There has been a lot of hubbub here and there on the net when it comes to nerds who also happen to be attractive females, and even models. As I’ve been told that I count as one of these, I felt like I needed to say my piece. True, I have written on similar topics in the past, but I think there’s a message that bears repeating: you don’t have to be what other people think you should be.

Many people are so quick to lump others into easy to manage categories. That person is a jock, that one’s a diva, over there is a goth. While it may make it easy to sort things in your mind, I believe everyone is more than a singular, stereotyped label. This is not to say that labels are a bad thing. I do consider myself a nerd, but that’s not all that I am, either. Labels sometimes help us to find and communicate with those that are like minded. As has been noted in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once the base requirements for survival have been met, they are immediately followed by an instinct to seek out a group and gain a level of acceptance amongst your peers. This is how society survives and these are the connective tissues that keep us together and help us build meaningful relationships.

While this system of categorizing can be helpful, it also brings with it a set of problems. With labels comes stereotyping and often a narrow sense of what these titles translate to. I know a lot of people who fit into categories thought to be paradoxical, including the marriage of the categories “nerd” and “attractive female”. Nerds, by many, are still perceived as socially awkward, and often unattractive men that frequently take up residence in their mother’s basement. For a while, this may have been a pretty apt description, but as with all things, it has evolved. Nerds are no longer regulated to the outskirts of society. In fact, it seems that nowadays it’s hip to be square.

However, there is still a lack of parity between nerds when they happen to be men, versus when they happen to be women. There is this perception that women either can’t be nerds or, if they are, they are never going to be on the same level as men. Now, if you’re an attractive female and a nerd, well, that seems highly improbable to people. If they do decide you might be as nerdy as you claim, there is often a testing phase that comes next. I experienced this first hand at an event a week or so ago. I was with a group of nerdy women who also model, and we were treated to a barrage of questions intended to make us prove our “geek cred”. While a part of me found it amusing, another part found it insulting that we couldn’t be taken at our word. (Yes, I am aware some of this also occurs on the male side of things, but in my personal experience, it is far less severe.)

Sadly, this sort of trouble comes not only from the outside, but within. There is a strange tendency for people that identify with any sort of group to claim that many outsiders are “posers”. There’s a sense of exclusivity when you are part of what appears to be a minority. The issue is that until they start being more inclusive, nothing is going to change. The in-fighting only serves to schism things further. I’ve seen a lot of girl versus girl hating, and it needs to stop.

There is also the argument that you shouldn’t need to prove anything, or a self-proclamation of geekhood is a call for your legitimacy to be questioned. While, no, you don’t NEED to prove anything, there are benefits to doing so. For example, until the media realizes there are more women wanting shows like “Game of Thrones” or films like “Lord of the RIngs”, they’re going to continue to cater to male audiences first and foremost. Same goes for video games, comics, merchandising, etc. If we don’t have a voice, then these things will never change.

There is also the discussion of why can’t we all just be nerds/geeks without the male or female designation. That goes back to my last point. I’d love for everyone to live under one heading, but geeks and nerds are not a one size fits all group. I can think of many occasions where I would have gladly bought shirts for a film only to find that there was nothing being produced in a more breast conscious fashion. There have been games where I would have preferred some more gender-balanced options. There is a legitimate reason for all of the outcry from geek girls on the web.

Stereotypes are based on sweeping generalizations of one group or another, and there is usually some basis in truth. They are often deeply ingrained in the social consciousness, and they are not easy to change. However, I believe that if we work to change the perceptions and keep the conversations going, that we can be there to witness the shift.

To all of my fellow nerd/geek girls: keep talking and discussing and breaking out of the box to which you have been assigned. Only together will we see any real change.

*Please note that I use the words nerd and geek as synonyms. I know that not everyone agrees that they are the same, but to my mind they are so close as to be relatively interchangeable.

-

Take a good look. They might not exist in the future.

Let’s get things straight. The animals on this planet were doing just fine until we came along and started screwing it up. There is a plan in nature, but some people don’t seem to get that. Instead we assign acceptable population numbers to certain species and decide whether or not they deserve protection based on our convenience. In a recent article about delisting the gray wolf there was this sentence:

Some members of Congress say there are too many gray wolves in the United States.

Really? How did they come to this conclusion? Who decides how many of any given species is an acceptable number? I can tell you what will happen next. They will take wolves off the list, people will start killing them willy nilly again and eventually lead to them being put right back on the damn list.

Humans, on the whole, have shown themselves to be utterly irresponsible in taking care of the nature around them. How many species have we been responsible for taking to the brink of extinction? For that matter, how many species have had their natural home taken away from them in lieu of being regulated to parcels of land that are a fraction of their ancestral territory? Then, when the wildlife roams into areas that were once their home, people scream about how dangerous it is. I saw this happen a lot in Arizona. Folks kept bulldozing the desert to make way for more housing developments and then got pissed off when coyotes were wandering through the neighbourhood. What people fail to acknowledge is that the coyotes were there FIRST! You took their home and tried to make it your home.

Here’s another asinine quote from the article:

“If they’re not endangered anymore, then shouldn’t some action be taken?” Hastings asked. And if an abundance of wolves is posing a threat to cattle, he said, “then there needs to be a way to deal with that.”

Humans, as a species, are so selfish and arrogant. You take away the homes of these creatures and then complain that they are hunting your livestock. Instead of turning to violent options to cull their numbers, why don’t you look into research on ways to help protect your livestock without killing animals that are inconvenient to you? The wolves are looking for food, and you just provided an easy source. Of course they’re going to attack your livestock if you don’t take the necessary measures to protect them.

I saw a documentary a while back about a man who was living with a pack of wolves to better understand them. He suggested that ranchers set up loudspeakers to play back sounds of a wolf pack howling to assert their territory which would be a deterrent to other nearby packs. Did it work? Did anyone give it enough of a chance? There have got to be other options beyond taking out your gun and pumping them full of lead.

House Republican, Danny Rehberg, believes that protective legislation should be left up to individual states. He believes that the government is too removed from the issue and that they can better manage their wildlife locally. I call bullshit.

Let’s look at an example. According to Rehberg, I, as a Californian, should have no say in what they do out in Montana. I have no voice in protecting this countries wildlife because I don’t live in the same state. By taking out government involvement, you are taking out the rights of anyone outside of your state. This isn’t deciding if the main street in town needs another traffic light. This is something that goes beyond what should be handled solely on a state level.

Here’s the other argument that really pisses me off. There is a claim that wolves are a threat to the other wildlife. Namely, game animals such as moose and elk. They FUCKING eat them. Oh no! Who would have thought?

Seriously, grow up and call it what it is. By allowing the wolves to do what nature designed, they are taking away from game hunters being able to go out and kill things. They want less wolves so that some jackass can go and shoot Bambi and strap him to the hood of their car. I’m not against people wanting to go and hunt, but I am against people who view natural predators that need these creatures to SURVIVE as competition.

This issue comes up time and time again. The arguments are often weak at best. The complete decimation of wolves sometime in the foreseeable wouldn’t surprise me. Too many people have become too far removed from the realities of this planet and the fact that we’re not the only ones living on it. We have to share. We’ve screwed things up pretty bad for our animal friends, but very few are willing to accept that blame. We’re going to leave nothing behind, and it makes me hurt more than I could ever express.

We will be our own extinction, and I will be glad.

Read more: Lawmakers aim to delist gray wolves as endangered

To help: Defenders of Wildlife Petition

-

Mmm...Wolverine.

Oh the madness that is casting a comic book based film! Recently, we had two uproars from fans. The first was the announcement that Anne Hathaway was cast as Selina Kyle (mind you, the press release said nothing about Catwoman) in the next Batman film. The second is Henry Cavill as Superman.

It seems we go through this every time. It’s so rare that a casting decision is embraced by the fans when it comes to their beloved comic heroes. My question is, is it that Hollywood really casts the wrong people so frequently? Or is it that comic book fans are too choosy.

I think it goes without saying that no one actor is going to satisfy everyone. There will always be a group that complains. However, I think there should be more of a willingness to let physical appearances slide a little in comparison to acting prowess. Sure, Hugh Jackman isn’t as short and burly as Wolverine appears in the comics. But, who is? Danny DeVito? What Jackman lacks in mirroring the physical appearance of Wolverine, he makes up for with his performance. I really can’t imagine anyone else in that role now.

When I heard Edward Norton was going to be cast in “The Hulk”, I thought there was no way it was going to work. I just didn’t see him as Bruce Banner. I was wrong, and he was amazing. A lot of people whined about Heath Ledger as the Joker, and we’ve all seen how that turned out.

The bottom line is that there should be allowances by the fans when it comes to casting. Should someone who’s three feet tall play Beast? No. However, have some small measure of flexibility. I know we all want our fantasy dream team to grace the screen and fill the shoes of the characters we love, but until we’re all Hollywood movie makers, it’s not going to happen. You can scream and complain until you’re blue in the face. It’s not going to change things.

Let’s also look at the reality of the movie business. It’s precisely that: a business. The studios are out to make a commercially viable film, and with luck, turn it into a franchise. You may know the ins and outs of the characters, but the movie going public at large may not be that familiar. Studios have to make films accessible to the widest group of moviegoers they can. Without that income, they won’t be able to make any films in the first place.

Also, let’s not forget that even in the comic book world, origin stories and characters evolve and change. It’s a fluid world where very few things are locked in forever. Characters die, come back, become younger or older, change to villains, etc. Even a film that is true to a comic to a fault is going to catch flack from those who wanted to see the alternate story told.

It’s okay to not like a movie. It’s fine if you think it’s drivel or screws everything up. The brilliant part is that it doesn’t change a damn thing about the story you adore. You can still go back and read what you fell in love with in the first place. Plus, chances are, there’ll be another reboot in a few years you can complain about, too.

-

"TRON: Legacy" title and cycle.

I already knew that recapturing the mystique of the 1982 original “TRON” would be a challenge, if not an impossible feat. After seeing “TRON: Legacy”, I feel I have been proven right. Now, “TRON: Legacy” isn’t a movie I would call bad per se. However, it is a movie with problems that were too numerous for me to ignore.

This is going to be another spoiler-iffic post, so you know the drill if you haven’t seen the movie or don’t want to know about major plot points.

That being said, here are the problems I had with the movie in no specific order:

• In the original film, Flynn is zapped onto the grid and essentially becomes a program. He is automatically dressed for the part. I’m good with that. In the new film, Sam is zapped in while still in his street clothes which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It seems the whole point of that is so that we can have an unnecessary prep scene with sexy programs cutting off his clothes and suiting him up.

• So, Sam has been assigned to the game grid, all while being really confused and claiming he’s not a program. (Even the afore mentioned sexy programs say that “this one is different”.) Yet, the only way that anyone else figures out he is a user is because he gets cut and bleeds. That made no sense to me. By being zapped into the system, wouldn’t he be a program and not flesh and blood?

• When Sam and Quorra are escaping from the light cycle games, she says that they won’t be followed because the cycles can’t go off road. Hence, they are safe as Flynn’s zen pad. Yet, the bad guys certainly find them later and make it there just fine. I would think CLU would be more prepared to have given chase via some sort of flying vehicle, or would have located Flynn previously.

• My understanding of the shaky logic of the movie is that Quorra is an ISO, which is sort of like a self-occurring AI. She is, in fact, a program. This presents two issues to me. One, is how these ISOs were supposedly going to help mankind as Flynn keeps suggesting. Two, is how does she become what seems to be a real person at the end of the movie when they escape the grid? I’m alright with matter to energy ala the first movie, but the reverse is a little confounding. Quorra was never a real person to begin with.

• When Sam enters the grid, he enters through Flynn’s physical arcade and then a virtual one when he’s been zapped. Yet, the exit is all the way the hell across the system. The reasoning for this is that Flynn wanted to make sure no programs could get out, yet they also make it very clear that none of them could do that without having his identity disc. If Flynn is the only one coming and going, what’s the point of putting it so far away beyond using that solely to drive what was an already faltering plot?

• This is more of a minor gripe, but the set dressing in Flynn’s pad is really strange. He’s supposedly all zen now, and yet he has a crystal chandelier, a bowl of metal fruit and some other random stuff. Seemed like odd choices.

• While at Flynn’s pad, Flynn, Sam and Quorra all sit down to a meal. A meal? They’re f-ing digital. How does that even work? It seemed again like another needless thing added to the movie so that they could work through more exposition.

Overall, I think there were so many wasted opportunities with this film. The plot is basically CLU building an army to go out into the real world and make everything perfect. I think it would have been much more interesting as a chase movie where CLU was trying to hunt down the Flynn so that he could rule his virtual world as he saw fit.

As for the titular character, he was hardly in the damn thing and even then, you didn’t know it was TRON until pretty far into the flick. The title seemed to be kept mainly for branding purposes.

Another minor issue I had with the movie was the creepy Jeff Bridges CGI. We’re getting close to being able to create believable human CGI characters, but we’re not there yet. He just weirded me out.

Maybe I got some of the above wrong. (I did only see the movie once.) However, even upon one viewing, a movie goer should be able to understand how the world you’ve set up works. If they must see it multiple times to “get it”, then you’ve likely done something wrong unless it was the whole point of the movie. I have a feeling that wasn’t the point of “TRON: Legacy”.

This whole thing may come across as nit-picky, but I can only suspend disbelief for so long. Once you get such a conglomeration of things you’re just supposed to just accept unquestionably, it starts to eat into my enjoyment. If you’re going to create a world with its own rules, then you need to be consistent with those rules and at least offer some real explanation no matter how fantastical it might be. A good deal of the critics out there agree that the plot and logic of the film are failing and most have based a positive rating on the effects and music. I will take a good plot with shoddy effects over a terrible one with good effects any day.

“TRON: Legacy” is a mediocre film, with some cool special effects that can’t carry the weight of it. A lot of people really love it, and that’s fine by me. My guess is that there are also a lot of people enjoying it for nostalgia’s sake. I grew up with “TRON” myself, but even that couldn’t make me enjoy this movie to the level I would have liked.

End of line.

-

…aka Why You Shouldn’t Spend Sixty Bucks On Fable III

Let me go ahead and say that this will NOT be a spoiler-free review. If you don’t want spoilers, turn back now. You’ve been warned.

After playing Fable II and enjoying it thoroughly, I was more than willing to lay down sixty bucks for Fable III. I’d heard some shaky things about it, but I doubted it could really be that bad. How wrong I was.

I happily took my purchased game home and when the time finally came to start it, I cheerfully put the disc in the XBox and booted it up. It took maybe all of twenty minutes for the luster of it to wear off. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to take the things that worked in Fable II and break them.

The simply explanation of the plot of the game is that you are a prince or princess and your brother is in charge of the kingdom and is messing it up royally. (Pun intended.) You end up having to flee the castle and go to work on building a revolution to take your kingdom back. You do and then find out there’s actually an even bigger threat and defeating it is the real goal of the game. The more in depth explanation of the game is about the same. There’s really not a lot to it.

Overall, the game is pretty dull. Even the characters are pretty bland. You waste a lot of time on what generally seem like pointless tasks that lack much creativity. I also found a few glitches that kept me from finishing (and even starting) a couple of the quests. The main point of the game is to run around your kingdom, trying to gain support and making promises to various groups in return for their promise to fight in the revolution. Each task that you complete earns you Guild Seals which unlock certain items on the Road to Rule. I’ll elaborate…

The Road to Rule is what was put in place in Fable III to help explain your progress and allow you to unlock more powerful spells, weapon abilities and so forth. The creepy blind woman from Fable II is back and appears on the Road to Rule as some kind of strange spirit guide. There are a few problems with the Road to Rule. The first is that you have to play a lot of side quests to earn enough seals to unlock the treasure chests containing various skills, so you have to pick and choose carefully or do just about every quest in the game. However, a lot of those chests are for things that I feel your character should be able to do from the beginning. Did we really need to unlock the ability to buy houses, to buy businesses, to have other characters fall in love with you, to earn additional character expressions, to go up levels in the mini games and dye your clothes? Are you saying my character is too stupid to be able to fall in love without wasting seals for them to learn how? Or how hard is it to go and buy a house? Did I actually unlock some kind of medieval home buyers guide?

The combat in the game is pretty easy. You have three focuses you can work with: melee, ranged and magic. Depending on which you focus on more, your character’s physical appearance will change. Melee combat makes you more muscled, ranged makes you taller and magic makes you all glowy. Attacking is really basic and there aren’t really any special moves. The best part about training your character up in any of the three options is that with a focus in melee or ranged weapons, your weapons actually evolve to look more bad ass. With magic, you are able to do a thing called spell-weaving which actually lets you combine two different magic spells together. For example: fire and electricity or ice and magic daggers.

Individual enemies in the game are pretty simple to beat, but it’s easy to get swarmed by bad guys and have your ass handed to you. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the only times I ever got knocked out were because of random swarms of baddies and not the final boss fight. How does that work? I also got tired of the non-randomized enemy encounters that seemed to happen every five feet. It wasn’t exciting, it was annoying.

Instead of tweaking the menu system from Fable II that so many complained about, they removed it entirely. This removed easy access to your inventory, stats, saving, etc. Instead they decided to give you a sanctuary that you could return to any time by pressing the “start” button. Even once you arrived there, you had to go into a separate room for you weapons, clothing/hair/makeup and money. When you access a side panel for your character’s stats, you receive a watered down status. There are no fun stats like how many chickens you’ve kicked, bad guys you’ve killed, STDs you’ve received (I’m not making this up), etc. Instead, you will see those randomly appear on your loading screens. The main room also includes a map which allows you to check in on the status of property and quests and then to teleport to different locations.

One of the other rooms in your sanctuary is basically the XBox Live room. You can locate other players and buy in-game items with your Microsoft points. That’s all very well and good, but you are constantly reminded of it when you teleport back and your butler recommends checking out the shop. I get it, you want to sell me stuff. Shut the hell up already! It was like listening to a bloody commercial on repeat. Wait, that’s exactly what it was. Infinite infomercial loop.

While it may seem nice to be able to save your game at any point by traveling to the sanctuary, it’s really not that necessary. The game auto-saves a lot, but that’s also part of the problem. If you screw up, there is no going back. Maybe the point was that the game makers wanted you to have to live with your decisions, but I found it ultimately frustrating. It also means that to see an alternate outcome to something, you’d have to start a whole new game.

Also located in your sanctuary is an area for gifts you’ve received from people in the kingdom. No more finding out what they gave you when you receive them. No, you have to go back to the sanctuary to open them.

On the subject of gifts from towns people, you can no longer win over crowds with your charm. You have to approach NPCs ONE BY ONE, waste a lot of time doing things like heroic poses or whistling to win them over and then they send you on an errand to win them over completely. (Winning them over completely is a crucial step to starting a relationship should you want to have an in-game romance.) The errands get dull and repetitive for not much return.

Starting a family in Fable III is fairly consistent with how it is in Fable II. (Even though my fair skinned child changed racial backgrounds for no apparent reason at one point.) However, there is one kink. Your children will ask you for presents, but unlike Fable II where you could go to most any shop and get a lot of similar items, stalls and stores only carry two to five items or so. So you either have to find the right stall carrying the right item or find it out in the world. One of my children got all upset because I couldn’t find the porcelain doll they asked for anywhere. It was like trying to find the hot Christmas item for kids on Christmas Eve.

So, let’s link this in to the problem with shops. It is incredibly hard to find what you want half of the time. There are items that are exclusive to each town and, as noted before, each shop has a stupidly limited amount of goods. Are you really telling me the guy at the gift vending stall only carries two things? Really?

In Fable III, they bring the money-earning mini games back. The available jobs are blacksmithing, lute playing and pie making. To play, you have to hit a sequence of buttons on your controller in time with the screen (sort of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band). As you play each section of any given mini game, your gold multiplier goes up (the amount you earn per successful sequence). The problem is that I kept running into lag on my system and it would screw me up around the sixth or seventh level multiplier. It also didn’t help that the NPCs were stupid and would walk right through my character while playing the games which ended up being distracting.

So, I’ve covered a lot of what I didn’t like about the game. What about the things I did like? Well, they were few and far between. There were a couple of quests that were fun (one is particularly entertaining if you’re a D&D player). There was a lot of quirky humour throughout, including some really awesome posters that are displayed in the cities. The game does seem to pick up a little bit in the second half, but it’s too little too late. What parts I did enjoy were pretty much washed away by the major problem with the game: it sets you up to fail.

As with the last two games in the Fable series, you are allowed to be a moral and upright character, a conniving villain or something in between. This game makes it exceptionally hard to start out playing an evil character. The whole point is that you’re supposed to gain support from various factions to aid your cause. How can you do that if you just piss them off all the time? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t change things much to be evil, but with the auto-save system, it’s hard to give it a try and back up if necessary.

Here’s where things get screwed up. If you decide to play a moral character, the ending will screw you over. What seems like the goal of the game (winning back your kingdom and being crowned ruler) is only a part of the final story. It turns out there is an evil darkness heading your way and you need to amass enough wealth to properly afford protection for your citizens and you only have one year to do it in. As ruler, you have to make decisions that will eat into your money pile or will help build it. Keeping the promises you made along the way always eats into the funds, but choosing the more corrupt options will help you build it. So, if you’re playing a moral character you have to choose between most of the population of Albion dying or deciding to become a dick. Making unpopular decisions does more than upset your people, it also ruins your kingdom. Things like using one area as a place to dump sewage and draining a lake to mine for precious materials. Out of all of the decisions you have to make, only two or three (of maybe twelve to fifteen or so) are moral and earn you money.

The year you are allotted to try to build up your treasury counts down unevenly. You start with 365 days and once you complete the tasks for one day, you’re knocked down to 320-some days and so on. There is no knowing when you’re finally going to run out of time. This caught me off guard and prevented me from transferring personal wealth to the kingdom’s treasury. Because of this, the majority of my citizens died. After a ridiculously easy boss fight where I simply spammed the magic button, I came back to find my castle strewn with dead bodies. By doing the right thing I doomed most of Albion’s citizens to death. What kind of ending is that? If you play an asshole, then you save more people? Is it like Dark Helmet says in “Spaceballs” that “evil will always triumph because good is dumb”? I can’t recall ever being so dissatisfied with the ending of a game before.

Fable III feels unfinished, forced and unoriginal. It’s a short game, and it pales in comparison to Fable II. Sequel games should get better, not worse.

Save your money. Go by Cataclysm or, if you’re looking for another fantasy game on a PS3 or 360, get Dragon Age. I guarantee either of those options will be better than the fail that was Fable III.

-