Tag: Blog

Oh no – it’s the Steam Summer Sale again… please help me, no.

Amusingly enough, I recently came into a lot of different video games, so I’m really loathe to look through the endless deals that are going on in Steam. Playstation changed their whole monthly service, meaning instead of the two sub-par games they were providing you every month, you now have a library of games available to you for a couple bucks more.

I have faded a bit on playing console games, but when I saw some of what they offered, I paid upfront for the year and we’ll see what I think when it comes time for renewal.

Here’s the games I downloaded first.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY – This was up front top of the list on their advertising, and for good reason. It’s a game that sold very well, so they probably aren’t losing a lot of money in giving it away. For a budget gamer like me that was waiting for the price on this to drop to below $30 to now get to play it for almost free? Easy.

Anyway, it’s an almost on-rails action game with a ton of character. They really went somewhat deep into the comic lore, blending it with the movie lore so it’s fun for everyone and they don’t have to pay Chris Pratt for likeness licensing.

GHOSTS OF TSUSHIMA – This is the game I installed first. I have head nothing but good things, and with already 8 or 9 hours in, I get it. It’s Dark Souls combat, but easier. It’s Grand Theft Auto with samurai. It’s gorgeous landscapes and mythology. The fact that the world isn’t as engaging as something like Red Dead doesn’t matter when I’ve stopped to watch flowers bloom as I ride my horse across the world.

CHOCOBO MYSTERY DUNGEON: EVERYBUDDY! – It’s a loot-grinding dungeon crawler with rogue’y elements. Originally for the WII, it features big fluffy Chocobo in outfits as you give them classic Final Fantasy job classes. My wife, looking the list with me, looked at me like I had two heads as she is downloading the zombie world Days Gone, and I’m squeeing like I just got let out of elementary school early because I get to play with Chocobos.

So do you do Playstation Plus? What are you downloading. Tell us in all the usual places. Till then – this has been Hatton.

Hey All, PCR here!

While driving home from work yesterday, I was re-listening to when we were on Gutting the Sacred Cow (Our episode, 92, can be found here…) and we got off on a brief tangent about collecting comic books and.. it got me thinking…

I collected a lot of varied titles.. from popular stuff, to stuff I (mistakenly) thought would increase in value, to things I… just LOVED reading regardless of what other people thought or how popular it was.

So here’s a not-entirely-comprehensive list of the stuff that was my guilty pleasure, even though they weren’t mainstream titles!

Badger – First Comics

Created by Mike Baron and originally published by Capital Comics before it landed at First Comics, Badger was the story of Norbert Sykes, a Vietnam vet who suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder.  One of those identities is “The Badger”, a guy who calls everyone Larry, talks to animals, and is possibly the best martial artist vigilante around.

Dreadstar – First Comics

Originally published in Marvel’s offshoot “Epic” (it was Epic’s first title), it eventually landed at First where I found it during my collecting phase.  The stories of Vanth Dreadstar, Iron Angel, Oedi, Willow and Skeevo was some of the best writing I had read in comics.  The issues I had in my long boxes were written by either creator Jim Starlin or Peter David, and the artwork by Angel Medina was jaw dropping.

Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! – First Comics

One of First Comics’ first titles (you’re probably seeing a pattern here…) American Flagg! was one of my first ‘non mainstream’ titles, and the one that introduced me to all the other First titles I collected.  The story of Reuben Flagg, a former porn star turned Plexus Ranger in 2030 Chicago… Chaykin’s style was perfect for this title.  The gritty and stylized artwork, the amazing characters, the story…  Chaykin isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but man did I fall in love with this title.  It was the only title I collected that I went out of my way to eventually pick up the entire run of.

Aliens – Dark Horse Comics

I was never really in to Black and White comics.  Aliens changed that.  The artwork by Mark A. Nelson and story by Mark Verheiden (later of Falling Skies fame) were riveting, and the original 6 issue run is nothing short of a masterpiece

Grimjack – First Comics

While Flagg! was my first foray into… well.. First, Grimjack filled that void once Flagg! ended and is easily in my top 3 all time title.  Originally created by John Ostrander and Timothy Truman and later drawn by one of my favorite artists, Flint Henry, sometimes the character was John Gaunt, other times he was James Edgar Twilley, but he was always Grimjack and if you ever needed him, you just had to find your way to Munden’s Bar in downtown Cynosure.

For those who collected, or still do… what are YOUR favorite titles?  Let us know over at @STSTCast on Twitter!

– PCR

The internet has made us all boiled frogs.

The boiled frog syndrome is that people don’t accept bad situations at once. If I was to suggest you need to listen to screams all day, you would think I was bonkers. If I told you that you would be given a dollar for every scream every hour… maybe you would say yes. Then the scream got a little longer. A couple more screams, but a slightly higher payout. Longer screams. A little less payout. More screams. Etc etc until your life is now making nothing and listening to a scream all the time. You would be a boiled frog, the temperature getting higher and higher until you didn’t even know you were dead.

So on one side of the internet, places like Facebook and Youtube have removed your ability to see things the way you would like to see them in lieu of providing you the things it expects you want to see. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen them before or they are years old – their science has shown this content will provide them with the best situation for revenue, and what you want bedamned.

I spend more of my life than I would care to admit trying to find ways to give me data the way I want it. The people that have grown with the modern internet, at times, don’t even realize that these are options! The belief that for your video to be relevant it must be on Youtube or have high Ups on Reddit… all the while your work, your art, your podcast, your video, is chaff on the wheel of data aggregation.

Here – to help you all on your journey of freeing yourselves from the shackles of Big Data are some applications and programs I use to help me fight through the drudge of companies telling me what and how I want to look at things. If you have any more, you know where to find us….

BNTP – Bookmarks in New Tab
This is actually the thing that spawned this article. I lose links. Google is getting harder to find fine-tooth detail the way it used to. This bookmark app puts all of your links right up front and they’re super easy to read and organize. Love it.

Fluff-Busting Purity
Facebook is a nightmare. Ads. Data spread out. Timeline in hodgepodge order. Ads. Sponsored posts… which are really just ads. Only seeing 20 of your friends posts and feeling like you are missing out on so many other people’s lives. Fluff-Busting gives you a giant list of ways to change Facebook from dark mode to removing sidebars to tabbing everything. I have no idea what modern Facebook looks like.

Reddit Enhancement Suite
This is almost a gimme if you are a reddit user – but I have to assume there are some that aren’t aware of it. RES adds so many useful desktop features to Reddit. Sadly, organizational control over when articles came in isn’t one of them – but tagging users, mass opening, color coordinationn, tabbed viewing and grouping. It really makes Reddit a slightly less home for scum and villainy.

Happy Friday Somethings!

So, I’m 3 episodes in to Obi-Wan and… it’s…  shrugs.. Ok… I guess.

Mind you, I do not consume all things Star Wars.  Never saw Rebels or Clone Wars if only because I never checked them out… not because of some “anti show animosity”.  Mando was great, BoBF was… okish, but Obi-Wan I wanted to enjoy more.

Are there cool aspects of it?  Sure.  Are there mind-numbingly dumb things that happen for the sake of moving along the store in a 6 episode show?  Yes.  SHOULD it be 6 episodes?  Can’t give a full answer yet till it’s over, but I DO hate how these shows have become exposition to movies and nothing else.  D+ “Shows” went from 9 episodes (still short) to 6 and personally, I feel like they’re doing their fans a disservice… but that’s a conversation for another day.

What I *don’t* enjoy.. is that the Star Wars universe is SO VAST.. they literally could tell any story they want and set it in the SW universe, and it could be awesome and make that already rich universe grow even more.. instead, we keep having stories set around the main players we’ve already seen for years.  The latest SW trilogy took a half step in that direction, but rather hamfistedly in my opinion, and… to be fair.. the toxicness and entitlement of some of their fans (not that only SW suffers from this… EVERY fandom has it’s toxic side) makes it hard to strike out in new directions.

I’m hoping the last 3 episodes turn the show around for me, but if it doesn’t shrug oh well….

Want to hear some original Star Wars stuff?  Go check out our friend Crystal Storm’s audio drama “Legacy” in your podcatcher of choice!

– PCR

It’s that time a year again… my least favorite time of the year.

It should come as no shock that I’m a bit of a homebody, and the last two years have done absolutely nothing to help that. I enjoy going out and doing a thing on occasion, like hosting burlesque or having in-ring segments for UWA Elite, but by and large – I’m content at home. Inside.

Now though, as we reach the beginning of the Summer, the inside begins to bake. My apartment, for as much as I like it, has one major flaw… and it is that it is made out of some sort of anti-thermos material. It makes the tepidly warm things hot in the summer and cold in the winter – and on a nice breezy day, it ruffles their hair. So given we are on the cusp of my most miserable time, I thought I’d do a quick run down of the seasons, and my opinion of them. In order of favorite to least favorite.

WINTER – It’s a delight. You’re cold, so you put on a sweatshirt. You’re still cold, so you wear a blanket.  Still cold? Drink some coffee.  Seriously, nothing is better than being ever so slightly chilly, but having reasons to wear thermals and sweatshirts. Everything is crisp and crunchy and dead, which isn’t some gothy outcry.. you’ll understand in a moment.

FALL – I know a lot of folks who love the fall, mostly because of Halloween, but I do appreciate the change of fall. It’s probably the most visually pleasing of the seasons, and aside from Christmas smells, has the best flavor profile of the seasons. I would have to really think hard as to whether I like eggnog or apple cider more… so yes, Fall’s enjoyable, but it doesn’t get snow.

SPRING – Here’s where the pain begins. The first third is the inverse Fall, which is all the growing, budding, pollening, flowers with a nice breeze.  The rest is a wet sloppy mess that starts climbing the roller coaster towards ..

SUMMER – No, I don’t want to go out. It’s hot. Yes, fine, I’ll go and enjoy the beach for a day or a pool, but I’m going to go home – and it’s still going to be this miserable sticky skin-blistering rage virus on my skin. And the bugs are out. So many bugs. All of the flying, buzzing, wooshing, biting, tree-falling, stinging, swarming, crawling bugs are out because outside is a dirty hellscape filled with monsters that are all trying to usurp our land with their nests. Remember that adorable and charming image of how you get warm in the Winter?  Yeah… all you can do in the Summer is reverse it, and eventually you’re left naked, with nothing else to take off, and making whimpering noises every time the oscillating fan moves beyond you.

The Summer sucks, and if you are one of those ‘Oh Summer, rah’ types… I don’t want to hear you bitch when the thermometer hits three digit temperatures and you feel like saying things like ‘Real scorcher out there!’ — of course it is.

It’s Summer, and it hates you

– Hatton

Morning Somethings!

You get A Little Something Extra a day early today because Livestream For the Cure kicked off at 9am TODAY and we couldn’t be more excited!

We’re raising $20,000 for the Cancer Research Institute over 3 days!

Head over to Livestream’s Twitch channel and watch all the amazing creators, and check out our “Movie Quote Trivia” segment Friday night at 9pm!

– PCR

Hatton here with this week’s blog that was supposed to be last week’s, but I have lost all cohesion and concept of the passage of time. Thanks Rob for picking up my dumb dumb slack.

Anyway – I am a Trek person. If you love all sci-fi equally, go you, but if I had to choose between watching a lightsaber or a phaser, I’m going to choose a phaser every time. That said, not all Trek has been created equally, and in recent years there has been a surprising number of new shows that wear the Trek name. Thankfully these shows have disregarded the Abrams version of Trek entirely and have rested solely on the ‘prime timeline’ for lack of a term.

So what are my thoughts on these new Treks? I thought I’d give my pros and my cons this week.

Star Trek: Discovery – Starting in a world before the original series, with nods to original Captain Pike, Tribbles, and Spock, we follow Michael Burnham who was the canonically inserted adoptive sister of Spock.

The good here is that this show has the heart of Trek right. The characters grow and learn lessons, they are humans who are fighting for the Prime Directive. Also, given this show is being produced now, the morality of Trek is updated along with it featuring women, people of color, non-binary, lgbtq all in the chain of command with absolutely no fanfare. There are moments of real tearjerking beauty in Discovery, and I look forward to every season.

The bad though… the bad is its main character, Michael Burnham. Not the actress, as Sonequa Martin-Green is excellent, but the character. Her primary flaw is that she isn’t perfect enough to compete with her near god-like Spock, so she is always fighting for relevancy when compared to him. That concept makes her too good at near everything else, and as the show goes on she seems to somehow get smarter than people at the height of their profession. Answering medical questions for doctors and history questions for anthropologists… she’s just too much at times.

Star Trek: Picard – The final adventures of my favorite captain, Picard is an interesting mix of nostalgia and telling stories outside of the standard ‘captain and his crew’ world that most shows lean into. I have only taken in the first season, but within we learn what’s happened to Data, Riker, Troi, Seven of Nine, and I have no doubt that there is more to come in the next Season. It clearly loves the source material and pays homage in every inch of it.

The bad is mostly plot oriented. It’s story, where fun and intended to take us to various corners of the universe and explore the aftereffects of what Picard went through in Next Generation, the big season plot would have largely never been a concern if not for the heroes getting involved. There is a season finale issue as well that others may have a problem with, but I’ll leave that for the forum-arguers.

Lastly – we have the cartoons. Lower Decks and Prodigy. Decks is a Family Guy style comedy and Prodigy is a CGI animated kid-friendly adventure. Both have their merits and their love of Trek on their sleeve. (Prodigy, notably features show friend Bonnie Gordon as the ship computer). Lower Decks makes fun of the things we love, but holds onto a lot of Trek’s heart, and Prodigy is a big adventure that, due to its CGI, sometimes feels less Star Trek and more Reboot… both though are enjoyable as hell.

So, what’s your favorite current Trek? Are you looking forward to Strange New Worlds? Sound off in the usual places. Hatton out.

Hey all, PCR here!

I know we missed Friday’s blog post, we were a little busy doing a 12 hour stream over on Twitch helping to raise awareness for Livestream For The Cure 6!

Thanks to your early donations, we are OVER $1100 towards our goal of $20,000!  That’s HUGE being just under 2 weeks away!

If you were looking to donate early, you can do so here!

If you see any of Livestream’s posts on social media, please give them a share!  The more eyes we get on the event, the more money we can raise!

Thank you to all the early donators, and we look forward to seeing you May 19-21st for the stream!

– PCR

Hey all, PCR here (again!)

I’ve been in a weird music mood lately as I drive around for my job, and I’ve been falling back in to some Classic/Old School Rap tunes, so for those of you who love it so loud your rear view mirror vibrates, here’s what I’ve been bumping lately…

California Love – Dr. Dre/Tupac.  A quintessential West Coast anthem.  The lyrics from Dre feel laid back while Tupac’s verse has a sense of urgency feel to it.  Both sides of that coin flow amazingly with the beat and the musical hook.  “Bumpin’ and Grindin’ like a slow jam” indeed.

Gangsta’s Paradise – Coolio.  Quite possibly the most memorable thing about the movie “Dangerous Minds”.  The haunting violins and chorus merge with the window-rattling beat as Coolio weaves his verses about being a victim of his surroundings and street upbringing. a subwoofer thumper for sure.

Rockbox – Run DMC.  An even further back classic from their debut album, it was one of the first rap songs I can remember that merged with shredding guitar tracks to create something that had as-of-yet been unheard of.

Shake Ya Tailfeather – P Diddy, Nelly, Murphy Lee.  From the Bad Boys II soundtrack, this is like a mini-recreation of “P. Diddy and the Fam”.  Each verse is unique and fits each artist’s style while still maintaining the flow of the song.  Still hits.

ANYthing off “No One Can Do It Better” – The D.O.C.  I can’t even begin to think of how many hours and hours and hours this CD used to play in my car on road trips back in the day.  A car accident crushed his larynx and changed his voice, but 7 years later he regained enough of it for his second album, but the debut record for the man who co-wrote Eazy E’s solo debut remains a classic.

– PCR

Hey Somethings, Podcast Rob here!

2022 is a Year of Milestones for us… July will mark 9 years of The Something Something ‘Cast, we hit over 50,000 downloads earlier this year, and by end of this year we’ll be at 350 episodes.  Hell, we even got a quick shoutout on G4TV!

That’s.  Nuts.

We NEVER would have guessed way back in 2013 when we started back in Hatton Studio 1.0 that we’d have gotten this far.  It’s all thanks to you.

This show has given us the opportunity to meet and become friends with some amazing people that we never would have gotten the chance to otherwise, and we will always be grateful for giving us your time to bend your ear with our personal brand of humor and stupidity.

We’ve always kept our show fluid in the respect that this isn’t the same type of show as what we started with back in 2013.  We’re always willing to change based on what people want to hear and what we think people will find entertaining.  Sometimes we guess right, other times we don’t.. it’s all part of the process.

Today, I’m asking you, our listeners.. what do YOU like to hear from us?

Random babbling?
Reviews of Movies?  New?  Old?
Video Game talk?
TV Dissertations?
Mysteries?

We want to do more of what you want to hear, so please, don’t be shy and let us know at the following places!

Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
somethingcast.com

Thanks for everything, and we can’t wait to do more!

– PCR