Comics (Columnists) Should Be Good
Jan 22I have to throw a quick shout-out to Greg Hatcher, who has probably become one of my favorite writers on the web when it comes to comics and the full range of pulpy pop culture detritus.
His latest column discusses the visceral thrill of hunting down old pulp drugstore novels and comics off the spinner racks back in the day, a phenomenon I got to experience VERY briefly in the earliest days of my comics-collecting life.
Anyway, he’s up every Friday, and he’s always a good read.
DS=Disappointing, So
Jan 22Caught a piece on Digg this morning about VoIP options for the Nintendo DS.
It really got me to thinking. When the DS first came out, I was feverishly obsessed with it, for months leading up to the release. I bought one the DAY they went on sale. I thought for sure, this miraculous device heralded a New Age for Gaming, where Nintendo would take all their innovation and ability and apply it to truly moving gaming forward.
And forward it went…a few inches. Enough to impress the kiddies.
Us adults have been sorta left out in the freezing cold, as only a fraction of the handheld’s true potential has been unlocked. Yes, we can game online, but only through the pain-in-the-ass Friend Code system. We can’t browse the internet, or truly conduct VoIP conversations, or connect with others to enjoy a true online gaming experience, with real communication and interaction connecting people across continents.
Every time Nintendo puts something out that makes my heart skip, I find they eventually break said organ, slowly and painfully.
How They Won The War
Jan 19This is most likely bullshit, but it did get me thinking about the super-shocking end to Civil War.
Remember all that talk of Joss Whedon walking into the big Civil War planning meeting for like ten minutes and coming up with the PERFECT ending? Well, what if that ending…
Hollywood immortality is now iron-clad.
Jan 19For the longest time, if someone wanted a dead star to appear in a movie or commercial, you went with look-alikes, or you would use a body-double whose face you would never see, but a voice immitation would be heard. In the past ten years this took a big jump forward, as computer technology allowed filmmakers to insert an actor into old footage, or to isolate an actor from old footage and insert them into a new scene. Actually, the former was around before, using optical techniques, but it was pretty limited, and spotting “the blur” of the SFX usually gave it away. But with computers, these same effects got very sophisticated, allowing Tom Hanks for example, to appear in a lot of historical footage.
Computers now allow Hollywood to do a lot of things, but replicating humans has proven hard. At the very least, you can have Fred Astaire dancing with a dust-buster or the face of Gene Kelly mapped onto three different break-dancers (again, The Blur spoils the effect somewhat – admittedly, commercials don’t have the budget for perfect clean-up passes.) At best, you can take a digital, 2D scan of an actor, and put that 3D version to work.
But the holy grail that was always just out of reach was 3D models for dead actors – they, as mentioned, are dead. You can’t sit them down for a 3D scan. And some who are near death, look their age – 3D scanning them locks them into that age (plus or minus a decade, with a little tweaking.) There has been no perfect solution to resurrecting the dead, until now.
Superbama!
Jan 18At the risk of getting all political on yo’ collective asses…this gets me atwitter.
