Heading to Montana

Yee Haw!  We're loading up the covered wagon and heading to Montana for a Science Fiction Convention.  MisCon - Montana's longest running Sci Fi Con.  We're even taking the dogs.

See you on the flip side!

Iron Man 3 is this Weekend...Power Up the Reactors!

Looking Forward to Iron Man 3 this weekend

I have not seen the new Iron Man 3 movie yet, but I have my tickets to see it on Friday.
I’m excited and hoping it is a good movie.  Iron Man 1 was great, 2 was okay.  I’m hoping this one is a at least good.

Iron Man has always been one of my favorites ever since I was a kid of 7 and 8.
When I first started trading empty bottles for nickels and dimes and dimes for comic books, my favorites were Batman, Captain America and Iron Man. 

Batman in those days was a silly detective and the books would give you clues and you would try to solve the crime before Batman and Robin did.  Batman was fun in those days, not the psychologically burdened Dark Knight that he became later.  I liked Batman, everybody did.  He had a TV show and was super famous.

Captain America was pretty well known as well.  But Iron Man seemed to be somebody only I was reading about.  None of my friends knew Iron Man.  He had no TV show.  In my circle of friends and family, I was the only one buying and reading stories about Tony Stark and his crazy technological inventions.  Tony wasn’t a drunk or a psychological mess in those days either—he was a respected business man with a suit and tie with a secret identity and secret skills the people around him did not know about.  As a young Mormon kid, that was how I felt.  I had to be proper and wear a tie, but secretly I wanted to do things and learn things I wasn’t supposed to be doing and learning.  I dreamed about building a secret lab with secret planes and rockets and robots and stuff.  But mostly my secret life was filled with comics and books from the library full of stories I wasn’t supposed to be reading.

I also learned how to draw by copying the pictures in those comics.  Then I would put my own dialog on the pictures.  I’m still kind of doing that these days.

Later, as I got older, I started realizing that Iron Man’s armor was kind of a metaphor for all our technology.  I learned that no matter how we wrap ourselves in metal cars and planes and extend our senses with TV and satellites, that we are still biological animals with limitations and issues that cannot be solved with technology, that we are still scared little monkeys no matter how cool our toys and how powerful our inventions.  Tony Stark showed me a lot of that, and it has remained true even as I have learned a lot more than what could be slipped into a comic book.

Iron Man comics have been all over the map from horribly bad, to corny, to incredible (I’m looking at you Matt Fraction).  But even at their worst, they are always enjoyable.  I’m hoping this movie will be an addition to the “Incredible Iron Man” list.  But even if it is corny, I will still enjoy it.

See you at the movies.  And then let’s go save the world!

-- Jay

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Don't forget, Next Week is LarsenGeekery's next show:

May 11 &12th 2013, Pacific NerdWest 13 - Bellingham WA

Games, Art, Vendors (including LarsenGeekery), and I hear Fargo from Eureka is going to be there!