Lucifer: Volume 10 (2006)

Morningstar (2006)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly / Colleen Doran / Michael Kaluta | Page Count: 192

"Fight. Win, or be defeated. Die. Make your own arrangements. I'm not your keeper."

Volume 10 of 11 in the Lucifer series. After an emotional opening, picking up a thread that may have seemed done and dusted in one of the earlier books, the apocalyptic conclusion to the shit-storm that has built around the Lightbringer for the past few books gets underway. What follows is conflict on a grand scale - chaos unleashed in a place unprepared for it... again.

While some fight for victory, some for honour, and some simply for the joy of fighting, Lucifer knows that to craft the New he must first destroy the Old, and not just in the physical sense. The victor may win the battle but it's not just Above and Below any longer; the whole of Creation itself is at stake. So what if the collateral damage is a few billion souls? In such a crusade, his rules are the only rules that matter.

Godzilla: Heisei Era Films (1984-95)

16. The Return of Godzilla (1984)

Dir. Koji Hashimoto

NOTE: numbering continues sequentially from the Shōwa Era. For simplicity's sake I've used English language titles for each of my Godzilla reviews, but it's always the original Japanese language versions of the films that I refer to.

The Heisei Era is almost exclusively a case of Godzilla vs [ANOTHER] kaijū; the exception is the first film, which is a reboot of sorts, being a sequel to the original 1954 film that ignores the other fifteen Shōwa films. It was a deliberate attempt to return the series to its origins. It successfully made Godzilla scary again. No longer something to be mocked, Godzilla is total fucking destruction.

The first proper reveal of the rejuvenated beast is impressive, with newly added facial animatronics that enabled it to have nuances like never before.

AER: Memories of Old (2017)

AER: Memories of Old (2017)

Genre: Adventure | Players: 1 | Developer: Forgotten Key

AER: MoO deserves praise for a number of things, but perhaps not so much as an actual game. That doesn't mean it's a joyless experience, though. I enjoyed much of it, for the brief time that it lasts.

Its biggest influences are Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, specifically Skyward Sword (2011), which is the least fun I've ever had with a LoZ game, and Thatgamecompany's majestic Journey (2012).

It has a similar setting and makeup as SS, (i.e. set upon floating land masses in the sky, with a few dungeons/temples that must be visitied in order to progress) and attempts the same kind of soulful pilgrimage that Journey handled so perfectly.

Both the aforementioned games feature a wordless protagonist, as does AER. Her name is Auk.

Auk is a shifter, able to transform at will into a large bird, enabling her to traverse from one floating island to another with ease. The actual transformation is fluid and pleasing to do, performed by a single button-press, both ways.

Stargate SG-1: Season 10 (2006-07)

Stargate SG-1: Season 10 (2006-07)

Dirs. Various | 20 episodes, approx 44 minutes each.

Ten years is a heck of a long time to be watching a weekly TV show. Luckily, with shiny disc media (or stream or DL) it can take just a fraction of that to watch it at home from beginning to end.

I scheduled one post per month for ten months, but I finished the series in about half of that time. Binge-watching is a double-edged activity, but ultimately it allows one to better evaluate how a show changed over time; having to wait a decade between the first and last episodes would make that difficult. For my purposes, the binge-watch positives outweighed the negatives.

Stargate changed quite a bit over the years, in scope and in cast, but its greatest strength was always in its team dynamic, which is something that it remained largely true to throughout.

The individual members would clash often in their beliefs, particularly Jack (Richard Dean Anderson) and Daniel (Michael Shanks), but at the end of the day each of them was elevated and heartened by having the other at their side.