Reportedly Links

Ben Affleck Reportedly Doesn't Want to Play Batman Anymore. Are we at full on crisis mode over at the WB/DC yet? Around the time when Ben Affleck was first announced as the new Batman he went on record saying he would direct a stand alone Batman movie as long as the script was right. First it was announced that he wouldn't be directing the movie now everyone and their grandma is reporting that he doesn't want to do it at all. That's not good. Combine that with how poorly Dawn of Justice was received by critics and the rumors that Wonder Woman is a mess and everyone at the studio hates it, and you're left with a less than rosy outlook for the DC Cinematic Universe.

Oh yeah, it's also been reported that they're trying to get Mel Gibson to direct Suicide Squad 2. Can't wait for the scene where Joker calls Harley sugar tits.

Kate Upton lands 2017 'Sports Illustrated' swimsuit issue cover. I thought we were all over Kate Upton, so congrats I guess, for getting back in the public eye. I think she's tied a record for most cover appearances. I guess I could google it but that seems like more work than I want to go in on this. Someone on the radio mentioned this was some kind of record so lets just go with that.

Also Angie Everhart is the greatest former SI model no one ever talks about. #fact

Inside the Booming Business of Adults Who Play With Toys on YouTube. Oh man, my daughter is all over these stupid videos. She will hand me the kindle and ask to watch "let it go", which doesn't mean she wants the song from Frozen. It means she wants to watch one of these Youtubers that always plays with Elsa and Anna dolls. Next to Paw Patrol and waking up in the middle of the night, it's like her third favorite thing in the world.

Hero Coder Adapts 'Portal' for the Apple II. I don't know if I'd call him a hero, that doesn't look like a ton of fun to play. I'm surprised more of these kinds of things don't exist. Sure pretty much no one has an Apple II in the house but getting your hands on an emulator is super easy. How come there aren't more SNES and NES games. If I was single and had freetime you know I'd be coding up some mods for SFII, sexy mods. Like Guile without a shirt on.

One Million Pageviews (does the Dr. Evil pinkie raise thing)

A couple days ago the old blog hit one million pageviews. Now, I'm pretty sure I started this stupid thing in 2009 so a million pageviews over 8 years isn't exactly anything to crow about BUT I remember how few hits my first couple websites got and a million might as well be a billion. Seriously those first couple websites I built in, I want to say 1996, would get like one or two hits a day. I think my main website which this one replaced had something like 4,000 hits when I retired it. My Pimpbot 5000 site actually did quite well, but that was back in the day when if you could get your website listed by Yahoo you were gold.

Anyway, if you're one of those one million, thanks a bunch. If you're a bot in one of the million, BEEP BOOP BEEP BEEP.

New Iron Fist Trailer

A couple days ago Netflix released a new trailer for Iron Fist. It's pretty good. I mean on it's own, in a vacuum, it's fantastic but I have a few minor issues with it that probably aren't really it's fault.

The biggest one is the Might Whitey trope. I've talked about it a bit here before but in case you're unfamiliar the Mighty Whitey essentially refers to a type of story where some white guy is placed in a different culture and suddenly becomes better at everything that culture does, often he becomes an exalted hero or leader. It's a story telling trope that was big in the 18th and 19th century but is still plenty popular today. I mean when I think of famous Samurais, Tom Cruise is the first one to come to mind...

Anyway, the story of Iron Fist is a product of it's time and by that I mean it's kind of a rip off of the TV show Kung-Fu. White kid is stranded in a Mystical Asian city, learns super Karate, becomes the most powerful Karate guy on the planet. It's fine, I mean it's lazy but its fine. If you want to complain about Asian representation in Superhero movies and TV shows ask someone why there's no Kamala Kahn/Ms. Marvel movie, or an Amadeus Cho Netflix series. Iron Fist has a long history in the comics and they're sticking with the original origin. It's like a B- move for Marvel. They did hire RZA to direct an episode so it's not like it's all bad here. Also Iron Fist is far better know as being part of Heroes for Hire with Luke Cage and that book actually had real cultural significance in the 70s with it's portrayal of a pair of black and white superheroes who were best friends. If Marvel/Netflix decides to go that route and once those two characters are paired up, the Mighty Whitey/cultural appropriation stuff starts become less and less of an issue.

My one other knock here on this specific trailer is the whole, hey kids here's the last of the Defenders. I'm totally over the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff. I think it worked fantastic in Captain America and Thor for the build up to the first Avengers movie but it kinda ruined the Iron Man movies. Also obviously Avengers two was a loosey goosey mess and Joss Whedon directly blamed the insistence from Marvel to add a bunch of cinematic universe nonsense into the story. I don't really think any of the Netflix shows have really suffered in the build up to the Defenders but that doesn't mean I'm still not wary of it.

Ok, this is way more that I had planned on writing about this trailer. I'm sure the show will still be good, if nothing else it's probably going to have a great soundtrack.

Bill Nye Saves The World, Trailer

Hey kids remember Bill Nye? Sure you do, he was on The Nightly show just about a year ago talking about global warming while a couple really bad comedians shouted over the top of him some stupid sex jokes. In related news, Hey kids remember the Nightly Show?

I'm not super into Netflix bringing back shows that were canceled over a decade ago. Fuller House is terrible and from everything I've seen the new Arrested Development season was a disappointment, but this new Bill Nye show doesn't look much like the old Bill Nye the Science Guy. Quite frankly this reminds me a lot more of the science segments he would do on Almost Live with John Keister. I'm all in on that. Sort of like Mythbusters but with an occasional celebrity guest.

WWE Smackdown Live: The Review

My son and I went to WWE Smackdown Live last night. That's me in the circle holding a sign. I'm super famous now.

A couple months ago It came up randomly in a conversation with my son that the next time the WWE was in town he wanted to go. It was weird because he really doesn't have much interest in wrestling. Whenever I'm watching it he's usually got his face buried in his Kindle watching youtube or playing Roblox. So, when it was announced Smackdown was coming to town I jumped all over a couple tickets and we made a fun day of it. We visited the Space Needle first, checked out the EMP (Mo-Pop now), got a huge thing of french fries and some french fry only place at Seattle Center.

This was only my 3rd live wrestling show and the first one in about 15 years. I was expecting the experience to have changed a bit but it really hadn't. Same mix of drunk guys and families yelling at a bunch of sweaty dudes pretending to beat each other up. If you're into the pro-graps it's definitely worth your time and money to check it out. I had forgotten how loud everything is. The fireworks, the guys hitting the ring, the crowd. Oh man, the crowd. There were several time the crowd got really loud and tried to drown out the wrestlers while they were on the mic. The Miz in particular was having a lot of fun with it. Holy cow, that guy is fantastic at what he does. I think I had forgotten how much fun it was to boo someone in real life.

Anyway, we had a ton of fun. WWE puts on a good show. Key Arena is still a pretty good facility to check out small events like this (assuming you were in the lower bowl and not in the nose bleeds). Seattle Center has a lot of fun stuff to check out, it was more family friendly than I had remembered. All in all it was an A+ kinda day.

Super Bowl Movie Trailers, all of them

Ok, so this probably isn't all the movie trailers you'll see during the Superb Owl but it's a few of them. The big two holdouts right now are expected new Spider-Man: Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy II trailers. It's probably a pretty significant sign as to how confident the studio is in their movies as to whether or not they feel like they need to leak their big trailers early.

There's also a chance we'll see new trailers for Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok and a big big big maybe that we'll see something for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. All three of those movies have been shot and are to be released later this year. None of them probably need the hype machine started this early (with the exception of Wonder Woman, there are a lot of bad rumors surrounding that one) but hey a guy can dream, can't he?

Oh yeah, I can't believe they still make live action Transformers movies. Who watches these? Kids?

The Pressure

Game Links

Skin In The Game. You guys know I normally throw a few links up here covering whatever noteworthy web articles I've stumbled across over the last day or two but today all I've got is this one long form article by ESPN. I actually read it in ESPN the magazine last night, which is something I don't ever remember subscribing to but just started showing up at my house last year. It's a staggeringly good article, and is a real insight to a side of eSports that I've never really heard about, unregulated gambling.

Specifically this article deals with all the gambling that goes on related to Counter Strike: Global Offensive. I knew CS:GO was a popular game, I know there are professional players with twitch and youtube streams that rake in the bank. I even knew the game had micro-transactions where players could pay for and trade in game items. What I didn't know is that there is a huge gambling market related to those in game items. Players won't just bet unique gun or knife skins on professional Counter Strike games, they'll bet them on online slot machines or coin flip games (yes, apparently these on-line gambling sites were inspired by Vegas Vacation).

I'm telling you this is the kind of thing that scares the crap out of me as a parent because by the time you actually learn about what's going on your kid can be neck deep in a $10,000 gambling problem. They could be 12, they could be 20 the trap is there and from the article there's a ton of youtube and online personalities out there that make bank off these gambling sites. It's like the 1960s, when Robert Mitchum would be telling all the cool kids how great smoking is. Most kids are stupid they'll do anything their heroes tell them to do. Last year an estimated 5 Billion dollars worth of in-game content was gambled on these sites. 5 billion. That's absolutely insane.

It's a long article but trust me it's well worth the read. Unless you're too cool for school and you already know about all this stuff but if that's the case why didn't you tell me about it already? I thought we were friends.