Tag Archives: comic books

Awesomecon Flashback, Modified Mario, Elegance, Ramone-less, and Various Other Bits of Stuff from the Weekend

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This entry is part 61 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The weekend wasn’t anywhere near as productive as it should have been.

Sure, I finished off another canceled series or two from my Hulu queue and finally got around to a couple of movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years. Even read things that weren’t being displayed on a screen (I think we call them “books”). But there was more I probably should have done.

There’s a big difference between “should” and “could”, though. I don’t think I legitimately could have been much more productive. I needed the break, as seems to be the case often. Life in the “regular” world by a “normal” schedule just grinds me down more now than it ever has before.

I know there are reasons for that. I’m working through them as best I can. But, well, it’s slow going.

So, instead of being as productive as I “should” be, I do what I can when I can and learn to live with that.

But, there were still a lot of fun links to be had over the past four days.

Here’s hoping you enjoy them.

 

Tesla Awesomeness, Classic American Musicals, Good Superhero News, and Homestar

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I was moderately successful in the music theme I wanted to have going today. I didn’t get to quite as many posts about it as I’d wanted, but that was mostly due to not having time to hunt through my feed for more interesting stuff to put between the clips.

I’d sure like to know what’s generating all the heat in this apartment. It’s near 80 degrees in here… it’s in the mid-60s outside… and the A/C (which was on because it was raining outside, which kind of precludes leaving the windows open) can’t even keep up. The oven’s off. Everything else generates negligible amounts of heat (definitely not enough to warm up the room this much–it wasn’t happening in the fall or winter).

Pretty sure that leaves the HVAC unit itself as what’s generating more heat than it can handle.

That’s just… problematic.

Guess I’ll have to put in a call about that sometime soon. Maybe next week when the summer weather plays hide-and-seek with us.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of music in the feed… go enjoy it.

Bad Dice, Blackwater, Continued Hobby Lobby Hubbub, Nature, and a Little Fan Service

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This entry is part 56 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The two big bits of news that were bouncing around today were the Supreme Court’s decision in the case for Hobby Lobby regarding whether it should have to pay for insurance plans that cover contraception and the recently released documents that show just how messed up the U.S. relationship with “freelance security” firm Blackwater was.

Both of these stories point toward different, yet similar, machinations that go on when powerful ideologies get involved and sensibility takes a back seat to making a point.

In the Hobby Lobby case, it seems the only reason they’ve suddenly started to care about what insurance their employees have is because they’re against the healthcare reform act that was passed. They’re needling their way into nooks and crannies that were left open in the law as part of the eviscerating “negotiations” that had to take place in order to get it moved through congress.

In the Blackwater case, it’s about a company given far too much power in a war zone and how that power was abused. Many Blackwater employees and management staff seem to have thought that they were above the law… and, it seems, some of them may have been right.

Both of these are playing games with the lives of people outside of the debate–Hobby Lobby’s employees (who are just trying to make a living and stay healthy) and the U.S. and Iraqi people who were harassed, threatened, and in some cases murdered by Blackwater.

Now, undoubtedly, the Blackwater situation was a lot more immediately serious, but the Supreme Court decision on the Hobby Lobby case opens up a more insidious can of worms. With Blackwater, you had a bunch of hooligan with guns doing as they please. Worst case scenario there is they end up on the other side of the list for the U.S. military–as targets instead of assistants. Pretty cut and dried when you really get down to it. The Supreme Court decision, though, seems to open the door to all sorts of denials of service based on an amorphously defined religious preference and privilege.  That’s the sort of thing that can quietly accrue bits of case law here and there for months or years before there’s someone with enough time and resources to challenge it… and in that time, it can touch thousands, if not tens of thousands of lives.

It’s going to be interesting (and, I’m suspecting, unpleasant) to watch both of these situations play out now that they’ve come to light and are on the table for discussion.

Tarot History, Takei Respect, DRM Woes, Work Tunes, Illusions in Motion, and Comic Book Stuff

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This entry is part 50 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Hopefully, after today’s utter insanity and stress, things will fall back into a more “schedule-friendly” rhythm at work. We should be past the point where a project that should have ebbed has continued to flow… right over top of a new project that was planned to start in the down-time.

In the feed, there’s what I consider a nice story about the insistence on DRM (Digital Rights Management) has come back to bite the company that insisted upon it in the ass. Seems a publisher that vehemently insisted Amazon only sell it’s ebook editions with DRM in place, is now in the sticky situation where it’s no longer happy with Amazon’s terms and charges, but can’t pull out without more or less using it’s entire customer base–because they’re locked into only being able to read the books on Amazon readers… because of the DRM.

Even more “fun” is the tidbit in the article that mentions Tor Books, which dropped DRM from it’s ebooks a couple years back. Ostensibly, DRM is in place to prevent piracy. Well, it seems that since dropping DRM, not only has Tor not seen an increase in piracy, they’ve actually seen an increase in sales.

Same thing happened when Amazon really jumped into the MP3 game… challenging iTunes by offering DRM free downloads. That may not have been a clear-cut victory, but Amazon’s music sales aren’t too shabby.

DRM has always treated legitimate customers like criminals and done little to nothing to deter, let alone stop, actual criminals. In most cases, it seems that it’s created more who break the law–by stripping out or otherwise circumventing the DRM so they can use their products freely.

People pirate stuff because they can’t get it legally in the form they want to make use of it. This is a lesson you’d think everyone would have learned when Napster was the biggest thing. People went there to effectively steal music because there was no legal way to get it in that format.

Ebooks are popular because people love the format. It’s bad enough that there are so many competing formats (which offer very few differences when it comes to the actual content… outside of which device you can use to read them). Adding serious DRM to them does nothing but open the door for things like a content producer getting screwed over by their DRM provider.

Maybe this time around, companies will learn.

Probably not.

Food, Real Heroes, Diversity in Comics, Movie Trailers, Net Neutrality, and some Randomness

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This entry is part 30 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

It was a busy weekend. One that probably should have been busier, as I still didn’t get everything accomplished that I wanted to. Almost caught up now… almost.

My college and my home town have both made the feed recently. The first for being named “geekiest” by (DC) local nerd mecca Think Geek. The second for being the host of a full on rave-type festival this coming weekend. That second one is kind of surreal… as that’s exactly the sort of thing that would have never even been considered before the performing arts center on the Woodstock site (Bethel Woods) was put in place by a “local boy who done good” (by making a few million dollars in the cable TV industry (he sold his local empire to Time Warner over a decade or so ago).

More important news has come up, of course. There’s still the ongoing net neutrality fight. But the FCC is also dealing with a spectrum auction for wireless space. It’s going to be all former TV broadcast spectrum–so it can mostly make it through concrete buildings–and is reported to open the door for better cell service because of it. The words “super wifi” were also thrown around in a few articles. Very interesting, indeed.

And, returning a little to geeky news, the new trailer for Marvel’s next blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy, dropped today. I think it’s looking pretty amazing. Every time I see something new about this film, I love it more. It’s going to have an full on action/comedy feel and (director) James Gunn is looking like he’s pulled it off perfectly. That’s not much of a surprise. The man has a great grasp of genre and how to twist it just right to add the perfect amount of humor (check out Slither to see what he did with horror and Google PG Porn to see what happened when he took all the sex out of porn film ideas).

There’s also a new version of Dungeons & Dragons on the way in July. It’ll be the fifth edition. I played about one and a half sessions of 2nd Edition AD&D in college (before we abandoned it for Cyberpunk and RIFTS) and a handful of sessions of 3.5 a few years back when a friend was running a custom world setting using those rules. I’ve dabbled in it a little (as the OGL) while looking at some other game settings, and I can firmly say I’ve never cared much for the D&D system. So I’m thoroughly unimpressed that we’re getting a new version (priced at about $50 per core rule book, at that!).

In the past few years, I’ve checked out over a dozen different role playing systems and I’ve liked most of them better than D&D. Of course, I’m more story and character oriented than a lot of the classic D&D stuff seems to be… and I’ve never been interested in fully optimizing a character to just kick ass like a lot of people I know who played D&D seem to (at least once upon a time) be into. I like flaws in characters and games where combat doesn’t necessarily happen every session.

Ah, well… guess we’ll see how that all plays out. I expect some mighty nerd rage (just like when 4th edition came out).