"If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be? In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book.

so @tradespotting.bsky.social is now team "every superhero comic writer must read THE DISPOSSESSED"

Thunderbolts* was a Grade-A Banger, getting the same creative team on X-Men is a slam dunk

Movie’s gonna rule

And fwiw I did not feel this way about the first movie at all. I thought there were moments, here and there, where that movie almost cracked something along these lines, but this one felt like a quantum leap in filmmaking to me, it felt so much more assured of what it’s trying to do

Maybe you can just chalk it up to “fan service,” but my jaw was on the floor through that whole sequence. When we get this huge, intricate oner that smoothly slips between our characters’ physical reality and 8-bit simulacrum, the Whys and Hows totally ceased to matter to me

The apotheosis of what the movie is doing is the Mario Maker sequence- the whole movie embraces the absurd dream logic of the source material, & that bit is the point where it drops the pretense and starts seamlessly weaving the action in and out of straight up video game visuals

And like, on some level, it does demand that you be in on the joke, it does require you to have a degree of emotional attachment to the things it’s riffing on. But it’s doing it in such an infectiously silly and high-energy way

Plot is knowingly paper-thin, it’s basking in the tropes of its influences, using them to fuel an onslaught of lovingly rendered setpieces that jam in so much iconography and so many design elements, and remix them in such kinetic ways, that it becomes more collage than story

Ok I’ve cracked it, I can tell you exactly what it is that I vibed so hard with about the Mario Galaxy Movie:

That movie is to Nintendo games what Project A-Ko is to 80s anime

Have any erotic Kingdom Hearts fanfiction ever ended with Jiminy Cricket jumping out and squeaking “and I was taking notes the whole time!” and if not why not?

There’s a deep cut cameo in the third act that actually made me laugh out loud. I don’t think the first movie made me chuckle more than once.

And also like… this doesn’t *make* it a good movie, but as a cinematic tribute to 40 years of Nintendo history, it fucking rules, the references that are there are funny and clever and well-incorporated into the set pieces.

I actually thought some of the character stuff worked this time too! I think Peach has a nice arc, they do just enough with Bowser to give him a little depth compared to the first movie

The action scenes in this one go fucking crazy. There’s so much wild camerawork and choreography here. It’s not taking as many stylistic swings, but in terms of sheer technical craft I actually believe this is borderline Spider-Verse stuff. I’m honestly in shock.

If you hated the first movie this won’t convert you, but if, like me, you were lukewarm on it, I don’t understand how you come out of this one seeing it as anything other than a massive improvement in every way

I fucking loved the Super Mario Galaxy movie??? What the hell lmao

I know I’m walking into some stupid bullshit, I’m doing the full experience, I just hope it’s a good theme park ride

Seeing Da Mario Movie in D-BOX 3D tomorrow. I can’t wait for Mario to assault my eyeballs while my chair kicks the shit out of me

They’ll ban you on Twitter for posting this just ask @tradespotting.bsky.social

The other thing about DLSS 5 is that no one can even afford a DLSS-capable GPU anymore anyway, so what the fuck are we even doing

The thing about DLSS 5 is that this is the footage they’re willing to show- you know that when games are actually in motion it’s gonna look even worse

Tangle & Whisper mini or the Metal Virus saga or the Impostor Syndrome arc aren’t high art, they’re also kids comics, but they’re kids comics where characters have nuanced emotions and interpersonal problems that have to be resolved in interesting ways. The things good stories do

Like I get why this might hit for the target audience of CoroCoro- IE, 8 year olds in Japan who want to imagine how awesome it would be if Sonic was their best friend. I do not get why adult fans prefer this to the actual plotting and themes and character arcs of the IDW book

Yuuta’s fucking boring! The whole series is predicated on how cool a concept it is that Sonic is just utterly taken with this kid whose sole defining trait is that he’s Good and Nice. Everything is in service of this self-insert child’s non-arc

I keep wanting to see why the JP purist side of the fandom is so vocal about this being so much better than the IDW comics, but it’s just fuckin dull as shit. The last couple chapters *finally* had some decently drawn action, but it’s all orbiting such a nothing character

Caught up on Sonic and the Blade of Courage. Don’t know why I keep doing this to myself

I find that without that specificity of different hardware, different OSes, etc. games start to blend together into a soup of broad technical categories, 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, rather than individual libraries with their own quirks and design trends

(And that’s when I’m not feeling REALLY nostalgic and I bust out my elderly GBA SP and an actual cartridge, just for kicks)

In my own life, for my own purposes, I prefer having separate devices with libraries of games built for those devices. I have a N3DSXL for 3DS games. I have a DSi for playing DS games. I have my Vita for PSP games. I’ve got the 34XX, which is a near 1:1 GBA replica, for GBA games