Welcome to the end of April! I hope you guys are ready for all of those May flowers! For more from April, click HERE.

That’s actually not fair. It hasn’t rained much here at all. Due to our sewage issues, we recently had a chunk of our back yard dug up. We put down some grass seed, but I’ve been having to water it pretty much every day since. April showers, you have lied to me!

(Although we are supposed to get thunderstorms today, and tomorrow says 100% chance of rain. And that IS technically still April!)

Aside from that, the wife and I started an exciting new craft: decoupaging comic book covers onto our old kitchen table to turn it into a snazzy gaming table! We started last night, and it went… poorly. Her first effort resulted in the covers having a LOT of air bubbles and wrinkles, so we have to scrape it all off and start over. This means I wasted a lot of my favorite covers because I wasn’t clever enough to give her some lesser ones to try first.

Still, when god destroys one door, he puts another on sale. After we tapped out for the night, I saw on Facebook that my comic shop is having a special on Saturday: all dollar books will be fifty cents! So I’ll head in with a twenty spot and find forty awesome new covers to replenish my supply for the rest of the table. Maybe I’ll find another Lobo’s Back #1.

Or at least another 80’s comic with that snazzy Friday The 13th Part 8 ad on the back cover.

Anyway, wish us luck with finding great covers and doing a more crisp job on our second attempt. And yes, it DOES kind of hurt me to rip comics apart like this, but I’m very excited to have vaccinated friends over and play tabletop games on this incredibly busy and distracting table.

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MOVIES

A big two-week run saw me tear through eleven movies to close out the month, with multiple days of two-fers. And by and large, it was a good run! These flicks averaged out to 3.45 stars, and you have to be happy with that.

Mad Max Fury Road is one of those movies that I gave a very good score to, and yet folks are going to give me crap over it. “Only 3.5!? Are you insane?”. I can already see it. But the thing is, that movie was a solid 20-30 minutes too long for what it was. When Max and Furiosa eventually hit the desert and say “Hey, let’s just turn around and do everything we did over again”, I actually sighed. It made the previous hour feel like a huge waste of time, and even great action sets can get tedious if you do them over and over again. Also, I was weirdly distracted by how much gasoline everyone seemed to have given that it takes place in a world with low gasoline supplies.

Still! It IS a very good movie, and I enjoyed watching it a great deal. I just wish they would have shaved twenty minutes off or ended it with the uncertainty of the heroes journeying into the desert.

Hey, Mortal Kombat 2021! It combines the stilted, terrible acting of Mortal Kombat 1995 with the utter joylessness of some screenwriter who thinks these movies should be serious business! I was unimpressed. Also, I kind of want to take Wonder Woman 1984, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Mortal Kombat all together and force them to watch their HBO Max brethren Godzilla Vs Kong. Then I would tell them “This is how you do special effects! Like this! I don’t know where the hell you learned how, but learn from this!”.

Guardians of the Galaxy is still a 5 star flick, and as I noted elsewhere, it’s inspired my wife to want to watch the entire MCU in chronological order and, pfft, like I’m going to say no to THAT? I still need an idea on how we can incorporate that series into the site or podcast, though.

Let’s wrap up this section with some quick thoughts on a few of the others:

-Eurotrip was ROUGH. I did laugh quite a few times, but the movie would invariably do something immediately after to make me feel bad about it. And it had too many moments that wanted to be funny but weren’t.

-The 1933 Invisible Man is HILARIOUS, and I’m pretty sure it is intentionally so, so I gave it a good grade. I laughed more at this than most straight comedies these days; it was definitely better than Eurotrip. What a subversive horror flick for 1933! It could be higher if it wasn’t so rushed.

-I really wanted to like The Farewell more, but it had a few too many minor subplots that didn’t really matter. The story needed tightening up, but it’s still a quality flick.

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TELEVISION

Nothing terribly new here, and there probably won’t be until June when Loki starts.

We did finish up the 19th season of Hell’s Kitchen (my wife took it extremely personally when Mary Lou did not win) and the first (only?) season of The Falcon & The Winter Soldier.

I’ve seen people kind of down on the finale to TFATWS, but I didn’t necessarily have a problem with. The Sharon Carter reveal wasn’t great, but I thought the action was tremendous, and I really appreciated Sam getting a classic “Cap Gives A Speech About Things” moment. It solidified him in his new role. And his new costume is SLEEK. Big fan of that.

As a last TV note, I’m still getting through my first viewing of the entirety of Schitt’s Creek, too. I’m just about at the end of season four, so… two seasons to go! I had no idea this show had that many seasons. And you know? Now that I’m watching it, I can empathize a little harder with the 2020 Emmy’s for the tough choices they had to make when its last season was the same year as The Good Place‘s last outing. Now it’s just baffling to me that both of those shows kept jobbing out to Fleabag or The Marvelous Ms. Maisel in their earlier seasons.

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GAMING

NOT MUCH! But I did decide to see if all of these months after the release of the Crown Tundra DLC there were still a decent amount of people doing Endless Raids in Pokemon Sword and Shield. I am happy to report there are! I tried dropping in on a few raids yesterday and never had a hard time finding a full party to raid with.

That made me pretty happy because those Endless Raids manage to be both challenging and fun. I had fallen out of doing them for a while (because if they go well, you can easily sink well over an hour into ONE), but maybe I’ll start popping in on them more often.

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And that is it for April. After two months of making lame jokes about Lions and Sheep or Flowers and Showers, no legends of the month of May immediately spring to mind. I’ll look something up.

Until next time… take care!