Danny Choo’s latest book entitled Otacool 3: Worldwide Workspaces has hit the shelves in Japan. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of Otacool, it’s a book that basically details an aspect of otaku culture. The first volume dealt with otaku rooms/living areas, while the second book dealt exclusively with cosplay. This third volume, currently available via J-List, deals with – you guessed it – otaku workspaces. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some pretty awesome workspaces — the book has plenty of them, and some of them are pretty impressive — but honestly, I fail to grasp the concept of a workspace, otaku or otherwise, being cool. Read more…
Are you fond of betting with fictional currencies because you have nothing to carry your cash with? That probably won’t be a problem for much longer – Star Trek Mighty Wallets are on the way. In case you you don’t know what those are, Mighty Wallets are basically seamless, seamless, stitch-less wallets constructed from high density polyethylene. That’s the same material used to create those nearly-indestructible tags you’ll find on mattresses. Of course, the wallets are slightly thicker. These specific wallets feature some amazing art from the original Gold Key Star Trek comics published during the ’60s and ’70s — making one a must have for anyone who loved those classics. They go on sale next month, but you can pre-order yours for a mere $15 here. There’s also a short trailer if you’d like a closer look.
Posted by Tim Sheehy on Aug 18, 2010 in Videogames
I have to admit that I’ve never taken the time to sit down and play Metroid. It’s not that I haven’t had opportunities over the years, but I’ve always wanted to start from the beginning in order to better understand the on-going plot. Fortunately, Nintendo has gone through the trouble of explaining history of the series for us with this interesting trailer for their upcoming title Metroid: Other M. While Samus Aran’s voice over might seem a bit stiff, she does a decent job of catching us up on the series. So far, I’m pretty excited about it. This latest game will feature a mixture of third and first person gameplay, and is currently set for release on August 31st. Read more…
Generally, Japanese commercials tend to be a bit more outlandish than our own TV spots, so I was a bit surprised to learn that Apple hasn’t really done much to change the format of their recent iPhone 4 ads for an international market, aside from hiring Japanese actors of course. It would seem that Apple has focused almost entirely on their Face Time feature, hoping that live video chat would be enough to sell anyone on their reception-impaired smart phone. To be fair, a simple case can fix that, but why should there be a problem in the first place — right? Any ways, the commercials are still pretty cute. I just wonder if it’s enough to steal NTT Docomo’s loyal fan base.
There’s been plenty of news from last weekend’s Celebration V event floating around the net, but everyone seems to be talking about the upcoming Star Wars Blu-ray release, set for 2011. As you can imagine, I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of having to purchase yet another set of these films, no doubt remastered with more pointless and potentially annoying edits by George Lucas – let’s face it, Han shot first. Fortunately, I can justify the purchase as the discs will include never released deleted scenes. While the exact number or content of scenes have yet to be revealed, a short clip of Luke building his lightsaber in Return of the Jedi was shown during event. The clip was subsequently uploaded by fans to YouTube, but Lucasfilm was quick to have it removed from the site. If you’d like to try and catch a glimpse of it while you still can, you click here.
In the 80s the Amiga was eons ahead of everyone else in the PC market: They had everything from the ability to play full color animations to multitasking. However this amazing platform just never took off. Why? Because the user base took advantage of the first generation of floppy disks and BBSs to pirate pretty much every last bit of software that was written for the platform. Because of this Microsoft never created a version of Word for the Amiga and WordPerfect lost a great deal of money thanks to cheap users. In fact the only winner that came away from the Amiga was the NewTek Video Toaster which was pretty much dongle protected due to the hardware aspect of the product. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 17, 2010 in Comic Books
Yes I know the that the name of this book sounds like Image Comics talked to an SEO expert and took all of the top trends and baked them into a title: However if that was true they would have included the key words Vampires and Zombies as well! This series has impressed me since it came out and issue #8 which comes out this Wednesday is no disappointment as Riley Rossmo’s drawings keep you eye moving from panel to panel in the book. The minimal color palette is also a nice touch as it add just enough to the artwork without becoming too distracting — and the drawings in those panels remind me of Bill Sienkiewicz too: Read more…
I believe very strongly that Google has an unhealthy monopoly on the internet, so for the past week or so I’ve switched all of my browsers to use Bing as the default search engine. For the most part Microsoft has done an amazing job of going from nothing to something to create a great search engine in a short amount of time, however there are still a few things that they need to beat Google. Having been born with dyslexia one of the things I love about Google is that their spell checker is amazing — in fact often when using Microsoft Word I’ll pop out of the program when I can’t get the spelling of a more obscure word. And this is the very sort of feature that not only does Bing need badly, but something that should also be incorporated into the online version of Microsoft Office. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 16, 2010 in Comic Books
I’ve been really enjoying following the comic book King City which is by Brandon Graham and presented by Tokyopop. Issue #11 will be out this Wednesday and is well worth checking out. What I love about Brandon’s work is that his drawings have a highly animated feeling to them and have just a slight sense of surrealism that reminds me of Krazy Kat by George Herriman. The only thing I regret about this series is that they didn’t color it, although the black-and-white pages show off the artwork pretty well: Read more…
