But what of those who don't like dessert?

I saw a post on HeroPress tonight about a new blog that's stepping in to try and fill the void of cheesecake and whatnot that's been left by Al Bruno's shift away from it and towards his original fiction and such (and I wish Bruno all the luck and success in the world in his endeavors). It got me thinking and ruminating. I really want more than anything to increase my focus on Nerd Trash and it's become more than crystal clear that employing any kind of regimented posting schedule or features is never going to work for the very simple fact that I can't abide by them. What I'm dwelling on is whether or not to broaden things a bit and start posting cheesecake and other risque content?

I'm not talking porn, let's make that abundantly clear right now. Scantily-clad? Yes. Pin-ups? Yup. Nude, but without any of the naughty bits visible? Yeah. Those same bits and bobs in plain view? Nope. I never intended for Nerd Trash to be a PG-esque blog but for the most part, it has been. There have been exceptions, especially when it came to those Jamie Lee Curtis posts, but generally it's been a clean blog.

Now, if I did decide to do this, it wouldn't be as constant as Al Bruno or any likewise bloggers. Women are visually appealing, especially the half-naked variety, but I'm not spending an entire day everyday trawling Google or Tumblr for them.

Really, my goal is to get my head back into the space it was at when I used to post more frequently and posted whatever I felt like. Long posts, short posts, and medium posts. Geeking out and ranting over some BS I've come across.

So what do you think? Should I do it?

THERE.ARE.FOUR.BOXES.¹

I've been busy the past couple of days in a purge of my way too big already book collection. I've got a bad habit of buying used books that at the time I assure myself that I'm absolutely positively going to read and of course, never do. The fact that I managed to fill four boxes with them stands as a testament to that fact.

I really need to vacuum...

Yikes and yowza. It's a hodgepodge of sci-fi, fantasy, classic lit, modern stuff, etc. and all of it collecting dust and taking up valuable space, so out it goes to a thrift store later this week.

On the flipside of this coin is that I'm planning on buying more books tomorrow and this Saturday at the local library's twice annual book sale. I'm aiming to be a bit more conservative with how many I buy, but who knows.

¹One slip of gold-pressed latinum for the reference.

About that Justice League trailer

In my previous post, I called the trailer for the upcoming Justice League movie "lackluster". Tim Knight from HeroPress left a comment that summed up my thoughts fairly well.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Post-Wonder Woman's box office success the trailers and marketing have re-positioned her front and centre, but it can't make up for the fact - even with the increased humour (in the trailers, at least) - this looks like a retread of BvS with a faceless mass of CGI 'parademons' for our heroes to smash. I strongly suspect this will tank critically and its strong opening weekend will drop off dramatically once word-of-mouth gets around!

Exactly. The reason why I think the trailer is lackluster is because it's little more than a confusing mass of random scenes strung together with little to no coherence. You get no real information about the movie's plot and you don't even see Steppenwolf, the antagonist. Somebody put this trailer together and decided that including a shot or two of the antagonist was a "bad" idea. Wow.

Just to drive my point home, here's the trailers for Justice League and another movie that's coming out next month, too - Thor: Ragnarok.





The difference is startling. With Thor, we know who all of the major characters are, including the antagonist, Hela. We have know what the plot is and a very nice sampling of what's going to happen in the movie, with some nice smashy bits added for flavor.

What makes it even worse is that this isn't a movie that's coming out six months down the line. Justice League hits theaters next month. And this is the best that Warner Bros.'s marketing department has to offer to convince people to fork over like eight or nine or how many dollars to watch this movie? Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I have to agree with Tim's prediction on Justice League's box office earnings. It'll debut near or at the top of the box office, then slip down once the reviews start coming in. Some people might deride websites like Rotten Tomatoes and movie critics in general for "hating" on DC's movies, but there's going to be a lot more who will heed their words and buy a ticket for something else.

And maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe what DC and WB need to motivate them towards fixing their malfunctioning cinematic universe is for Justice League to bomb. They're already making changes to "fix" the problems, but its all for nought unless they're willing to break the DCEU down and start fixing from the inside out.

My hot take on the Justice League movie

First, here's the lackluster new trailer.



Second, will Justice League be a success? Well, it depends on how you measure success. Box office, I would be genuinely surprised if it didn't make a ton of money. I'm sure Warner Bros. has set a too high bar of a billion dollars for the movie which it might not reach. Certainly, it'll get close, probably half a billion at the lowest and over three quarters of a billion at the high-end, but otherwise, it would be a shocker if it actually broke a billion dollars. Still, it will more than pay for itself.

Critical reception, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. Thus so far, only one movie in the DC Extended Universe has had both financial and critical success and that is Wonder Woman. Man of Steel is a distant second and both Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad don't even get participation trophies. Justice League might get a boost from Wonder Woman, but don't expect it to be much. Man of Steel garnered a 55% and a 55 at Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, so the best WB can hope for is Justice League getting at least that high. Certainly, it's not getting the 94% and 76 of Wonder Woman, and it would have to be total trash to get the mid-twenty percents and mid-forties of Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad.

In fact, if this movie somehow scores that low, the effect would be bad for the DCEU. Very bad. I on't think even a hefty box office would be that much of a balm for the cinematic universe's ills. I do know that Warner Bros. is trying to right the ship by putting Geoff Johns and others at the helm and de-emphasizing the interconnectivity of each movie. If Justice League does fail, then I think it will set off a major crisis and WB will kneejerk and maybe do away with the DCEU altogether in favor of a return to the old standalone model. What they should do is disassemble the whole thing and find and fix all of its broken bits, starting with the "grim and gritty" tone that someone decided was a great idea. When I think grim and gritty, I don't think DC Comics or its movies at all.

Hey look, a new Star Wars: The Last Jedi poster

(via Star Wars Twitter)

Spiffy.

The Mysterious Disappearances of Ellie Walker and Warren Ferguson

During the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, Sheriff Andy Taylor was paired with Mayberry's pharmacist, Ellie Walker. Twelve episodes later, she was gone with no on-screen explanation. The two real life explanations given have the lack of chemistry between the actress, Elinor Donahue, and Andy Griffith. Donahue claims that she asked for a release in order to deal with personal issues.

via Mayberry Wiki

I'm a longtime fan of The Andy Griffith Show since I was a lad and I've never been a fan of the pairing because of the difference in age between Griffith and Donahue. Griffith was around 34, while Donahue was about 23. While eleven years isn't a huge deal, Griffith looked much older than his years, so it always seemed to me as if he were a middle-aged man rocking the cradle. But, eh, that's just me. I always thought him and Helen Crump were a much better pairing since they were closer in age, presumably.

Now, what's hilarious is that one apparent fan theory is that Ellie ditched both Andy and Mayberry to become of all things...a groupie. It's based on the sole fact that Ellie's last appearance on the show was an episode called "The Guitar Player Returns" wherein a guitar player reunites with his manager and band. The guitar player never appears on the show again. And neither does Ellie. The idea is that the town is sooo scandalized by her running off, that they decide as one never to mention her again.

[Overly dramatic zoom in]

Or maybe it was something more...sinister. What if Andy caught Ellie two-timing with the guitar player and the Sheriff Without a Gun became a Man with a Gun and a dead body. Could Ellie Walker be lying at the bottom of Myer's Lake, waiting for some hapless fisherman to accidentally reel her in? Is that why Andy abruptly moved out of state at the end of the eighth season?

[Cue X-Files music]

[Zoom out]

Or you know, not.

I don't know about you, but I would certainly buy this man's books

via Reddit.

If I were Stephen King, I would use that as my author's photo forever.

Best damn World Series ever, yes siree

via Wikipedia.

Finished: Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Title: Around the World in Eighty Days
Series: Voyages Extraordinaires
Author: Jules Verne
Genre: Adventure
Pages: 230
Publisher: Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Year pub: 1873
Rating: ★★★★☆

I can honestly say that I never expected to enjoy Around the World in Eighty Days as much as I did. It's really a testament to the writing chops of Jules Verne that a 144 year old adventure novel still holds up today.

What I loved about AWED is just the premise, the idea of someone would make a bet on the spot to travel around the world in less than three months and does it while being wrongly pursued by a police detective for a crime they didn't commit. That Phileas Fogg globe trots while being completely unaware that he's being pursued just serves to make the overall story even better.

Then there's Passepartout, Fogg's poor, put upon man-servant who, first day on the job, gets Shanghaied into this mess. You have to feel sorry for the poor chap because he took the job in full expectation of having a quiet, sedate life and Fogg tosses that right out the window.

Really, the only complaint I have with Around the World in Eighty Days is that it shows it's age a little in its depiction of non-white civilizations. It's nowhere close to being even half racist, let alone full blown racist, but the way Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans are depicted shows a hint of some of the prejudiced views white Europeans had back then. Having said that, it won't foul up your reading of the book, but it might cause an eyebrow to rise.

As an aside, this was only the second work of classic literature that I've ever read, the first being The Prisoner of Zenda, as well as the oldest that I've read. I don't know why, but I've never been able to get into classic lit before, so this is a promising sign that my horizons may be broadening and I'm looking forward to reading more of Jules Verne's works as well as other classics in the near future.

There's a Crisis on Earth-X: DC-TV's next crossover event

I first saw this picture over on Tumblr late last night and it piqued my interest.

via the official Arrow Twitter.

My first take on the title was that this year's big crossover between the four DC-TV shows (Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl) was going to be an adaption of some sort of the famed Crisis on Infinite Earths mega-event DC Comics did back in the mid-80s. I did some googling and according to the DC Database, Earth-X was one of those infinite Earths of DC's old multiverse. This was an Earth where the Nazis won World War II and was subject of one of the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossovers and a group of heroes from Earth-2 (all of whom DC acquired from Quality Comics), called the Freedom Fighters, moved to Earth-X to free it from the Nazis.

So the obvious question is if this is what DC-TV is going for with this crossover? The answer is yes. DC Comics has an article about the crossover on their website which linked to another article about the upcoming Freedom Fighters: The Ray animated webseries from CW Seed. That series is set on Earth-X and features Nazi doppelgangers of Green Arrow, Supergirl, and The Flash dubbed The Reichmen, so that's what we'll see in the crossover. It's certainly going to be chilling to see those doppelgangers in the flesh and disturbing if they start throwing Nazi salutes.



What I'm curious to see is how events of the crossover effects the non-white and Jewish heroes. I can only hope that the writers don't pull a dumb and have evil versions of them. Provided, you know, that their doppelgangers even exist on Earth-X (because *Nazis*). If they do, they'll probably be members of the resistance.

Moving on from that, the other big thing are Barry and Iris at the bottom of the center-piece. The image suggests that the two are finally going to tie the knot this season, after having been matrimony blocked by the Speed Force last season. How this relates to Nazi doppelgangers, I have no clue. I guess we'll just have to wait for either the trailer or when the crossover happens starting November 27th.