Beyond My Geeky Life

I know it has been some time since I have posted here.  I have been real busy lately. Had a great vacation to Disney World and Galaxy's Edge and I do plan to do a full post about it soon. Got back from that and published the second Georgie and Armand's Place novel, ' Georgie and Armand’s Place Under Siege' ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B095WDZPXM ). I then did some promoting of the book. Nerd Alert News ( https://nerdalertnews.net/celebrate-pride-month-with-an-interview-with-author-ian-brazee-cannon/ ) posted an interview with me on their website. Then 5280 Geek ( https://weekendgeekupdate.podbean.com/e/weekend-geek-update-1623186267/ ) had me in the studio for an audio interview as part of their podcast. Now here on my blog I am going to give the readers of my blog a little treat. I do a series of short stories in the  Georgie and Armand's Place called the  Georgie and Armand Vacation stories. These are fun stories following Georgie and Armand as th...

Right now it seems like the toxic fans are getting worse every day. With all the youtube channels dedicated to promoting counterproductive attitudes as they promote and encourage aggressively destructive toxic actions, we are seeing a growing darkness expand over fandom in general right now. I'll start off by trying to explain the basics of what it is to be a toxic fan. Just disliking a show or program or some creative choice in a franchise is not being a toxic fan. You can dislike something and just say 'I don't agree with what they did' or 'I didn't enjoy that show/movie' without being toxic. You can have opinions and express them in non-toxic ways. That is 100% fine. Toxic fans on the other hand dislike something and instead of just respectfully expressing their opinions, they go and try to burn the whole franchise down. They often resort to childish, personal attacks at a specific person that undeniably cross a line and have at times chased talented peop...

 Just saw the date of the last post here and I didn't realize it has been that long since I last put up a post. I've been busy working on my writing. My second novel, 'Georgie and Armand's Place Under Siege' is almost finished and will hopefully be out by summer.  Of course you can go and pick up the first novel 'A Day at Georgie and Armand's Place' if you have not done so yet. (https://www.amazon.com/Day-Georgie-Armands-Place-ebook/dp/B07YK6C8N5). Now on to the topic of this post. Knock-Off actions figures are an interesting market. There is a lot of odd stuff out there. A lot of it is straight forward poor quality reproductions of existing figures that often are just humorous, especially with whatever odd title the figure is given, that often suffers from translation issues. I have a few knock-Offs in my collection. The Aliens Fighter is my favorite. So you have a X-Wing fighter from Star Wars, with the wings put on backwards and a standard grey alien ...

 I will try to be good and keep this all spoiler free, but I make no promises. If you are big on keeping spoiler free, best not to read on. This season of The Mandalorian has been really good. The story has developed well, with a lot of connections being made with other Star Wars storylines such as the two animated series Clone Wars and Rebels as well as getting to see the first live action versions of characters from those series. They did deal with the Mandalorian Helmet issue I talked about a few posts back and I was very close to being correct about how it all works. They just keep doing it right to make the show a solid part of the Star Wars universe and in this last episode, they did what needed to be done for forty years. While it was really awesome, it was no surprise that Boba Fett was going to be back and be used in a significant way. When you start off the season with an episode all about his armor and giving him a brief cameo at the end of that episode, there was no way...

 In honor of Marvel comics hitting the 80 year mark, Marvel released many publications to celebrate the historic milestone. One thing they did was set of graphic novels to celebrate each decade by highlighting whatever it was they felt best displayed that era.  For the 50s they picked Captain America. I ended  up with a copy of that graphic novel and have been reading it lately. It has been a very interesting read. So first off you have to understand that at one point every story in this collection became non-canon as a decade later the Avengers would reveal that Cap was actually frozen during this time period, so none of these stories could have happened. This was then later ret-conned to make it a different man having taken on the role of Captain America because the government wanted to keep the legend alive. Even with all that knowledge, this post will be about the stories on their own, completely independent from any continuity issues. The first item of notice, as wit...

 We are just a few days from the premier of season two of The Mandalorian. It should be an interesting ride to see where the story goes. Now one big thing from the first season was that the Mandalorian did not remove his helmet in front of others, as was the way for all Mandalorians we saw in the series. This was clearly a very big rule for them, as it was mentioned many times throughout the series. Now if one is into Star Wars and watches everything like we do in this house, you will find that in both cartoon series,  'Clone Wars' and Rebels', we see a lot of Mandalorians going around without their helmets for long periods of times, very openly in public, for all to see. As all three of these are technically Star Wars canon, there pops up some obvious issues over this area of Mandalorian customs. I've seen a few articles talking about the helmet mandate being part of the aftermath of the Empire decimating Mandalore in an attempt to wipe of the Mandalorians. There are a...

So to repeat what I titled this post, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is NOT the worst Indiana Jones movie, that honor undeniably goes to Temple of Doom. So the first real issue is Indiana's love interests. Out of the three he is given in the four films, Willie is by far the worst. She is fully  useless through out the whole film, mostly used for comedy relief as she is just annoying, spoiled and whiney, nothing else. I don't believe for one moment Indiana would be attracted to her, as she lacks common sense and is just unlikable on ever level. There really is no doubt he ditched her as soon as possible and most likely forgot about her, hoping to never see her again. Then we have the plot.  The story for Temple of Doom is not compelling, you just don't care. Which is a big problem, since it has Indy doing his most noble of missions, yet there is something lacking. I can't explain it, but of all his quests, this one I really didn't care if he completed it or not. Helpin...