I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.
This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.
Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:
Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.
Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.
Every so often you’ll hear about some sort of writing challenge. Write every day for a month! they’ll say, sometimes with a list of suggested topics. Sometimes the challenge is just the list of topics and the idea is you’ll spend thirty days writing about your great love of, I dunno, horses or whatever.
This post marks five hundred days straight of blogging, without missing a day.
Nobody ever gets to tell me to do anything, ever again.
That’s out of five thousand and eighteen posts total, by the way, meaning that my five thousandth post was me being whiny and bored, and I didn’t realize it was such a significant number. The blog hit its twelfth anniversary in June; twelve is kind of a whatever number, so I deliberately didn’t worry about that.
Total wordcount: an utterly ludicrous 1,694,839, not counting this post.
Just imagine what I could do if I was, like, writing for money or something like that.
(Part of me wants to take tomorrow off, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen.)
The Treehouse set, which has since been retired, has been sitting in my office waiting patiently for me to get to it since my 48th birthday. I finally started putting it together a week or so ago, doing a couple of bags at a time because the instruction manual was terrible and I was going blind every time I looked at it. One way or another today I finally tackled all those leaves and finished it off. There were also green leaves in the box, but I like the autumn look a lot more.
Also, my fingers are not quite bleeding, but damn, putting all those vertical pieces into the leaves hurt.
The leafy portions can be lifted directly off, and all of the roofs come off of the three “house” portions of the set, so you can explore inside if you want to. Everything is detailed and furnished according to Lego’s traditional “details where no one will see them” system (and there’s a yellow gemstone hidden underneath the grass for some reason, too) and it all looks really nice.
In its final resting place, giving the A-Frame cabin some extra shade:
I may end up putting it on a little riser to make it more visible. That picture’s not from eye level in my desk chair but it’s still a little more covered up than I’d like.
What I really ought to do for this review is just copy and paste my Superman review from a couple of weeks ago and then change all the names. Because it’s really kind of ridiculous how similar my feelings on both of the movies are. Which is, if you missed my Superman review, very much a good thing.
My son is sitting behind me, working on something for his summer science class, and he just read that over my shoulder and went “Heh. A good Thing.”
Ben Grimm is magnificent in this film, by the way. There has never been a good Fantastic Four movie, and there’s never been a good Ben Grimm in the bad Fantastic Four movies. This movie somehow manages to be one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen despite picking up a franchise with an incredibly bad track record on film. I loved it for a lot of the same reasons I loved Superman— namely, that this is a story about heroes, who want to be heroes, and who are expected to be heroes. The whole intro to the film is all about them saving lives. There’s no squirrel rescue scene, or anything like that, but there’s lots and lots of saving people, which is the whole point of this entire genre.
Another thing this movie does right that it has in common with Superman is it knows good and Goddamn well that you’ve been watching superhero movies for twenty years now, and there have been four movies about these guys before this one, and so it dispenses with the origin story in about five minutes. This means that the film doesn’t need to start with Reed and Sue not being married and they don’t need to show them being in love; nay, it can literally start with, in a first for a superhero movie, Sue sitting on the toilet, having just peed on a pregnancy test, which is coming up positive.
Marvel tried to hide the pregnancy angle at first and then stopped, but this movie has no time to waste, so Sue’s pregnant right away, and is actually massively pregnant during the first encounter with Galactus– who, in another first, is also done right. Sue actually gives birth to Franklin Richards on the ship on the way back to Earth, and watching the team deal with her going into labor while trying to not get killed by the Silver Surfer is a hell of a thing.
I’m kind of rambling, so let me cut to the quick, here: this is a great superhero movie, for very much the same reasons that Superman is a great superhero movie: it understands its characters, and it understands why they’ve been in (damn near, in this case) continuous publication since the 1960s, and it doesn’t bother screwing around with them or changing them for the tastes of Modern Audiences, which always, always involves making them more evil and stupid. This Fantastic Four is optimistic and cheery and unapologetically brilliant, and there’s no dark secrets, and no hidden betrayals, and they fucking love each other, and that is so Goddamned refreshing in a 2025 superhero movie that it was really all they needed to get right for me to love the movie.
The boy wants me to mention that Mole Man was cool. He is correct. Mole Man, for the first time in his history as a character, was cool.
The casting was superb across the board, really. I had my doubts about Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards; they were incorrect, and now I can’t really picture anyone else in the role. Sue and Ben are fantastic great. And Johnny …
…
Let’s talk about the Human Torch for a minute here.
Johnny Storm is very frequently, and for good reason, used as the comic relief in Fantastic Four stories, regardless of the medium. He currently literally has a handlebar mustache in the comics for no reason other than that he knows everyone else hates it:
He has an interesting role in this film– and, hell, it’s just now hitting me that this is sort of another parallel to what Superman did with Jimmy Olsen– in that he usually sort of gets the Xander role, as the useless funny guy, and neither movie was interested in that character. This movie remembered that he was on that first flight for a reason, and handles it in a way that I’m still not convinced about.
(Minor spoilers to follow. Not a big deal. I’ll use separators.)
So this universe’s Johnny Storm is apparently a master of linguistics, somehow? Like, on Reed’s level, practically? There have been repeated alien signals coming for months prior to Galactus’s arrival, and Reed is preoccupied with running countless tests on his genetically-altered pregnant wife to make sure that the child is going to be okay, so Johnny takes over looking at the signals. And he figures out that the signals are in the same language that Shalla Bal (Silver Surfer) says to him during a very brief conversation, and he decodes the entire alien language in a couple of months. And then he manages to figure out some other things that I won’t spoil, and it ends up being way more important to the climax of the film than one might expect.
This Johnny Storm also has a streak of nobility to him that isn’t exactly new, but is definitely more pronounced in this film than I’ve ever seen in the past. There are at least two different points where he is more than ready to die so that everyone else can live. He’s completely fearless to the point where it feels unhealthy, to be honest. I like it. He may be the most carefully developed character in the movie, and that’s usually not how these things work.
Minor spoilers end.
Let’s see, what else? I loved H.E.R.B.I.E., and I loved that the movie didn’t bother explaining him and that he was just there. I love the retro-future 1960s look of the movie. Love it. I love that, and this is going to be dodging a spoiler again, the movie managed to surprise me with the way it ended, which has never happened in anything featuring Galactus before. I had some ideas about how this movie was going to connect with the wider Marvel universe(*), and let’s just say I was completely wrong. I don’t think I’ve speculated about that here, so we’re probably good. I liked that they remembered that Ben was Jewish. I liked that they kept him dressed for most of the movie. The Ben Grimm in the comics wears clothes! All the time! And so does this one.
There are some great insights into Reed Richards’ character, too, and some conflicts he gets into with Sue, that really felt true to the characters. Again, the main thing this movie did right was understand the people it was about.
The standard caveats! I am super enthusiastic about stuff I like, and I really liked this movie. To be honest, were I not substantially more invested in Superman as a character than I am the Fantastic Four, I might be willing to call this a better movie, and I think I have fewer complaints about it than I do the Superman movie. It’s crazy that two superhero movies this good in such similar ways came out in the same month. It’s even crazier that we’re basically done with superhero movies and TV shows until next summer, too. I don’t know right now if I’m back on board for Avengers: Doomsday or not. We’ll see. But between now and then, you should definitely make time to see this one.
(*) The movie starts off with a title card stating it’s on Earth-828, a number I thought about for a minute and couldn’t come up with any particular significance for. It ends with a quote from Jack Kirby, who was born on August 28th, 1917. Nice touch. Also, apparently there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Jack and Stan Lee together in a montage at the beginning of the film. I missed it.
For the record, I did see Fantastic Four: First Steps today, and it was magnificent. Full review coming, probably tomorrow.
I finished Crypt Custodian yesterday, hitting 100% after about fifteen hours of play, although there’s a boss rush mode I’ll need to dip into if I want to get all the trophies, and I’m probably not going to. It’s one of the nicer surprises of the year, because I basically just grabbed it for free from Game Pass based on the image you see up there.
It’s a Metroidvania. You play a cat. You’re dead and a ghost. You’re prevented from entering paradise by a really bossy dead frog (that’s not a joke) and you spend the entire game cleaning up trash with your broom and whacking monsters with it. In classic Metroidvania fashion, you unlock a bunch of abilities over the course of the game that let you go back and get into areas you couldn’t reach before, and while I have no intention of spoiling the ending, it revolves around making 10 friends so that you can invade Paradise and visit your still-living loved ones, and the ending will make you cry a little bit.
I play these games for the exploration, right? This is the map:
Or, if you prefer a slightly more abstract, right-click-for-much-larger version, you can have this one:
Don’t worry about the Chinese, the words don’t matter. The point is the map is ridiculously large, and the different areas are wildly different, some with environmental challenges (one area reverses its polarity every time you dash, making walls and floors either appear or reappear along with roughly half of the enemies at any time) and some that just look cool. There’s rainy forests and castles and tombs and enormous retail backrooms and an amusement park. You can teleport to save spots at any time and there’s no penalty for dying, and you can even unlock a power-up late in the game that prevents missed jumps from hurting you, so there’s a strong incentive to just pick a direction and go. Your power-ups can be equipped using little upgrade spheres that can be found or purchased, so there’s an element of switching back and forth between them depending on what you need to do– I found myself with an exploration build and a boss fight build after a while, for example– although by the end of the game you can find enough of the spheres that you can equip nearly everything you need, and you might be able to buy as many spheres as you want; the one vendor doesn’t seem to run out of them.
So, yeah. Games like this are why Game Pass is worth the money; this game is delightful and everyone should play it, whether they have to pay for it or not, but if you can get it for free then you really have no excuse. Give it a shot.
I kind of want to solve all of the world’s problems with violence tonight, which means I probably ought not to be writing about it in public. I’m in a hell of a mood.
That said, I should be seeing Fantastic Four tomorrow, so hopefully that’ll be fun.
I spent part of the day adulting, part of the day working on a LEGO set, and the rest of it pushing through The Eye of the World. I’m under 200 pages from the end and am hoping I can finish it before I go to bed.
Also, somehow today God killed an elderly orange-skinned Florida man with shitty hair, genocidal politics and a massive racism problem, who had strong ties to reality TV and professional wrestling … and got the wrong one.
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