Stopping Uwe Boll

So I have this co-worker at Flying Lab named Bert and he detests German director Uwe Boll. As both a movie fan and a gamer, he finds Boll's film adaptations of computer games to be harmful to both art forms. Several times over the past 18 months I've heard Bert go off on rants about Mr. Boll and hilarity always ensued.

A few weeks ago I was reading Defamer and ran across the story of an online petition to make Owe Boll stop making movies. I tried to remember to tell Bert about this petition the next day, as I was sure he'd want to sign it. Turns out Bert was quite familiar with the Stop Uwe Boll petition: he started it! The story of the petition has spread and Bert was interviewed by several media outlets, including the NY Times. Even better, Boll himself responded. He said the petition would need at least a million signatures before he'd take it seriously. Over 275,000 people have signed already.

If you want to end this menace, you can sign the petition here.

http://stopuweboll.org/

Do the right thing.

Nerdy Saturday

Yesterday was pretty nerd-tastic. I took the bus downtown in the afternoon to go to Emerald City Comic Con. I generally far prefer gaming cons to comic and scifi cons because there's a lot more to do. Emerald City had some seminars but nothing like the programming you'd see at a game convention. I was there to do a bit of business and then catch up with a bunch of people I don't see that often. I also ran into some old friends from WotC, as well as some of the newer blood like Rodney Thompson (who contributed to Buccaneers of Freeport, at print now). I picked up volume 2 of the Walking Dead, which I've had trouble finding locally. Then I stopped by the Boom booth to chat with Ross. He's an old gamer and I had sent him a box of GR stuff a while back. He loaded me up with 14 of their graphic novels and that put an end to my shopping, as my bag was stuffed.

Nik and Kate arrived mid-afternoon. Kate was a zombie because she had stayed up half the night doing a sleepover with her friends. I tried to find some things of interest to her but she was too tired and couldn't muster any enthusiasm. After we left the con, Nicole suggested we make a second attempt to see Iron Man. That seemed only too appropriate so we walked over to Pacific Place and had no trouble getting tickets this time. I enjoyed the movie, particularly the performance of Robert Downey Jr., though I wasn't as blown away as some of my friends have been. I understand the impulse for film makers to do origin stories in superhero movies but I wish they'd stop. This one was better than most attempts, but I'd rather they just got on with the superheroics. I also want to see the protagonists as part of a larger superheroic world. In the Superman movies, for example, you never get the sense there are other supers in the world and that's too bad. This is why the scene after the Iron Man credits excited me a lot more than the movie itself. Until the promise of that movie is fulfilled though, my favorite supers film remains X-men 2.