Nerdy Month in Review: July 2015

On the first of every month, I will recap my nerdy endeavors over the course of the previous month.

July was a hectic month from a non-nerdy standpoint, helping our little lady get through having her tonsils out and adjusting to another foster child in the house. We've also had some pesky visitors in the form of lice and mice, so I have been busy and will continue to be busy. Here is what I did manage to get in, though:

TV
The Little Lady and I have been working through Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As of today, we have gotten about 10 episodes into season 2. We've witnessed the Avengers tackle Loki and his invasion of Asgard, the Kree, and right now, the Skrull invasion. The cartoon is epic, far more than the movies ever will be, so for anyone that wants to get into the Marvel universe, this is an excellent place to start (others might suggest the comics, naturally, but if you are like me and comics aren't your thing, then check out the cartoon). I wish they worked harder to get more female superheroes into the mix - we've recently been introduced to Ms. Marvel, a strong female superhero, and Wasp has been there since the beginning, but she fits too many ditzy female stereotypes to really count as a solid female superhero. The comic relief is consistently good, and the series does a good job of recalling intertwining storylines that began at the beginning of the series. Despite the complexity of the storylines, The Little Lady has had no problems getting what's going on until recently, when she got thoroughly confused on who was a Skrull and who was not.

In other TV nerdiness, Umberto MacJay and I are attempting to watch every season of Dexter and rank each and every episode. We spent one glorious afternoon discussing our rating mechanisms and how we are going to rank each episode and present it to all of you wonderful readers. The entire list will probably be available on this blog sometime in the Fall, but don't hold us too closely to that - this is a significant undertaking, and I myself am only about halfway through season 2. I have seen every season except for the final season, which fans were not crazy about, but I am going to withhold judgement until I see it for myself.

Video Games
Where to begin here? I have been playing a wide variety of games over the course of the month, mainly because whenever I finally get time to sit down and play one, it's been so long since I have actually played anything. As a result, I've done mostly gaming without any semblance of a story - Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. I already wrote at length about Super Mario 3D World and will spare you anymore details here (no, I have not yet beaten that STUPID OBNOXIOUS RIDICULOUS final level). Mario Kart 8 continues to be a challenge with the addition of 200cc, a ridiculously fast romp through the levels that forces you to change your entire racing strategy. It's like playing a brand new game after being so accustomed to 150cc and the Mirror tracks. I am still missing a 3-star, gold trophy on one of the Mirror tracks, and got 2 stars on one of them (I HATE not getting 3 stars - I usually quit as soon as I don't get first in a race as a result). But, I have enjoyed trying 200cc and silently cursing Nintendo for forcing me to change the strategy that I used over the course of an entire 8-game series.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is out and about again in my house because I purchased all of the DLC. Ryu has been a fun addition, and I have enjoyed whipping out all of my old Street Fighter moves when I use him (although really, I usually fall back on using the B button to use all of the special moves to ensure my victory). I wish they had added more locations in the new DLC - I miss the stages in Brawl and Melee so much, the newer versions haven't quite lived up to those - but overall, the game is still a blast to play in a living room full of people.

I spent a lot of the beginning of the month playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. It's easily one of the strongest entries in the Zelda franchise, and perhaps, at the moment at least, is my favorite of the overhead, 2D Zelda titles (not that it is really 2D, with its gorgeous 3D visuals). I am super glad they ditched the requirement of using the touch screen to control Link. I never finished Phantom Hourglass as a result - my hand would get cramped up eventually, and I always ended up doing things I didn't want to do eventually, because of the odd controls. A Link Between Worlds, while I am not even halfway through, has proven to be a phenomenally deep game. I just hope I have more time over the next month to play it.

The Little Lady has taken over LEGO Marvel Superheroes, although I got pretty far before she decided she was going to play it all of the time. Again, I wrote at length about this earlier, so I will spare the details now, but the depth of the game continues to amaze me. I could wander around LEGO New York City for HOURS and still not find everything, and that's a good thing. The Little Lady has also taken over Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and thankfully, she is no longer leaving all of her stuff lying around town. As the mayor of Koholint, my town in Animal Crossing, I want my village looking immaculately clean. She probably wouldn't have cleaned up the town except I pointed out that, if you go to the Mayor's Office, my secretary points out how absolutely annoyed all of the villagers are about it. Thanks, Nintendo, for making a game that encourages me to obsessively organize things - that almost makes up for changing my Mario Kart strategy.

Movies
Nothing much going on here. We have been having The Little Lady watch the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes, we'll probably show her the prequel trilogy because it is, after all, canon. Then we can take her to see the new one, whether she's still living with us or not. I continue to love how interested she is in virtually everything - it was so easy to get her into Star Wars and keep her interested. She still asks me sometimes why Obi-Wan didn't tell Luke the truth about Darth Vader. She seems very annoyed about that.

We went and saw Inside-Out and both my wife and I bawled while the girls were simply non-plussed by (spoiler alert) the realization that yes, some important memories can be sad and our emotions get more complicated as we enter our teenage years. Pixar's slogan should be "let us entertain your kids while you bawl your eyes out." That damn Lava short-movie didn't help - I honestly thought they would give us a sad ending to that volcano's tale for a few seconds, and thought, "Geez, Pixar, I thought you wouldn't stoop this low after the first ten minutes of Up." Don't worry, guys - it's Pixar, it ends happily, although you still might cry.

Books
After finishing Stephen King's It, I read the not-so-nerdy Faithful, the story about the 2004 Boston Red Sox in which Stephen King was a co-writer. The Red Sox are my one truly non-nerdy interest, although I needed to read Faithful to remind myself that I am still a Red Sox fan after such a horrible season up until now.

It is a good book if you think about it like a short story collection, but overall, it's a mess of missed opportunities and silly storytelling shortcuts, all in an effort to force out some sort of epic story even though there really isn't any need for it. Characters like Henry Bowers (a truly amazing King villain) and Beverly's father (King knows exactly how to take abusive, horrible people and make them somehow more disgusting) are far more terrifying than It, and the backstories and the little vignettes King tells are often far more fascinating than the main story. I want to like this book, but it's such a mess that I have to consider it one of the worst King outings I've read, probably the first one I have read that disappointed me (I haven't even come close to reading them all, and if it matters, my favorites so far are The Stand, The Shining and The Dead Zone).

I am now reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something I am told I should have read long ago. As a nerd, it's probably criminal that I haven't read it yet, and so far, I am pretty impressed. Some of the comedy within it feels twinged with arrogance on the part of the author, a sort of "oh wow, look at how clever I am" sort of feeling, but enough of it is quite entertaining that I am continuing to read it each night before going to sleep. It's part of an anthology with three other books by Adams, so I'll probably read those too.

Coming Up in August...
My wife and I will see Ant-Man at some point, and I am sure I will just throw all of my wonderful feelings about the Marvel cinematic universe down in a blog entry at some point afterwards. I will continue to read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, hopefully getting through it by the end of the month, and I want desperately to work harder on The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, in the hopes that I can write a Game Profile about it. More Dexter is on tap as well, perhaps allowing me to write an entry about how well it humanizes such a dark character, and adds darkness to characters that are otherwise good. I have also been thinking a lot about online gaming and what it has done to the social aspect of gaming. I have an opinion that is probably in the minority of opinions on online gaming, but hey, I'm going to throw it out there anyway.