ManSlap

Feminism- Is it in You?

This is actually a movie review, sorry about the misleading title. I saw Passengers, that movie starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence where they look cute together on a space ship. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m sure you will be able to find it On Demand within a week or two.

The plot is that Chris Pratt is on a spaceship where everyone is frozen until they arrive at some far-off destination in 120 years, but you see, Pratt’s hibernation pod breaks down after only thirty years and he and JLaw swim in zero-g water and the robot waiter is funny because he looks like a human but doesn’t act like a human and Pratt can only afford to eat the low class breakfast every morning while Lawrence is rich and can eat eggs and bacon at the replomat and Chris Pratt is a man’s man who makes things with his hands and Jennifer Lawrence is a writer who is actually named Aurora and a video call to Earth takes forty years and costs $6,000.

And, not to ruin the movie for you, but things on the ship don’t go quite as planned. As a matter of fact, things on the ship start to go very wrong. So it’s up to the cute couple to save the day, and maybe the human race while they’re at it.

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Weekly Riddle Number FIVE

Remember how depressing the song “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” (by Band Aid) is? Here are some of the lyrics:

And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time. The only gift they’ll get this year is life. Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow, do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

Still, it’s pretty catchy. There should be radio stations that play it 24/7 from Halloween until Christmas, like some cable stations play “A Christmas Story” for six months straight each year.

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MLTV

Every so often I kick around an idea for a book. One that I’m going to write and that, unfortunately for you, you are going to have to read.

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Reviewing the Criterion Collection

Note: A college professor once made the mistake of telling me that I would make an excellent sportswriter, movie reviewer, or literary critic. It immediately went to my head, and ever since that day I’ve thought that people would want to hear what I have to say about pop culture stuff. Now that I have this forum in which to vomit my thoughts on just about anything, I am proud to dust off the childhood dream and make it a reality. To that end, I’d like to present the first in a line of reviews that I’ve lined up exclusively for the readers of Baveblog.org. The movies I review will run the gamut from comedy to action to drama to romance, but each will have one thing in common with the others- some outstanding distinguishing feature or criterion* that sets it apart from its contemporaries. Some of these movies will be popular fare, and some will be titles of which you’ve likely never heard. The hope is that by writing about these forgotten classics, I may revive some small discussion about the merits and demerits of movies that, regardless of your thoughts, are deserving of analysis. So without further ado, I present the first movie review of what is known as the Criterion Collection.

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Weekly Riddle Number FOUR

So the Putnam has come and gone, thank god, and I can get back to my regular life. For those who care about that sort of thing, I got 5/12, or 50 points, but I’d like to put an asterisk next to it. One of the concepts in one of the questions was particularly up my alley, and rather than continue with the test, I spent about an hour exploring the ramifications of one clever concept. So I probably should’ve gotten a 60/120 (I was able to answer another question later that night), but I still would’ve been disappointed with myself. My goal was to get higher than a 60, and that wasn’t happening even with the extra ten points. Ah well, there’s always next year.

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Affected

(Note: This article contains spoilers on the stories of several older RPGs, and one new one. If you have not completed any of Final Fantasy IV, Phantasy Star II, Final Fantasy VII, or Final Fantasy XV, you should probably skip this article. It also contains a spoiler for the movie “Project X”, but you don’t care about that. If you are still interested in reading about this author’s difficult weekend, please scroll down until you see a trio of asterisks, and read only below.)

As a grown man who has played over a million role playing-games, I have seen my share of video game death. Most of it was at the hand of my avatar, slashing bloody swaths through tortured souls who have been consumed by the shadow of darkness, or megalomaniacal despots bent on resurrecting 1000 year old demon-gods. Somewhat less frequently, I have borne witness to the loss of friendly faces and trusted allies- parents of a hero, a mayor of some pastoral town, or in the most tragic of circumstances, a member of my own party. Yup, if you need someone to be present at the melodramatic end of some role-playing character’s life, you can count on my fat carcass being in the right place at the right time.

And I haven’t cared about a one of them.

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Weekly RIDDLE Number Three

pudzian

Hi there. I spent the entire day sitting in the student lounge of the college in which I teach, administering the Putnam examination to the latest batch of Math luminaries. I say that without irony, because these are some of my best students, and the Putnam test is no joke!

What is the Putnam Exam? It’s Mathletes on a Mariusz Pudzianowski heaping of steroids, a grueling six hour gauntlet designed to humble the orneriest math student. What’s Mathletes? Well if you don’t know, then you either accidentally clicked on the wrong link, or, Hi Mom, thanks for visiting my site! The Putnam is pretty much the most difficult Mathematics Exam out there, requiring both extensive book learnin’ and extreme outside-the-box thinking ability. Lest you think that you have an aptitude for math and could walk in cold and score some points on the Putnam, let me dispel that illusion immediately by informing you that the average score on the test is a 0. A test taken by only the very best college undergraduates across the country, and on average, zero points are earned. Still don’t believe me? Here’s question 1 on the Putnam this year:

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The FIRST and SECOND Weekly Riddles

peterson I love recreational math. I’m sorry to have to say it, but there it is. It’s practically what I do for a living. I’m a math teacher by trade (in that I’ve been all around this great blue and green marble and ply my trade wherever math teachers are needed), and rather than teach what the curriculum states I should, I warp the curriculum to satisfy my desire to do recreational math.

That isn’t really as intimidating or boring as it sounds. A lot of people enjoy the mathematics of games, and spend a lot of time pondering riddles. Most people, however, don’t know that when they are contemplating a brain teaser, they are actually performing a subtle form of mathematics. Take this guy for example:

pencil-lift Remember him? He’s that guy you used to doodle into your notebook back in grade school. Or maybe junior high school or high school, or all of the above. The goal is to sketch the drawing of this barn-type thing without lifting your pencil off the paper, and without crossing over any lines that you have already drawn.

No doubt at some point in your life you attempted this little game, and no doubt after a bit of work, you figured out a way to accomplish the feat stated above. How did you do it? Did you use logic and reasoning, or did you just draw it a bunch of times until trial and error revealed the solution? No offense, but probably the latter- at least that’s how I used to do it.

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Role-Playing Games I’ve Written (Part One)

8-bit-rpg I’m a man of many ideas, most of them unquestionably terrible.

Not ideas of the “screen-door on a submarine”, or “no-stick frying pan” variety, as such concepts require some combination of imagination, technical savvy, and ingenuity, and I possess only one of those three qualities. Most of my ideas fall into the category of “creative fiction”, and as such, take the form of writing which consists of mind-bending (and sometimes nonsensical) plot-twists, dialogue both as witty and lacking in substance as real-life banter, and fantastical world building and lore which is left to rot on the vine for lack of dedication to the moments in between. None of these in and of themselves make for particularly satisfying reading, and so my career as an author was stalled at an early age.

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The ManSlap Club

sly-and-arnold

Right now, at this very second, I am watching a wrestling pay per view. This is notable because it is the first wrestling pay per I have viewed in sixteen years. (Side note: Are they still called pay per views?) I stopped watching back in 2000 or so, around the decline of the “Attitude Era”. But that’s a tale for another day.

Here’s what I noticed watching this pay per view- man are these guys muscular and good looking! A far cry from the days when you could make a living rasslin by possessing nothing more than a prodigious gut or laughable physical abnormality. Now you gotta be jacked and vascular, just like my two heroes Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone. Watching these beefcakes narrowly miss punches and kicks has got me thinking back to what my buddy Dan and I dubbed “The ManSlap Club”.

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