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Melissa Voelker has written 95 articles so far, you can find them below.
If I could have run away to Pern, I totally would have. Because there, dragons existed. There, dreams came true. There, people lived and fought and died for all of those terribly brave and heroic things I always thought I wanted to live and fight and die for. And it was Anne McCaffrey that made all of those things come true on the page.
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To me one of the best things about anime “celebrities” – voice actors, directors, producers, artists – is that they are so accessible to the fans. They participate in conventions, hosting panels about themselves as well as anime related topics. They sign autographs without charging fees, they take part in silly activities, and they don’t treat convention goers like idiots (even if they are wearing cardboard clouds, sparkles, a sign that says “Free Hugs” and not much else). Anime celebrities are real, down-to-earth people who we can relate to and like, even in real life. And one of the most down-to-earth of all is Wendy Powell, she of the deep voice and southern drawl, that hails from Texas and provided the voice of Envy from both popular Fullmetal Alchemist series.
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The petty, jealous, tween girl deep inside of me wants to hate the girls of Team Unicorn. They are pushing past the geek girl stereotypes (they’ve actually been accused of being TOO SEXY) and creating media projects that I want to have created. But they look like they are having so much fun doing it all, and when they talk about their interests, I can relate to them. These are my peeps – albeit the tall, gorgeous, famous ones who don’t actually know that I exist. Still….think if I invited them to my slumber party they’d come?
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It is 3am and the room is full of people laughing hysterically as they watch Commander Riker and Jesus Christ act out some outrageously bad “A-Team” based erotic fanfiction. We’ve been in our seats for over two hours, we’ve heard about Harry Potter going on a heavy-metal inspired trip through the cosmos, we’ve witnessed the S&M inspired downfall of the Care Bears and we aren’t done yet.
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I stopped believing in fairy tales when I realized they made real people with fallible natures look bad. Those characters that questioned authority or their station in life were punished, while those that did everything as they were told and never made mistakes managed to prosper.
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Todd Jensen is more awesome than you are. And unlike those (falsely) modest people out in the world, he knows he is more awesome then you. He’s been in movies and hosted local televised talent shows and he has almost been compared to Steven Seagal (once in a drunken debate at a bar). He gets paid the moderate bucks to act like he can act in such impressively bad direct-to-video and made-for-TV movies such as Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead, The Prince and Me 3: A Royal Honeymoon, Boogeyman 3, and Mega-Snake. But the pinnacle of his awesomeness, the highlight of his career (at least in my not-so-humble opinion) came when he starred as the secret-government-agent-action-hero-bad-guy in Raging Sharks. One of the WORST undersea horror/sci-fi/action films of all time (and I have seen Deep Star 6 and Leviathan so I have some basis for my statement.
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Leatherface managed to take the plight of star-crossed, cannibalistic, self-mutilating lovers to a new level. And it definitely made me re-evaluate my own past “bad” relationships. As horrible as some guys may have treated me, none of them ever cut the face off of one of my friends and forced me to wear it while slow dancing with me.
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By Melissa Voelker – Sometimes I choose to watch a movie because it was universally praised or panned by critics or it has been recommended by friends and family. Sometimes I watch because the DVD box art is attention grabbing (or shiny, sometimes all it takes is for it to be shiny). Sometimes I watch because it’s the only thing on television in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep and I’m too lazy to do something useful. And sometimes I choose to watch a movie because I’m female and I like to look at pretty things and Jensen Ackles counts rather high up on the list of pretty things. Which is how I came to watch Devour, starring Jensen Ackles and Shannyn Sossoman and Dominique Swain.
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By Melissa Voelker – I can actually find more good things to say about Bloodrayne than I can about Ghoulies 4, which is a situation almost too unbelievable for me to wrap my poor little brain around.
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By Melissa Voelker – atching the webseries made me realize several things: 1) I want to go to PAX really really really badly (but this year its on the East coast instead of in Seattle which is close to me. Lame), 2) I’m jealous of the ease with which Tycho and Gabe think up jokes and stories for their comic strips, and 3) I want to work at the Penny Arcade offices.
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By Melissa Voelker – Vampires are taking over the universe. They are forcing their way into books, flaunting themselves on TV, and now they are even taking over the world wide web. With all this over saturation of the fanged monsters in the media, someone has to take vamps to a whole new level to make them interesting again. The webseries “Bleed,” created by Matt Lawson and Taterfight Productions, promises a lot. The website advertises it as “Kevin Smith meets Buffy,” which certainly sounds like it could be cool – and chatty.
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By Melissa Voelker – It doesn’t take a lot to make a great talk show. Some shows on broadcast television employ large crews, famous guest stars, and fabulous sets to prove how great they are. But, all you really need is a couple of chairs, a camera, a great host, and a hilariously loony guest. Invention with Brian Forbes, the webseries starring Dave Beeler and Tom Konkle, is just such a talk show.
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By Melissa Voelker – Transferring print media to TV or film can be a tricky business, especially if the source material is a comic book or graphic novel. In some cases it works out well, such as with “Sin City” and “The Dark Knight.” In other cases it doesn’t work out so well (that is being generous really), such as with “The Spirit” and “Fantastic Four.” What all of these great and not so great adaptations have in common is that they come from stories that already existed in one form and were being changed into another.
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By Melissa Voelker – Popular movies and TV shows have seen their fair share of amateur made spoofs, prequels, sequels, episodes, and alternate reality storylines. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and some just leave you wondering why anyone would put time and effort into making them. “Pink Five,” the story of a female fighter pilot who cares more about her hair and her CD player in her X-wing then she does about killing Imperials, happily falls into the Awesome category.
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By Melissa Voelker – Everyone has lived somewhere that felt like it was hell. Either the neighbors partied all night and kept you awake, or you lived atop a nightclub that seemed to be packed each night of the week, or all of your appliances had a nasty habit of catching on fire every other time you used them. But while living in a place the city wants to condemn may FEEL like hell, it couldn’t be as bad as Guy’s new trailer, which actually IS hell. Or at least a portal to hell.
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By Melissa Voelker – I haven’t done a rant to start off with lately, but I feel like doing one this week. I am sick and tired of season finales that end on cliffhangers. I think that is really rather rude of the show creators, especially when it is a show like Sarah Connor Chronicles that may not be back next season.
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By Melissa Voelker – This has to have been one of the best episodes of the entire series. In fact it was so good, and so much better than “Today is the Day, part 1,” that I am just going to pretend Part 1 didn’t exist. That episode was dumb, and didn’t feel right to me one little bit, so it no longer exists. POOF! (I can do that; I’ve decided it’s my superpower now.)
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By Melissa Voelker
The second half of Season Two has certainly been different than what I had grown accustomed to in this series. First, there were several very character-driven episodes back to back, and then when the action and adventure returned, it was almost written WELL.
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