I recently read about some new Street Fighter sneakers from Nike, only to be disappointed by how little the shoes seem to resemble the characters they’re supposedly “inspired” by. I can understand Nike’s desire to aim for subtlety rather than an out-and-out declaration of geekdom, since they could sell plenty of these shoes by “accident” and still probably hit a few sales among the Street Fighter fans, but that Chun Li shoe looks like it could have been sold by them for years and just decided to slap Chun Li’s name on the tag. BORING.
Bruce Campbell is a geek’s hero: the star of the Evil Dead franchise and the man’s own tongue-in-cheek charisma have skyrocketed him to superstar on his own terms. If you’re ever at a fan event featuring Campbell, you should do yourself a favor and attend his panel– especially at Comic-Con. Here’s why. Read more…
Improv Everywhere is a group located in New York City that puts together flash mobs and other public improv events (or “missions”) conducted by volunteers (“agents”). Some of these missions are more infamous than others– the Slo-Mo Home Depot mission, for example –but quite a few of them are astonishingly geeky. Here are the ten best, organized by geek type. Read more…
As a Japanophile of some record, when I first heard the words ‘Super Shogun Stormtrooper,’ my first mental image was of the samurai Darth Vader swag and costumes I’ve seen around over the years. I further extrapolated that a Super Shogun Stormtrooper would be something along those lines: a Japanese-inspired Stormtrooper redesign. How cool is that? Might go nice in a glass cabinet, right? Geeky, but with a bit of class!
As any well-trained fanboy (or fangurl) should know, Comic-Con International— also known as San Diego Comic-Con –is right around the corner, running from Wednesday, July 21st to Sunday, July 25th. Those five days are jam-packed with programming, and as usual, some of those days are…special. Read more…
I’m not much of a Trekkie (nor a Trekker), but even I can get a kick out of the following video, spotted at Topless Robot and shot in what I’m going to guess were the early ’80s, possibly late ’70s, featuring Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and Bill Shatner (Kirk) recalling fond memories of their time on the Star Trek set…particularly as it relates to Nimoy’s bicycle.
Oddly enough, it’s the Shat who spends more time proclaiming to be the logical one in the situation… Read more…
Upcoming villain-as-hero CG flick Despicable Me is opening this week, starring Steve Carell as supervillain Gru who is forced to care for three not-always-adorable children. But while Carell might be better known for sweet guys like his Andy Stitzer in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he’s spent plenty of time being despicable– like in the following Even Step(v)hen bits alongisde his then-colleague at the Daily Show, Stephen Colbert. Read more…
Everyone loves Creative Commons-shareable webcomic XKCD, whether they’re geeks, nerds, or pretending to be one of them because they acknowledge that geeks and nerds now rule the earth. My personal favorite category of strips, however, are the pranks that the nameless characters of XKCD conduct upon an unsuspecting public. Here are five of the best prank strips. Read more…
Having managed to run the most popular X-Men characters into the ground in a mere four films (“mere” given the sheer volume of characters to make use of), Fox’s X-Men: First Class is starting to look like one of those movies that’s the fourth or fifth flick in a popular movie franchise, where the movie gets released directly to DVD and stars an entirely different (and cheaper) cast than the original. Read more…
Apparently tired of their own boring and ubiquitous banner ads, Ancestry.com decided to try a more novel approach to publicity, more in the time-honored tradition of tabloids and Perez Hilton: release interesting information about celebrities. Rather than go about peeping in windows, however, Ancestry.com used its own database to discover that Robert Pattinson, aka “that guy who plays the vampire in Twilight, the book/movie franchise designed to sexually arouse 13-year-old girls,” is in fact related to Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula.
The funny part, of course, being that anyone who has the slightest understanding of genealogy or of how long ago ol’ Vladdie lived knows that you might be too! Read more…
I’ve been thinking a lot about those often (and not unfairly) maligned films known collectively as the Star Wars prequels– episode I (The Phantom Menace), episode II (Attack of the Clones), and episode III (Revenge of the Sith) –due to the subject coming up in a couple of interviews, and I’ve been thinking about the anger and hatred George Lucas receives from a particular set of Star Wars fans. Here’s why he doesn’t deserve it…kind of. Read more…
I haven’t watched Toy Story 3 yet, so I don’t know what all of the little cameo toy appearances are– but here are some of my favorite childhood toys (which may date me as a child born in the mid-’80s) that definitely deserve some Toy Story screen time. Read more…
No, I’m not talking about Left 4 Dead 4 Wii– I’m talking about ZombieFit, a new program at a gym in St. Charles, IL where you basically learn how to be a movie badass by assigning yourself an even harder target: be able to survive a zombie apocalypse. Read more…
I’m a journalism major, not a design major, but I have to say that the logos for the upcoming film adaptations of Marvel comics’ Thor and Captain America are…less than thrilling. And I mean that in the literal sense. They’re pretty boring. Let’s have a look-see. Read more…
In certain video games, there’s a phenomenon I’m going to call “Boss to Minion Progression” (or you may know it on TVTropes as Degraded Boss) in which an early level’s boss reappears– weaker, and perhaps a different color –as a regular-occurring baddie in a later level. Nearly every Final Fantasy has had this, along with games like Castlevania, beat-’em-ups like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage, a bunch of the Legend of Zelda games…it’s pretty common. Read more…
Glee is sort of an odd topic for this website. Sure, it’s got a growing and devoted fandom, plus the kind of soap opera drama, colorful characters, and just the right level of fandom gap* that gets fanfic authors’ motors revving. On the other hand, it’s a (slightly) grown-up version of High School Musical– pretty far from the genre, game-related, and foreign materials that usually qualify for their own geekdoms. Read more…
Olivia Munn is many things: a Chinese-German-Irish American who speaks Vietnamese, a host for G4’s Attack of the Show, a bikini model, a sports reporter, and a film actress. But a comedienne? …I dunno about that. Read more…
You don’t need us to tell you that Prince of Persia was a mildly entertaining action-adventure film. You either know that already or don’t care. But I CAN tell you a few things that you may or may not know about the loosely game-based Jake Gyllenhaal feature and the world behind it that might surprise you…unless Hollywood’s poor choices don’t surprise you anymore. Read more…
Word came out this week that the Pee-Wee Herman Show, and its infamous star Paul Rubens, are moving on to Broadway, for a short time at least. This is one of those ideas that makes you go, “why didn’t anyone think of this YEARS ago?” because Pee-Wee and its mix of puppetry and live stars are perfect for the stage.
But it’s not the only show that I’d like to see get a Broadway adaptation. Here are just a few from my childhood* that deserve a shot.
* I watched some Nick at Nite, so this is all technically true. Read more…
Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature has been a pretty handy tool since it launched. Users could slog through entire seasons of Law and Order, classic flicks like Harold and Maude and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and certain sets of niche genre films, all at the click of a button.
But recently Netflix added a batch of titles to its library that transformed Watch Instantly into THE place for kids who watched a lot of cartoons in the ’90s (not including anime, which makes up the vast majority of Netflix’s “Anime & Animation” section). Read more…
The Law of Inverse Importance states thus: the more splashy Square Enix gets about a game announcement, the less exciting the actual game is.
Example: When a new Final Fantasy comes out, all its official site might have is a simple logo to start. But Square Enix’s latest game was announced via a teaser site with Yahoo!, promising a game that would “make history” in Japan and was left up for some time, encouraging visitors to Tweet about it and garnering attention. Viewers wondered: could it be a Dragon Quest MMO? A Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy crossover? What could this history-making game BE? Read more…
Posted by Gia Manry on May 22, 2010 in Comic Books
Recently comic creator Hope Larson, of the tween girl series Chiggers and the romantic Grey Horses, recently released the results of an informal study she conducted with 198 teenage girls and women, all comic readers. The results were interesting and, true to form, many pundits reporting on the finding missed the point entirely. Read more…
Right on the heels of releasing the new DSi XL, Nintendo made a surprising move: they made the product almost immediately obsolete by announcing the tentatively-named Nintendo 3DS, a portable game console with 3D capabilities– glassesless, no less. The possibilities for such a device are endless, but of course it’s always easier to bring out a new game in an established franchise to launch a console…so here are ten games that absolutely belong on the Nintendo 3DS. Read more…
