Burke's Joystick

If you are expecting a comprehensive overview of Neon Genesis Evangelion , I am sorry to say that you are not going to find that in this post.  Truth is, I have only watched the first five episodes of this piece of anime, and then only because Adult Swim was showing  Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth a few days ago.  From what I could tell, this was a movie cobbled together from various episodes of the series.  Sadly, I had no idea what the heck was going on, but I was intrigued by the many religious themes that kept popping up during the movie, such as the logo for NERV, mankind's defense from the "angel" onslaught: Anime with religious sensibilities and mechs?  Sign me up!  So I decided to start at the beginning of the series.   Like I said above, I've only made it past the first five episodes, so I cannot reach any conclusions yet.  However, while the jury might still be out on this series, I can say that episode 4 has...

Is it too early to start queuing up some entertainment for Halloween?  Just a bit.  Regardless, I find myself doing just that.  Part of the reason is that summer for my region never really arrived.  Instead of the requisite heat and humidity, we were treated to largely cool, dry days.  Really, it has felt like little more than an extended late spring or early autumn.  As a result I have found myself yearning to get autumn underway as there isn't any point of continuing this useless summer.  This is why I have been looking forward to Halloween: it is THE holiday of autumn! But in addition to that, two games have recently awakened in me a love for the horror of "urban fantasy":   Shadowrun Returns , and The Secret World .  As I detailed here , those two games have hit a home run with me, and made me reconsider the whole horror genre - a genre I never particularly cared for seeing the low budget "torture porn" tripe coming out of Hollywood...