Why ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ will be the best show to air this fall

There are going to be a lot of great shows airing this fall. Some oldies-but-goodies will return, and there are even a couple of spinoff shows, which I always enjoy watching if I like the original.

There are going to be some new shows too, but I’m throwing down the gauntlet right now: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to be the best one.

If you haven’t seen the promo yet, watch it here:

Reasons why ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ is going to be AWESOME:

1. It’s a spinoff of The Avengers. I mean, you kind of can’t go wrong if you’re basing your show off of the third highest grossing movie of all time, right? People love The Avengers for about a million reasons, and even though nearly all of the characters from the film won’t be involved, it’s still based in the same world. And that’s definitely something to be excited about.

2. It’s a TV show. I’m a huge movie buff, but sometimes television just kind of trumps film. Would you rather have a two hour movie, or a 22-episode season? I guess that would depend, but in this case I’m super excited this wasn’t turned into a spinoff movie, but a spinoff show instead. We’re going to be able to get so much more action and information now, and it’s going to be amazing! I’m sure it’s going to go on to see many seasons.

3. COULSON LIVES. “I’m clearance level six. I know that Agent Coulson was killed in action before the battle of New York.” *Coulson emerges from the shadows* “Welcome to level seven.” YEAH, THAT JUST HAPPENED. It was so heartbreaking when Coulson died in The Avengers, so I’m so glad to see him back. I knew he was involved with the show, but I thought this might take place pre-New York Battle, but it’s not! He’s going to add so much to this series.

4. It’s got it all. Action, comedy, mystery, supernatural elements. Seriously. We’ve got some kickass characters (they are spies, after all), some hilarious lines (I want to walk around quoting “Don’t touch Lola” all day), some intriguing story lines about the protags and antags alike (“S.H.I.E.L.D. Government. Scary men in dark suits that come after guys like you.”), and we’ve also got some superheroes. The latter is probably what I’m anticipating the most because we’re going to be able to see a lot more characters than just the ones in the movie. Yay!

5. Joss Whedon is involved. Whedon is like King Midas of the movie and television industry. At this point, it’s like saying, “Yeah, Chris Nolan is directing,” or “Yeah, Morgan Freeman is starring.” You know it’s just going to be out of this world. Whedon has a great record with television (well, according to the fans, at least), and this is going to be exactly his element. I wish he were MORE involved, but as of right now he’s sort of overseeing it and directing the first episode. Good enough for me!

Honestly, there’s about a hundred other reasons why I seriously can’t wait for this show (not least of which is that Melinda May looks completely amazing and whoever plays Agent Ward is, whew, *fans self*), but these are the big ones. I was excited before, but the premiere is better than I ever could have hoped it would be. It’s just…ahhh…*flails*

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me.

Are you excited for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Will you be watching it? What are you most looking forward to?

Mushroom season is upon us!

If you’re new to my blog, you might not know about my interest in mushrooms.

Or that interest is an understatement.

I’m kind of obsessed with them. Don’t ask me why, because I have no idea. I used to hate them. I never even wanted to touch the things. Then one day I decided to give them a go. I didn’t mind them, and soon I found I was craving them.

Now? I go crazy for them! If someone brings me something with mushrooms on it – or just mushrooms by themselves because, hey, I’m not picky – I tend to declare my undying love for said bringer of fungus-y goodness.

And, no, that’s not an exaggeration.

I kind of wish it was, because this is turning into an issue. (Also an understatement.)

I’m a part of my local Mycological Society (yay, other fungus lovers!), and each year they hold four mushroom forays. We strap on our boots, grab a basket, and head out into the woods to look for any type of mushroom we can find – edible, inedible, and poisonous alike.

When we find edible ones (like the morels pictured above), they clean ‘em, cook ‘em, and we eat ‘em! It’s a lot of fun to mingle and learn some new things, plus it’s a great excuse to go walking in the woods.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, this Saturday is our very first foray of 2013, and we’re going to be looking for morels, among others. I’m going to be posting pictures and stories after each foray, just like I did last year. If you want to check out my previous entries, you can find them under the ‘mushrooms’ tag.

The first one will probably be up on Monday if everything goes according to plan. I hope you guys enjoy them as much as I know I will, and that you’ll be able to learn a lot and maybe gain a better appreciation for mushrooms.

Yay!

Why I fancy foreign fighting films

How was that for alliteration, eh?

I just recently watched Ong Bak, which is a great movie about a man named Ting who is forced to fight to get the head of a sacred statue back to his village. It stars Tony Jaa, who is an amazing martial artist, and incorporates one of my favorite fighting styles, Muay Thai. I recommend seeing the film for some grade-A fights, which is always helpful to watch if you have some fighting sequences in your novels.

But today I want to talk about why I love foreign fighting films. I’ve been trying my hardest to watch as many as I can on Netflix, and I found some that I have truly fallen in love with. I’ll watch pretty much anything Jeeja Yanin is in because I think she’s incredibly talented, and I always love seeing a girl doing her own stunts and totally kicking butt! I also recently discovered Tony Jaa, and I think he’s amazing. I can’t wait to see more of his movies.

The main reason why I love foreign martial arts films is because the fighting is almost always superior to American-made films. The sequences are more complex and more beautiful. It’s not just about throwing punches and who can take the most hits before they fall over, it’s about your skill set and your ability to adapt to your opponents’ style, to truly defeat them using your mind and your body.

I find the sequences to be far more realistic, both in how they play out (i.e. when someone gets punched, they don’t get knocked out cold for the rest of the scene, they actually get back up and try to keep fighting) and how they look. From the movies I’ve seen, a lot of the times these actors are taking real hits. It’s a lot more dangerous that way, but it also makes for some incredible shots.

Another reason why I love them is because they have far more respect for the art than most American films do. In so many of these action films we have here in the States, people get beat up and blown away by guns and no one really thinks about the impact it makes on a person. It’s just entertainment. And that’s fine. It really is. I love action movies, and I think they serve their purpose. But films like Ong Bak often portray the main character as a reluctant fighter, and I think that’s important. A lot of the time it isn’t about revenge, it’s about self defense. They have a respect for what they can do, and they know how dangerous even one punch can be. It’s something I’d like to see more of in all kinds of movies.

While the storylines aren’t always the greatest (for example, if I were to watching Raging Phoenix  again, I’d stop about three-quarters of the way through and pretend it ended there), that’s because the highlight of the film is the fighting. If you can get past the cheese and the silly dialogue and the not-always-solid writing and just focus on the talent of the actors and their skill sets, you’ll find movies like Ong Bak to be incredibly enjoyable and enlightening.

Do you like watching foreign martial arts films? Which ones have been your favorites? Least favorites? Do you have any recommendations for me? (Preferably something I can find on Netflix Instant!)

ROW80 – R2C6 – Writing!

I’ve been doing some honest-to-goodness writing this week. Not tons of writing, mind you, but enough that it feels like I’m actually creating again. I do a lot of writing outside of my own projects – Hypable certainly keeps me busy – but journalistic writing certainly doesn’t give you the same high as creative writing does. (Well, it doesn’t for me, at least.)

Main Goals

1. Write or edit every day. 4/7 This is the best I’ve done in quite a while, and I’m very happy with the outcome. I completely scrapped my latest short story and started over – and the story has benefited immensely from that. It’s almost done, too!
2. Read every day. 4/7 I’m reading Moby Dick right now, and if you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know I’m not really feeling it. But I will press on! Maybe it’ll get better.
   
3. Exercise three times a week. 1/3 I had a very intense workout on Friday, so I’m okay with just the one this week. I really want to get back into making this part of my routine, almost automatic, each day. It’s just been hard.

Bonus Goals

1. Rewrite one of my short stories. Still working on this. I’m going slow because I want this to turn out right.
2. Think up a concept for another short story. I’ve been throwing a couple things around lately, but nothing solid has emerged yet.
3. Update my contests doc. *sigh* I wonder if I’ll EVER get around to this.

List of Awesome

1. I’m officially all set for BEA, yay! I’ll talk more about that later, closer to the date.
2. I forgot to mention this last week, but I got a new author photo. I like this one a lot better. What do you guys think??
3. I managed to nearly write 1,000 words on Thursday. That’s the most I’ve written in a while!
4. If you like the show Once Upon a Time, I wrote this fun column about the cliffhangers we DON’T want to see in the season 2 finale.

Points and Words

Each of my main goals gets FIVE POINTS. Bonus goals get TEN POINTS if they’re completed.

• Week 1 – 15 points
• Week 2 – 60 points
• Week 3 – 85 points
• Week 4 – 35 points
• Week 5 – 35 points
• Week 6 – 55 points

This week I wrote:

• Week 1 – 0 words
• Week 2 – 1,188 words
• Week 3 – 2,509 words
• Week 4 – 0 words
• Week 5 – 0 words
• Week 6 – 1,815 words

Total words written in round 2: 5,512 words

Total words for the year: 67,911 words written since January 1, 2013

What have you guys been working on lately? Poems? Short stories? Novels? Share away!

Taboos: Why people don’t talk about them, and why maybe they should

ta·boo adjective \tə-ˈbü, ta-\

1 Forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers

2 Banned on grounds of morality or taste <the subject is taboo>

3 Banned as constituting a risk <the area beyond is taboo, still alive with explosives — Robert Leckie>

There are many subjects that are taboo, topics that people just don’t talk about. Taboo subjects aren’t universal either. Everyone has their own preferences due to their own experiences and upbringing.

I’ve never seen it, but Dexter is one of those shows that people may be uncomfortable with, given what Dexter does.

In fiction, horror specifically, dismembering bodies and killing innocent people isn’t the best thing in the world, but more than likely we’ve all read a book or two that contains a graphic scene. But even those books don’t breach certain topics. I don’t want to even type them here because they’re so undeniably wrong. Perverse acts that involve the deceased or children tend to be on the other side of that invisible line we all know not to cross.

(This is, of course, a generalization. There are sick people out there that enjoy these things. There are people out there that might not see a subject like necrophilia as taboo as the average person, but those are the outliers. We’re ignoring them for the sake of our own sanity.)

The world is ever changing, and different cultures have their own special circumstances when it comes to taboos. When I was in Italy, visiting Pompeii, there was a stand selling little mechanical dolls. When you moved the trigger up and down, they would come together and fall apart in the act of sex. As an American, we were pretty shocked and embarrassed. Can you even imagine someone selling that on a street corner over here? But the guy, in broken English, laughed at us and said, “It’s funny! It’s a joke!”

And, of course, time changes taboos too. A few decades ago no one talked about sex or menstruation. Now? Sex is all over the radio, and I see about thirty commercials a day for feminine products. We’re much more comfortable with certain topics these days than we were back in the ’50s, for example, and that’s going to keep changing and keep evolving.

But should it? It’s an honest question, not because I feel uncomfortable talking about certain taboo subjects – in fact, I find the idea of some of those subjects being taboo completely ridiculous – but because you have to think of the whole picture. You have to think of other people.

Over on Hypable, one of the other staffers wrote a brilliant article titled, “Breaking fandom taboos: Let’s talk about slash shipping.” For those that don’t know, slash shipping is the pairing of two characters of the same sex. This might just be who you want to see get together in a show (your “OTP,” or “One True Pairing”), or it might be who you decide to pair in your fan-fiction.

The Dean and Castiel (“Destiel”) pairing from Supernatural has a huge following.

In the article, Selina talks about what happened at a Supernatural panel and the followup explosion that resulted from it. It’s an interesting read, and I suggest you read both the Hypable article and the Daily Dot article she sources. It really is fascinating to see fandom coming out into the daylight and walking around in the real world. It has some interesting consequences.

The question here is, should these subjects stay taboo? Should they stay in that dark corner of the internet we call Tumblr? Or should we talk about them, bring them out in the open, and normalize them?

I’m of the opinion that the more we talk about these uncomfortable subjects, the less uncomfortable they’ll be. Acceptance of certain subjects in pop culture can lead to their acceptance in real life, and in some cases that truly is a wonderful thing.

Don’t get me wrong. Some subjects should be taboo. Some subjects are just plain wrong. I’m not talking about those.

Love it or hate it, this book has done a lot for the erotica category.

But, to bring this back around to fiction, as I know most of you here are writers, it makes me wonder, what can we be doing to help normalize the topics that have not quite stepped over that invisible line yet? Shows like Teen Wolf make homosexuality a complete non-issue. Books like The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices by Cassie Clare have insanely popular and likable characters that just happen to be gay. And this is just one topic in a long list of topics that are beginning to be addressed in popular works.

To give you guys a more relevant topic, I feel as though erotica is just touching down on the other side of that invisible line. Some people still don’t like to talk about it. Some people still giggle or side-eye you when you say you’ve read it, but a lot more people are accepting it as okay. And whether or not that’s your thing, I think acceptance of any person and their preferences – save for the truly twisted, of course – is a wonderful thing.

What do you think? Should taboo subjects stay taboo? Are we becoming too open and too comfortable with certain topics? Or do you think accepting people with open arms as they are will bring us all together in a more positive light?

Featured Video: Vacuum Kitty

Guaranteed to be the greatest 38 seconds of your day.

Finally, a superhero that’s actually human (or, I ‘loved Iron Man 3′)

This is a spoiler free review. It’s not even a review, per se, but my thoughts about why I loved what they did with Tony’s character in Iron Man 3.

Because, you see, they made him human.

Okay, yes. He was already human. But that’s kind of not the point. He acted human, and I think that’s something a lot of superhero movies forget to take into consideration.

There are a lot of superheros out there that aren’t fully human, not like you or me at least. Superman. Spider-Man. The Hulk. Thor. Any of the X-Men. The Fantastic Four. And, of course, a lot of their opponents — Magneto, Venom, Loki, Thanos, etc. etc.

There are fewer superheroes that can be called human. Batman is obviously a huge one. Tony Stark is too.

I think the recent Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan did a great job of humanizing Bruce Wayne. Some of it was still a little out there, but you know what? It’s a superhero movie. It’s supposed to be.

But if you take a look at some of these other characters – the ones that are more human than, say, Superman – they sort of welcome their new powers with open arms, don’t they? Peter Parker decided to sew his own suit and run around catching bad guys. Someone like Rogue obviously struggled with discovering her power, but instead of being driven mad, she struck out on her own to try and survive away from the civilization that she knew would judge and persecute her.

Me? I’d probably go crazy if I realized I could shoot freaking spider webs out of my hands or suck the life force out of my boyfriend.

Not all superhero movies have the time to explore this theme, and that’s fine. I’m not complaining. I love these movies. But it’s nice to see a movie go down that road, make it a part of the storyline, and not have it detract from the awesomeness of the film.

So. Iron Man 3.

I loved it. I thought it had a little bit of everything – action, humor, emotion, sincerity, and a lot of Tony Stark. (Because you just can’t go wrong with Tony Stark.) And that’s about as much as I’ll say about the actual movie – just because I want to talk about something else in particular. If you want a real (spoiler-free) review, check out my friend’s over on Gamerscene or Mr. Sunday Movies (for a video review – also spoiler free). If you want a spoiler-heavy place to discuss the movie with fans, check out Hypable.

The absolute best thing about this movie is the way they portrayed Tony. He’s out of his suit quite a bit. He has to make due without his fancy gadgets at some point, and it makes him vulnerable. It also makes him scared.

Tony has to deal with anxiety attacks in this film. And after what happened in New York City in The Avengers, it should come as no surprise. But it was surprising, because Tony’s always been cool. He’s always been calm and cocky. And so many other superheroes face down the supernatural and keep going on with their lives. Captain America is a great example of this. Sure, he’s sort of super human, but he’s still very much a man of the ’40s. And yet he faced the Red Skull, became a capsicle for 70 years, and woke up to a completely new world in which there’s Norse gods and giant green men and aliens coming out of a wormhole in the sky?

It’s actually a wonder he didn’t just jump back in the ocean.

Tony dealt with it while it was happening. It’s not like he really had a choice. But once he got home? Once the adrenaline receded and he could relax? He was a changed person. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop building Iron Man suits. He couldn’t function in society. He had anxiety for the first time in his life, and – in my opinion – that made him an even better character.

It’s always been hard to relate to Tony. He was never really a true underdog, was he? He always had the money and the cars and the gadgets and the girls. You obviously feel sorry for him, and you like him, and you root for him, but he doesn’t exactly represent the masses, does he? Someone like Cap will always have more of an underdog origin story.

But in Iron Man 3, Tony finally becomes a pleb. He’s finally one of us. He’s scared and vulnerable and he doesn’t have his suit to protect him every step of the way. He’s desperate, and I think that’s the first time he’s felt that way since he had to find a more permanent (and convenient) way to stay alive than hooking up a car battery to his heart. And even that didn’t last long. He went on living life in mostly the same way.

Until New York happened.

Now he’s different. He’s paranoid and he’s angry and he’s so, so scared. This is how a normal human being would react to everything Tony’s gone through, and it’s finally made Tony accessible to the rest of us.

Who knows if there’s going to be an Iron Man 4. Who knows where Tony is going to go from here after everything that’s happened in this movie, but whatever does happen, I hope he stays this way. I love the old Tony, but I love this one too, and the writers showed us that they can balance hilarious one-liners with heartfelt emotion.

If we get more of that in a sequel, I say bring it on.

Have you watched Iron Man 3 yet? What did you think? Do you like the changes that Tony went through, or do you prefer the old Tony? (Note that the comments may contain spoilers!)