Friday, September 27, 2013

One Last Slice of Life (Dexter finale spoilers)

Dexter is over.  The series finale aired this past Sunday.  It was just okay

That's the most I can say for the final season of a show that at it's best, may have been the most original and well-written crime/procedural drama on television ever (and it turned that genre on it's head).  Unfortunately, as even great shows tend to do, Dexter became a sort of parody of itself in the last season.  So the end wasn't the epic finale the fan base desperately wanted it to be (oh, some people are pissed), but I also feel like it wasn't awful enough to detract from the overall warehouse of awesome that was the entire Dexter series.

MULTIPLE SEASON SPOILERS BELOW.  YE BE WARNED.

Anyway, in my opinion, the main problem with this season, and the previous one to some extent, is that most of the really interesting stuff already got thoroughly explored in earlier seasons.  All that remained, really, was the plot-centric question of what happens to Dexter, as in: does he get away or not?  The answer: Sort of.  He fakes his death and becomes a lumberjack.  Because that's what people do when they want to disappear.  Just ask Wolverine.

Then there's Hannah.  There wasn't really an aspect of her that wasn't already handled in a more likable package (Rita, Lumen), or a more annoying one (Lila, aka the titty vampire).  So you get Hannah and there's not a lot to her, because other than being an amalgamated version of the previous women, she disappears for a good portion of the two seasons she's featured.  In her first season, she has to share "Big Bad" status with Issak Sirko, who is actually sort of interesting until he gets blown away by his boring henchman, who then gets conveniently blown away by Quinn.  Then she reappears halfway through the last season and is suddenly the love of Dexter's life, even though we honestly never got to see why she's so special other than some on-the-nose dialogue where Dexter flat out says so.

At least we got some closure with Cody and Astor...  Nah, I'm just messin' with ya.  Cody and Astor just sort of bugger off because we need to concentrate on Harrison and ignore the fact that, like the youngest child of a sitcom family, a lot of his stuff is going to end up a rehash of the things that the older kids already went through.  Also, seeing too much of Rita's kids would lead more people to question why Dexter thought it best to send his child to live with a fugitive murderer he's known less than a year instead of his actual blood relatives.

The last season also features some subplots that sort of go nowhere.  Vince Masuka has a daughter, it turns out, which provides some comic relief, but not much else because it's like the writers realized they only had ten episodes and they also have to deal with the Quinn/Deb/Jamie love triangle and this season's Isaak Sirko played by Charlotte Rampling who previously starred in the greatest movie of all time: Zardoz.

All in all, I think the reason I'm not as angry about this as some other fans is that the show was clearly not what it once was and I'd already sort of lowered my expectations.  There's all kinds of "how it should have ended" posts on the net, and a few people going so far as to suggest a kickstarter to shoot a proper send off to America's favorite serial killer.  Yes, the lumberjack ending was all manner of lame, but I don't know about actually trying to do something about it.  I feel like quoting another great show with an ending that made a lot of people angry, but I felt was a far superior way to end a series:

"What's done is done."

That's right.  I managed to shoehorn LOST into a post about the end of Dexter.  And tell Vogel's son that "Make Your Own Kind of Music" is Desmond Hume's song, so step off.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

A Three-Year Engagement

November's just over a month away.  For normies, that means football, leaves changing colors (if you live in a place where they actually do that), and something about Native Americans hosting a dinner for a bunch of people who got kicked out of England for wearing buckles on their hats.  (Seriously, it's not like the buckles were holding anything up.  Stupid pretentious fashionista Pilgrims...)  For myself and thousands of other writers, it means the self-imposed stress of National Novel Writing Month.  If you're not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's this writing challenge that takes place every November where you write a fifty-thousand page novel in thirty days and behave like some neurotic, OCD novelist while your friends and family shake their heads and call you names behind your back, provided they don't already do that, in which case, you probably won't notice.

There are no real stakes and no real enforcement of the rules, except maybe some decent discounts on writing software and similarly related products, so it's kind of hilarious how stressed out people can get over their NaNoWriMo project.  I imagine people new to the idea raising an eyebrow and asking "What's the point?  What do I get out of this thing?"

After a brisk backhand to the cheek, I imagine Yoda narrowing his eyes whilst stating "Only what you take with you," because I'm a gigantic nerd and should probably get out of my Mom's basement.  I'm joking again; I live in Southern California and nobody has a basement here.  But I digress...

This year will mark three years since my first successful Nano and holy shit, I promised to release the damn thing independently on Kindle, Nook, etc, then become rich and famous like that pervert who wrote 50 Shades of Gray.  I even used GIMP to paint a nifty cover before promptly going all lame and putting it on the back burner.


Yeah, so it's an adventure novel involving radioactive mushrooms and international espionage in an alternate diesel-punk timeline.  I've decided I'm finally going to put this thing out before November because three years is a long ass time to sit on a project that in purely technical terms is only long enough to be a "novella".  I decided that just now as I was writing.  As soon as I finish this blog entry.  Hah, I'm already procrastinating on the editing by not ending this blog because once I end this blog, it means I have to get started...  And I will.  Right.  Now.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

8-bit Assault Loadout

Tribute to retro/old-school gaming.  It was weird working on a quad-core processor in Manga Studio 5 at 125 x 125 resolution.

This design is available at RedBubble on shirts and whatnot.