What characters were rip-offs of others? Are comics and pro wrestling actually tied together? Is the story from the comic better than the story in the movie? Just what the heck was happening in comics in the 90’s?

These are some questions any reasonable human being who contributes a portion of their weekly salary to the funny books may ask. The Flickcast alumni Jonathan ‘Wally’ Weilbaecher and I join forces with Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles to answer these and more.

With regulars Joe Slepski of The Joe on Joe podcast, Pablo Romero-Estevez and Alan ‘Sizzler’ Kistler of Crazy Sexy Geeks and some guests like Lucha Underground’s Joey Ryan and The Flickcast co-founder Matt Raub, we haven’t come to many conclusions but we have had a ton of fun arguing our way there.

Zac Effron is Jason, a 20-or-so book-cover designer living in New York with his best friend and co-worker Daniel (The Spectacular Now‘s Miles Teller) and other best friend Mikey (Michael B. Jordan). Mikey discovers his wife canoodling with the lawyer who will eventually handle their divorce, and so he and Dan and Jason make a pact to remain single. However, Jason meets Ellie (Imogen Poots), they hit it off, but he’s reluctant to tell his friends because of, you know, the pact.

And Dan meets someone. And Mikey hooks up with someone. And they keep those trysts secret, too, because, again, pact. And to go any further meet be a spoiler, but so then would be any wild stab-in-Central-Park conjecture as to what happens.

That Awkward Moment isn’t a difficult movie to review, because it’s not very good. The dialogue plays like any mid-90s attempt to imitate Pulp Fiction — which is basically sitting around a table dwelling on the minute, trying to sound clever.

Jason, for example, believes it an incredibly profound insight that, when coming from a girl, nothing good ever follows the word, “So…” as in “So, where is this going?” a phrase I’m certain was the film’s title in at least one stage of development (but then they couldn’t say “Based on the popular meme!”), and yet, who reading this has not had an awkward break in the conversation when “So…” has led to intercourse?

I wasn’t holding out much hope for this one. Like anyone with a brain and a distinct fear of transforming from an adventurous roustabout into an office drone, I have a deep appreciation for the work of James Thurber (not to mention Danny Kaye, who starred in the original adaptation), and when the trailer hit, it looked like Ben Stiller’s take would be much more of a saga instead of a few simple flights from banality.

And while Stiller’s Walter Mitty departs halfway from flights of fancy, the first half is a delight. Mitty is a negative assets manager at Life Magazine – negative assets as in he’s the guy who handles photo negatives, and Life Magazine as in the periodical that Gestapo agents read when they’re tailing Indiana Jones and which, specifically in this flick, is in the process of becoming a purely online publication.

Mitty’s tasked with developing the final cover’s image, which has been misplaced, and which causes the sleazy consultant handling the transition (Adam Scott, in a wickedly dorky beard) to breathe stertorously down his neck.

In addition to that, Mitty’s currently engaged in setting up his eHarmony profile despite having gone nowhere and done nothing, diminishing his chances of attracting the pretty new hire (Kirsten Wiig). Helping him is Todd (a voice that may be recognizable, but whose identity is one of the best reveals, jokes, and sequences in the film), an overly dedicated eHarmony assistant.

The film has a fantastic start, as all the major performers – Stiller, Wiig, and Scott – come from the background of exploiting social awkwardness and revel in creating a facade of meekness in their characters, a meekness that barely veils the passions behind it. Scott in particular, is so good at each little passive-aggressive dig (I especially liked the progression of how he says “guy”: first cloying, then annoyed, then furious). And, thankfully, not all of Mitty’s daydreams are treated as immature revenge fantasies or love-struck dalliances. One sequence in particular gets very creative as Stiller and Scott battle over a Stretch Armstrong doll throughout the streets of New York, using the roads as skis and whatever else as improvised weapons.

When the original Kinect launched in 2010, it is safe to say the peripheral had a share of flaws. It wasn’t as detailed as one would expect and couldn’t detect hands and fingers the way it was originally designed to. It also had a hard time reading individuals under a certain height. Considering Microsoft was trying to drive kids to play games like Kinectimals with the controllerless gaming, that was up there in the list of top functionality f&#* ups from them.

One that also seemed to be an issue was the rumor that the Kinect also had trouble reading people with darker skin tone. This lead to the premise that the Kinect was actually racist.

The team at Whiskey and Waffles joined up with Sandwich Productions (because the combination just sounded too damn tasty to ignore) and created the mocumentary simply entitled Racist XBox. We were thrilled with the end result and just how awesome WallE looked as a forensic scientist. We won’t spoil anything here but I will say there is a little bit of mature language so I wouldn’t go showing this to your 10 year old.

YouTube has more than its fair share of short form series. It also has heaps and heaps of video game content. But with the exception of a few standouts like Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School, there aren’t many great examples of gaming and short form series together.

Someone trying to change that is Petros L. Ioannou and his series My Life as a Video Game. Funded by a Kickstarter that raised $32,000, My Life as a Video Game will be a 9 episode first season that explores what happens when gamer Don DeWitt, played by Petros, gets too into the game and is pulled in to a world where games are real life.

Exploring multiple gaming genres, Don finds Kera Althorn (Jennifer Polansky) and is guided by the MENU System (Brent Black, better known on YouTube as BrentalFloss) through this pixel infused world. FPS, side scrolling beat ’em up and space combat all look to be fair game in this epic launched on Petros’ YouTube channel LeonUnity. You can head there now to check out the first two episodes of My Life as a Video Game or check them out after the jump.