Heroic or Hella dumb

I was watching G4 Underground, a brand new series on G4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4_(TV_channel)) and they did this whole feature on real life superheroes. Yeah bonafide people who believe they are superheroes. Neither of these guys had powers but they dressed up in their outfits and went out fighting crime and keeping the public peace.

For a moment I was cracking up at this poor sad souls. I love comic books and I always dreamed that I would wake up one morning and have some awesome powers. It's one of the reasons why I love watching Heroes. Waking up one morning and having super powers? That would be too awesome.

But I am grounded in reality and I know their is no such thing as human flight, teleportation or having fire come out of your hands. Sure people can be super heroes without powers I mean look at Batman but still I do not think even Batman is possible. I mean the guy is filthy rich and McGuyver skills and knows nearly every martial art known to man. The man has technology that no normal person would have access too. So yeah a person can not wake up one day and be like Batman. It is not realistic.

Coming back to this show, that is what these plain joes tried to do. They go out at night in spandex and leather (I am not kidding) or their $5000 specially made outfits (again, not kidding) and try to fight the good fight. Stopping crime, keeping drug dealers off the streets, trying to be Super heroes. Noble idea I must admit, stupid in execution. You are a grown ass man. Leave the super heroics to the 'real' Heroes, police officers. The world is not a playground and people get hurt, people die.

We do not need 'super' heroes, we need people with common sense.

pP

Couldn't resist...

Blog needed a change... new music around the corner.

pP

April is around the corner...

and change is in the air.

It's about a week to April and as always I feel like making some changes.

One of minor changes will be the music. As you can see, this months music players was called 'march' LOL yeah, inspired eh? Anyway I decided to actually keep the same music player for a whole month. In the new week I will have a new music player called 'april'... awesome.

A aside on the music I picked for this month (which I should have done a lot earlier).

Say Goodbye to Love- Kenna: An obvious choice, anyone who know me knows I love Kenna. I picked this track out of the many tracks I like because it was upbeat and I haven't used it in a player before (to my surprise).

Fix You- Coldplay: Now I must admit I was not an initial fan of Coldplay, I despised 'Yellow' when it first came out but as years went on, the band has def grown on me and Chris Martin is a pretty nice dude with cool friends (Jay Z, Kanye West to name a few). 'Fix You' is probably one of my favorite tracks from them and it was funny when one of favorite tv shows Brothers & Sisters used it in an episode recently. Fate? Sheer Coincidence? Who Knows.

Rise (Leave Me Alone)- Safari Duo: Easily one of my most favorite songs recently that is not by one of my favorite artists. I would have never heard about it if it was not for a KYSG Tekken combo video called 'Crossing Ideas'... as I watched KYSG perform some incredible ridiculous combos, this songs was being played and soon it got me to the point where I wanted to hear it outside of Tekken, the beat breakdown is particular awesome.

The other change I want to make is to my blog itself, I have had it for almost three months now and it looked exactly as it did when I first started. I am going to change it up a bit especially after checking out some of the other blogs out there. I want to personalize it a bit and make it more a Apocryphic Visions creation and less generic.

Onward...

pP

It Begins Again

For people who do not know the history behind 'Run', it was actually something I came up with during the writing of 'Hauntings'. I created the cover you see above and even created a trailer for it. I, however put it on the back burner because I wanted to finished 'Hauntings' first. 'Run' remained through on my mind and I knew that after I finished 'Hauntings' it would be the next writing project I tackled. Well in between me finishing 'Hauntings' late last year and now, I hit a wall. The dreaded writers' block.

This morning however I woke up and for the first time in a long time I not only felt like writing but I actually could. Now you got to understand, there is a BIG difference between wanting and actually writing. I wake up many mornings, especially the last couple weeks 'wanting' to write. However I get caught up in my day to day affairs, which is sad to say, not much and by the end of the day I can not be bothered. It is not only that through. Things that seem so clear in my mind, I can not get to the harder part of putting pen to paper or in my case fingers to Word document. I have had a couple days like that, one too many.

This morning tho (which is now dated, thanks to this blog entry), that writer's block was gone and I was a dynamo. Concepts poured out of me and whilst I hit a couple false starts once I hit my stride I was confidant in what I was writing down.

As a writer I must admit the first chapter is always one of the hardest things to write. You always feel like you need to grab the readers attention. It was something we all discussed in my writers' workshop a couple weeks ago. Some of us have what some people like to call MTV attention spans. If something does not spring out and grab you, chances are you will not read it/ watch it/ whatever. With writing, that chance exists in the first chapter. If that first chapter does not spring out and get you, your book is probably going back on the shelf no matter how awesome the body is or jaw dropping your ending. So that is why writers slave over the first chapter and try to make it as dynamic as possible. Well after a couple of "maybe's" and a lot of "nah's" I have written the first chapter for 'Run'. I have re-read it a couple times, even read it out loud to my lovely spouse and she liked it too (of course she is bias but hey).

It begins again... now if I can keep up the momentum. The flood gates of creativity have re-opened and I want to make sure it does not get damned up again.

pP

P.S. I just did a spell check and I had no spelling mistakes at all in my first draft of this blog... yah go me!

Coming Soon...

to a AVisions near you.

Speaking of Transformers, how awesome does the teaser for Revenge of the Fallen look?

Watchmen, Wolverine AND Transformers 2... it's going to be a good year for movie fans!

pP

You Can't Stop the Signal (part two)

I have a round-a-bout way of thinking. Most of the times I will think of something which will lead to something else which would lead to something completely different which will lead to something entirely not related to the original thought but it will still kinda make sense and be connected, well at least to me.

So 'you can't stop the signal'. It's a line from Serenity, the big damn move (Firefly tv series reference). Firefly, created by Joss Whedon. I could go on and on about the show but this is not what the blog is about. It's not about Serenity, the movie that the fans of Firefly helped bring about. Nope, maybe some other time. No, this blog is all about 'you can't stop the signal'. No matter how they try to stop you, you can get your message out and you can make yourself heard.

For example, this video below

I created this video with and for my fellow F' Yeah/ Cincy Tekken players. It was a group project that I threw together after watching some of our Tekken footage. I noticed we were breaking a big amount of throws and I had an idea to do a montage of us throw breaking to the sounds of Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit. I was able to take some existing footage of us plus some new made for the video stuff and edited the hell out of it. I premiered it at our weekly gaming gathering MNT (Monday Night Tekken now Monday Night Thrashings)

It was pretty successful and everyone liked it. I was able to combined the look of 'Breaking the Habit' (which is an anime video with rough drawing art style) with pictures of Tekken I found,using the same type of artwork. It had a theme and at certain moments the lyrics would come up on the screen.

Then Warner Music Group (WMG) and YouTube had there falling out. WMG began to music claim every video on YT that had any WMG songs in it, snippets, full songs, whatever... they claimed it and soon, videos were being taken down, left right and center. Needless to say, Our 'Breaking the Habit' video was a causality of this little war that WMG has on YT.

So as it stood, YT muted the audio on the original video and now it exists on YT as a mere shadow of it's former self. I had to use Evanescene's (one of the few bands that actually allow YT to use their music indiscriminately) 'Going Under' so it just wasn't footage with no sound. But as it stands, I am displeased with the final result. Don't get me wrong, I love Evanescene. I have used there music in other projects and I am happy I at least have something I like accompanying the old video. However the video that exists on YT is not what I envision or intended to be seen. The pictures I used no longer have a reason, the lyrics on screen no longer match the song. The concept no longer makes sense.

Hence here we are on Blogger, a place where creatively is not stifled and restricted. Where a cold war between two companies do not affect the people who sustain them.

You can't stop the signal... don't even try.

pP

You Can't Stop the Signal (part one)

Firefly intro, hands down one of my favorite theme songs of ALL time for one of my favorite shows of ALL time.

To be continued in part two.

pP