Sidebar: The Spider-Man movie no one will make

I want to see a Spider-Man movie that focuses on Peter Parker. He's in college trying to juggle his course work with freelance photography. He makes friends, upsets girlfriends, eats dinner with Aunt May every Sunday, and manages to pick up a research grant his junior year.

Peter Parker as Spider-Man is in the backdrop of all this. Spider-Man is the focus of Peter's work for The Bugle. Spider-Man is the way Peter travels across the city. Spider-Man stops the mugging Peter would have witnessed.

I love that superheroes movies are still trendy ten years after the first Spider-Man movie came out, but I'd like to see a story that focuses on the human side of the superhero.

On Hypable: Why I Keep Watching Grimm

I wrote a piece about why Grimm still interests me, and Hypable featured it today. You can read it here.

Pinterest: First Impressions

With all the buzz around Pinterest, I wanted to check it out and see why some people are saying Pinterset is going to stick around. Here are my first impressions of the latest site to break into the top ten social networks.

Pinterest is still in open-beta, so I asked for an invite to join. Three days later, I received a link in my email. At the moment, you need a Twitter or Facebook account in order to join Pinterest. I understand this helps reduce spam accounts and makes finding your friends easier. That's all well and good, but I'd rather have an account that stands on its own and doesn't depend on another site.

After registering, a page with pins (essentially images) loads and you click on what interests you. Pinterest uses your choices to generate people for you to follow. I like that Pinterest embraces new users by connecting them to people on the site, but I wish the suggestions for people to follow stayed suggestions. Pinterest automatically subscribed me to a dozen people based on my few clicks. I would rather see the suggestions and then choose if I want to subscribe to people. One image that I liked doesn't necessarily mean I will like the rest of the content that person posts. I ended up going through each profile of the people Pinterest gave me to follow and unfollowed them. Then I browsed pins by category and found people that I actually wanted to subscribe to.

I've seen taste preferences done better on Etsy. When you join Etsy, the site asks you to choose items that you like from a random selection on the page. Based on your choices, Etsy will suggest other items you might like. Suggested content based on previously-chosen content. Pinterest, though, suggests people to follow based on your content choices. Pinterest's suggestions can't match your preferences as well as Etsy's can.

On the positive side, I've seen more activity on the content I posted compared to a new account on other social networks. But that's not enough to make me check in often. It might be because I'm new and still poking around, but I've been going on Pinterest about once a day. Compare that to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, where I check in multiple times each day. Pinterset doesn't have that much of my attention yet, but the coming months might change that.

If you'd like to see what I've done on Pinterest so far, here's a link to my profile.

Sherlock: Post Reichenbach Fall, Take 2

I re-watched The Reichenbach Fall again today. Moriarty said something to Sherlock that stuck out to me:

"That's your weakness. You always expect things to be clever."

What if that was a hint to us? Maybe the way Sherlock faked his death is simple and clear-cut. Clever enough to fool the snipers, but not complicated. No drugs. No muscle relaxants. No editing tricks.

After my previous post, Robinson (whoever you are), commented that Sherlock did jump off the roof, but into a padded laundry truck. I didn't notice the truck the first time because I was watching John, but the truck drives away from the body on the ground...presumably, the double's body. The double was already dead and bloodied to look like he fell from the roof, when really he fell from the truck. Molly is going to examine the corpse, so she can lie about the body's actual time of death. It fits.

Sherlock: Post Reichenbach Fall

It's been only a few hours since I've seen the Sherlock finale, but here's the theory I've pieced together. It isn't solid, but I think it's plausible. Spoilers after the cut.

Non-Spoilery Thoughts on The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I finished reading The Fault in Our Stars tonight, sooner than I thought, because of one quality John’s books all have. I want to keep listening to his characters.

His writing is transparent and simple. He captures teenagers’ conversations and interactions believably and yet while I’m reading, I have to stop and stare at the page every now and then because suddenly there’s a sentence that says “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” Sentences like those are beautiful, stand out against the rest of the narrative, and yet they feel completely natural. Totally organic to the story.

I’ve read John’s previous novels and while each deals with different themes, all of them dig deeper to show something about humanity. The Fault in Our Stars is no different.

Half of one of the bookshelves in my room is dedicated to the Books You Read In High School (Or Should Have Anyway). I’ve got The Great Gatsby up there. Catch-22 and Cather in the Rye. Some Vonnegut, some Hemingway. John’s novels are there too because they belong with thoughtful literature.

Done with Kill Arthur plots

Or, The Futility of Lethally Endangering the Protagonist in his Origin Story

*Spoilers for season 4 of Merlin*

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Besides not having a magic reveal, my major disappointment in season 4 was the repetitive plot of someone trying to kill Arthur. We could have seen more diverse stories than the villain of the week with a plan to kill the King.

After one or two episodes where Arthur might have died, it’s silly to keep writing that sort of plot. The audience knows that Arthur can’t die because he hasn’t become the Once and Future King yet. Arthur, Merlin, and (probably) Gwen are safe in every episode.

We know they can’t die, so we know that they’ll make it through any trouble that comes up. It’s interesting to see the characters react to fatal situations, but the threat of danger does nothing for the audience. After we’ve seen what characters do when their friends are hurt, we’re done with that story and that development. There isn’t any more to cover there.

This is the difficulty in origin stories: you can’t do any permanent damage to the protagonist. You have to find a way to develop characters without putting them in danger all the time.