Wednesday, July 28, 2010

San Diego ComiCon Costumes 2010


Yeah, so I didn't go to ComiCon, but here's the only reason why I would ever go: Costumes.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

DCU Online Trailer



Ok, I have successfully avoided MMORPGs for years, but this is pretty cool.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

The fourth wall of Dungeons and Dragons

The latest in breaking the barriers of reality: Inception, and this.

Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents' imagination:

"Carlton Mellick, III, the king of Bizarro fiction, has a new one out... The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is "an absurd comedy about a group of adventurers (elf, halfling, bard, dwarf, assassin, thief) going through an existential crisis after having discovered that they are really just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic AD&D role playing game. While exploring the ruins of Tardis Keep, these 6 characters must deal with their inept Dungeon Master's retarded imagination and resist their horny teenaged players' commands to have sex with everything in sight. '"




NOTE: you get a great deal on this with Amazon if you also buy Apeshit and the Cannibals of Candyland

Friday, July 23, 2010

God Hates Jedi (?)


San Diego Comic-Con going on as we speak. Love the concept of this absurd counter-protest-- sure to bewilder the crazy right-wing religious nuts who are themselves masters of the art of offensive picket-sign slogans.

Crayon Food Bars


CRAYON FOOD BARS!





SHERLOCK!

starting this sunday, the new sherlock holmes show created by steven moffat & mark gattis looks potentially pretty freaking awesome.

exhaustive coverage here.



Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Scott Pilgrim Video Game



Music by Ananmanaguchi. Art by Paul Robertson. Pretty neat looking! And a pretty straightforward Double Dragon Clone (with 4-player co-op, hopefully on one console). But then there was this,



which challenges me to forget everything I know about save points, co-op, power ups, and video games (among other things); which is odd, because both trailers actually reinforce everything I know about that stuff. Intriguing!

Saturday, July 10, 2010

another lightsaber battle

but I kinda like this one. Complete with kinda blah blooper reel at the end. Opening credits take about 57 seconds so the good stuff starts after about a minute.

Childhood cartoons

I promised Galspanic, Fugu and Pony a long time ago that I'd post a clip of Sally-chan, a cartoon I watched in kindergarten. Sally's family was from space somewhere and she had magical powers, but she lived on Earth and went to school among regular human girls and boys. She would travel back and forth to her parents, who lived in space, on her broom. It was great! I think all the girls in my kindergarten watched this! I don't think the boys got into it too much though. Probably because it probably didn't have any explosions or transformer robots.

The Real Life Super Hero Project


You know, I'm really not entirely clear what's going on here. Something's going on, though. I know this is of interest. I know a lot of us want to do good. I know a lot of us have costumes.


More information (kind of) here.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Double Rainbow

Main Course:


Dessert:


Mrs. Pony and I can't get this out of our heads. It has invaded our household. It is invading the internet also. Memeness and remixes aside, it's difficult to top the majesty of the original (although the autotune by the Gregory Brothers comes close).

Pitch-Perfect '80s Firefly Intro by @io9



Via io9.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Friday, July 2, 2010

My Four Favorite Robots:(sigh) Galspanic

I sigh because I feel like there were too many potential favorites. I'm a robot lovin' pigeon! I decided to keep personal creations out of this. Mainly because I'm not quite sure on Homeless Robot's personality, and personality was a big factor in my other decisions.

I almost went with Hakkaider as my lead off robot, but went with 1. 4-LOM first.



2.IG-88
Immediately follows 4-LOM because the personality thing I was talking about. I like these two robots because they aren't clearly evil. They might have bills to pay, or want to take their girlfriends out to a nice restaurant one of these days. they were in it for the money. Or the thrill of the hunt, or because they are good at what they do. It is unclear, and the lack of clarity excited me as a youth. Good robots were supposed to be the ones with personality, and the bad guys were supposed to be emotionless calculating engines of destruction.
If you were a soulless death automaton, would you risk everything on ten thousand Imperial creds? Hell no. You wouldn't be out for money. money is pointless to a "death to humans" type.(well maybe not pointless. I'm sure the "death to humans" types need to buy their death rays and stuff, but I can't imagine a "death to humans" type robot hanging out in a blaster store, trying to figure what gun will be their new "Ol' Blasty") These robots were gamblers. Risk takers. You know they were just dodging next month's installments on their spaceships. They make the universe a little greyer. Plus they look just nasty. Nasty robots are rad. Screw shiny and pristine. You got bolts and wires sticking out all over the place 'cause you are that awesome.




3.Braniac for the flip side of the coin. He is an evil and somewhat soulless engine of destruction. But he's clever, and something of a magpie. I like his tactical thinking. I can relate to his collector mentality. Plus his metallized DC superpowers Toy was bad ass and stuck with me all these years until the animated superman verison of Braniac came out. I still have the old toy's head somewhere.



4.Kobun
(introduced to me as Serv-bot in Mega man Legends) I love this guy because he thinks he is good and doing the right thing, despite the fact that he serves bad people. He is charming and nervous, and tries his best. he also has 30 sibling units. They ride in a giant air craft and go on missions. Sometimes they have to figure out what to serve each other for lunch. And that is rad.


I had so many runner-ups. SO many.

Four Favorite Robots: Ruby Tenneco

1. Ultron: he is permanently angry at his annoying dad, Ant Man.


2. Mechagodzilla: he is like Godzilla, but more mecha.


3. Robocon: he wants to be helpful but dishonors his family. Mr. Pony told me about him. I think he is Moby's great-great-grandfather.


4. Data: he is sensitive and shy.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Four Favorite Robots: Mr. Pony

@HumanHand, an Internet friend, asked me to name my five most interesting robots. Of course, this was in the context of me blathering on about dancing like a robot, but this fact is unimportant to the discussion. Vowing to take this question seriously, I have taken it seriously; and given our communal love of robots, this seemed the proper forum in which to take it seriously. I have reduced the number to four, to make the challenge more challenging to conceptualize, and less challenging to execute (drawing is hard).

X-51 (Machine Man; Aaron Stack)
In the beginning, X-51 spent his entire day agonizing over his humanity, never realizing that all this whining made him more even more human than the weird, flat characters with which he shared his comic book. As goofy as this endless soul-searching was, it begs certain questions. How could X-51 miss his own humanity all those years? Could it be that the mind is an imperfect tool for understanding its own workings? And if machines can ask if they have humanity, then don't they? (And if that's the case, why don't AI scientists just make a machine that speaks the question "Do I have a soul" and call it a day?)

Mouse Droid
Found aboard the Death Star. I cannot figure out, for the life of me, what these damn things do. They don't carry information— The Death Star has an internal comm system and intranet capable of displaying images and other complex readouts. You see Stormtroopers following them in one scene, but wouldn't an object designed to be followed be a little more, I don't know; visible? The only thing I can think of is that maybe they're like little Roombas, cleaning and polishing the shiny Death Star floors. I wonder what they're saying, with all those squeaks and squirts.


Shockwave
Near as I can tell, Shockwave just sat on Cybertron, talking to Megatron on the telephone. Once in a while he would open a space bridge, or something. He was support staff. He could also turn into a giant ray-gun pistol. The fact that he was apparently all alone in his office, and maybe his whole office building, and possibly his entire planet (it was really never clear to me if there was anyone else on Cybertron); with no one to hold the ray-gun he turned into; makes him an especially melancholy figure. At the end of the day, who did he have to go for drinks with? No one, that's who. I bet the time difference was murder, too. I bet when Megatron called, he was super-happy.


Moby
Yeah. Kinda partial to this guy.

* * *

Please, Community--submit your own Four Most Interesting Robots! As you can see from the tweet, these robots can inexplicably not include Bender from Futurama or the Robot from Lost in Space. For more information on any of these robots, fricking Google them.

Let the Right One errr... I mean "Let Me In"


DOH! I'll probably watch it, but I don't think remaking a 2yr old film that didn't suck was really necessary.