[Plasma Shield]

Update: Hip to be Square: I am Iron Man, Part 2 [Movie Review]

Ladies (scoff) and gentlemen. My name is Undead Knight and I’ll be talking about the latest and greatest in nerd fashion. Oxymoron much? In this column, I’ll be talking about movies, comic book, video games, TV shows, whatever. If it’s upcoming, nerdy, and it’s going to be big I’ll ramble on about it. I wanted to start off with a bang so I figured I’d go with the biggest thing for nerds so far this year…

Iron Man: The Movie

I saw the trailer. I quite honestly have no idea what to expect from it. If I am to go solely on the trailer, this movie could go either way. And I have to go on the trailer seeing as I can’t actually make a judgement on the film until it is released on May 1st. For those of you who have no idea who he is, Iron Man is millionaire (Upgraded to Billionaire in the film) Tony Stark who after being kidnapped makes a metal suit with gadgets that he uses fights crime. This is where (from what I can tell) the Movie is in directly in line with the book, though there are other slightly altered links that have been modernised. For example, instead of being kidnapped by “Commies” like in the comic, he’s kidnapped by terrorists. He is a weapons manufacturer in the movie, where as he’s just an inventor that had his technology used in weapons in the books. This is rather a moot point however. If I’m going to comment on this, I need to start listing good and bad points.

The Good ***

It looks amazing. The special effects are really outstanding. The only word I can use is sexy. At times, I wish I looked as good as these effects do. **** This leads to my first law of nerd movies: “Special Effects are directly proportionate to the “kick ass” of the Action.” And from what I can tell, it fits here. Iron man looks all sleek and shiny, the bullets and flames all look realistic. He is generally a robotic badass, which is what we want from the movie. Also, there is some quality humour (“Is it cool if I get a picture with you?” “Yes, It’s very cool.”) and the dialogue appears to be well written. (more…)

Recent data released by the Newspaper Association of America show that advertising revenue in 2007 fell from about 46 Billion to 42 billion a loss of 9.4% and 4 billion dollars. This is huge.

the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years >> Editor and Publisher

This reduction is another indicator pointing to the growing move to online media for content and advertisements. The second worst reduction in revenue of the industry was only 6 years ago in 2001, a fall of about 9%. Losses were experienced across print advertisement, national print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year, retail slipped 5% to $21 billion, classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.

Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms

John Sturm(Sturm’s a pretty cool name, “sturmarbeiter” is stormtrooper in german), president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.

Personally, I still like newspapers, there’s just something about reading the newspapers, the feel and the texture that you get when you hold it in your hand. Not to mention the ability to roll it up and hit people with it. That said, the convenience and dynamic format of online newspapers totally out weights the said advantages. I mean, you can’t link to youtube or other newspapers in a paper newspaper, you can’t type a comment in and have people be able to read it instantly, and you can’t send people links to a article in a (paper) news paper, the closest thing to that is folding the piece of paper with the article on it into a plane and throw it at the person you want to give it to. The most important thing that online newspapers has got going for them is that most of them are free. The two dollars or so you pay is pretty cheap already, but not as cheap as free. (more…)

Omg this is cool, it’s Stars Wars written in ASCII characters!

That’s right, Star Wars made with only the keys on your keyboard. Well actually, a bit less than that.

To watch it, open up command line, by either going to Run > Command, or search for command in the start menu if you have Vista.

and type in:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

or open up notepad and paste the above in in, save it and change the file extension from “.txt” to “.bat”.

Kinda sucks that it’s only half of Star Wars Episode IV, though. Oh, and if you’re using IPv6 you get the colored version. (more…)

Wow, Obama girl critizes Clinton? Really? How the hell did that happen?

But on a more serious(or not) note, Obama is gonna get alot of votes from Obama girl. She’s pretty damn hot.

First thoughts on this video? This is pretty effective propaganda, the video might as well have been 3 minutes of Microsoft Sam saying “VoteObamamVoteObamaVoteObama….”. In the whole video it was just “Vote Obama” in various different reincarnations, it wouldn’t be as bad, if it weren’t for the fact that none of the claims are substantiated. Actually I was a bit hesitant in calling it propaganda before. I change my mind, this s*** is propaganda.

In the video, and various other videos on the Barely Political site, it points at various television networks and shouts “biased!“. What the hell? What is Barely Political if not biased? Barely Poltical is biased on a level that no news service (except maybe fox) is, it only avoids backlash because it makes itself to be a light hearted comedy site. Which it is, but it’s comedy that’s manipulating people’s opinions through positive associations with the candidate it supports, not through reason as political coverage should be. If you look at the dynamics of the site, the traffic and popularity it has, is built supporting Obama, so if you think about it, if they want to keep the popularity and traffic(and the revenue they gain from the traffic), they have to more or less present pro-Obama views. Imagine if they were to start supporting Clinton, I doubt they’d get as much traffic, and the scantily clad women would create conflict with the pro-feminist part of Clinton’s campaign. It raises the possibility that Barely Political support Obama, simply because they want to retain their traffic/popularity. (more…)

The rain has come as the writers’ strike is over. But the long drought has left Hollywood brittle and parched as the writers’ strike has halted many plans and events. Who would have known a bunch of off screen paper churners would bring the whole entertainment industry down to the extent that the Golden Globes was desiccated.

It seems the WGAs (writers’ association) are so fired up because the writers aren’t getting a slice of the DVD sales pie. TV show DVD’s are not a very big seller. They’re lucky that the DVD buyers haven’t discovered p2p or torrents. What they should be more scared of is the internet. (Lets hope they never get fired up about the internet. Imagine what they’ll do. Kill the internets?)

This squabble over a slice of old pie about to be rotten pie has caused havoc already. Without the writers creating the scripts for shows has been left many shows without a storyline. Many shows have had to end their season early and continue later in a new season. Show like Heroes, Pushing Daisies and Bones had to or will run until they ran out of episodes and end the season abruptly. Most of these shows are betting on the next season overcome the disturbance. Some of the more resilient names in show biz such as Desperate Housewives, The Office and Scrubs have just gone on a break or temporary gap (a nice interseason holiday for the crew). Then there are the shows who were left out to dry with their futures uncertain. The seventh season of 24 is the hardest hit as it was scheduled to begin during the writers’ strike and it was necessary for the season for the show to have 24 episodes. The dwindling franchise would have problems keeping ratings if they had to halt seasons as it is episode intensive. The writer’s strike also weeded out those shows that were not faring well. Show like Bionic Woman that had horrid ratings was put on hiatus with future episodes or seasons in limbo. Reports say that Bionic Woman has been cancelled has been raised but not confirmed. (more…)

[UPDATE] Here’s a comment from a Blog called Sillis Bang

McFearsome eventually found out that the fool wasn’t the thief, but had bought it off him. Too late to stop people leaving more than 500 messages warning the kid of his impending rape in prison, and those were just the polite ones. Nice to see people happily abusing the anonymity they ripped away from him. As pretty much only one person was sensible enough to point out, it’s straight up harassment.

There were a few digg users that shared my view that it might have gone too far and it’s bordering on serious harassment, and people really should stop telling the kid he’s gonna get raped.

[UPDATE] McPherson has now had his laptop returned by the kid who was caught on camera trying to sell it. (Link)

Well, it’s gonna be a long time before this kid buys anything that connects to the internet off the streets again, I wonder what kind of trauma will result from being beaten senseless on the internet. What’s it called when you’re afraid of the internet(s)?

As many of you guy have seen, the internet can be pretty powerful, just ask the Scientologists. And to quote a the uncle of a great red and blue tights-wearing figure from (comicbook) history, “With great power come great responsibility”. In this case people rose up to take revenge on a thief, who’s arrogance, criminal antics and stupidity has now gained him global, and perhaps ever lasting, infamy. Years from now, people will occasionally ask each other, “Hey, do you remember that moron who stole an Xbox?”, or if they’re lazy or not entirely sober “Remember that Xbox moron?”.

Right now it’s not actually clear what the kid did, from what he tells Jesse McPherson(guy who had his property, among them a Xbox, stolen) he just bought the Xbox off the street (for $200). Either he really just bought it or he’s just lying and he did steal the xbox, you can’t really be sure of. Considering the time frame of him going online with the xbox and the time it was stolen, which was around a week, it’s possible. Mostly likely, he bought it off one of his buddies. Who really should be the butt of such internet abuse, not him. Most people (well, yesterday atleast) were under the impression that the kid who every one was linking to stole the xbox, at the time of writing it’s still unclear (more…)

Follow-up: XboxMoron: The Aftermath

Here is a case of, “check if the guy who you’re stealing a xbox from has a website”. A kid, who appears to be a really, really illiterate and redneck kid, stole a tv, mac powerbook and xbox from the author of this website. Understandably, the guy was pissed, and the first thing he does is check the local pawn store (which was pretty smart), and he gets images of the kid from the cameras in the store.

He calls the police department, and was ignored.

And then, you start realize how stoned and idiotic this kid really is. The kid then proceeds to send voice messages to the author, demanding that he pay to get his Xbox back. Of course, revealing his account name, and his account info in the process. All Xbox 360 owners would know, that in the process of registration, the account is linked with your msn email account, and if the intelligence of the kid is any indication, it is probably full of personal, and most importantly, identifiable information. All the police needs to do it contact Microsoft.

The author then calls the local authorities, who is the Philadelphia Police for him, and whilst waiting for a response gets 2 more messages from the thief. (more…)