I’m just going to leave this here:
Yeah.
So, anyway, that not enough Star Wars Christmas cheer for you? There’s more, after the jump.
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Geek Culture
We are in the midst of a First World Catastrophe here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. The home theater PC that acts as the linchpin of entertainment for our Big Main Screen has a component that is rapidly disintegrating. Which is normally fine – we are totally able to repair computers here – except that this particular part is a hobbyist part that is not inexpensive, is somewhat difficult to obtain quickly, and the failure of which causes the entire machine to hard reboot. And this part has failed ten times so far today.
So we are busily attempting to either locate a replacement part or laboring over the decision to finally, after ten years, make the jump to an actual TiVo box (We are not cordcutters here. Neither my co-editor Amanda nor I were allowed HBO or other pay cable while growing up, and now that we are adults you will take it from our cold dead hands) and planning the dithering at the cable company that that decision would entail to allow us to watch television sometime in the next week. Either way, I am truly thankful that this massive unexpected expense occured three and a half weeks before Christmas, and therefore three weeks before I did any Christmas shopping.
None of which you care about. But it means our time is limited, so here is a 35-minute animated version of Blade Runner, put together by artist Anders Ramsell from more than 12,000 watercolor paintings.
It’s not much content from us today, but it simultaneously tickles the part of my brain that desperately wants to watch a recalcitrant machine be shot with a .44 Magnum, and it gives us something to watch if this damn machine won’t cooperate.
(via The Mary Sue)
This year’s Boston Comic Con was a hell of a surprise, going from a little con with mostly local talent, held in a hotel basement, in 2009 or so, to selling out two days at the Seaport World Trade Center – one of Boston’s bigger convention halls – with programming and a double handful of A-List talent on the floor to boot. Sure, the convention showed a few growing pains – if you weren’t in line by a certain time it took forever to get into the hall, and for the love of God, they need to stop clearing the programming rooms between each panel – but it was damned impressive nonetheless.
My biggest fear was that it was an anomaly. This year’s convention was supposed to take place in a smaller hall in April and was displaced until August and the Seaport World Trade Center thanks to the Boston Marathon Bombing, which meant a few more high-profile guests signed on either to show support to the city or just because the timing was better. And initially, the word was that the convention was going to move back to April, but instead the organizers announced that they were not only sticking with August, but adding a day, going from Friday, August 8th to Sunday, August 10th, 2014.
Which was a good start… but a better sign is that the convention has already announced their first slate of special guests. And let me tell you: last year’s A-List talent was no one-off fluke.
Last night the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Staff convened for the broadcast of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. I would like to say that a lot of tequila was involved with the construction of these tweets, but there wasn’t. Sierra Nevada and a fair amount of Sauvignon Blanc were the main perpetrators. The rest was inspired by circumstance. And, possibly tequila happenstance. Enjoy.
For people who attended San Diego Comic-Con this year and have been waiting for word on when the pre-registration for next year’s SDCC would be coming off, all we’ve known since about August is that it will be happening “sometime between November 1 and December 31, 2013.”
Which was, and is fine – if the people at SDCC handle it even remotely like they did for the 2013 convention (which happened in August, 2012), all you need is access to a couple of computers with access to reliable high-speed Internet (at a couple of different locations in case one is hit by a bolt of lightning or a meteor or something), nerves of steel and an adamantium bladder so you don’t have to leave the screen until the deed is done. So they can do it pretty much whenever.
However, we are now less than one week away from American Thanksgiving, and there hasn’t been a lot of details released about exactly when this pre-registration is gonna happen. And if it happened during Thanksgiving weekend, it would be an apocalypse.
It would be an apocalypse because many of us travel to visit our parents during Thanksgiving, and have you seen your parents computer? Can you imagine trying to log into the pre-reg Website, competing against thousands of other people, on a malware-packed laptop rocking Microsoft Vista (Service Pack Yeah, Right)? Using a browser with about thirty different third party search bars on it? Over first generation “high speed” 512 KbS DSL? It would be easier and faster to start randomly sucking dicks at the bus station and hoping that some kind soul will pay you in SDCC passes.
Well, fear not. Because even though we still don’t know exactly when pre-registration is gonna happen, we do know that it won’t happen until after Thanksgiving.
There isn’t a lot of hard news in this interview video – by which I mean there isn’t any hard news in it – but it caught our attention because of the people involved.
J. J. Abrams has been doing the press circuit, not for Star Wars, but for a book called S, which Abrams conceived of and which was written by Doug Dorst (The author of something called Alive in Necropolis, which is, as you’d expect based on the title, a zombie story) and is comprised of not just the book, but “handwritten” notes and letters detailing a fiction investigation about the book and its author. And promotion for that book brought Abrams and Dorst to England and the BBC… where they were interviewed by an obscure journalist whose reporting is best known in a book called Don’t Panic, a long out-of-print companion book to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide series published in 1988.
That journalist? Some dude named Neil Gaiman. If that is his real name.
What? You say you’re already two episodes into this season of The Walking Dead and you can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet ultraviolence? Miss the satisfying pop as a shovel separates a walker’s head from his spinal cord? Wish Shane, Merle or the Govenor was still around because they helped to reinforce the idea that evil doesn’t come in an airborne virus or a shuffling, hungry horde, but rather through the way we treat our fellow man?
Still happy Andrea’s dead?
Then watch this mash up where The Walking Dead meets The Monster Mash and all will be well. At least until you start to get the zombie apocalypse DTs next Sunday – for that I’ll recommend whiskey. It always stops my hands from shaking, especially if I’m trying to whack my neighbor’s kid a zombie in the head with a shovel. Precision is everything.
Via The Mary Sue.
I’m afraid it’s a busy morning at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – the coffee is barely latching onto my neurotransmitters, and we need to pack up and head to Worcester (The Heroin Capital of Massachusetts!) on a mission of parental mercy involving helping with computers. Which means that by noon I will be filled with my recommended daily allowance of hatred and rage, and will thus be in poor shape to write about comics.
So instead, with the limited time I have available this morning, I am pleased to offer this exclusive, never-before-seen Star Trek footage, which you can find after the jump.
In April, Amanda and I completely redid the Entertainment Annex of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and due to changes in layout and furniture, we haven’t reconnected my XBox 360 (My gamertag? You don’t want my gamertag. I shoot the Witches in Left For Dead 2, and I do it because I quickly reach a point where I don’t care if it’s my “teammates” or me who dies if it means I don’t have to hear about my mother’s sexual proclivities anymore).
And, in an effort to keep the newly-renovated room looking like adults live here, I have held fast in keeping it disconnected, despite having a yen to play my XBox Arcade downloads after a weekend of classic video games, and even through the release of Grand Theft Auto V, because I figure once either the XBox One or the Playstation 4 comes out, either will replace my elderly and slow Blu-Ray player in favor of a new one that will report my tastes in pornography back to Corporate Headquarters.
But I recently realized that, even if I need to balance the ol’ 360 on top of a speaker or run cables across the middle of the floor, I will need to hook that bad boy up, because Batman: Arkham Origins is dropping before the end of the month. And even though this one isn’t being written by Bruce Timm, and the main voices aren’t by Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill, and it’s the first Arkham game not produced by Rocksteady Games, the first two games earned more then enough goodwill for me to pick it up on launch day.
And the ads are helping to get me excited… kinda. On one hand, this new spot that takes us, in just a few seconds, through Bruce Wayne’s journey from Crime Alley to Batman… but it also makes me concerned that we’re gonna be spending more time than I’d like with Bruce Wayne instead of Batman. Arkham Origins without the Batman suit or the streets of Gotham or familiar rogues stands a real chance of becoming Double Dragon… but the emotional beats in the video give me some hope that it’ll be right at the core.
And you can check the latest spot after the jump.
Some of you might be wondering why we have been so silent over the events of the New York Comic Con, which has just finished up and featured news including the return of Stephanie Brown to the DC Universe proper.
Well, the reason is that we checked our bank balance after returning from the San Diego Comic-Con, determined that we didn’t have the cash or the cachet to attend another giant-assed comic convention three months after the Big Show, and therefore decided to spend the weekend doing something geeky, but geeky within our budget.
And that means video games. And being from Boston, that means that the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office exists about 100 miles from Funspot, the home of the American Classic Arcade Museum.
Now the whole “museum” tag might make the whole experience sound boring, but what it really means is that the third floor of one of the biggest arcades in the world is (minus the only indoor miniature golf course I have ever seen) completely loaded with original and working arcade cabinet games (the real machines, not that MAME stuff that your creepy uncle misguidedly uses to try to lure young-looking girls into his basement game room) that you can actually play with a simple token from an old-school token machine.
And, since Funspot is the arcade featured in The King of Kong, you can, for the low-low price of 25 cents, play the actual Donkey Kong machine that Steve Wiebe went head-to-head with against Billy Mitchell for the world record. Or, if you’re me, you can use that legendary machine to learn that you were never any good at Donkey Kong, whether you use the cross-handed grip you saw Mitchell use in that movie or not.
And not only did I learn that I am not good enough to fondle the joystick that Wiebe and Mitchell used to make history, but I learned that, when you are a 42-year-old man, spending eight hours a day playing as many video games as you want is more physically exhausting that you would have thought when you were 12 years old and never had more than five bucks to spend at any given arcade at any given time.
Meaning that I am physically crippled, and functioning only through the glee that, 22 years after it was released, I finally got through the second level of Tron. Combine that with Amanda’s excitement over holding the Pole Position II high score for the entire weekend, and we are collectively running on fumes here.
So while we recover, please enjoy these photos of a place that exists in this world 20 minutes off of Route 93 in New Hampshire, where any person with a quarter can play as Flynn against Sark (in not only Tron, but Discs of Tron), or as Pac Man before he had eyes and a Saturday morning cartoon, or even as Mario when he was still known as Jumpman and was just fighting against a giant monkey.
It is more fun than you could think you could have, and some proof is available after the jump.
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