If you’re headed to Amazing Las Vegas Comic Convention, you don’t have to gamble on getting the best deal at the Penguinate table. All you have to do is hold a VIP pass or be a Vendor and join our Patreon for the best deal.
As a VIP or Vendor, you’ve worked hard to get your pass,
which means you deserve a little break. At the Penguinate table, you’ll get $1
off of every purchase over $10. You don’t need to be a member of our Patreon campaign
for this discount, you just need to present your VIP or Vendor credentials.
Of course, we love our Patreon Penguinators, which is why we
offer them $1 off for every $10 they spend at are table. Join our Patreon at
any level before May 31, 2019 and you’ll be able to get this discount in addition
to the VIP and Vendor discount!
Our penguins are looking for good homes where they will be cherished and bring joy. They love to cosplay, and many of them already have costumes. If you don’t see a penguin that captures your fancy, we can make a penguin specifically for you. You’ll can place your order with a small deposit at the comic con, and we’ll begin working on it in July.
Every penguin is handmade with hand embroidered eyes, which gives each penguin a unique look. For every penguin we sell during ALVCC, we will give $1 to the Global Penguin Society.
If you are looking for posters, our penguin motivational posters are just the right thing to brighten any room. Disney fans will like our small prints of bygone Disneyland details, and movie buffs should look at our Russian Lobby Cards. Stop by our table and say “Hi!” We look forward to seeing you.
Preordering is available to secure your items. Be sure to join our blog email list.
Even with its predictable plot, ridiculous need to stick to
tired clichés, and Tom Cruise, “Oblivion” gives viewers cause to wonder what
makes us human. Its answer is “our memories.”
As clone whose memory was wiped five years ago, Cruise’s
character Jack is bound to a tower where he lives safely and ventures out to
patrol the land, kill Scavs if he has to, and fix drones. However, since Jack
is cloned from the best of humanity, he starts to wonder about his existence
and the dreams he has about a woman he doesn’t know. When he meets her and
meets himself with a different number, he realizes who he is and who he isn’t. She
doesn’t mind. She’s his wife and says that it’s the memories that make a person
who he or she is.
If memories are what make us who we are, humanity might be
in trouble. Smart phones and the Internet are eroding are ability to remember
things. There’s no reason to remember facts when they can be found easily with
a quick search, but when you don’t practice using your memory, you begin to
lose the ability to remember. This is seen in the “photo taking impairment
effect.” Because we take a photo of it, our brain doesn’t have to remember it.
While this hypothesis is still being tested and debated, the question is:
If we are our memories, who are we when we don’t remember
anything, and who will be as a society when we forget our past? What happens to
humanity when the phones have our memories? Perhaps, the movie has told us more
than we realize… “Oblivion.”
Most of the time when people curse, it’s not pleasant or
natural. It’s like they’re trying too hard to make a point: I’m cool, I’m down
to earth, I’m angry, I don’t give a rip what others think… (probably should
have put a swear word in there.) The words spew forth like so much phonic vomit
with no care for art or lyricism. Christina Applegate’s Jen in “Dead to Me” is
the exception.
This classic and much-lauded episode features acclaimed
actor Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a man who loves to read in a world where
readers aren’t welcomed. His boss derides him for being a reader who isn’t
dedicated to his job and instructs Bemis to stop reading at work and at lunch.
His wife is worse. She scribbles on every page of a poetry book Bemis hid in
his chair. When he tries to read it to her, at her request, he sees the
vandalism. She then snatches the book and tears out the pages – one by one.
This world is not for him, much like the gunslinger world wasn’t for Mr.
Denton.
When everything is blown up, Bemis survives. He has plenty
of food, but the isolation and the lack of entertainment start to get to him.
Bemis finds his salvation in a destroyed public library where he is able to
pile up books sorted by month and year. Then the unthinkable happens.
What Bemis did to deserve his fate is unclear – except for
his last phrase. That’s not fair. It’s not fair. And so it isn’t, because life
isn’t always fair, and this may be how Rod Serling reminds us that not all
villains get their come-uppance and not all good men get what they long for.
As a VIP ticket holder at Lilac City Comicon 2019, you get a lot of cool things from early entry to the show and an exclusive print to a Disney enamel pin and priority reserved seating. This year, you’ll also get $1 off any purchase of $10 or more at the Penguinate table (A1)! This discount is in addition to the Patreon Penguinator discount if your eligible.
Our penguins and books are already priced lower than what you would pay online because you don’t have to pay shipping and handling, and we don’t like messy numbers that aren’t a multiple of five. If you preorder your items and show us your VIP pass when you get to our table, we will give you a dollar back. That means you don’t have to worry about losing out on any additional discounts. (Pro Tip: Our preorder prices are the lowest ever, and they may be even lower than what we open the comicon with.)
So, get your VIP tickets, and come see us to get your VIP discount. If you’re planning on going both days, an extra $4 (when compared with two single day adult passes) for VIP treatment is totally worth it. Remember VIP tickets must be purchased in advance. We look forward to seeing you at Lilac City Comicon 2019, June 1 and 2, at the Spokane Convention Center. Vendors also qualify for the discount, just show your vendor badge!
With a plot as predictable as “Oblivion’s,” telling you that
this article contains spoilers is questionable. After all, if you know what’s
going to happen, me telling you isn’t really a spoiler, is it? It seems as
ridiculous as this movie and its ending. Still, there may be spoilers ahead if
you haven’t seen “Oblivion,” yet. I would suggest avoiding it altogether, and
with a domestic gross total of just under $90 million for this 2013 release, it
appears that’s what many people did.
That doesn’t mean that “Oblivion” is without merit. Sure, it
may leave you wondering how Tom Cruise continues to get acting jobs and why
Morgan Freeman decided to get mixed up in this 2-hour sleep pod. The film may
even have the same effect on you as a sleep pod.
Still, it does give you cause to ponder and imagine
thousands of Tom Cruises coming out of a spaceship on a mission to eradicate
humanity from the planet, or at least, destroy enough people to make the planet
harvestable. If the idea of thousands of Tom Cruises as an invading army doesn’t
give you nightmares, I’m not sure what will.
The stunning visuals and effects were wasted on Cruise and
his lack of acting ability. There wasn’t even a good running scene – he does
run, but the angle that it’s filmed from doesn’t allow you to make too much fun
of it. The movie’s end scene, which was supposed to be touching and beautiful,
had me laughing out loud as “Oblivion” slipped into the absurd one final time.
If you haven’t binge-watched “Dead to Me,” what are you
waiting for? With episodes coming in at under 30 minutes, you’re getting a
series that can fit in with almost any schedule, and every episode packs a
punch of drama, comedy, pathos and the exploration of psychology that comes
with it. Bookmark this page, go watch the show and then come back here for the
discussion. Spoilers are below the trailer.
Jen (Christina Appplegate) found out she had the gene
related to breast cancer and got a double mastectomy (Applegate went through
the procedure IRL in 2008) to save her family the trauma of what she went
through when her mother died. (She still smokes heavily, but that’s for a
different blog post.) After the surgery, her husband stops being intimate with
her, and unbeknownst to her, he finds a younger woman with larger breasts to
start a relationship with. He told this girl that he was a widower and his wife
died from breast cancer.
While Judy’s (Linda Cardellini) case is a little more
complicated, she says her fiancé left her after she had her fifth miscarriage.
He couldn’t deal with the pain or the letdowns, and he wanted to have a family
at some point.
These two experiences are parallel. As the two women have
their womanhood and desirability called into question when they, for all
intents and purposes, lose the body parts that make them female. Is Jen any
less worthy of her husband’s love after she sacrifices for the sake of her
family’s future? Is Judy less deserving of love because she hasn’t been able to
bring a child to term?
Most people would say “No,” probably including these two
women’s husbands before the procedure and the miscarriage had the hypothetical
been asked of them. For all of American society’s supposed advances in rights
and body image, the U.S. still values women for how they look and their ability
to bear children. Nowhere is that point made better without it being preached
than in “Dead to Me.”
The bacteria H. pylori are responsible for some stomach
ulcers. For decades, doctors had been able to see the bacteria in the stomach.
While it was on photographs and in literature since 1875, the doctors didn’t
see it. Because they were certain that bacteria couldn’t survive in the
stomach, they ignored it. It didn’t exist as bacteria for them. In 1940, a
doctor found the bacteria, but his supervisor told him he was wrong and ordered
him to stop his work.
One doctor in 1967 labeled the bacteria as “spirillum,” published it in a respected scientific journal where thousands of other doctors could see it, and no one examined it further. It wasn’t until 1979 that Robin Warren declared it to be a bacterium and called it H. pylori. That’s when doctors went back through the literature and photograph showing something that no one thought could be bacteria. A cause of stomach ulcers had been in plain sight for over a century – only hidden by a false belief that nothing could live in the inhospitable climate of the stomach (Kevin Ashton, “How to Fly a Horse,” 2015).
Count the number of passes the team in white jerseys makes in this video.
Did you count them? Did you watch the whole video?
Did you see the dancing gorilla? When people are told to
count the passes (and haven’t seen this video before), they entirely miss the
gorilla who walks through the middle of the basketball players. People talking
on their cell phone while walking down the street will miss a unicycling clown
that passes in front of them because their attention is on the phone
conversation. The brain prioritizes the phone call over everything that doesn’t
seem threatening or that doesn’t make sense. If you want to be more creative,
you have to see what others miss.
Human beings have so much input coming through their five
senses that they have to ignore a lot of things. Otherwise, we would all be
mad/crazy. (Maybe that’s what happening with cell phones…) The brain
prioritizes what it thinks is important and eliminates everything else. You
might think that driving a car and avoiding collisions is the most important
thing, but your brain will prioritize the phone call and the conversation
because driving is routine. Moreover, the brain doesn’t know how to process the
impending collision while also dealing with the conversation on the phone.
Seeing is one of the most important skills you can develop,
and that means getting rid of the distractions and beliefs that keep you from
seeing what’s right in front of you and millions of other people.
When you something new or something old in a different way, you spark your creative abilities. In “Big Hero 6,” Hiro’s brother tells him to shake things up as he turns Hiro upside down and shakes him.
Sherlock Holmes ability to deduce where someone was from and
why they had arrived came from his ability to remember facts and see details.
Those details were often esoteric, but the skill is akin to addressing someone
at a convention by his or her name. When that person asks “Do we know each
other?” The answer is “I read your name tag.” Everyone has the name tags on,
but many people forget the name tags are there.
Of course, seeing is only part of the battle. Once you see
something, you’re going to have to make others see it. Most people will ignore
the new information, especially if they know better. Others will intentionally
make you see something false so that they can justify their worldview rather
than face up to the reality of it. But when you know something the way that
Robin Warren knew there were bacteria in the stomach, you need to set up an
experiment and find someone to verify your results. In creativity, sometimes
that means finishing something you started and finding out you were wrong. And
sometimes, it means turning the world on its ear because you were right.
In the not-too-distant future, humanity is going to have to
decide what it should do with artificial intelligence. As much as human beings
have a fear of playing God, there’s going to be a time when artificial
intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. At that point, it
will need to be called intelligence or people will face the problems associated
with slavery, its consequences and what it means in relationship to being
human.
Unfortunately, people aren’t yet equipped to understand when
the change will take place. What separates the artificial from the organic? The
programmed from the born? Especially when so many people are programmed through
their culture, their religion, and their media choices.
In “The Lonely,” the captain of the rescue ship, who also
happened to bring the robot in the ship has no moral dilemma. He knows who is
real and who is not, and he makes his decision accordingly. But for the
prisoner, the robot was a living being with emotions who saved his humanity and
kept him from isolation-related madness (something addressed in “Where Is
Everybody?” and “Time Enough at Last” and, to a lesser extent “Sixteen
Millimeter Shrine”).
What happens when a machine saves a man from loneliness and
madness? What happens when our phones and computers do the same?
This article contains spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame.” If
you haven’t seen it, yet, seriously? You haven’t seen it, yet? Okay, well,
since things on the Internet are forever and this could be read sometime in the
future, if you haven’t seen it yet, book mark this page and come back to it. If
you have seen “Endgame” then continue on after the trailer.
There is a certain segment of the movie going (and general)
population whose trigger word is “feminism.” They came out against
“Ghostbusters,” so hard that Leslie Jones had to delete her Twitter account.
They’ve joined forces to harass “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” star Kelly Marie
Tran into leaving social media.
The problem is so bad that when Rotten Tomatoes recognized
campaigns to sink “Captain Marvel” “Black Panther” and “Star Wars: Episode IX”
through bad reviews before the films were released, it changed its policy for
reviewing films and only allowed people to review films after they had been
released. That same anti-“Captain Marvel” campaign was addressed by “Shazam!”
star Zachary Levi in a class act social media post about how those actions
actually hurt fandoms. People can like both films.
All of this plays into one amazing scene in “Avengers: Endgame.” All of the women on the battlefield during the confrontation with Thanos and his army come together on the screen to relieve Spider-Man and keep the gauntlet away from Thanos. It’s a glorious scene and sequence.
My first thought was “OMG! They did it. I can’t believe they
did it. It’s amazing.” My second thought was “OMG! They did it. I can’t believe
they did it. The trolls are going to be talking about this scene and deriding
the movie because of it.” And they did come out to comment, which is
unfortunate because one of the comments was a ridiculous “It’s not even
realistic that all these women could get together on a chaotic battlefield to
make this scene work.”
Let’s just take this comment at face value. “It’s not
realistic…” This battle is literally about one thing: Getting the Infinity
Gauntlet and keeping it away from Thanos. That’s all this battle is about. It’s
not about killing the army on Thanos’ side. It’s not about counting bodies.
It’s not about anything but Thanos and the gauntlet. Every eye in that battle,
especially on the Avengers side, should be on that gauntlet and where it is at
all times. Yes, you don’t want to get taken out by one of Thanos’ minions, but
you also don’t want to get taken out by a second snap. So, when the women heard
Spider-Man was in trouble, they all gathered to protect the him and the
gauntlet.
Now, let’s move on to the more important point: “It’s not
realistic…” We are talking about a movie where a rage monster merged with a
genius and became a green, hulking scientist with little penchant for smashing
things. This movie also featured an Asgardian getting a beer belly, half the
beings in the universe having been snapped away, and stones holding sway over
space, time, souls, reality, mind and power. Women were riding winged horses.
Aliens were coming out of there spaceships. A man had grown to the size of skyscraper.
A majority of the main cast had traveled through time, and many of the rest of
them were resurrected after being dead for five years. Yes, it’s not realistic.
It’s a comic book movie.
And let’s examine one more point: Comic team-ups are the
best, especially for those who are less interested in comics. As a kid, I
didn’t have a lot of money for comic books, so when I did buy them, they were
either really cheap and secondhand or they were a comic that included a
team-up. The return of almost the entire 11 years of Marvel superheroes at the
beginning of the battle was powerful. Having the women team-up in the middle of
the battle was also powerful. It was that moment of awe and wonder. They were
both fan services, just for different types of fans.
For anyone who would criticize this scene, it’s important to
realize what the scene really is and why you’re reacting to it negatively.
Chances are, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find that you don’t like its
implications of change at a cultural level. It does represent a shift in the
status quo, and there’s no going back, no matter how much you fight, whine,
complain and troll. What you should realize, though, is this shift is going to
make it possible for your favorite comic book characters to survive. As more
people enjoy the movies, the profits will funnel to the Marvel division of
Disney and they will keep the comic books themselves on the shelves.
If you love Marvel comics, you should be grateful for
everyone who saw “Avengers: Endgame” regardless of their politics and the fan
service paid to them. Instead of wasting your time trolling, step into the
light of a new day and find your power for positive transformation – like Bruce
Banner and the Hulk. Maybe, you’ll even realize that scene wasn’t a fan
service, it was a way to troll the trolls.
Penguinate! Positive Creativity 