Category: Rant

Posted on

What Is Going On With DC Entertainment?

In the last twenty-four hours there has been a lot of DC movie news: Martin Scorsese is producing a stand alone 1980’s Joker origin movie, The Batman film is no longer part of the DCEU (maybe), Gotham City Sirens is being replaced by a DECU Joker and Harley movie being made by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa the directors of Crazy Stupid Love, but now it is not and DC is making both, the Shazam movie is both in and out of the DCEU, they cut Jesse Eisenberg out of Justice League (though it looks like he was never in it), and who knows what else.

Know what I think?  There was a meeting where a lot of ideas where pitched, and now people are talking about them, so rumor sites are getting wind of what was talked about.  Most of these new movies will never enter production, but we will still get our one to two DC movies a year with most of them being in the DCEU, but if a talented filmmaker wants to make an Elseworlds tale, Warner Brothers will consider it.  How can you say no to Martin Scorsese?  DC Entertainment, even with Geoff Johns, is not like Marvel Studios.  They are more of a traditional studio and don’t just make movies under the direction of one person, and they are in a state of flux right now.  They know they need to start making good movies, so they are taking ideas from everyone, and honestly why not.

Movie studios get hundreds of pitches every day for films, but we never hear about them.  However, because DC’s back is kind of up against a wall, every movie idea or off the cuff statement from a director is big news, even though Warner Brothers themselves haven’t announced anything.  Honestly DC/Warner Brothers just needs to have its people sign a gag order and only talk about movies that are entering production, and then a lot of this internet fanboy drama would just go away.  Provided they start making better movies of course.

Posted on

What I Want From My Xbox One X!

I was able to pre-order my Xbox One X: Scorpio Edition, and I can’t wait.  I love new consoles, but here is the kicker, I don’t have a 4K TV, so the feature I want from this super powerful console is an Ultra 1080P/60 FPS mode.  I know some games are going to have it, but I hope it is a common occurrence.

I want the high res textures with super-sampling.  I want to run games without screen tearing or frame hitches.  Devs are saying the Xbox One X is like a fast PC with an NVidia GTX 1070 in it, and the 1070, while it can do some games in 4K, really shines at running games with max settings in both 1080p and 1440p, so while there are not a lot of 1440p resolution TVs out there, if you render the games at 1440p and then downscale to 1080p it should look amazing! (Yes I know that is what super-sampling is, which I mentioned earlier!)

While I hope the 4K is great with the Xbox One X, and that people with 4K TVs love it, I just want a true full featured 1080p experience which neither the PS4 or the Xbox One were ever really able to provide, but the Xbox One X should be more than up to the task!

Posted on

I Really Hope The Death Star Isn’t In The Han Solo Movie!

Ron Howard has seemingly tweeted out a pic of the Death Star interior from the set of his Han Solo movie.  I hope that isn’t what it is, and that he is just throwing us off.  Because as much as I love the Death Star, I am done with it.  It has been featured in three of the eight Star Wars films.  Four, if you count the brief scene with the plans in Revenge of the Sith, and five if we all agree that Starkiller Base from the Force Awakens is just a bigger Death Star.  In other words, giant death balls have had plenty of Star Wars screen time.  There has to be other stories to tell in the Star Wars Universe.

Not to mention it wouldn’t even make sense in this case.  If Han had known about the Death Star, surely he would have told someone, or at least not been surprised when he saw it for first time in A New Hope.  Plus I am sure he would have been a little more wary about taking a job from people not wanting to be caught by The Empire if he knew a massive murder orb was out floating around.  It would screw up his whole origin story.

The Star Wars writers need to dig through their massive pile of scripts and throw out everything that has anything to do with massive balls shooting planet destroying beams.  They can do better.  So help me if the newly announced Obi Wan movie is just him trying to track down the plans to the Death Star from Dooku’s cronies.  If that  happens, I am only going to watch it once!  JUST ONCE YOU HEAR ME!

Posted on

Crypto-Mining Is Ruining PC Gaming!

Lately I have been playing a lot of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).  It is a great game and tons of fun, but I have noticed that my graphics card isn’t quite up to snuff, so I thought I would check and see what video card prices are these days, and let me tell you, I was surprised.  There are no more mid-range video cards.  The RX 580’s and 570’s are either gone or selling for almost $500.  While the NVidia GTX 1070’s are also MIA.  The GTX 1060’s are still in stock, but going for almost $300, which is $100 too high.  The low end cards are still available, as are the super high end cards, but those are either not worth anyone’s time, or way to expensive for the every day gamer.

Why has this happened you ask? Crypto-mining.  The AMD RX series are super good at mining those sweet, sweet crypto-hashes, as are the mid-upper NVidia cards, and the more of those cards you get, the more hashes you can crack.  This was a problem back when Bitcoin first took off as well, but thankfully the hashes got too hard to crack for all but the biggest mining operations, but now Ethereum has launched.  It is like Bitcoin’s younger brother.  It seems odd that there would be so much value in yet another crypto-currency, but here we are again off to the races, and we poor PC gamers are once again footing the bill.

I know what you are thinking.  If we wait out Ethereum, the hashes will get hard to mine, and then cards will start flooding the market just like what happened with Bitcoin, but here is the deal, now that people know they can make a ton of money at this, there will always be another currency to mine.  That means there will always be a need for tons of mid-range video cards.  Which means PC gaming is always going to be super expensive.  Which is a shame because there is nothing quite like playing games on a PC.  It is just a more intimate experience than a console.  A PC is just for you, while a console is more about family entertainment.

Don’t mind me.  I am going to return to the ocean and shake my fist tide, and scream to no-one in particular about crypto-miners stealing all the good video cards.  While the people around me wonder what the heck I am screaming about and hide their children from the strange angry man.

Posted on

We Are Getting À La Carte TV. Proving You Should Be Careful What You Wish For…

Disney announced that after its two year deal with Netflix is done it will pull all of its movies and shows off of the popular streaming service.  This is so it can launch its own online streaming network.  There has been no word yet on how this will affect the current Marvel/Netflix co-produced TV shows.  Though I am guessing due to their success they will continue to stay on Netflix and continue to be made by the same team.

The real news is that there will soon be yet another streaming TV service.  It will be joining the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, CBS All Access, CW Seed, and the soon to be launching yet to be titled DC/Warner Brothers online network.  Plus who knows how many others are in the works.  Netflix opened Pandora’s TV box, and now every TV Service provider who’s ratings have taken a hit due to streaming media want a piece of the action.  This would be fine if the channels were going to be cheap, but it looks like they will start around $5.99 a month a piece and then go up from there.  Heck HBO Now is $15 a month.  You thought à la carte programing was going to save you money.  Well guess what, it won’t.

People are going to have to think long and hard about what services they are going to watch and need, and if these services keep dividing up their content and charging a lot for it, it may force people back to cable to ‘save’ money.  For some reason when people said they wanted to be able to pick and choose their channels they assumed that they could still just pay the $1 to $2 a channel like they are now.  That of course is not the case.

The à la carte future everyone said they wanted is almost here, and it is going to cost us all a fortune.  Not to mention the services we using now are going to continue to have less content as shows and movies are added to their IP owners’ own services.  Somehow the future is always less cool than we hoped it would be.