Take hip-hop, video games, superheroes, guest appearances by Beefy, 1-UP, and MC OhmI, mix ‘em all together and out pops From Beta to Alpha Riff. Stream and buy the album on Bandcamp and the typical places: iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and more.

“Alpha Riff is a hip-hop artist with a penchant for waxing philosophically about video games, dungeons and dragons, love, and the universe.”

Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and at AlphaRiff.com.

San Diego Comic Con

Join The Baker Street Babes, Being Geek Chic, The Nerdy Girlie, SherlockDC, and Cara McGee for a night of sleuthing, tea, games, prizes!

DATE: Thursday July 18th

ADRESS: Brick + Mortar {820 5th Avenue}

TIME:  6 – 9 p.m.

Mingle downstairs with your fellow Sherlockians and gush over the pair at 221B. Have a cuppa of Cara’s famous Sherlock tea blends, goof around in our 221B photo booth, FREE FOOD {WAY better than the convention center!}, and prepare yourself for the best Sherlock night of your life (barring Series 3 airing, it’s a little hard to top that!).

You DON’T need a SDCC badge to come either! This is an ALL AGES party!!  We’ll be holding a raffle to win a signed copy of “A Scandal In Belgravia” signed by Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, & Andrew Scott amongst other things!

So what are you waiting for? The party, my friends, is ON!  We would LOVE to see you there!!

Purchase SherlockeDCC tickets

If you cannot attend the party, don’t fret!  We have awesome stuff for you too!  Visit www.sherlockedcc.com and you can purchase raffle tickets for the signed Sherlock script.  We even have Sherlock art exclusive to our event.  Please check it out and spread the word, your support is invaluable!

Well, after yesterday’s comments, we should be able to expect even greater things. Goyer, along with producers Charles Roven and Deborah Snyder, sat down for an interview with Hate U Guys, where he remained relatively noncommittal about Justice League and further Man of Steel movies.

When asked about Justice League, he replied:

“It would be disingenuous to say Warner Bros doesn’t hope that this would be the starting point for a shared universe. And Zack has said that Bruce Wayne exists in this universe. It would be a different Bruce Wayne from Chris’ [Nolan] Dark Knight trilogy, and it would be disingenuous to say that Zack and I haven’t had various conversations on set, around ‘what if’ and ‘moving forward’.

That having been said, it’s all going to depend on the next few weeks. Warner Bros has hopes that there will be more Man Of Steel films, and that this will be the beginning of a shared universe. We could meet Batman, or Wonder Woman, or the Justice League in these movies. But they all hinge on box office reception.”

If that happens, I would be happy, and nervous, to dive in.

Though it takes some interpreting, it seems he’s saying that they may start introducing more superheroes like Batman or Wonder Woman in further Man of Steel installments, which means we’ll be meeting these characters through a Superman movie, when Superman meets them. Considering the fact that Man of Steel 2 has just been announced and without attempting to extrapolate too much, we can make a somewhat safe conjecture that either Batman or Wonder Woman could be introduced in the sequel. Take this with a vat of salt, please.

Aside from all this speculation, logistically speaking, I think introducing the rest of the Leaguers in a Man of Steel flick would work. He is the leader of the Justice League after all and it would be cool to see them congregate and look to him for leadership. Plus introducing a brand new Batman into Man of Steel would work well too because this new Batman will be as much a stranger to us as he is to Supes. We’ll learn as much about this Batman as he would allow himself to reveal to Superman. Batman has always been the more aloof Leaguer and according to the Timmverse, a part-timer. He’s a self-contained hero and does his own thing in his own city. From a Justice League standpoint, the less we know about him, the better. It’s only after seeing him work with Supes for the first time, will it be better to branch off until his own reboot. At least, that’s what I would do.

This somewhat corroborates Snyder’s teasing when he first mentioned the Batman Easter egg. Though Goyer seems to think that Snyder confirmed Bruce Wayne’s existence in this universe, it’s hard to get over Snyder’s dismissive attitude towards the Easter egg in that interview he gave.

In the same interview, Goyer would neither confirm nor deny that he is writing Justice League, but does have the knowledge that the original script that surfaced last year, by Will Beall, is not the one they’re going with.

Ingredients:
1 oz Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka
3/4 oz Captain Morgan’s Original Spiced Rum
3/4 oz silver tequila
3/4 oz gin
1 oz sour mix
Sweet Tea
Coca-cola
Lemon

Directions: Shake all ingredients, except for the sweet tea and cola, with ice and pour in a highball glass. Top off with an even mix of cola and sweet tea and garnish with a lemon wedge. Toast to the Independents and drink up! This variation of the classic Long Island Iced Tea cocktail is also known as Browncoat Tea.

Family Guy Giveaway

On June 20, 2013, one lucky Family Guy fan will win a Family Guy Collector’s Gift package which includes Family Guy Volume 1-10 DVDs and the Monopoly Family Guy board game. Click on the Family Guy Characters above to enter.

Some people say Superman is a boring character because he has so many powers. Blasphemy, right? When you think about it, it’s really not that hard to believe some of the Supes haters out there. In reality, you have to ask the question: what will make this godlike being flinch? What challenges can Superman really endure to make a compelling story? Can’t Superman simply solve everything with a swipe of his mighty palm? With such limitless capabilities, it’s hard to imagine that Superman would ever really be challenged. Though there is a lack of characters that can seriously pose a real threat to Superman (thus the reason to create even more powerful villains like Doomsday and Darkseid), the easiest and probably most effective way is make him human. Make him a sympathetic and relatable character that just so happens to be able to lift a city bus with one hand or fly faster than a jet fighter.

As a Batman fan, it was difficult for me to have any interest in a character like Superman. Though I never deemed him boring, I just failed to generate any real liking for a character with so much power. But in recent years, I’ve learned to appreciate him because of his unwavering dedication to justice, similar to Batman, and also his eternal optimism, dissimilar to Batman. Reliable and omnipresent, rest assured Supes has your back. Therefore, a movie like Man of Steel came at a good point in time where I could fully appreciate the character, when movies like Superman Returns really reinforced my borderline antipathy for him. Man of Steel had the recipe for a good movie. We had Christopher Nolan, the man who ushered in a new era for superhero movies, David S. Goyer, the man who helped realize a new, grittier take on Batman, and Zack Snyder, a visionary director who had a couple spectacular comic-book movies under his belt. I’m glad to say that I wasn’t disappointed with the end product.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Man of Steel, being an origin story, begins as expected on the surface of a dying Krypton, as brilliant scientist and father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) discusses the great things that his son is destined for with his loving and courageous wife, Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer). Here is where we are introduced to our primary antagonist, military leader, general Zod, who’s staging an insurrection to steal the Codex that will help him begin a new Krypton. Entrusted with the Codex, the blueprint of Kryptonian life, Jor-El ships off his son into space, while Zod is captured attempting to shoot the vessel out of the sky. Doomed to the phantom zone, Zod declares revenge on the Son of El.

The film then takes place over 30 years later on the planet Earth, as we find what appears to be a disheveled vagabond with extraordinary abilities. His first display of said abilities is saving a crew from a burning oil rig. From there, we learn about Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) through flashbacks. Clark grows up aware that he is different and somehow special, he is coaxed by his father Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) to hide his uniqueness for fear that the world will not understand or accept him. A particular eventful bus ride prompts further discussion and Jonathan finally reveals to Clark the ship that he arrived in. Present day Clark has been on a journey to discover his identity, when he finds himself at the North Pole, where the military is attempting to excavate something from the ice that’s estimated to be 20,000 years old, with Lois Lane (Amy Adams) reporting on the events. It’s when Clark discovers what lays under the ice that our adventure really begins, and he fully realizes who he was meant to be.

Satisfied, he returns home to his mother, Martha Kent (Dianne Lane) and attempts to settle down and continue life with his newfound identity, when a mysterious ship appears outside of Earth. Zod infiltrates the airwaves and broadcasts a demand to see Kal-El. Armed with weaponry far more advanced and coupled with the same abilities granted by Earth’s sun, Clark obliges. It is soon discovered that Zod intends to finish what he started when his own planet was languishing. He wants to rebuild Krypton and he doesn’t care if he needs to sacrifice the human race to do so.

I find that in Snyder’s tale of Superman, there isn’t much to complain about. The flick may get tedious at times because of how heavy-handed the more dramatic or emotional scenes are played out. Though mostly filled with brilliant performances by this cast, it seems Snyder took this flick so seriously that the direction hams up some of these scenes a lot more than any of the actors anticipated. The way some of these scenes are shot kinda borders on melodrama and that may turn some folks off when this is supposed to be a big actioner. Snyder’s desire to make this movie elegant and artsy results in so much lens flare that J.J. Abrams would be jealous. Then, on the flip side, when we’re privy to an action scene, he speeds things up… a lot. So much so that it can be hard to follow sometimes and to add even further confusion, he likes to move the camera a great deal, shaking it more often than not. I understand that he’s trying to capture the chaos and sheer power and speed of a fight between gods, but I think there could have been another way to do so without putting your audience through vertigo. There was one particular scene in which he plays ring around the rosie with Clark and Jor-El that left me a little dizzy. However, these are just small missteps that can be overlooked.

What makes this flick work is probably the amount of reverence that the cast and crew feel towards this character and the determination they had to create a really memorable movie that properly honors him, and that translates. All that heavy-handedness just seems like an authentic but misguided attempt to really give this movie and therefore give this character the proper depth that he deserves. As I said before, the way to really make this character shine is to balance the godlike abilities he has with the human side of him. And I’m glad to say that that Goyer managed to properly reflect that with a script that shows Clark Kent, an adoptee and an immigrant with a shrouded past and a fear that the world he’s come to love will reject him for being different. This works best when told from a point of a view of a child who wants nothing more than to be normal. Though I’m sure it’s not breaking any new ground, it really makes us feel for a character that is wholly and truly above us. We are also treated to an antihero villain as well. A lot can be said for a character that is pure evil, but more can be said for a villain who really wants to do right, but is willing to make sacrifices to do so. In the end, Zod just wants his people back. Don’t worry; they balance all this mushy stuff with action. A crap ton of it. A spectacular crap ton.

So while Snyder may have had problems properly infusing an emotional core into this flick, he makes up for it with over an hour of action. There really isn’t another word to describe some of the stuff that goes on during the second half of the movie other than spectacular. I was in awe throughout most of it. Some more so than others, such as several of the shots where Supes is just discovering his ability to fly or as a matter of fact, any of the scenes where he’s not in direct conflict with a Kryptonian. In fact, he handles much of the special effects and CGI initially with a lot of grace and wonder. But when the brawls start kicking in, that’s all out the window as he attempts to harness all that frenetic energy and purposely fails to do so. While watching the trailers, I wondered whether or not the Kryptonians would do more damage to Metropolis than the Avengers did to New York (doesn’t everybody?) and I can tell you there is absolutely no contest, and you’ll just have to see exactly how large that discrepancy is.

I was also particularly fond of the ensemble cast that they managed to assemble, as they showed their reverence for the material with brilliant performances all around. Special props are given to the fathers Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe, both of whom bore a lot of the emotional weight in those scenes.

Here’s the skinny: Despite some missteps in direction, I feel like Snyder really managed to pull off a strong, thrilling action-packed spectacle while still grounding Superman in a way that makes the character relatable. He has some troubles bringing that emotional core to the screen, but Goyer’s script is still translated well-enough through the brilliant performances by the cast. It’s a script that does Superman right by showing us just how powerful he is but also balancing it well enough to let us know that he’s not without feeling, by bringing Superman down to a human level, allowing audiences to really feel for someone with that much power. Overall, the admiration they have for this iconic character is pretty obvious and that makes the movie that much more enjoyable. It’s definitely worth a watch in theatres and if you have the extra cash to dish out for 3D and/or IMAX, go for it. I’m not the largest proponent of either format, but they make very good use of it in this movie, but that’s just one man’s opinion.