Scans_Daily

I’m typing (most of) this Twitter bit on Thursday and it’s interesting which Twitter accounts are still verified. The right wing grifter accounts still have their checks. The Pope is no longer verified and wars have been fought over less (he had a grey check by the weekend so crisis averted). I found one writer who admitted to paying for professional reasons and one loudly insisting that he didn’t. Based on Musk’s sad attempts to kiss up to Stephen King and admission that he was paying for that and some other accounts…well, I think there’s a good chance that certain celebrities aren’t actually paying for verification on a site run by a nerd of a certain age.

The one I don’t get is the very popular politically active British trans comedian whose been around for ages. I can’t imagine either one offering support to the other.

Also, I guess Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo are the only Muppets with money to waste. How will I know if I’m following the real Grover?

(And then the weekend happened and apparently all the accounts – including a fake one claiming to be Disney Jr UK – with over a million subscribers were automatically verified for some reason. It feels like they’re opening themselves up to a lot of false endorsement issues but what’s one more lawsuit for Twitter at this point?)

And yes, this does all feel like a distraction from his malfunctioning cars and rockets.



Me: Well, I guess I’ll watch the last season of Better Call Saul while I cat-sit.

Netflix: Who are you? STRANGER DANGER!

(Also, I guess they’re ending the disc rentals this year. I didn’t know they were still doing that.)

https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-dvd-the-final-season



I did watch the Power Rangers 30th anniversary special. It handled some (okay, one) actor absences better than others and is largely a Zack and Billy story for obvious reasons. I had a big smile when I recognized the voice behind Alpha (I was today years old when I realized “Richard Wood” was Richard Steven Horvitz. Really should have noticed that when I was rewatching the Christmas specials a while back). Also Bulk and Skull selling sandwiches is a much better direction for then than becoming cops.


I finished the rest of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur season one and it confirmed I was right about something I mentioned before. Considering the titular pair seem to be able to communicate perfectly, I’m not sure if its funnier that Devil didn’t notice or that he just didn’t share.


Dracula Daily starts up again on May 3 for those who missed it previously.
https://draculadaily.substack.com/about
I still think it’s an interesting way to experience an epistolary novel even if a lot of the later emails that managed to avoid my spam folder remain unread.


Assuming Discovery doesn’t decide to kill it at the last minute, Venture Bros: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is coming at some point this year. I’m a little fuzzy if it will be part of the upcoming DVD box set or if it will get a physical release at all.

Looks like Final Space is getting a graphic novel (the designs indicate its NOT a proper finale) which is weird I thought this show was killed for a tax write-off.

Jim Butcher confirmed that The Olympian Affair (the second Cinder Spires book) will be out on November 7th.


I “love” the completely random update times for DC Infinite. Maybe it will be updated Tuesday morning. Maybe Tuesday afternoon. Maybe by Wednesday. Maybe not at all. Or maybe no new comics came out six months and a week ago; it isn’t like late in the year is a busy time for retailers. Say what you will about Marvel Unlimited but the books are always up early Monday … often significantly more of them than they meant to add that week.

(Edit: the books were added by Sunday. I read World’s Finest #8, The Flash #787, and Nightwing #97]

World’s Finest was fantastic, Flash finally acknowledges that Wally doesn’t have anything going on beyond being a superhero dad (hopefully they follow up on that), and Nightwing* took a very odd turn after wondering aimlessly for months.

*Is there any fictional character with a worse career trajectory than Maggie Sawyer? She keeps getting police commissioner jobs in progressively worse places. If this keeps up she’s going to be in Hub City before long.)

I’ve been reading Kurt Busiek’s Superman run; some of it for the first time. This is a very good run. My one note is this run seems really poorly timed. A lot of the story in Camelot Falls centers around the idea that humanity would be better off without superheroes because every time they save the day the dangers escalate until one day they’ll be too big and bring about an apocalypse. This story is set right in the One Year Later era where most of the major heroes (including Superman) were returning after being inactive for a year so it feels like this is less a philosophical debate and more something that would have come up in the last 12 months. I guess “poor timing” could also apply to the late Carlos Pacheco’s delays but that just gave us more opportunities for Busiek to do more great single issue stories with fill-in artists. Also, the whole “Third Kryptonian” arc is funny partly because we’re constantly told that Power Girl, Chris, and Krypto don’t count and partly because New Krypton is just around the corner.

(I haven’t read all the Action Comics issues that coincide with it so I wonder if they explain how Krypto went for “missing for a year” to “oh, he’s with Jimmy”. I did read the Krypto story they published during Grounded that picks up right after Infinite Crisis and then I needed to stop reading for the day. If you’ve read it, you know why.)

I actually read some of my Hoopla borrows this month.

It helps that two of them were Stan Sakai art books (Art of Usagi Yojimbo and Usagi Yojimbo: 35 Years of Covers).

In The Rocketeer: The Great Race our hero flies a dangerous aircraft (no, a different one), makes a new friend, punches some Nazis, and fails to maintain a secret identity. I don’t know why it took so long to realize this but Cliff Secord really is just all the cool parts of Hal Jordan without the …everything else of Hal Jordan.

I also read a bunch of the Mighty Nein Origins OGNs (Celeb, Jester, and Yasha). The Yasha one stood out the most because (a) Ashley Johnson’s scheduling conflicts resulted in Yasha being the least developed of the bunch so she was most in need of something like this and (b) I really don’t care for the art. The others are perfectly fine comics that mostly tell you things you already know if you watched the second Critical Role campaign. Probably a pretty solid entry point for the Amazon series they announced, though.


Marvel Snap unlocks:

Continuing numbering from last week just to see how long it takes to get the last four pool 3s. The drop rates seem a lot better when I do them as I go instead of doing them all at once.

24 – Kingpin – Off to a good start. He looks fun to play around with even if he REALLY telegraphs the last turn. Kind of a shame he doesn’t work like Fisk Tower but I guess that would make him way too powerful. He seems like he’d work well with Nimrod (which I don’t have) in a Movement deck but I have no place in Cerebro Four because he falls short of the weakest link (Phil Coulson). Shame Areo isn’t as good as she used to be.

25 – 500 Collectors Tokens – Almost half way to a pool 5 card. Hopefully whatever I get doesn’t get nerfed as often as Thanos.

26 – 400 Credits – “Sorry, try again. Here’s 2/3 of your spent credits back”

27 – Luke Cage Pixel Variant – I can’t wait to have all the pixel variants so I stop getting pixel variants.

28 – Attuma – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8&ab_channel=Odin
(I bet you were expecting the Kindergarten Cop clip)
I know there are ways to work around Attuma’s downside and I think he’s going to be much better when more of us have Knull in a month.

29 – 400 Credits –*sigh*

30 – 200 Collectors Tokens –I can’t wait to buy whatever the hot new card is in two months.

31 – Valkyrie – It seems like this game really doesn’t want me to have Shuri. Oh well, all the new pool 3s are solid and Val works well with the Bast I got last week.

32 – 400 Credits – So if it takes 600 credits (generally) to go up the 12 Collection Levels you need to open up the next Collector’s Reserve then opening three Collector’s Reserves with 1200 total credits is basically just breaking even on two and getting nothing on the third. I think I’d rather have a terrible title I won’t use at this point.

33 – Vulture Variant (it just says “Variant”) – Another design I don’t recognize. He looks like a luchador.

34 – 500 Collectors Tokens

35 – “Rhymes with Orange” Title – So they just didn’t reject any title ideas, huh?

(Still no Shuri...but I wrote the following few paragraphs assuming I’d have her after a week and I’m not changing it.)

#? – Shuri – Finally! Okay, sort of a mixed bag. She’s not as good as she used to be. Also having all the pool 3 cards means I’ve reached the point where the game stops giving me new things (other than Pixel Variants) unless I spend money or wait a month.

I doubt I will be opening enough Tokens in the next three weeks to get Galactus or Kang – if I do, I’ll be cutting it close – and I don’t want to risk getting a pool 4* card that’s about to become a pool 3 card so I guess I’m done with Collector’s Reserves until mid to late May when we all get Kitty. Looking forward to unlocking a ton of variants next time there’s an event like the Steampunk and Winter things in June or whenever.

*(Assuming the pattern continues, Silver Surfer, Darkhawk, Knull, and Sentry will be May’s new pool 3 cards. Since everyone gets one as a freebie, that will mean opening another dozen Collector’s Reserves…give or take based on luck. Apparently, I was mistaken on the pool 4 drop rates; there isn’t one in every 40, there’s one in every GROUP is 40 so there may be 78 attempts before you get there again.)

Dropped as low as rank 56 last week. New season starts in a week. I clawed back up as high as 65 with a pretty basic Patriot Deck that includes Super Skrull but I’ve gone up to 60 only to drop again a lot this season.

Since I started at 70, all I’m really missing out on are an ugly Hit Monkey Avatar (80), some gold (90), and … okay that Goose card-back (100) looks amazing and I want it.

Between the Classic Agatha, Alex Ross Dr Strange, and Giulio Rincione Hobgoblin, Friday was the best looking my variant shop has ever been but I don’t have enough gold for more than a couple so I ended up passing on everything. I should probably start hoarding gold for the inevitable Spider-Verse tie-in bundles in June.

I could have sworn we were getting weekly Thursday updates starting last week but I guess the monthly Tuesday update was big enough that they didn’t bother.

That is ... wow, nothing about that is what I expected.

I wish him luck but that's too rich for my blood.

Yeah, I know he was going back and fourth between this and the Dresden Files (in theory) but there were some pretty big delays and Peace Talks / Battle Ground was clearly meant to be one book that just got too big.

Meanwhile the other series left off with a cliffhanger nearly eight years ago.

I need to know what happens to that cat.

And the humans, I guess.

I am constantly amazed at how badly Marvel mishandled Slingers. The story starts with a zero issue (packed inside a random issue of Wizard Magazine) and then issue one had four variants WITH DIFFERENT INTERIOR STORY CONTENT. There have been zero collections. All their subsequent appearances ignore the end of the series (Prodigy and Hornet should not have powers). Hornet is killed off-panel in a terrible Mark Millar story.

(And I should probably stop there. Partly because talking about Loners and Beyond again will only make me more angry and partly because discussing Prodigy’s relationship to heroism is worthy of an essay by itself.)

Wait, these are technically Sony characters, right? Spider-Verse spin-off?

I could have sworn default Patriot was Eli. I stand corrected.
America is one of the first cards you get in the game.
Stature was added in the Quantumania season.
Iron Lad and Loki have been leaked (though I have no idea when Loki is coming)
https://marvelsnapzone.com/cards/unreleased/

I’d say they’ve been pretty good about YA inclusion considering the game is fairly new and a number of major characters don’t have cards yet.

(It is a little weird we haven’t had Kate as a Hawkeye variant yet. Same with teen Vision…though I guess he makes more sense as an Iron Lad variant.)

My Power Rangers knowledge pretty much begins and ends with MMPR. Oh, and a few years back I caught a chunk of a marathon that featured the PR making pizza (whichever series that was). Watching some of the later holiday episodes without any context last December was an interesting experience.

(And I've seen the TMNT crossover but - like the rest of The Next Mutation - I am actively trying to forget it)

Appreciate the hug. Stories like Futurama's Jurassic Bark should have trigger warnings.

Cage is also good with Typhoid Mary, Lizard, and for keeping a Cerebro deck stable.


I've said it before but I feel like the difference between a good card and a bad card is how you feel when it beats you.

If your reaction is "I wish I had that card" or "I should use that more" then it's a good card.

If it is "I wish people would stop using that card" "or I wish they'd do something about that card" then it's a bad card.

Wong is a good card. Even though I'm considering buying him just because I know he won't become more common, I think Galactus is a bad card. He's just not fun to play against. If I sabotage their Galactus then they retreat. If they successfully use Galactus and I don't have a counter then I retreat.

For the record I think Thanos was a good card but I didn't get to play with him before they buried him in nerfs. I didn't retreat from Thanos decks because I knew I had a fighting chance but he still looked fun to play with.

I think the idea of Shuri is sound but she's part of a really frustrating combo that is bad. She's another card I used to retreat at the sight of. I don't see enough of her now to know where she stands currently.

I'll be really curious to see how things shake out with Leader. First he was the absolute worst card in the game (to play against). Then he was one of the worst (to use). Hopefully the current version finds a middle ground.