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, by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Groo and the Siege Series: Groo the Wanderer #19 Author: Sergio Aragones Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Genre: Comics Pages: 24 Words: 2K
Hahahahahahaa! Grooella is trying to get her castle back and of course Groo tries to help. With predictable results. Of course, even when Grooella tries to kill Groo by having him shot by arrows, he manages to escape. What a scamp! 😉
And the funny thing is, the castle still isn’t recovered by the end and so Grooella makes sure to tell us that this IS STILL NOT THE END.
This reminds me of the Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians series by Brandon Sanderson. Each of the Smedry’s had a power that was utterly ridiculous, but they all found ways to make use of it. Everyone in this comic keeps trying to use Groo as a conventional weapon when what they need to do is some very unconventional thinking. Of course, then things wouldn’t be nearly as funny 😀
★★★✬☆
From Bookstooge.blog
Grooella is besieging her own castle to take it back from the cominos. Groo attempts to help with creating a catapult and destroys it. He attempts to dig some tunnels under the castle walls and ends up digging under Grooella’s army, nearly destroying them.
There are also some flashback scenes of Groo and Grooella as kids where Groo is attempting to play with Grooella and her friends. Every attempt ends in disaster.
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 by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The King of the Swords Series: Eternal Champion: Corum #3 Author: Michael Moorcock Rating: 4 of 5 Stars Genre: Fantasy Pages: 127 Words: 45K
While I still enjoyed this, I did not find the story as engaging as the previous two. Part of that was just how weak the gods of Law are. They control 10 of the 15 planes of existence and yet the single god of Chaos is more powerful alone then all of the gods of Law combined. They came across as weak and effete. So when I found out at the end that Kwll and his brother Rhynn had killed ALL the gods, both of Chaos and Law, I didn’t shed a tear. It did make me wonder what that meant for the Cosmic Balance, as Kwll seemed to go out of his way to emphasize how he and Rhynn didn’t believe in the Cosmic Balance and thus weren’t under control by the rules of it.
That kind of philosophizing permeated this book much more than in the previous two. Corum gets to meet Elric and Erekose (other incarnations of the Eternal Champion. Erekose is the only one who remembers every incarnation though and maaaaan, is he a whiny pants cry baby) and Moorcock waxes on (yes Mr Miyagi!) about the nature of reality, blah, blah, blah. I think the ideas here are great for teens and young adults to be exposed to, because thinking about the nature of reality is important. People are ignoring biological facts today, which is reality, and are reaping the consequences by going insane.
We do get to see Corum go whizzing around in one of the flying boats and boy howdy, does he go all over the place. He travels his own world, he travels to other planes of existence and has adventures. He even goes to Limbo. I would say this ends happily with him and Rhalina being at peace, but knowing there is another trilogy to come means Corum is going to get boned somehow. Eternal Champions are Eternally Unhappy.
Why Moorcock chose that line of reasoning is still a mystery to me. Maybe it was pure marketing? When you’re writing for the teen and YA crowd, tortured anguished heros usually sell better. I’d like to believe that he had better reasons than that but I don’t care enough to find out. I don’t even know if there are any biographies on the man. He is just a name on the cover to me and I suspect it will be better for me and everyone, if he stays that way.
★★★★☆
From Wikipedia.com
A spell – determined to have been cast by the forces of Chaos – forces the inhabitants of Corum’s plane to war with each other (including the City in the Pyramid). Desperate to stop the slaughter, Corum, Rhalina and Jhary-a-Conel travel to the last five planes, ruled by Mabelode, the King of the Swords. Rhalina is taken hostage by the forces of Chaos and Corum has several encounters with the forces of Chaos, including Earl Glandyth-a-Krae.
Corum also meets two other aspects of the Eternal Champion: Elric and Erekosë, with all three seeking the mystical city of Tanelorn for their own purposes. After a brief adventure in the “Vanishing Tower”, the other heroes depart and Corum and Jhary arrive at their version of Tanelorn. Corum discovers one of the “Lost Gods”, the being Kwll, who is imprisoned and cannot be freed until whole. Corum offers Kwll his hand, on the condition that he aid them against Mabelode. Kwll accepts the terms, but reneges on the bargain until persuaded to assist. Corum is also stripped of his artificial eye, which belongs to Rhynn – actually the mysterious giant Corum had previously encountered. Kwll transports Corum and Jhary to the court of Mabelode, with the pair fleeing with Rhalina when Kwll directly challenges the Chaos God.
In a final battle Corum avenged his family by killing Glandyth-a-Krae and decimating the last of Chaos’ mortal forces. Kwll later located Corum and revealed that all the gods – of both Chaos and Law – have been slain in order to free humanity and allow it to shape its own destiny.
I came home today after work and jumped online to check the blogosphere. I always check my spam comments folder because people get caught in there and I don’t want them to be stuck for days 🙂
Well, I had over 100 flipping spam comments all saying something along the lines of “This was a great movie, everyone should watch it” along with a link. I’ve had this going on for a couple of weeks, but never this bad.
When the russian spammers hit me, in cyrillic, I simply copy/pasted one of their letters and put that in my “goes straight to trash” rules for comments. However spammers work, once the programs realized the comments were going straight to trash without even the spam folder to check things, they dramatically decreased. To the point where I get 1 or 2 per week, instead of 10-20 every day. 2 years ago I did the same thing for the spanish spam bots. Just put in an upside down question mark and voila, they went straight to trash. And I haven’t been bothered by them for over a year now. So making spam comments go straight to the trash definitely stops them from mobbing my site.
Therefore, I am going to take some seriously drastic action, for about 2 months. I am going to make the word “movie” verboten in the comments here on Bookstooge.blog. Any comment with that word in it will go straight to the trash without me ever checking it. I realize this will cause chaos and confusion on my ever popular “movie review of the month” post, but I suspect you all have the intestinal fortitude to weather such vicissitudes. I also realize this will hit some bloggers much more than others and for that I apologize in advance. I just can’t think of any other way to deal with these forsaken movie link spammers.
I will re-examine things in September and make a decision about continuing this ban on the “M”-word then. I really hope that this drastic action will take care of things however.
X-Men, directed by Brian Singer, was one of the first really well done Super Hero movies. The first Spiderman movie hadn’t come out yet, but neither had such flops like Ghostrider, Elektra or the Fantastic Four duology. A brand new cinematic world was opening up to us.
And it was glorious!
I was rather hesitant to re-watch this, as I had such good memories and did NOT want to sully them; Marvel has done that well enough on its own. But my goodness, I had so much FUN watching this.
It definitely helped that much of the storyline was familiar to me from the 90’s X-Men comics. But it was a comic book and it just reveled in it. I mean, Magneto has a massive mutant making machine already installed in the torch of the Statue of Liberty? Come on, that’s ridiculous. And it worked perfectly because it is exactly how badguys always operate in the comics. This was not a Zack Snyder grimfest or deconstructionist dystopia. Singer has a love of the goodguys kicking butt, overcoming great odds and looking good doing it 🙂 It also wasn’t 3hrs long. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
While I have enjoyed the Infinity War story arc that the MCU took us on, by the end I was ready for it to be done. I was ready for standalone movies with standalone stories. Kind of like this movie in fact. Which might explain just why I enjoyed it so much. While there are 2 sequels, this could easily be watched as a standalone. That really appeals to me.
So if you are a comic book fan and you want to watch a superhero film that is just plain fun and gives you a good time, watch X-Men.
While Blogshido is as varied as the people who practice this ancient art, the core of the discipline has always been the same. You can remove the Monthly Kata and still practice Blogshido. You can even ignore the venerable, honorable and most inspiring Taekommentdo and still practice Blogshido. But if you do not practice Post-fu, then you are not practicing Blogshido.
Some Masters of Blogshido, when practicing Post-fu, will pour out their very life essence into it, an artistic outpouring. You can almost feel the blood, the sweat, the tears, the absolute agony that went into the creation of their mastepiece of Post-fu. You know you are watching something special, something never to be repeated even while longing to perform it so well yourself. The downfall of this kind of practice in Post-fu is that the artist themselves know they will never reach such artistic heights again. It can easily turn into a self-defeating spiral of doom instead of a celebration of something wonderful.
Other Masters of Post-fu take a much more workmanlike attitude towards it. They make posts like they make a bologna sandwich. Bread, mayo, bologna, cheese, bam, put it all together, wham, done. Eat and enjoy. And they can do this day after day, week after week, month after month and even sometimes, year after year. The audience isn’t wowed, they are not moved to tears, nor are their hearts shattered. But they get a nutritious and filling bologna sandwich every day (well, as nutritious as a bologna sandwich can be anyway!)
A grounded Master of Blogshido will know which style suits them best for writing. But they will also know the proper balance in the choices they make of which blogs to follow. If I follow 100 Workmanlike Masters of Post-fu, while my Taekommentdo might become second to none through practice, when will I have time to practice my own Post-fu? And if I follow 100 Artistic Masters, who only post once a year, that sets an impossibly high bar for myself when I do go to practice Post-fu.
Personally, I only follow people who practice Post-fu at least once a month. Now there are always special circumstances and that is fine, but if someone isn’t practicing once a month on a consistent basis, I don’t consider them a follower of Blogshido anymore. How can I call you a Sandwich Maker if you never make sandwiches? And don’t even try to pull that “There is no sandwich” crap on me, Neo tried it with the spoon and look what happened to him, he got Matrix Resurrections. I trust that is warning enough for you all.
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 by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Kill for Me Series: Victor the Assassin #8 Authors: Tom Wood Rating: 4 of 5 Stars Genre: Action/Adventure Pages: 364 Words: 114K
Victor gets involved in a Guatemalan drug cartel war between two sisters. And dates a DEA (drug enforcement agency) agent. I was sure she was going to die, but color me surprised, she not only survives but gets a big score, thanks (all unknowingly of course) to Victor.
This felt like a very different Victor book. Thinking about it though, each book has never been a clone of the previous ones. Here, Victor has shed his chains to both the US and the UK intelligence agencies and is trying to live his life anonymously again. I’m not sure that’s possible, but the very fact that the token romance girl actually survived this time throws my every calculation off now. And that’s a good thing. Being a predictable author is as bad as being a predictable assassin.
I saw the one double cross, mainly because it was so obvious that even I couldn’t miss it. The other two, I kind of suspected but wasn’t sure so it was a nice little surprise to see how they all worked out.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I am not sure why I enjoyed it as much as I did, but I think the lack of world politics and intelligence agencies played a big part. Give me the Pure Assassin of Death, not some chained lackey of da’ Man….
★★★★☆
From the Publisher
Lethal assassin Victor lands in the middle of a Guatemalan cartel war in the latest nonstop thriller from the international bestselling author of The Final Hour.
Victor is the killer who always delivers…for the right price. And Heloise Espinosa, patron of Guatemala’s largest cartel, is ready and willing to pay him just that to eliminate the competition–her sister. Heloise has been battling Maria for control of the cartel in an endless and bloody war. Now Victor decides who survives. An easy job if it weren’t for the sudden target on his back.
Victor’s not the only one on the hunt. Someone else has Maria in their crosshairs and will do anything to get the kill. In the middle of cartel territory with enemies closing in from all sides, Victor must decide where to put the bullet before one is placed in his head. His only chance at survival is to team up with the one person who may be as deadly as he is…
