men sang about their grungy emotions, stopped wearing make up, and women starting to take center stage as moody gravitas-bearing muses. Even some of them stopped wearing make up, too. It wasn’t all Cyndi Lauper and her…

[snarkotron]

Crush or Squish?

We all have little crushes every now and then. Occasionally there are those big ones that seem to consume us with desperate longing and poetically appropriate heartache. Growing up and struggling with being gay, I had more than my fair share of these episodes ranging from brief flavor of the week types to years long infatuations.

I kept these feelings to myself and the process became a deeply…

[snarkotron]

Interstellar: A Review

Released in 2014, Interstellar, a film by Christopher Nolan, is an epic sci-fi adventure in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Featuring award-winning special effects and a boundary pushing plot, Interstellar is sure to baffle the uninformed and enthrall the willing. But is it the kind of epic sci-fi film I would go for?

Let’s see.

• Special Effects

While I wouldn’t consider myself a slave to…

[snarkotron]

Sticks: An Attempt at Poetry

My feelings are like sticks

I used to carry few

Now there are many

Some are marked as special

I can’t see them among the rest

My arms are crowded

Novel thoughts

New feelings

Old burdens remembered

Responsibilities assumed

Where is that feeling?

The one that made me glad?

Or that serene one?

Somewhere within

It’s there

But it’s lost

Sometimes I catch a glimpse

Sometimes

The rest are sticks I have…

[snarkotron]

From Out of Nowhere: Seven Kingdoms 2 HD

I had just mentioned in a previous post how every game from the last twenty years was getting a remake of some kind. I just happened upon this one when I noticed that GOG.com was giving me a free update to a game. Little did I know that one of my favorite strategy games of all time was getting an HD remake with some new features, new support (a new patch has just been released), and the music…

[snarkotron]

Homeworld Remastered is Here

It seems like every game is getting remade nowadays. The Curse of Monkey Island got one. Tomb Raider got one. Age of Empires 2 got one. Even Baldur’s Gate got one. So it was only a matter of time before a high profile series like Homeworld got one.

Released in 1999, and spawning a stand alone expansion and a sequel, the Homeworld series is a fully 3D real time strategy experience that features…

[snarkotron]

The Wheel of Time Turns on My Mind

The recent scandal surrounding a surprising and controversial pilot episode, and the resulting lawsuit filed against author Robert Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal Rigney, has definitely put the entire series back into the spotlight. Not since the series’ conclusion a couple of years ago has this much attention surrounded it, and my own attentions have returned once again to the stories that…