Believe it or not denizens, female Samurai are not restricted to the wild imaginings of anime and western movie plots; they truly existed. One of the premier names that tends to come up when you mix the words woman and samurai is Tomoe Gozen, a beautiful and extraordinary woman whose life was so dynamic that many think that she never really existed. Lady samurai were known as ona bugeisha, there weren’t very many of them and the few that lived came from the bloodline of samurai (Japanese cast system dictated a strict division between lords and peasants). Being as it was a rare thing to become a lady samurai, you can imagine that most who took on the title were very good at what they did. Tomoe’s legend begun when her master Minamoto no Yoshinaka took Kyoto and assumed leadership of the Minamoto clan. This did not sit well with his rivals and before long… [Read more]

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A million years ago I was a nerdy kid programming QBasic games on my Packard Bell 286 and learning more and more about bulletin board systems. I was hooked on BBS after the muscular running back of my football team introduced me to them (go figure, you think nerds are skinny and weak huh). Anyway I was on people’s boards playing text based games, chatting it up with like-minded nerds and keeping it to myself so not to draw the blank stares and confused looks that most people would give me at this BBS thing. The last one I visited was prior to college and after I logged off I went to lead a 4 year span of clubs, women, Hip Hop and scholarship. 3 years later this internet thing blew up and websites were all the rage as information became accessible at the tip of our fingers. While my buds used the library’s computer… [Read more]

Editor’s Note: So rumor-mill has revealed that Kim Kardashian may be the next Lady Lara Croft on the big screen and that led me to think of this old article I wrote for 3GodKings.com (our sister site). Without ripping Kim for her acting (for which I haven’t seen), I can anticipate garbage just off the premise that video game movies are bad and to place a new “actress” in the role of a very familiar heroine just sounds like a recipe for disaster. It is a common reaction by Gamers and movie-goers alike to groan and sigh when the announcement of a video game movie is made. How can you expect otherwise when we have experienced the failures of Street Fighter, Double Dragon and Doom? There aren’t many movies that have been acceptable to Gamers outside of the rendered CGI ones like Final Fantasy: Advent Children and a few other animes like the Street Fighter… [Read more]

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There seems to be this misconception that the quieter, more introverted people in society are somehow the nicest. While they may seem polite at face value or super-intelligent and innocent, there are many who are the deepest sexists, racists and homophobes. Now many of you have not known a good amount of nerds in your lifetime, when I say “a good amount” I am speaking of 10+ different people with different personalities. Your experience with nerds may be limited to a trip periodically to GameStop, your college campus and probably the internet. Still this is actually a good gauge being that nerds do vary much; you have your Sci-Fi nerds, your sports geeks, your video game nerds, anime otakus and of course your all-around nerd. Some people dabble in nerd activities but cannot truly be classified as one due to having interests and a personality that spans beyond the umbrella of the standard fit. Still… [Read more]

Dear Hollywood, please step away from our video games and anime. It is quite obvious that you cannot transition animated stories into live action properly, regardless of the success that was The Dark Knight and Iron Man. What seems to have been an exploitation of the nerdy sub-culture has gone a bit too far now and I would like for you to back off. I was more than happy back when your depictions of us nerds were glasses wearing, bad postured, asexual losers rather than take our sub-culture seriously and try to resell things we love in a cheap live-action package. With movies on the horizon like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (when did she become legendary?), Dragon Ball: Evolution (google this abortion and count the cries of disappointment), an M.Knight version of Avatar The Last Air Bender and a whole host of other potential stinkers scheduled for release, you must understand my annoyance. Let… [Read more]