Deadpool (2016 & 2018)

 

The Deadpool movies are essentially the same, so I decided to combine them into one post. Both movies were enjoyable, filled with junior high level humor and laugh out loud moments. They were more enjoyable than a sandpaper dildo. One of the cool things about Marvel movies is that they don't take themselves too seriously, and Deadpool takes that concept to the next level, constantly referring to the studio and other Marvel characters, poking fun at them. I've always enjoyed Ryan Reynolds, partly because I share a minor resemblance to him, and his performance in these movies was enjoyable as predicted. Both movies err on the side of violence, which at times can be a bit much for me.

I have a difficult time ranking these movies in terms of the larger Marvel picture. I liked the first movie better than the second, though both were enjoyable. The character feels a bit like the red-headed stepchild of Marvel. He isn't a part of the MCU and isn't afraid to remind you that he doesn't belong to a specific group. He resists invitations to join X-Men, instead forming his own group X-Force. He's completely self-centered, and the plots of both movies focus entirely on him, to the point that there really are no supporting characters. I can't even remember who the villains in the movies were. In fact, after watching the second movie, I wasn't even sure who the villain was (was it the kid? was it Juggernaut? was it Cable?). While Deadpool is an enjoyable character, he feels like he doesn't really belong in the greater Marvel picture, and isn't afraid to remind you of this.

Thrawn: Treason

 

Thrawn competes with Orson Krennic for military funding in this book. Thrawn wants additional funds for his Tie Defender ships. Krennic doesn't want funding taken from the Death Star project to support the Tie Defenders. A supply line for the Death Star is being interrupted by Grallocs attacking their ships. Thrawn and Krennic enter a wager, orchestrated by Moff Tarkin. If Thrawn can get rid of the Gralloc problem to improve delivery of supplies to the Death Star, he can get additional funding for his Tie Defender program. If not, the funding will go to Krennic and the Death Star. Thrawn takes the wager, and in the process discovers a conspiracy.

The ships had been rigged to be attacked by Grallocs by pirates, in order for them to steal the supplies. The ships were thought to be lost in space, their hyperdrives destroyed. In reality, they were taken to a trading post where their supplies were confiscated. During his investigation, Thrawn runs into his old Chiss Ascendancy partner Ar'alani. Turns out the Chiss are also investigating these disturbances. Together, they learn that the trading post had been attacked by Grysk pirates, an alien group both Thrawn and Ar'alani consider to be a threat to their respective military. In addition to attacking the post, the Grysk had kidnapped a Chiss skywalker, a child navigator capable of using the Force to help with ship navigation, a skill called third sight. 

Thrawn and Ar'alani work together to save the Chiss navigator, as well as eliminate the Grysk. After rescuing the young skywalker, they use a much older skywalker's ability to use second sight to read the mind of the young navigator, leading them to the Grysk base where they defeat the aliens. In the process, Thrawn discovers that Grand Admiral Savit was responsible for the Gralloc attacks, thus disrupting the Death Star supply chain and committing treason. Like Thrawn, he disagreed with so much funding going to the Death Star, and instead thought it was more sensible to spread the money throughout the military.

Of course, in the process of working with Ar'alani to save the Chiss skywalker, Thrawn himself also made some questionable decisions by utilizing Empire resources to aid a foreign group. In the epilogue, the Emperor encourages Thrawn to return to Lothal to deal with Ezra Bridger. Afterwards, he is to return to Coruscant to have a long talk with the Emperor. In this sense, the book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger in terms of Thrawn's future., and I don't think any additional books exist (currently) that explain what happens to him. The last time we saw him on screen, he was battling with Ezra and they get blasted off into space along an unknown vector. Ahsoka mentions him during her appearance on The Mandalorian, apparently searching for him and Ezra, so I suspect we will learn more about his story in upcoming Disney+ shows. We also learn that Thrawn's former assistant, Eli Vanto, is doing research for the Chiss on Skywalkers and second and third sight, so there may be more to their story as well. 

City Journal: London - Completion of the Outer Boroughs

 

My region continues to expand outward, away from the London city center, and with this expansion comes the completion of the outer ring of boroughs that encircles the city of London. This expansion not only includes new neighborhoods to the region, but also growth in the transportation networks that move people throughout the region. London has an extensive network of trains, and I plan on having a City Journal post in the future focusing exclusively on its train networks. Below are highlights of the outer boroughs. There are a lot of noteworthy places in the outer boroughs, and they were fun to build.

Starting on the west side of the region, Fulham includes notable sporting places like Stamford Bridge, home to the Chelsea football club, and the Queens Club tennis championships. It also contains Earl's Court Exhibition Center, which hosted events in the 2012 Olympics.

Moving a bit north, the city of Hammersmith is home to London's Heathrow airport, one of the busiest international airports in the world. In reality, Heathrow sits farther west than Hammersmith. However, on my regional map this is as far west as the map goes, so I had to place the airport a little closer to city center.

While building the outer boroughs, it became apparent that I needed to build St. Pancras train station. St. Pancras is a major international train station, connecting London to the rest of Europe via the Chunnel. It also has many regional connections to the rest of the UK. It became famous due to its appearances in the Harry Potter films. I placed the station in the borough of Islington, which is actually an inner borough. However, its rail lines run through the outer boroughs so it was important to build it now before further developing the outer boroughs.

The city of Haringey is where the Alexandra Palace is located, an amazing sports and concert venue.

Stratford is home to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for the 2012 Summer Olympic games. Additionally, Stratford contains the Stratford International Station, a train station which connects to St. Pancras and was a major European hub for travelers to the Olympic games. The real Olympic Park contains a tower called the Orbit Observation Tower. I couldn't recreate this in the game, so instead I used Berlin's Fernsehturm Berlin tower, a massive 1,207 foot tall communications tower. This is the tallest structure in my version of London.

Newham is a city just north of the River Thames that contains London City Airport. South of the river in Greenwich is where the famous O2 Arena lives.

Woolwich is where the famous Royal Arsenal was located. This is where the Arsenal football club gets its name. The area played important roles in previous wars, but currently has been redeveloped as a residential zone.

Wrapping up the outer boroughs is Wimbledon, obviously famous for its All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club.  Wimbledon is also an important junction for travel, with Underground trains connecting to the southern Tram lines as well as regional Thameslink trains.

Logan (2017)

 

This movie takes place in an alternate future in 2029. Xavier is old and senile. Logan is an alcoholic and ill, no longer healing as well as he used to. He learns he is a father, his DNA used without his knowledge in an experiment to create mutant child warriors. His child escaped the facility where she was created, and the bad guys are after her. Logan and Xavier are attempting to take her to North Dakota, where other mutant children have gone to escape to Canada. Along the way, the bad guys continuously catch them, and various bad things happen, including unleashing another version of a Wolverine, genetically programmed to kill. Eventually they make it to North Dakota, and his kid escapes, but not until the bad Wolverine kills Logan. I have two words for this movie: incredibly violent. It got good reviews, and was well written and acted. But generally I didn't enjoy this movie as much as other X-Men movies because of the over the top violence. 

New Sound System - Part 3: New Cables and a Single Surround Speaker

 I don't particularly like pulling my receiver out of the entertainment center. There are 100 wires and cables connected to it, and every time I pull it out I'm afraid one of them will come loose and cause me trouble, especially the speaker wires.  This has actually never happened to me, though, so as I was pulling the receiver out of the entertainment center last weekend I kept that in mind. I had a couple of changes I wanted to make to my system.

The first was to extend the sound. The theatre part of the basement is on one side, whereas the treadmill is on the complete opposite side. You can see the TV from the treadmill, but in order to hear the TV you have to have the volume up quite loud. Sarah wanted me to extend the sound with a speaker so that she can hear the TV while on the treadmill without shaking the house. I didn't think this would be difficult to accomplish, but that proved to be wrong. I first thought I could do this using Bluetooth to broadcast to headphones. This didn't work, however, because the receiver can only receive via Bluetooth, it cannot broadcast. I then thought I could set up a second audio zone. My receiver can handle up to three audio zones, with the theater section next to the receiver being zone 1. My plan was to connect a speaker to the zone 2 output and set it next to the treadmill, thus making a second audio zone closer to the treadmill. Despite my best efforts, I could not get any sound to come out of the zone 2 speaker. I might look into this zone 2 option a bit more, though to be honest there wasn't a lot of instructions on how to do this in the manual. It seemed fairly straightforward. I might look into getting a Bluetooth transmitter, if that is an option.

With this failure, I decided to use the zone 2 speaker as a surround speaker. I had a convenient way to hide the wires for the left surround, as well as a table to set it on which was in the perfect place. That wasn't the case for the right surround, as ideally I'd need to run wire under the carpet to hide it and I also don't have a good place to set it right now. With that being said, I've connected one surround and have the wiring connected to the receiver for a second surround, whenever I decided to do that project. It's a bit asymmetric, but at least provides some surround. I might be the only person on the planet who is running a 4.1 surround system.

The other change was to disconnect the PS4 to make room for the PS5. The PS5 has all kinds of audio and video upgrades from the PS4. This, in addition to the fact that a lot of movies streaming on my Apple TV stream in 4K, I decided to upgrade my HDMI cables. I was using a mismatch of HDMI cables, some I had purchased, others that came from my satellite (9 years ago) or that I got from various places. I won't nerd out on the differences between HDMI 2.0 and 2.1, but suffice it to say that if you want to maximize the audio and video your devices can deliver, you need to be running HDMI 2.1. Since I was connecting the PS5 (which involved moving my Apple TV to a different section of the entertainment center because of its large size), I thought this was a good time to upgrade all of my cables to the 2.1 standard so that I know what I'm running and make everything uniform. Of course to take advantage of the upgrades that come with 2.1, all devices connected have to be able to utilize HDMI 2.1. Currently half of my devices can use 2.1 - the PS5 and Apple TV. My receiver and TV do not support 2.1, so possibly more to come on this at some point in the future.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

 

As the title suggests, this movie tells the origin story of Wolverine. In addition to his claws, he's a mutant who doesn't age and has super healing powers. After fighting in many wars for the government, he agrees to join Stryker's Weapon X program to get revenge on Sabertooth, who killed his girlfriend. In doing so, his skeleton is infused with Adamantium, a metal alloy giving him additional strength, and thus becoming Weapon X. 

After reading about Wolverine in the Marvel Encyclopedia, I think the movie does a pretty good job explaining his origin story. Some details are changed (such as Sabertooth being his brother in the movie), but I've come to expect these changes in the Marvel movies. Since I wasn't a comic fan, it doesn't bother me. At times the movie gets bogged down by some questionable writing and too much fighting, but generally was enjoyable and worth watching if you're a Marvel or X-Men fan.

The cast of this movie was great, which has come to be expected in Marvel movies. I enjoyed seeing Liev Schreiber (from Ray Donovan) on screen, and even Patrick Steward makes a brief appearance. Of course, Hugh Jackman was the star, this being the first time he played the Wolverine character, with many more movies to come. Perhaps the most interesting actor in the movie was Ryan Reynolds, who played the mutant Wade Wilson before he was transformed into Deadpool. Interesting that Reynolds goes on to play the Deadpool character in the later released movies. I wonder if his casting in those movies had anything to do with this movie. Stryker even mentions the name Deadpool when transforming Wade in his Weapon X program.

Playstation 5 Deals

 

Despite launching in September of 2020, I was just now able to get my hands on a PS5. To be fair, I didn't really look much in 2021. However, starting in 2022, my interest piqued because a handful of games are being released that I think will be better on PS5 vs Switch (or aren't available on the Switch). I started casually looking at availability at some stores, and either they were sold out or had them available for an exuberant price ($800+). I wasn't willing to overpay (at least not yet), but it quickly became apparent that I needed to belong to discount clubs to get first dibs on new stock. We are already Amazon Prime members, and Sarah signed me up for Gamestop's discount club for $15 per year. The strategy at this point was to wait for a restock at Amazon or Gamestop, and try to snag one since we have memberships at those stores. Then something interesting happened.

Last week, my friend and work colleague, who I sit literally feet from several days per week, turned to me and asked if I wanted a PS5. I have casually mentioned wanting one since release, so it was completely random that he asked. He told me his friend could get one for me for retail price, so I said sign me up. The entire situation reeked of a scam. I half-way expected to have to pre-pay, just to receive a box of bricks. However, a few days later I received a screenshot of a receipt from the Playstation store. A few days after that, I was driving to Pittsboro, IN to pick up the console. I didn't even pay for it until I was back home. 

Apparently my friend's friend has a side-gig buying and selling difficult to find items. This isn't limited to game consoles. He also sells sneakers and Lego sets, among other things. The whole situation is just fascinating to me. The fact that these things are impossible to find in stores or online, and yet a random side conversation at work produced one in just a few days, is just bizarre. Driving to a friend's house to pick it up instead of a store is equally odd. It is one of the more memorable console purchasing experiences I've had. It probably takes the top spot on the podium, ahead of the second place experience of randomly finding the difficult to locate N64 on a Target shelf in Bloomington, and the third place experience of standing 6 hours in line at Wal-Mart for the Playstation 2, with my mom filling in for me for a couple of hours.