Animate Dead - MTG 4th Edition

Muppets Most Wanted (2014 Movie)

This was a direct sequel to The Muppets (2011 Movie) and by direct sequel I mean this picks up at the last scene of that movie. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this until 2 things happened. First, Ricky Gervais showed up as “Dom Badguy”, so I knew I was going to appreciate the humor (how can you not love it when one of the dumb badguys is named such?). Secondly, Sam the Eagle, as a CIA agent, has a badge measuring scene with an Interpol Agent (played by Ty Burrel, whoever he is) and THAT’S when I knew this movie was for me.

The gist of the movie is that Kermit gets replaced by his evil duplicate and nobody notices except Animal, Fozzie and Walter (the new muppet introduced in the previous movie). Bad Kermit has plans to steal the Crown Jewels and uses the Muppets and only Kermit can stop him.

I loved this movie. I am not usually a fan of Ricky Gervais, but once again what made the difference is that he really played like he was acting with others in the scenes with the muppets. I think the biggest issue with Muppet movies is getting actors who can simply accept, and thus show by tone and body language, that the muppets are other legitimate actors in front of the camera. He played up his own strengths but at the same time didn’t feel like he was stealing any scenes for himself. Much like Michael Caine in Muppet Treasure Island, Gervais enhanced the scenes he was in.

The pure zaniness was back. Whoever wrote this, they seemed to understand the kind of humor that Jim Henson had captured in the original Muppets. It was whacky, it was silly, it was zany and it most important of all, it worked. I will be buying this and its prequel on bluray sometime by years end. This deserves a spot on the Muppet Shelf.

The only downside to this movie is that it is pretty essential to have watched the previous movie to understand everything clearly. Other than that, I highly recommend this Muppet movie.

Out of Wordpress Jail!

For the last couple of years my ability to comment on the WordPress.com Forums has been curtailed because I said some things about staff and called them shills, etc when the block editor was forced down our throats and many blogging options that had been available in the old editor were removed. I regret nothing! While the staff are not the creators of the block editor, nor implementers of it, they WERE the public face of WordPress and they sang it’s praises like it had a hold of certain delicate parts of their anatomy and they deserved every word that I wrote.

So this past week I was perusing the forum (you can learn a lot by reading stupid peoples’ mistakes and questions) and realized my ability to comment was back on. What a waste. The flipping Pro Plan and rapacious Starter Plan are already fully integrated into their business model so it’s pointless to go raging after that. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next dumb move by WordPress.com to get banned again.

Sometimes life is hard when you’re me 😉

Agent Zero (Agent Zero #1) ★★★☆☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Agent Zero
Series: Agent Zero #1
Authors: Jack Mars
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 322
Words: 115.5K

Synopsis:

Kent Steele is getting over the death of his wife and is doing his best to provide stability for his 2 daughters. One night he is kidnapped and told he’s a secret agent for the CIA, the most lethal agent the world has ever known. Kent, a history professor, knows this isn’t true and is convinced the kidnappers have the wrong man. Then they remove a small module from his head and suddenly he’s having memories that seem impossible.

Turns out Steele WAS a secret agent going after a organization that was so scattered that no 3 members knew more than 3 other members. They had penetrated governments and security agencies and it was obvious to Steele that the CIA had a mole or 3. So he chose to have his memory suppressed, faked his death and was trying to hide in plain sight.

Now that he’s back, Steele means to see the job done. He hunts down the organization and puts a stop to them killing hundreds of world leaders and business moguls. Now Agent Zero is back.

My Thoughts:

Jason Bourne meets John Wick, with kids. This was a decent story. However, this was originally published in 2019 and right now, in 2022, the series has ended at book 12. That’s 4 books a year. I know that output doesn’t HAVE to indicate quality (as evinced by the Galaxy’s Edge series by Anspach and Cole) but it usually is a good indicator. This was well written and I really hope the quality stays this high.

While I did enjoy this, we’ll have to see if the author has the imagination to keep the story interesting for 11 more books. What concerns me is that Kent Steele has a dead wife, 2 young daughters and in this book gets a potential love interest from his past. That’s a LOT of drama potential. The kids especially worry me because most authors either kill them off OR end up making them non-entities. Neither of those options is enjoyable to read about nor does it ever indicate a skill level that is above average in terms of story telling.

I realize I’m being pessimistic here but sometimes it is hard not to be. I’d like to end this by saying I did enjoy the story and the main characters name just made me laugh. If you’re a comic fan, you might have already picked up on it. Kent is the last name of Clarke Kent, who is also known as the Man of Steel.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The Ivory Graveyard (Groo the Wanderer #7) ★★★✬☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Ivory Graveyard
Series: Groo the Wanderer #7
Author: Sergio Aragones
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 24
Words: 2K

Synopsis:

This has two stories, one about Groo and one about a character named the Sage.

The Groo story has Groo first defending a group of poachers and then trying to kill them all. They sail away on a boat and Groo’s luck with boats is known so nobody will help him. He hears the legend about the elephant graveyard and seeks it out to sell the ivory to buy cheese dip. He finds it and the story ends with a dying elephant falling onto his head.

The Sage gives a child a candy and makes him feel better and some city guards see it and think he is a great physician. They take him to the palace and the queen tells the Sage to heal the King, who is very sick, or she will torture him to death. The Sage finds the king dead in bed. Instead of panicking, he locks the door, starts hollering about how he’s healed the king and then throws the body out of the window. Thus ensuring that the death of the king wouldn’t fall on his head.

My Thoughts:

This was once again a little amusing interlude to break up the day. The most amusing parts to me were when Groo was trying to hire a boat to chase the poachers and ended up sinking one boat in 4 seconds and another instance of a guy chopping up his own boat “to save time”, hahahahaa. Of course, the final panel is just priceless. How can you not laugh at that irony?

The Sage story wasn’t as funny but the twisted thinking of the Sage (throwing the dead king out the window to fake the king’s death) really aligned with me and brought a smile to my face. I have no idea if he’ll start sharing page time with Groo or if this was just a one-off that Aragones needed to get off of his chest. Personally, while I like Groo better, having 2 stories for the price of 1 is nice and adds just enough variety to keep things interesting. Of course, if the Sage keeps showing up and keeps thinking empty-headed aphorisms all the time, I reserve the right to change my head and want to behead him with a wakizashi 😉

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

• All of My “Groo the Wanderer” Reviews

Currently Reading: Battlefield Earth

Currently re-reading Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. So far, this is the only book by Hubbard that I’ve been able to re-read. The cover on the right is the one I read from the library (it’s the first edition hardcover) and is the one I owned. The cover on the left was made for the audiobook and ended up becoming the cover for the mass market paperback. That is a MONSTER of a paperback, at around 1000 pages. There are also some movie covers but the less said about that utter travesty the better.

I am enjoying this quite a bit. Of course, with a main character named Johnny Goodboy Tyler, you know he’s a Gary Stu. But Gary Stu’s have an important role in stories, they remind us that the Good does win in the end and that Evil will be defeated, even if it appears to be at its strongest at the moment.

Pyrate Cthulhu Vol. 1 (Cthulhu Anthology #4) ★★★★✬

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Pyrate Cthulhu Vol. 1
Series: Cthulhu Anthology #4
Editor: Pyrate Press
Rating: 4.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Cosmic Horror
Pages: 221
Words: 77K

Synopsis:

Table of Contents

The Swelling by David Conyers

The Disciple by David Barr Kirtley

A Colder War by Charles Stross

The Ghoulish Wife by Kevin L. O’Brien

The Last Horror Out of Arkham by Darrel Schweitzer

Harold’s Blues by Glen Singer

Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley by Richard A. Lupoff

The Plague Jar by Allen Mackey

The Dead Man’s Hand by Jason Andrew

A Little Job in Arkham by John Sunseri

In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb by Tina L. Jens

My Thoughts:

Where the last volume edited by ST Joshi was in the Weird Fiction, Pyrate Press returns us full speed back into the Cosmic Horror and it was good.

The first story, The Swelling, was a King in Yellow tale and it set the tone for the whole book. This book covered the whole gamut of Cosmic Horror entities, not just Cthulhu. The Disciple was a wonderfully delicious twisted tale where evil feeds on evil and it just made me chortle with unholy glee. The Colder War was a bit longer but reimagined the Cold War with Elder Entities being involved and the destruction of Earth. It was interesting while being gloomy and bit by bit you could tell the main character was losing hope.

This was a really good collection of stories. They were all interesting and they were well written. I tried to find out about Pyrate Press, but beyond there being a Vol 2 in this series (which I have on tap), I couldn’t find anything on them. Even this book I had a devil of a time trying to find any concrete info. Well, maybe if Vol 2 is as good as this I’ll try to do some serious digging but right now I’ll just have to rest on my laurels.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

• Cthulhu Lives! (Book 1)
• Cthulhu Lies Dreaming (Book 2)
• The Madness of Cthulhu Vol 1 (Book 3)

Animate Artifact - MTG 4th Edition

Bethink Yourselves ★☆☆☆☆ DNF@50%

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Bethink Yourselves
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Translator: Ayimer Maude
Rating: 1 of 5 Stars
Genre: Essay
Pages: 60 DNF / 30
Words: 15K DNF / 7.5K

Synopsis:

An essay against war. DNF’d at 50%.

My Thoughts:

I a not sure that I would have liked Tolstoy as a person after my attempt to read this short essay. Tolstoy and I would both agree that war is bad, but where we differ is that he didn’t believe it was necessary while I most certainly think it is (I wonder what he would have thought about Hitler?).

The reason I just quit this in disgust though was Tolstoy’s repeated attempts at categorizing war as explicitly anti-Christian, ie, there was no way to justify being a Christian AND to fight in a war. He doesn’t even address the idea of a Just War but just throws it out the window without even examining it (at least in the half of the essay I read). He repeatedly bangs the drum of “Thou Shalt Not Murder” (the 6^th Commandment given by God Himself to humanity) but ignores the fact that God sent Israel on wars of conquest as punishment against the Canaanite nations. It wasn’t so much that Tolstoy was anti-war that disgusted me but that he was proof texting (basing a conclusion on one or two Bible verses without looking at what the Bible as a whole has to say about a subject) and doing it very badly.

The movie Hacksaw Ridge shows what a lot of 7^th Day Adventists did (and do) about this situation. They are Conscientious Objectors but they still participate in a war overall. Desmond Doss was a medic in the army but wouldn’t carry a gun. Tolstoy doesn’t even consider options like this but is All or Nothing with him being on the Nothing side of the equation.

I’ve had glimpses of Tolstoy’s philosophy in his novels but this was the first time I’ve been exposed to it directly. Not a fan. I just hope this doesn’t affect my enjoyment of his novels.

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

• The Russians
• Leo Tolstoy
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Ivan Turgenev
• Nikolai Gogol

An Introduction to Magic the Gathering

With my Monday posts now pretty much being dedicated to magic the gathering cards from 1994/95, it has become evident that there are questions that I simply cannot answer in a comment. I thought about trying to do a typed out tutorial but after 10minutes of typing realized it was hopeless. Magic is as much a visual game as anything and as such, you need to see it visually explained. The Professor from the Tolarian Community College has put together an excellent primer tutorial on how to play. At close to 20minutes, I don’t expect anyone to actually watch it (because if you had put up a 20min video “explaining” something, I’d skip it like a jump rope!) but it gives me a post to which I can refer all game mechanic related questions to.

The Professor is a very personable fellow and is quite amusing in his own way. I hope this can begin to answer some of those burning questions you all have been asking. If not, please go to a licensed physician, they have creams and salves for those other burning things.

ps,
This post is what happens when I have 13+ reviews to write but would rather cut off my own big toe than to buckle down and write them. Any and all comments that distract me and give me reason to not hop on the review writing train are more than welcome.