Let us cleanse these foul streets. Fear the blood.

I'm not a big cosplayer (yet), but I'm also no stranger to cosplay. Many years ago, a friend of mine helped me put together a Pyramid Head cosplay for an anime convention. I was pretty pleased with the result. I tried to be as accurate to the Silent Hill 2 video game as possible, but at the time, it was difficult to find decent reference images at the fidelity necessary to get a good idea of what materials to use and so forth. Nowadays, however, Konami has granted licenses to toy companies that have gone on to make numerous statues and figures. So any would-be Pyramid Head cosplayer now has plenty of reference material. Lucky them...

Years ago, I made a Pyramid Head costume [LEFT] without all the figures and references [RIGHT] that I have now.

For the most part, however, I didn't do much cosplay (and wasn't much into costumes in general). Over the past few years, however, I've been getting more into costumes. Part of this is because I started buying swords from ren faire, and wanted excuses to wield them. Another reason is that my girlfriend has a friend who hosts a pirate-themed Memorial Day party every year at his lake house in California, and we make the drive out there to attend -- costume required!

We attend an annual Memorial Day pirate party -- costumes required!

Another factor is that we have a six year old girl running around the house who just completed kindergarten, and she's getting into arts and crafts. Which means that my girlfriend and I have to get into arts and crafts as well, and we need projects for her (and us) to do.

Currently, we lack the time, energy, and skill to make full cosplay from scratch, so we're still stuck making small modifications to costumes that we buy. Though I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some warbla and seeing what I can do with it! We've also moved on to crafting accessories for the costumes.

This year, we bought tickets to a local comic book convention, and my proxy daughter wanted to attend in costume. So my girlfriend created a homemade Harley Quinn costume for her. As for us adults, we decided to go with Bloodborne costumes.

Hunter and Doll costumes

I started out by buying a (rather expensive) Bloodborne hunter costume off of eBay. I had just received a large bonus check from my former job and had some extra discretionary money to treat myself. I had been laid off in November (along with everybody else I worked with in the local office), and had forgotten about the annual bonus payments. So the money came as a pleasant surprise, and I decided to splurge by purchasing this costume. This costume can also be purchased from other sources, such as Amazon, but I chose eBay because sellers were selling it for much cheaper...

You've probably already heard this, but Logan is not a typical comic book movie. In fact, this movie feels less like a comic book movie, and more like a western combined with Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Last of Us. This last analogy is particularly apt, considering that Logan deals with the extinction of mutants from the X-Men film universe.

The X-Men comics and movies have always been known for being topical, with their themes of racism, bigotry, and so forth, and Logan manages to to also be surprisingly topical regarding its storyline of a child fleeing [what amounts to] a violent drug cartel in Mexico, being unwelcome in the United States, and having to flee even further to Canada.

And this movie is laden with so much more possible metaphor. Logan's rejection of the comics' fallacious telling of events may symbolize our own need to let go of our childhood nostalgia regarding these fictional universes and characters and accept new and different interpretations. The final scene, with the child clutching the action figure, just so perfectly captures this bittersweet sentiment. And thank goodness that there isn't an end-credits scene, because I would have been pissed if anything had come up to ruin that perfect final shot. Or maybe it symbolizes the gradual and steady loss of our own real-world heroes. The last astronaut to walk on the moon died this year. We've lost civil rights leaders, WWII veterans are becoming increasingly rare, our 20th century pop culture icons are slowly kicking the bucket. What kinds of heroes will replace them? There's a lot to unpack here.

The X-Men are revered, mythical figures within the film's universe.

And by avoiding any strong, direct connections to other X-Men movies, Logan not only allows non X-Men fans to get into the movie without all the extra baggage, but it also kind of implies that maybe the previous movies aren't to be taken seriously either...

Suicide Squad

I wasn't sure what to think when I walked out of Suicide Squad this past weekend. I desperately wanted this to be the movie in which DC finally gets its ducks in a row and makes a fully competent movie (instead of just half a competent movie). I wanted to find things to like about the movie. I wanted to see some brilliant artistic vision that was realized in the film. But I just couldn't. The whole movie was just off-putting.

I feel like the original creative vision revolved around showing a sense of nobility and honor among villains, while also highlighting that supposed "good guys" can actually be very evil. You know, real Watchmen-level kind of stuff. This would have mirrored some of the more enjoyable elements in the first half of Dawn of Justice (in which Superman and Batman's actions are viewed from different perspectives) and would have offered a pretty solid artistic message. This possible original intent is most apparent with Deadshot and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), whose behavior is inverse of their perception within society. Deadshot is a vigilante and murderer who is locked up in prison, but he is the most noble and compassionate character in the film. Waller, on the other hand, is a national security adviser responsible for protecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but she is a merciless, cynical bitch who will shoot her entire staff in the heads because they apparently didn't have clearance to participate in ... the operation that she enlisted them into?

It's all so ham-fisted. Despite being the most likable, relatable, and heroic character in the movie, Deadshot's sense of honor just gets obnoxious. Waller, on the other hand, is obnoxiously vile. The result is that neither character really works for me, and that underlying theme about "who are the real bad guys?" just kind of gets lost in the meaninglessness of the individual characters' actions.

Deadshot and Amanda Waller seem to be ham-fisted attempts at subverting the "bad guys" and "good guys" tropes.

The fact that none of the other characters besides Harley and El Diablo (who ended up being my favorite character in the film) get any development at all certainly doesn't help. A two-hour runtime is pretty standard for a movie, but I simultaneously feel as though half the movie is cut out, and that half of what is present drags on...

My past two blog posts have been focused on open world gaming. These posts have been continuations of an earlier post about the narrative "limbo" that many open world games create via their quest structures. In the first post in this second series, I pointed out what I perceive to be a problem with open world games that insist on turning their sandbox worlds into little more than convoluted mission-select screens and collectible checklists. In the following post, I described some games that I think managed to make successful open worlds by including features or mechanics that made traveling through the space (or knowledge of the space) into a meaningful mechanic. This time, I want to go back to some of the games that I singled-out in the first post in this series, and brainstorm some ways that they could have made better use of the large spaces that their maps offered so that traveling around the world wouldn't become so boring later in the game.

But before I do that, I want to re-emphasize that I don't hate these games. They're just not very good at using their space, and that's what I'm criticizing. Well, the newer Assassin's Creed games have been pretty terrible. Anyway, I pick on games like Skyrim and The Witcher III a lot, but I like them just fine - I bought the DLC for both. I pick on them, not because I hate them, but because I do like them and I want them to get better (or for their sequels to get better). Rather, my objective here is to find ways for these games to make better use of the large, open spaces that they provide the player, so that exploring the map feels more mechanically relevant, more interesting, or more rewarding; and to feel less like a time-sink.

Games like Skyrim and The Witcher III have massive worlds, but do a poor job of utilizing the space.

Bethesda's Skyrim and Fallout titles, as well as CD Projeckt Red's Witcher III and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V, already have open worlds that transcend being simple, convoluted mission-select screens like games like Assassin's Creed and Metal Gear Solid V. They populate their worlds with little narrative world-building details that make their worlds feel alive and lived-in (even though they may feel stagnant). So what could a game like Skyrim or The Witcher III have done to improve its open world?

Deadpool tries to make a big deal about how this is "a different kind of super hero movie". He backs this up by pointing out how he just turned a bad guy into a bloody kabob, and by dropping F-bombs and explicit sex jokes every other line of dialogue. True it isn't exactly the typical super hero movie, but it wasn't anything that we haven't already seen in the larger field of comic book movies. Adaptations of graphic novels like Watchmen, Kickass, Sin City, and 300 are loaded with plenty of gratuitous, graphic violence, foul language, sex, and even some impressive glowing blue penises. Heck, even within the subset of Marvel superhero movies, there's already the R-rated Blade.

So I thought it was a bit pretentious for Deadpool to make his movie out to be "unique" for its hard-R rating. It isn't. And it certainly isn't that unique in its plot, which is a pretty standard, cliched origin story with love interest female lead, complete with the hero trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from an arrogant villain. Nothing new there. It is a little bit more unique in its sense of humor though. If you didn't already know, Deadpool is pretty infamous for being a fourth-wall-breaking meta character. In his appearances in comic books, he routinely jokes or comments about being in a comic book, and his appearances in video games also usually include references to comic books or to video games.

So this movie is trying to sell itself on its wit, and it both succeeds brilliantly, and fails miserably. The opening credit sequence and other digs at the studio system (including a dig at the studio being too cheap to afford any other X-Men cameos) work very well. Other pop culture references fall a bit flat and will only serve to date the movie in the future. I was also very disappointed that Deadpool didn't comment on the absurdly cliche plot twist of the villain kidnapping the hero's girlfriend. That's like a violation of cardinal rule #1 for movie supervillians: don't kidnap the hero's girlfriend. Unless her name is Gwen Stacy, then I guess you've got a case for the kidnapping.

Ryan Reynolds pulls the character off with pitch perfect execution, and his performance isn't hurt at all by the occasional poor joke. He inhabits the role with the same dedication as Robert Downy Jr. in Iron Man, and Reynolds and Deadpool will likely be inseparable from each other for the future.

Despite the cliche plot, Morena Baccarin's character is surprisingly relevant to the protagonist's development.

The villain is pretty lame though, with paper-thin motivation that really does prevent the cliche plot from really transcending the banality of the genre. And really, that's probably the greatest weakness of the movie. Despite taking [what the studio apparently perceives as] risks with the R-rating and over-the-top violence and sex, the actual plot is so "safe" and cheesy. It probably would have worked a bit better for me if it had stuck to being a revenge movie, but once it became apparent that the bad guy was going to kidnap the girlfriend, I kind of sighed and sunk back into my chair, "Oh, another one of these."

At least the romance is much more integral to the movie's plot than in other super hero movies in which the love interest feels tacked on and just there...