Monday News Nightmare: Roadkill
Well I’m still not quite all the way back from the extended trip to Maine I’ve been on for the past five days, but I’m not going to let something like having driven a combined 16 hours over the past day and a half stop me from doing this even if it means finally turning the car over to my Dad for the last 120 miles.
Today was a holiday right? Funny the things you don’t seem to really notice when you’re on the road.
– Hobbylink Japan shows a preview of stuff from the All Japan Mokei Hobby Show, making me wish that pictures loaded through this connection quicker
HLJ really knocked me for a loop with that gorgeous 1/1500 scale Arcadia above; I probably won’t even get to appreciate it properly until tomorrow when I regain consciousness and look at it from somewhere with a stronger connection than what’s available to me on the road. The All Japan Mokei Hobby Show, where the model will be fully displayed, runs this upcoming weekend, the same as NYCC. That makes for two conventions likely to have some sort of Tiger & Bunny reveal, but between Harlock’s Arcadia and the Vanship from Last Exile, I’m interested in a model show, something I never practically expected. [Source: Tomopop]
Look! She was in a comic with Deadpool!
– 10 billion websites suddenly mention Ms. Marvel simultaneously, character’s profile now higher than two solo series could manage while I consider crying
It’s never too early for Avengers 2 rumors! Everyone’s temporarily forgotten about that weird minor outrage of the SHIELD TV show using original characters long enough to focus on what characters they expect to see in Marvel’s follow-up to their gigantic mega hit. While The Dark Knight Rises fans still can’t seem to tolerate the film’s existence long enough to not try and tear down for five minutes, speculation that the role of Carol Danvers, better known as Ms. Marvel, and more recently known as Captain Marvel, is down between two actresses: Emily Blunt and Ruth Wilson. I don’t really know much about Ruth Wilson, outside of seeing her on a few episodes of Luther, but I hate to say I can’t really get behind either of these options. Wilson seems a little too young and Blunt… just doesn’t feel right to me somehow. Maybe I’m thinking too much of her role in Looper, but the whole “tough” angle doesn’t really echo in my mind when I’m thinking about her, no matter how big a fan of the actress I am. Yet somehow I still think Blunt would have been best utilized as the Black Widow, the Marvel role she was originally meant to play all the way back in Iron Man 2; she had to opt out so she could finish the barely remembered Gulliver’s Travels from a few years ago. I’m glad that they’re trying to get her back in the fold somehow but “first available female role” doesn’t sound like an ideal way to do it. Personally I think she’d make for a better Wasp, but that character’s currently dead and Ms. Marvel just had a high profile relaunch, so odds are we’re going to be seeing one before we do the other. [Source: Bleeding Cool]
– Website for Monsters University opens, makes me depressed about higher education in real life
Admittedly that’s not a hard thing to do as I have a longstanding and intense hatred for the local university around here, detesting their policy of treating their students as cattle at the expense of supplying the influential residents of town with a pseudo-prestigious social event in the form of basketball games, but the Monsters University website isn’t helping, especially since the film’s whole environment seems based on one of those nice schools that can actually supply their students with a future instead of mortgaging their dreams for more programs that go nowhere. I have to admire Pixar’s hard work though, as the site is just about as detailed as you can get as an oblique promotion for a film almost a year out; it’s packed with so many things it’s like getting a DVD special feature before the movie itself hits theaters. Hell, the site is more detailed and functional than the one for the university I was just talking about! [Source: Slashfilm]
– Takara reveals more Masterpiece Transformers while Mattycollector gets ready for a savage knife fight over my wallet
This is getting stupid ridiculous: Takara just revealed that not one, but TWO, sets of cassettes will be coming for December’s Masterpiece Soundwave! Ravage & Rumble will be joined by Buzzsaw & Frenzy, expected this February and March respectively after which you can debate with your friends about which one is actually Rumble and which one is actually Frenzy. Fun! At the tolerable price of $60 apiece, these guys are a direct line to breaking my will so I hope the first quarter of 2013 isn’t too ridiculous for Matty releases (it probably will be). Besides that, they also showed off the snazzy looking Black Convoy, a.k.a. MP-10B, alongside the mother of all Encore choices: Fortress Maximus. While I still lack regular MP-10, waiting for the TRU exclusive Hasbro version, I do have my eye on Fort Max as one of those insane things I’d love to own since the one I picked up at a yardsale as a kid had almost none of his actual parts anymore. Heck, I didn’t even know how to properly transform him until the mid-90’s! [Source: Seibertron]
I’m going to stop since this is all I managed in about 3 hours of trying really hard, not counting all the stuff I just added since we finally got home a few minutes ago. Can I finish all these polishes before midnight strikes? Actually, yeah, it’s looking like it. But don’t stop there! Read the stuff from last week which is all a lot better than I know deep in my heart this news installment turned out!
Monday News: Eye candy and pistons
See where I posted a ton of videos last week because I actually had time to work on the news!
Tuesday: Talkin’ ’bout Turtles – IDW TMNT #14 (by Marshall)
Marshall continues to be one of my personal heroes by turning in an article, therefore making me and Jaysun’s whole week at least 35% less stressful!
Wednesday: The Great Albums: Van Halen – Fair Warning (by Jaysun)
Jaysun writes about Van Halen, a band I know more about than people apparently assume I do. I’m guessing it’s the glasses or my lack of a political science degree or something.
Thursday: Frankenweenie review
What happens when I try and write a review in 90 minutes after not sleeping for 38 hours and driving for about 3/4 of a day? Read and find out!
Friday: Illustrating a point – The Red (by Jaysun)
Jas makes a graph about how people don’t understand things that I’m honestly not sure if I understand. I blame the vacation that wasn’t a vacation resulting in how my brain feels like the Mach 5’s engine after racing against the Mammoth Car. Still, something had to go up and I was still… goddamn… driving.
Did you make it to the end? That’s cool. I apologize for the crappiness of this entry but all the time spent driving round trip was something like 52 hours total and there’s only so much you can do when you’re having to use your phone as an internet router in the rare patches we drove through where I had service. Stay tuned tomorrow for something that I hope will make you guys forget that this ever happened, while I try to focus on actually getting the show going again!
Planned Banter 
Definitive answer: Rumble is red. The reason? Not only did the toy come first, but you don’t treat a cartoon as some color bible when half the episodes accidentally featured upward of 7 Staracreams on screen at any given time.
Okay, it was probably 2 Starscreams once or twice. But also several crazy-ass Seeker colors, born of error, who eventually got random toys just to explain away all that craziness and let us sleep at night. I’m still coping with the fact that Starcream walked into a graveyard of WW2 vehicles to create the combaticons and walked out of there with a space shuttle dude. That Hitler fella was a bit further along than the Allies had expected. Not really. I think some junked out plane magically morphed into a brown space shuttle for no reason upon activation, which makes the Astronaut Hitler theory I just invented seem tame by comparison.
I love the look of battleship-based space cruisers and there’s something strange and beautiful about the way that’s such a very Japanese thing that I think is absolutely cool and iconic enough to cross cultures, but really hasn’t very much despite how very long they’ve been around. That one is gorgeous, but I’ll be able to resist it unless it turns out it folds into a skull robot. Which it certainly won’t.
I don’t have a huge invested interest in Ms. Marvel besides generally liking her when she pops up, but I’m really pulling for her! Marvel would sacrifice a litter of orphans to have their own Wonder Woman of sorts, and I think she’s the one for the job. Their previous efforts for an A-list female have always fallen short or felt EXTREMELY forced. Remember a few years ago, when some assortments of Marvel merchandise would feature Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine….and Elektra for no damn reason. They’ve tried Storm, but she also feels odd yanked away from her team. It seemed like Spider-Woman was being built up to A-list status for a while, and she can be a good character, but as far as being bumped up to one of the faces of the Marvel brand it seems kinda crummy that the best they could do would have been a character perceived by the general public as lady Spider-Man.
So, anyway…let’s go Ms. Marvel! She’s her own character! She’s tough! She can stand on her own without feeling like a piece of another team! She’s not a damn assassin resurrected by Ninja!
I think she can do it. I like the character and she’s got a history of decent, very comic booky looks. Marvel needs this while DC continues to sit on Wonder Woman while farting a lot.