In fall 2010, Tech gained an award-winning science fiction writer in the Literature, Media and Communication School (LMC).

Kathleen Goonan gained popularity for the first novel in her Nanotech Quartet, Queen City Jazz. Her debut novel, Queen City Jazz is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is Goonan’s hometown.

Since Cincinnati was her childhood home, Goonan decided to mirror her childlike perceptions of the city in the novel. As a result, Queen City Jazz is a surrealistic novel with a nonlinear structure charmingly mimicking an adolescent perspective.

Less than a decade after her birth, Goonan and her family moved to Hawaii, where her father worked for the U.S. Navy designing fire protection for buildings.

The local library was a walk away, so young Goonan devoured books on fairy tales as well as Hawaiian history and folklore.

When she moved back to Hawaii 28 years later, Goonan used these early readings as inspiration for her novel The Bones of Time.

In 2008, Goonan won the John W. Campbell Award for her novel In War Times. Goonan says it is a personal favorite of her works because “it interweaves my father’s WWII memoirs with a science fictional investigation of why humans are so warlike, and how we might change that tragic propensity.”

Before winning major awards, before being placed on lists for best science fiction novels of the year, before accepting a job at Tech, Kathleen Goonan was a recent college grad with an English undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech who realized she wanted to be a writer.

To achieve this goal, Goonan realized she “needed to know more about life and about writing, and [I] trained to be an Association Montessori Internationale teacher in a program that is now a Master’s degree course at Loyola University.”

She wanted to open her own Montessori school so she could teach for nine months out of the year and use her evenings and summers to write. As usual, life decided to change things up a bit.

Goonan opened a school in Knoxville in 1979 and enrollment filled up quickly. The school was on a year-round, full-day schedule. Even though she loved teaching, Goonan found she had less time to write than she originally intended.

“When I woke up on the morning of my thirty-third birthday,” Goonan said, “a voice in my  head said ‘If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better get started.’”

She took the voice’s advice to heart and started writing at every opportunity that presented itself. Mornings, weekends and lunch breaks all saw Goonan scribbling away to produce her first novel. Her work resulted in the aforementioned Queen City Jazz.

Goonan did not always have a focus on science fiction.

“My first writing identity was that of a poet,” she revealed. “I had some success with poetry when a college student, but during the fifteen years in which I was a Montessori teacher, something within me to which I have little access decided that I would write narrative fiction, and, more than that, science fiction, for which I had no background at all.”

Part of why science fiction allured Goonan was the intellectual challenge. Science fiction provided “a literature in which I could be experimental in the use of language as well as with story.”

This challenge, combined with her love for Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, novels which “stand out like mountain peaks for me,” turned Goonan into the respected writer she is today.

Dr. Lisa Yaszek, Head of Undergraduate Studies in LMC at Tech, invited Goonan to speak at Tech and at a few meetings of the Science Fiction Research Association. Dr. Yaszek later invited Goonan to teach at Tech. Goonan accepted, and said, “I enjoy it tremendously.”

Goonan particularly likes teaching science fiction at Tech because she finds that Tech’s focus on technology education has fostered a respect for the genre amongst the students and faculty.

She has also benefitted from teaching at Tech, saying that “teaching at a research institution has deepened my own appreciation of the history and the possibilities of science fiction as an emerging international literature uniquely able to investigate and portray culture, politics, and how radical change affects countries and individuals.”

When asked which of her works was the most difficult to write, Goonan responded, “If you define ‘difficult’ as ‘unpleasant,’ then I would have to say that none of my writing has been difficult. It is my life’s work…Writing consists of proposing one’s own challenges and finding ways to solve the puzzle of communicating vision. For me, writing is thus the keenest enjoyment imaginable. When I am immersed in a story or novel, what I am working on seems like the most difficult thing I have ever attempted. Once it is down on paper or pixels, once it has been wrested from the part of me where story lives, which is a lot like trying to remember a dream, the fun, easy work of editing, shaping, and refining begins.”

Infamous: Second Son is Sucker Punch’s third entry in its Infamous series. A new protagonist drives the game’s changes from previous entries. Second Son improves on the core gameplay of its predecessors but fails to grow significantly.

The protagonist of the first two Infamous games was Cole McGrath, a bike courier who accidentally gained electric powers. Most of Infamous’ fun came from rocketing around the open cities, unlocking new abilities and generally causing havoc on criminals and innocent people.

Second Son’s major development on this formula is Delsin, who is Cole’s replacement as protagonist. Delsin has the ability to absorb other people’s powers. This means that instead of being limited to one power set, Delsin has multiple ones he can switch between.

Sucker Punch did a good job of making each power feel different. Even though some moves basically overlap between the powers, such as a standard blast from the hands, they have different perks like firing rates or strength.

The only real downside to having multiple powers lies in the decision to not allow access to all of them simultaneously. Players can only use one power set at a time. In order to switch, Delsin has to absorb the power from a source. While plenty of power sources scatter the landscape, it feels like an odd decision to give players a variety of powers to play with but restrict them to using only one at a time.

This inflexibility aside, the powers are all fun to play and explore as Delsin runs wild through Seattle, the game’s location. As with the first two games, Second Son is an action sandbox title.

Fights take place in a third person shooter style, with the camera hovering over Delsin’s shoulder as he fires blasts, bombs and rockets at his opponents.

Seattle is painstakingly rendered with all the detail fans expect from the series. While unable to attest for virtual Seattle’s likeness to the real thing, I can assure that the former feels like a breathing, living city. Citizens lean against buildings on a smoke break or whip out their phones to take pictures of Delsin’s heroics. Or his villainy.

Second Son continues Infamous’ tradition of utilizing a moral system. It also continues to be baffling in its simplicity. There are only two sides to the system: essentially, Hero or Villain. The more Delsin heals civilians or kills drug dealers, the more he progresses to becoming a Hero. If he kills said civilians and blows up a few annoying street performers, then he becomes well on his way to attaining Villain-hood.

Abilities can only be unlocked by progressing one way or the other down the morality system, and a few of them are exclusive to Hero or Villain.

The problem with the morality system is that everything is presented to the player as being heroic or villainous. There are points in the story where it forces the player to decide between one action or another, and each is clearly labelled as being good or bad. It is a highly simplistic view on the philosophy of morality to the point where it simply feels like a gameplay excuse for withholding certain abilities.

Whether the player decides to make him a Hero or Villain, Delsin is a marked improvement over Cole in the character department. Delsin is an Akomish Native American who falls squarely under the “young person trying to find who he is” stereotype. It is a fairly common archetype in superhero stories. But Delsin manages to have something Cole never really achieved: personality. The reckless rebel, Delsin quickly accepts his new powers to fight a repressive government. The flaw with the character is the tendency for him to err on the side of being annoying.

Infamous: Second Son is a minor evolution, but it at least takes a step in the right direction. Multiple powers and better writing has made Second Son the best in the series.

Throughout his many, many lives, Red has never had an adventure quite like this. The streaming website Twitch.tv was recently home to perhaps the strangest game of Pokémon this side of a creepypasta. A Generation One Pokémon playthrough was given a live feed with a simple twist: Anybody could input a command via the chat log.

Basically, the Internet exploded. The number of people playing the game was consistently greater than the population of small countries. If you ever talked about the game with players, they referred to themselves as “we.” “We” caught Zapdos today, or “we” are stuck in ledge hell. When checking up with a fellow player, I caught myself asking, “What did we do today?”

Since there was roughly a 30-second delay between a command’s input and execution, there was no way of knowing exactly what you had just done. This led to chaos. Red was often stuck in corners for hours at a time.

The stream’s creator implemented a new system a few days into the game. Players could vote in Anarchy, in which the game continued chaotically, or Democracy, which executed the action with the most inputs over a certain amount of time. The theory was that Democracy could be implemented to navigate through tricky areas like the Safari Zone. Democracy was used sparingly and some of the major advances in the game occurred under Anarchy. The fact Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP), the name of the playthrough, beat the first gym is, to me, miraculous.

While TPP wasn’t purely random, it was purely chaotic. The inputs were not truly random; the input stream confirms this since B and Start were used far less than the directional buttons or A. It was chaotic, though, because there was no cooperation in terms of button inputs, and the aforementioned inability to know what your input would actually do for the next half minute.

Theoretically, this game could have never ended. This sometimes seemed to be the case considering the hours stuck in certain locations.

TPP has implications in various academic and creative fields. For example, how did TPP complete the game? The community gathered together to create short-term goals, but this doesn’t guarantee success. This is proven in the creation of “the False Prophet.” The community decided to get an Eevee and evolve it into a Vaporeon so as to eventually teach it Surf. They created a Flareon instead, and the resulting confusion resulted in the release of two beloved Pokémon on the team.

Flubs like this prove that merely having a stated goal, such as “beat the Elite Four,” wasn’t enough. Yet TPP did it. Was this an exercise in group psychology or game design? If you create a hivemind with an understanding of basic mechanics, will it always eventually reach its goal? Or is this a statement on game design wherein games are, accidentally, impossible not to beat if given a continuous stream of chaotic commands?

To me, the most fascinating part of TPP is the re-confirmation of humans as creatures of stories. The community took the meandering Red at face value and asked why someone would act like he did. From this simple assumption sprang narratives that ranged from mythological to post-modernist.

Religious narratives about the Helix Fossil and BirdJesus were born. Fan art and stories ran rampant. Stories were created towards the end to directly subvert previously written, widely accepted mythos. GIFs and comics told Red’s stories from the perspective of other characters in the game. This speaks to our need for stories. From the inability to throw away an item, we create a god. From an accidental evolution, we create a false prophet. From chaos, we create narrative.

The Fab Four transcended pop culture. No matter how one feels about their music, the Beatles undeniably have been mythologized. This is easily demonstrated, and purposefully played with, in the title of Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson’s graphic novel The Fifth Beatle.

Because the Beatles are considered a unit of four, this mysterious fifth is immediately subject to reader suspicion and curiosity, the latter emotion compounded by Sir Paul McCartney’s quote headlining the back cover: “If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian.”

Brian Epstein was the Beatles’ first manager, the young man who felt his destiny was to introduce the world to the nascent band. The Fifth Beatle is primarily Epstein’s biography, but a biography defined by his involvement with the Beatles.

The only backstory one gets of Epstein is a brief flashback paralleling his various past rejections with his early attempts to secure a record deal. Besides that, the graphic novel details only his life in relation to the band and ends with his early death shortly after the release of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The story balances his professional struggles of elevating an unknown local band into a music phenomenon with his personal struggles. Both make equally compelling reads and results in sharing common themes and symbols, particularly Epstein’s fondness for bullfighting.

The dialogue is snappy and Tiwary manages to give the main characters distinctive voices, a skill not many comic writers are able to pull off. In particular, the band members speak in a charmingly weird and collaborative fashion, as if they were always writing lyrics to their own lives.

The story’s main weakness is the pacing. It has a tendency to feel disjointed because major chunks of time are skipped page by page. Getting the band a record deal, Epstein’s first major challenge, is solved in a short amount of reading. While the entire graphic novel makes sense plot-wise and delivers a satisfactory emotional conclusion for Epstein, the individual sections can feel rushed.

In terms of art, the book is stunningly beautiful. Savannah College of Art and Design alumni Andrew C. Robinson draws most of the novel and takes up colorist duties as well.

Ethereal atmospheres dominate the panels, enhanced with ample use of vivid color; nothing in this book is muted or subtle in colors. Fantasy and dream sequences are drawn with the same style as the real parts of the book, causing that hallucinatory quality to bleed into reality.

However, there is still deliberate care in depicting the characters. Epstein and the Beatles are instantly recognizable but allowed to express themselves in the exaggerated expressions granted comic characters. They are real people drifting amidst vibrant, fantastic settings. In other words, the art is reminiscent of how a Beatles song would look; beautiful characters cloaked in the unreal.

Kyle Baker draws a small section depicting the Beatles’ disastrous trip to the Phillipines. A drastic change in style, this section is presented satirically. The characters are caricatures and run around animatedly as if in a cartoon show. It fits the section’s subject and does not overstay its welcome.

The Fifth Beatle fails as pure biography because it does not want to be pure biography. It succeeds in educating readers in the life of the man who, arguably, is the reason the Beatles became gods of music.

Following a prevalent theme of the band it follows, the book presents Brian Epstein’s life with a shroud of fiction that expounds upon the facts of his life to elevate it into something tragic, beautiful, something mythic.

Our Take: 4.5/5

2013 was a stellar year across the entertainment mediums. Sony and Microsoft joined Nintendo into the new console generation with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, respectively. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Katy Perry and Justin Timberlake released new albums. Major blockbusters like Iron Man 3 and Star Trek: Into Darkness dominated summer theaters while award hopefuls like Gravity and American Hustle were released in winter.

It is no baseless claim that 2014 has big shoes to fill.

The video game industry is looking to start the year strong again. Highly anticipated Bioshock: Infinite stole the spotlight last spring, a job that falls this year to two exclusive titles: Infamous: Second Son for PlayStation 4 and Titanfall for Xbox One.

The third Final Fantasy XIII game sees the light of day as Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. The next numbered entry in the franchise, Final Fantasy XV, formerly known as Final Fantasy Versus, is still plagued with a vague 2014 release schedule.

Other high profile games include Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for Wii U, Dark Souls II for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Elder Scrolls Online for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and South Park: The Stick of Truth for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Spring offers a wide selection for films as well. Early blockbuster titles include colon-riddled sequels 300: Rise of an Empire and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

All-ages films being released include the latest Muppets movie, Muppets Most Wanted, complete with an all-star cast. Hayao Miyazaki’s rumored final film The Wind Rises, voiced by such talents as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, hits theaters Feb. 21.

Wes Anderson’s newest film The Grand Budapest Hotel, George Clooney-directed The Monuments Men and Pulitzer-prize-winning play turned film August: Osage County  are other films to keep an eye on.

Atlanta itself will host a variety of concerts and shows. Three musicals are scheduled at the Fabulous Fox theatre: Book of Mormon in late January, Once in March and The Lion King in April. Concerts at the Fox include Robin Thicke and Ellie Goulding.

Spread across the great venues of Atlanta will be acts like Switchfoot at the Buckhead Theatre on Mar. 2, Fratellis at the Masquerade on Feb. 21, Panic! At the Disco at the Tabernacle on Feb. 7 and  AFI at Center Stage Theater on Jan. 18.

Even if there are not any imminent secret album releases, the next few months already promise a few gems.

A little over a decade after his death, Johnny Cash is having a posthumous album, Out Among the Stars, released collecting lost recordings from sessions in the 1980s.

Glee star Lea Michelle releases her debut solo album, Louder, in March. Foxes, the singer of Zedd’s hit single “Clarity,” also releases her debut album, Glorious, albeit one day ahead of Michelle.

Upcoming albums also include Young the Giant’s Mind Over Matter, Of Mice and Men’s Restoring Force, Switchfoot’s Fading West, The Fray’s Helios and Bruce Springsteen’s High Hopes.

Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 has further legitimized short stories as a serious genre, and this year’s book selection reflects this changing mentality.

Lydia Davis, practitioner of experimental literature, has a book of short stories entitled Can’t and Won’t: Stories in April. Ben Marcus’ new short story collection Leaving the Sea was recently released this past week. And short story writer Loorie Moore’s new collection Bark will come out late February.

Novels are still, naturally, dominating the bookshelves. New titles from Teju Cole, Emma Donoghue, Jesse Ball and Rachel Joyce are just a sampling of the major talents publishing this spring.

Comics continue to see a rise in popularity thanks to their Hollywood counterparts. Marvel is putting out a wave of titles as part of their NOW! initiative, making perfect jumping-on points for new readers while DC continues their evolving New 52 line-up.

2014 seems to be hitting the ground running, and this spring may be the start of a great year in entertainment.

The Internet is arguably the greatest invention of the 20th century. It has revolutionized nearly every facet of modern society, from social interactions on Facebook to artistic expressions on YouTube to information delivery with news station websites.

Perhaps the greatest unintended side effect of the Internet is anonymity.

It has, in a pessimistic sense, led to demonstrating the worst side of humanity. Cyber bullying has become a prominent issue facing children and teenagers now that a fake online identity on pretty much any social network is a few clicks away.

Vitriol is available in any comments section. Punishment, when enforced by site admins, often consists of account bans. This is circumvented by the arduous process of creating a different account before resuming the stream of personal attacks.

Anonymity is also the reason behind the degradation of online gaming interaction. Any FPS player can attest to the annoying assault of expletives, racism, sexism and generally any offensive combination of words in the English language. Sometimes these players are punished. Not, it would seem, as often as should be enforced.

Considering video games provide a dominant iconography and one of the first social experiences of the upcoming, and our own, generation, these negative environments set potentially harmful examples.

There are also benefits to the anonymity provided by the faceless. Wikipedia, for example, is entirely supported by the efforts of the nameless. While this does allow misinformation to slip through, the fact that anybody can edit the content, tempered somewhat by fact-checking editors, means even minutiae has its own page of information. The absence of a singular author holds every Wikipedia “fact” to scrutiny, meaning anyone can question or elaborate upon a subject without being intimidated by the name of an expert. It has, in a sense, fostered a desire for knowledge.

Anonymity took a literal manifestation in the hacker collective known simply as Anonymous. This group has, to date, infiltrated such organizations as the Westboro Baptist Church, the U.S. copyright office, the Church of Scientology and PayPal.

Anonymous and the concept of anonymity have in part even fueled an economic and social demonstration in the 99 percent movement. The hacker group has claimed to represent the majority will. In a similar vein, the 99 percent movement was a revolt against a perceived minority power for the good of the majority.

Anonymity has seeped so seamlessly into online interactions it’s easy to forget how prevalent it is in everyday use. The metaphorical grapevine has circled the globe. Rumors, misinformation and conspiracy theories all spread with the press of a few buttons. We live in an age of ceaseless information pouring from the fingertips of faceless men and women.

Writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja publish magic on a monthly basis.

Comic books are often criticized, especially in the Big Two publishers Marvel and DC, for their “assembly line” production, wherein a single, 22 page comic can boast a writer, penciller, inker, colorist and letterer as its creators.

This is not always the case, of course, since some of the most respected names in the industry are those who tackle all these jobs by themselves for their artistic endeavors. It is safe to say, however, that a majority of titles follow the procedure of divided labor, and this division leads to comic books that feel disconnected from themselves.

Then there are titles like Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye, which restore fans’ faith, not just in superhero comics, but in the medium as a whole.

Hawkeye protagonist Clint Barton lacks the recognition afforded such powerful names as Clark Kent or Tony Stark, and this fact has been instrumental in defining his character in Fraction and Aja’s run. Their Hawkeye revolves around what the man does when he is not gallivanting about the globe with the Avengers.

In fact, Barton spends the majority of his time outside his costume. The plot focuses on his personal life which, surprise, develops into a complex mess. Plenty of action unfolds alongside the drama as he tangles with the local mafia, but city-wrecking monsters are lacking. This has turned Hawkeye into the least super of superhero comics, yet it manages to be one of the best the genre currently offers.

Fraction and Aja’s collaboration is seamless. It is impossible to tell where the script ends and the art begins. Naturally the dialogue is a decent indicator, but the expertly-timed pacing of the book relies on a plethora of smaller moments that tend to be silent character panels. It is nearly impossible to tell if Fraction scripts them or if Aja adds them himself.

Both can be commended for their talents. Fraction writes a Clint Barton who is frustrating, occasionally suave, clueless about women, gold-hearted, seeking solace from his past and generally being too much fun to read. The secondary characters, such as “not” sidekick Kate Bishop, are also handled with love. Issue 11 is even told from the perspective of Barton’s adopted dog Lucky, who promptly solves a murder.

The character who stands out the most, however, is New York. Fraction taps the energy of the city through the tenement slum in which Barton resides. Barton’s neighbors appear briefly, but each panel is used to build their lives subtly and beautifully; they range from a single mother of two children to a man known affectionately as Grills for his tendency to grill food on the tenement rooftop.

Aja brings this crazy world to life. Technically, his art is great, but Aja excels at acting and composition as well. The characters practically deserve Oscars. Every subtle embarrassed head scratch, every expression of do-not-touch-me body language, every reconciliatory smile and heart-wrenching frown humanize the two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional characters.

Flipping through any issue reveals Aja is a master of compositions. They break, distort, re-build, elaborate upon and utterly change the rules about how to make a comic page layout. 24 panels should not fit on a page, let alone illustrate the delicate relationship between a mentor and his student. Aja manages to surprise each issue.

Guest artists Javier Pulido, Steve Lieber and Francesco Francavilla deserve mention because their issues are amazingly drawn as well. Matt Hollingsworth, the colorist, also warrants high praise for accentuating the art with muted colors that follow a page-by-page color pattern. It is not as flashy or vibrant as other titles, but Hollingsworth knows how to underline the tone of the series so the emotional moments stick further in readers’ minds.

The first hardcover collection of the run is releasing on Nov. 19. It collects the first 11 issues and a plot-relevant annual issue. The next monthly issue being released is number 14, so this collection makes a good jumping-on point for any newcomers to the Hawkeye universe.

Gimmicks are an old sin of the comics industry that has never, and probably will never, disappear. Comic stands flood with new titles spawning under the auspices of their latest superhero blockbuster film, attempting to grab newcomers with familiarity.

Hawkeye was a title that fans had their eyes on, one they regarded warily as another money grab. The book seemed potentially doomed to be another side project profiting off the popularity of Marvel’s 2012 Avengers film. Beneath these squinted, jaded gazes, however, Fraction, Aja and Hollingsworth managed to deliver one of the best superhero comics of the decade.

Great video game sequels carry a series forward while remaining true to its core tenets. Pokémon X and Pokémon Y for the Nintendo 3DS are such games; they provide a myriad of upgrades to the tried-and-true formula without dismantling anything that makes Pokémon tick.

For newcomers, the Pokémon narrative revolves around a teenager who sets out into the world to capture the eponymous creatures, train them and use them to defeat other trainers in creature vs. creature skill battles until he or she becomes the Pokémon Champion.

The region in X and Y, Kalos, is based geographically and culturally on France, complete with its own Eiffel Tower. The battles revolve around a rock-paper-scissors style of fighting using “types.” These types include everything from fire to ghost to steel, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of each type is a player’s highest priority.

Veterans of the game series will first note the drastic change in graphics with this new installment; X and Y leaps into a fully three-dimensional world, complete with fluid character and Pokémon animations. Battles are no longer fought between immobile sprites but 3D Pokémon models that stomp, wriggle, flap and swim their way to victory or defeat.

Of course the low-level attacks more or less involve Pokémon simply jumping and recoiling, but some of the late-game move animations are beautiful and belong in an anime.

Aesthetics aside, X and Y’s gameplay brings a few new elements to the series’ surprisingly complex battle system. For example, Fairy is introduced as the eighteenth type to balance the previous dominance of the Dragon type, and some of the older Pokémon, such as Jigglypuff and Gardevoir, have been retroactively fitted with a Fairy typing.

Veterans of the game series will first note the drastic change in graphics with this new installment

Equally as exciting are Mega Evolutions. Through the story, players gain access to stones which evolve final-stage Pokémon one more time. Only certain Pokémon have these Mega Evolutions and they only lasts for the battle; they are not a permanent improvement.

The lack of permanence combined with a limit of one Mega Evolution per battle emphasizes this new aspect as a strategy for players to consider, as opposed to just another evolution for older Pokémon.

Two other major changes to gameplay are Pokémon Amie and Super Training. The former is essentially Nintendogs for Pokémon.

Players can pet, feed, coo and play mini-games with their favorite Pokémon, with the goal being to increase said critter’s affection. This player-creature interaction provides practical bonuses as well, such as boosted experience and a greater chance of critical hits during battles.

The latter, Super Training, is an attempt to eliminate the guesswork with EVs. EVs are secret stat enhancers obtained when defeating Pokémon. The system is notoriously difficult to keep track of and requires extreme patience. Super Training helps by making this accumulation of points more transparent by supplying a mini-game and graph to mark a Pokémon’s EV progress.

This only sounds complicated because, in fact, it is. However, any prospective player who wants to assemble a team purely based on their favorite Pokémon are able to enjoy the game.

That is the true beauty of X and Y: casual players can have fun with no troubles and hardcore Pokémon Masters can sink dozens of hours into building a perfect team. X and Y ultimately follows the first law of video games: be easy to learn and difficult to master.

The only part of the game that falls flat is its story. The previous generation’s story, Black and White, hesitantly stretched out to touch the line of maturity but never managed to do anything with its ethical premise. Any hopes that X and Y will continue to grow story-wise is dashed.

Team Flare, the necessary organized crime syndicate in the tradition of the original Team Rocket,  is merely an excuse to give the player something to do besides collect badges. There is a half-hearted attempt at some Pokémon mythology, but it rapidly devolves.

Despite falling flat on story, X and Y’s excellent online options offer real incentives to add friends all over the world. Once players get pass the Friends Code nonsense, adding friends is as easy as connecting to a Wi-Fi source.

Connecting to the Internet allows players to see “Passerbys.” These are total strangers with whom players can offer to trade, battle or merely chat if the inclination arises. It is as simple as tapping on their avatar and selecting the appropriate option.

The only part of the game that falls flat is its story.

One of the more interesting online features added to this generation are Wonder Trades. Select a Pokemon from the PC box, ensure the 3DS, or 2DS, is connected to the Internet, and the selected Pokemon is blindly traded with a random player from anywhere in the world.

Essentially a roulette, Wonder Trades offer the possibility to obtain rare Pokémon early in the game or those not obtainable by usual methods.

Of course, it is also possible said random player will bestow the majesty of a Bidoof. However, that is the price to pay for entering an unpredictable Pokémon lottery.

Avatars are finally customizable. Initially, there are not many options beyond such RPG standards as gender and skin tone.

However, a few of the towns contain boutiques from which players can purchase articles of clothing ranging from hat accessories to shoes to shirts and jackets. Halfway through the game it is entirely possible to create a style unique to each player.

In many ways Pokémon X and Pokémon Y will be remembered as a large stepping stone for the series. This sixth generation is the first to introduce a new type since Gold and Silver, and the graphical upgrade sets a milestone fans have wanted for years.

Most importantly, above all the talk of balancing a complex battle system and introducing dozens of well-designed Pokémon and bringing a beloved series to the modern era in a single swoop, avatars can now walk diagonally and sit on benches. What more could a Pokéfan want?

Two young Jewish men were tired of hearing stories. Stories of death. Stories of pain, of misery, of terror, of tyranny, of inhumanity. Villains were not concepts but creatures of flesh and blood standing behind podiums like pulpits, preaching the good word of hate. The worst of men cradled the Earth in their hands and called it their own.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were tired of hearing stories, so they decided to tell one. One last time, they morphed a concept they had been evolving for years. Superman met the world April 18, 1938.

Over the last seventy-odd years Superman has suffered a myriad of alterations to costume, powers, cast, even origins. His essence remains the same.

Writer Grant Morrison penned one of the best Superman stories, All-Star Superman. In an interview on the inspiration for the series, he dismisses superhero deconstruction in a single statement. “Somewhere, in our darkest night, we made up the story of a man who will never let us down and that seemed worth investigating.”

Superman has become a cultural icon recognized internationally as a paradigm of lawful good morality.

Superman has become a cultural icon recognized internationally as a paradigm of lawful good morality. However, an argument can be made that Superman is mis-read; that he is, as a character, representative of the nature of humanity.

A native of another planet, Superman is a literal alien who must save humans because we are naturally an evil race unable to save ourselves. Thus Lex Luthor is a metaphor of how the best and brightest human is in fact an egotistical maniac, whereas the best person on the planet is not actually human at all.

The argument is valid but cynical, and it misses the point. Superman’s lack of membership in the human race is merely a matter of biology. Everything Superman grows up to be is a result not of where he came from, but who raised him. The Kents, Martha and Jonathan, are farmers who find themselves in a unique situation as they discover a child of the stars. They wean little Clark Kent on values considered the pinnacle of humanity. Alien by nature, human by nurture.

God walks the streets of Metropolis in the guise of a mild-mannered journalist from Smallville, U.S.A. He passes citizens who have developed the habit of glancing up at the sky every now and then, attempting to glimpse a myth. Someone with great power who uses it for good. Someone who didn’t need to watch his parents gunned down in the street, who never indirectly caused the death of a loved one so he could learn that responsibility is shackled to power. Someone who simply wants to do the right thing, and will die defending complete strangers.

This is why the world needs Superman.

We are a disbelieving race, one who normally only looks up to curse the rain. Hope is a four-letter word often uttered with sarcasm or derision. Superman is perhaps the only literary creation who acts as our paragon. Someone to look up to, someone to strive to model. Not because he is a boy scout, but because he embodies everything we could be.

God walks the streets of Metropolis in the guise of a mild-mannered journalist from Smallville, U.S.A.

He is someone who makes us tell stories. Stories of life. Stories of love, of hope, of kindness, of charity, of courage. Where heroes are not concepts but saviors who fly across the world, helping others because we as a species have a great capacity for good. Stories that make us stop and turn our faces to the sun.

“Dragon Con!” Rambo screams from a balcony, a toy machine gun in one hand and a glass of amber liquor in the other. He howls a “Wooo!” to the wind and pulls the trigger on the toy gun, the tinny noise of electronic bullets lost amongst the din of the crowd.

Ninjas, robots, space marines, pirates, characters from video games, anime and comic books all ignore him as they congregate at the hotel doors, trying to escape the Georgia humidity. Air conditioning blows like a forgotten promise behind the glass doors, waiting to cool the mass of fanboys and fangirls.

Costumes elaborate as spiderwebs and lies pose beneath the admiring eyes of cameras inside the lobby. Leaning against the doorway, Superman smokes a cigarette with Flash and Green Lantern; a half-naked Justice League taking a smoke break before pulling on the spandex for another traipse through the Hyatt Regency.

One of the largest conventions in the southeast U.S., Dragon Con recently suffered a name change but retained its fun. Lovingly referred to as the Mardi Gras of sci-fi and fantasy conventions by its patrons, Dragon Con boasted a plethora of fans enjoying a relaxed atmosphere.

“Dragon Con boasted a plethora of fans enjoying a relaxed atmosphere.”

Every Labor Day weekend, Atlanta dons a cape and plays host to the most popular names in science fiction and fantasy of all media. A stroll around the Walk of Fame this year introduced fans to such television and movie stars as George Takei (Star Trek), John Barrowman (Torchwood) and James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Voice actors like John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama) and Phil Lamarr (the eponymous Samurai Jack) were also signing prints for their beloved public.

There were also authors such as Jim Butcher of the Dresden Files series ready to sign their books. After, of course, there was the requisite hour-and-a-half wait in line. These long waits can be a blessing, however.

Odds are, the people in line have at least one thing in common and friendships develop quickly between those who are waiting. Such friendships can last for the rest of the convention.

“Panels are a major attraction at any convention.”

The Comic Book and Art Galleries showcased some of the amazing talent behind the pens, pencils and paintbrushes of the visual arts.

Comic legends such as Neal Adams and George Pérez took commissions for those willing to pay. Auctions controlled the Artist’s Gallery. Everything from canvas paintings to masks to wire chess sets were available for bidding.

These interactions between creators and fans is a highlight of any convention because there is a direct connection between artist and reader. Even the smaller and upcoming names, such as Yale Stewart, writer/artist of the webcomic JL8, are delightful to stop and chat with. Between commissions and the prints for sale, always expect to leave the galleries with a lighter wallet.

Nerd swag was bountiful. This year, all the vendors moved to one location, the AmericasMart building. It was a smart decision to stick all of them in one place, but there was a clear difference between those on the first and second floors.

The second floor was much larger; the first contained a bunch of little rooms where some vendors were difficult to locate. It seemed unfair to those on the first floor stuck in a corner room when the second floor was one giant space teeming with booths side by side. Some first floor booths were doomed to obscurity.

Panels are a major attraction at any convention. The aforementioned creators and actors sat behind a table to answer any questions their fans invented, imparted advice or gave little lectures about their specialties.

Fans followed “tracks” which guided them through the weekend to panels, events and workshops relevant to their interests. These included, but were by no means limited to, Video Games, Paranormal, Animation, Science Fiction Literature, Space, Whedonverse and Folk Singing.

It can be overwhelming; there was the parade, the panels, the writers, the artists, the workshops, the costumes, the lines (still incredibly long), the late night raves and the Klingon karaoke. Attendees wanting to see everything were sorely disappointed and had to chart their time wisely.

Feet were sore, arms burdened with bags of vendor purchases, heads pounded with the seemingly endless throng, patiences wore away as the lines somehow elongated.

It was worth all the pain, though, for that time someone found an esoteric graphic novel they were craving for months. For that time a fangirl shook the hand of the artist who changed her life. For that time a fanboy proudly posed for the cameras in a handmade costume he finished the previous night.

It was exhausting. It was thrilling. It was Dragon Con.