My high school art teacher once told me I need to get better at finishing things. Mainly because it would take me an entire week to complete roughly 1/4th of a drawing, which I would then turn in and reply that Rome wasn’t build in a day. It’s not that I didn’t finish it, it’s that I didn’t have enough time!

She might have been on to something though; Now that I’m an adult, my wife keeps saying the same thing. Why is that? I’ll eventually finish doing my laundry, and if I don’t, they’ll dry on their own, right? If you let things sit long enough, they’ll either resolve themselves or just won’t be relevant anymore. Much like the long list of unfinished posts I have sitting in my drafts folder.

The 2.5 of you that read my blog regularly might remember my original Recycle Binge, which I published in April of last year. It basically was a composite of all of the unfinished drafts that I had clogging up the back-end, all tightly wrapped into a single post. It was important (to myself) to get them out there, as I felt that I had some good ideas and valid points to make, even if I couldn’t manage an entire post out of any single one of them. Ironically enough, the very first post listed here has a start date from about two days after I published Recycle Binge. Yep, it took me two whole days to start not-finishing things.

So here we go. Listed from oldest to most recent, Recycle Binge 2019 is about to commence!

Oh Yeah, I Have Mass Effect Andromeda

*There’s actually no text to this post. It’s literally just a title. Apparently I remembered I had Mass Effect Andromeda, then almost immediately forgot again.*

What’s Our Fascination With Mars???

It’s A Red Planet, It Attacks, And We Need To Get Our Ass There

If there’s anything that movies and video games have taught me, it’s that Mars is a fuckin’ nightmare. It’s a gateway to Hell, it contains little green men, mutants, and evil corporations conspiring to hide an ancient alien terraforming technology that would put their air-selling business.. um… out of business.

We as an all-consuming human race have been infatuated with Mars since people realized it was a thing. Countless movies have included it as a setting. We have…

The Nun Commits A Cardinal Sin

The wife and I saw The Nun this weekend. She is a huge fan of the the Conjuring universe and had been eagerly awaiting this newest installment. Our feelings when we left the theater were, mixed, to say the least. We discussed it on the way home, trying to figure out just where the movie went astray. Nothing in the movie was bad. The acting was solid, the writing was decent, and while some small parts of the set obviously looked like a movie set, it was believable for the most part. So if it had all the parts of a good horror movie, what was missing?

Well, I was sitting around thinking about it this morning, and I think I know what was “off” about this movie and why it seemed to fall short of some of its predecessors. I’m not quite sure how to explain all of this or organize it, so I’ll just list them as a collection of thoughts. Obviously there will be spoilers. Got it? Good.

So here we go.

First things first, my biggest gripe with the movie was that it didn’t try throwing me a curve-ball. See, in the Conjuring 2, the Nun that Lorraine Warren keeps having visions of seems like a secondary monster, something that Lorraine has been hinted at seeing during the first Conjuring movie. It’s an over-arching storyline that ends up being the main force behind everything they’ve gone through. The spirit that possesses the child in The Conjuring 2 is a spirit being held and tormented by the demon Valak, a.k.a The Nun. It’s using the girl to break through while also tormenting Lorraine Warren. So we already know who this demon is, and the purpose of The Nun was to tell us where this demon came from and how it came to be. Which it does, but it does so in the most straight-forward, unsurprising way possible. There are so side-stories, no minor demons or possessions, no ghosts. I was expecting, in true Conjuring fashion, to be surprised that the Nun actually has a tie-in that goes back even further. But for all intents and purposes, it seems to end (or rather, begin) there.

Another gripe was that the movie didn’t try anything new. The Nun’s entire approach seems to be based on jump scares and a few slight visual tricks. But there is no unknown. There is no uncertainty. We know the demon Valak escapes whatever the protagonists will attempt, so of course I was expecting them to fail in spectacular fashion. But they don’t. They literally “succeed” and seemingly go about their lives… well, except for the one that ends up being the tie-in to the Conjuring. But the movie would’ve lost absolutely nothing by killing off Father Burke or Sister Irene, and what could’ve made this movie truly terrifying were these characters not only dying, but doing so in the most grueling, horrific way possible. The movie plays it extremely safe, which is a weird about-face after Anabelle Creation’s big reveal. I was personally left thinking, “that’s it?” after the credits rolled.

Season 3 Of Daredevil Is Hitting Soon And I Have Some Catching Up To Do

The teaser trailers are trickling out for Daredevil Season 3, and it’s a great reminder of how woefully behind I am. Daredevil was the first Marvel series to hit Netflix, and arguably the first show that really took advantage of the lack of network restrictions. It was gritty, brutal, and for lack of a better description, didn’t pull any punches. Then we got Jessica Jones, and then we got Luke Cage, another Daredevil, then the groan-worthy Iron Fist, then the not-quite-as-groan-worthy-but-still-kinda-bad Defenders. It was a rollercoaster of highs and lows on several series that really failed to land with me.

Jessica Jones struggled to grab me at first, though I eventually managed to get into it, thanks to David Tennant’s awesome Purple Man. It was ultimately a downer of a show, though, and after watching it I had no real desire to go back.

Luke Cage was the opposite. I really loved the first half of the slow-burning drama that unfolded, but the “bait and switch” bad guy half way through totally lost me, though thankfully the ramping up of action helped get me through, and the emergency operation on Luke to remove some anti-Cage bullets was probably the best episode of the season.

Iron Fist was a slog, even though I gave Danny Rand the benefit of the doubt multiple times, his hard headed attitude just made you want to reach through the screen and choke him. It’s hard to root for a hero who keeps making one bad decision after another.

All of these led up to the Defenders, which I had my doubts about, which were all but confirmed when I actually watched it. The Defenders was ok, but it failed to juggle all the respective heroes in a way that made their shaky alliance believable. It also didn’t help that Danny Rand was still being as annoyingly stubborn as ever. After what I would categorize as “Phase 1” of the Marvel Netflix Universe, it was really hard to get back in the mood to watch the beginning of “Phase 2” with the second season of Jessica Jones.

Jessica Jones season 2 starts out with a bit more intrigue, but still leans way too heavily on Jessica being a train wreck, even though the show is digging into why she’s such a mess. It’s hard to really care when JJ is such a miserable person to begin with. It’s been another slog so far, and I hope it picks up…

XPN Junkie’s 2018 Year In Review

*Okay, apparently I wrote almost an entire “year in review” and never actually posted it. So, uh, here’s your XPN Junkie 2018 year in review!*

A Look Back at 2018

Ah, 2018. You’ve been a year. 365 days, to be exact. It’s been a quietly productive year for XPN Junkie, having no fewer than 98 original posts as of this writing (with four days still to go).

2018 kicked off with a Rant-astic update on what I had been playing, and I’m happy to say that I have completed at least some of the games I had listed there. I should also note that as of that writing, I was still unemployed and had a little bit of pent-up hostility toward, well, everything. Not so this year! I have a job, albeit a shitty one, but at least I no longer have pent-up anger issues. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the hostility, I just have people to take it out on now!

Looking back on what has changed between 2017 and 2018, it’s obvious all that free time and frustration fueled my writing style, because it was admittedly much better. Nowadays, between work time, game time, and life, it’s all I can do to just get a new post thrown up every few days. Cherry and Merle sure’s hell aren’t helping. Cherry’s busy with her own priorities and Merle’s a lazy sack of shit. To be fair, Merle’s main contribution to the website is his Rated M feature, and until Dead or Alive 6 comes out, there just isn’t a whole lot for him to write about.

XPN Junkie
On my end though, 2018 brought one big change in particular. Namely, the name. We went from being PopCult & Pinups to being XPN Junkie. The main reason for this is that I felt the word Pinups was labeling us before we even really had a chance.  The second reason was that while I wanted pinups to be a feature, I never really wanted it to be the main driving subject. So a name change was inevitable, and I ultimately decided on XPN Junkie, because holy shit coming out with a gamer blog name is difficult. I actually wanted to go back to my old VinylGamer blog name, only to realize someone had a YouTube channel called VinylGamer, which was unfortunate because my blog pre-dated the age of that YouTube account by a good 3 years. But whatever. I like XPN Junkie. It’s grown on me over the past year. Maybe 2019 will be when I actually get some original artwork for the site and stop using copyrighted characters. That’s gonna come back to bite me one day, but for now I have yet to make a single red cent off the website, so I think I’m okay for now.

Backlog Barbecue
The end of 2017 brought the birth of the Backlog Barbecue category. It was a necessary replacement for the Backlog Bingo feature I created for PopCult & Pinups. While it was fun, and I had a wonderfully enticing photo of Penthouse Pet Jessi June that I photographed myself, the move away from pinups required me to bring about something new. Hence, I created the Backlog Barbecue, an on-going feature of whatever games in my pile of shame I was able to “burn” through. Get it? Burn? Pile? Barbecue? It’s subtle, I know.

Anyway, I actually had a great deal of fun and success with the Backlog Barbecue. I found a format for the Featured Images I really liked, that was inter-changeable with whatever games I completed. I think it works really well, and I’m not locked into a set list of games I force myself to play through. I did try a spiritual successor to my Backlog Bingo over the summer, called Backlog Barbecue Cook-Out Edition, and that was a colossal failure. I hated every minute of it, and in the end it was a mercy killing. I went back to the open-ended nature of my backlog, and I’ve been really happy with the results.

Of course, the very existence of the backlog is a beast that never dies, or even shrinks, so I can see the Backlog Barbecue smoking out the neighbors for a long time to come.

Re-visiting Splinter Cell Re-visited
In 2017 I stared re-playing the Splinter Cell series, one game at a time. That was quite the under-taking, and it ultimately broke me. I drifted away from it, then in the middle of 2018, Microsoft announced that the remaining Xbox 360 games would be backward compatible, and I realized it was time to finish it. So I did, with varying degrees of success. Some of it was surprising, as I ended up enjoying Conviction more than I did the last time, and didn’t like Blacklist as much as I used to. You can find that entire list of write-ups on the top menu, or by clicking here.

Rated M
This year I brought Merle on board to write for the website. Merle’s an older guy, and brought with him his own edge and a more… adult… approach to his content and writing style. Since I created XPN Junkie in the hopes of being a censorship-free zone, I gave Merle the reigns to write about whatever he wanted to write about, within reason, of course. He created his own feature, Rated M (for Merle), and whenever he decides to take time out of his leisurely scheduled life (seriously Merle, you’re not that busy, what the fuck) he’ll contribute with a racy post about cosplay, well-endowed heroines, metal bikinis, or whatever else he feels will make people uncomfortable. You know what will make me uncomfortable, Merle? A regular posting schedule!

Mixer Stream
I (XxEvil AshxX) have a channel on Mixer I have been streaming on quite regularly. The only problem is, I don’t stream Fortnite, nor do I have a giant pair of boobs, so it’s been quite the challenge getting viewers. I’m being a bit catty about the boobs thing, since there are obviously many successful male streamers out there, but the fact of the matter is that I can’t afford to play the latest and greatest of everything, nor do I have the luxury of sitting around my house playing video games for ten hours a day. Both are pretty much required if you want to be successful at streaming. Or you can just play Fortnite like all the other lemmings. Seriously, fuck that game. Hopefully someday people will realize it’s not so much a game as it is a masterfully crafted collection of marketing bulletpoints, all designed to hook the kiddos and keep them consuming. How’s that for catty?

XPN Junkie has a Mixer channel as well, but I never use it due to complications I *think* I’ve already covered here. Suffice it to say, the Xbox One X that I do 99% of my gaming on isn’t my “home” console, so every digital game on the system is locked out. The “home” console is in the living room for the wife to use. My two choices are to keep swapping my “home” console every time I want to use the old unit, or to use my external streaming device, which isn’t hard to do, but right now it’s dedicated to streaming Dragon Quest XI off the PS4. First world problems, indeed.

The Year Ahead

I’ll admit that right now, I don’t have a ton of projects in the works. Most of my free time outside of life and work is focused on getting through this horrid backlog. I did create a page called “In The Works” and I hope to start updating it about once a month, where I update with the things that are too early to do write-ups on, but that I still want people to know about. Basically it’s a progress report of sorts on some of the bigger projects that are obviously going to span me multiple months to complete. Projects like, say, this completely ridiculous attempt at completing every Assassin’s Creed game, in order…

Pushing Forward in Final Fantasy XIII… Literally

Yeah, you read that right. I’ve begun (i.e. “continued”) my inaugural play-through of Final Fantasy XIII. I’ve been pushing forward, quite literally, for about 10 hours now, and so far it’s been a battle of attrition. The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy has always been regarded as a bit of a black sheep, but I never realized just how much of a departure it was from the core FF experience. It’s been a rough go so far, and admittedly the 10+ hours I’ve put into the game have taken me several months to accumulate.

Part of that was because of the marathon Assassin’s Creed gaming session I have been working on, having completed practically all of the legacy AC games in only a few months. While that took up a large portion of my time, I took breaks to play other things, such as Resident Evil 2, among others. But every once in a while I’d boot up Final Fantasy XIII and give it a go…

‘Games as a Service’ Is Killing My Backlog

There once was a time where a guy or gal could play a video game, finish it, and move on to another game. If for whatever reason he or she moved on before that game was completed, it would fall into the dreaded backlog, a.k.a. the “pile of shame.” While back in the day, before the video game industry became the colossal beast that it has, great video games only came out once or twice a year, and keeping that backlog in check was relatively easy.

Those days are long gone. It’s been hard enough to keep the backlog to a minimum in recent years, and I’ve even attempted little activities for myself such as the Backlog Bingo, which eventually morphed into the on-going Backlog Barbecue. But now I have “Games as a Service” to contend with.

If you don’t know what “Games as a Service” are, then you’ve been under a toadstool for the past few years. I now have multiple games on my system that are labeled as such, and if I had to put a definition on it, I would say they’re games that are meant to be played for long periods of time, that are designed to never be finished. They’re meant to keep you playing and playing until the end of time.

While this isn’t entirely a bad thing, it does bring about a bit of a conundrum to someone as backlog-conscious as myself…

Well, that about does it. Ya know, now that I’ve gone back and read through some of these incomplete posts, I’ve realized that they’re not nearly as entertaining as I thought they would be. Perhaps that’s why I never finished them. Perhaps some things are better left unsaid.

Ah, well. If you’re reading this, you’re just as bored as I am. Thanks for stopping by!