Isaiah Mustafa is BLACK VULCAN!

There's a well done faux trailer of the Old Spice Guy as Luke Cage out at the moment. See the video below. I like the Old Spice Guy, but he doesn't come across as the bad ass that Luke Cage should be. For Luke Cage, they should cast some NFL Football type brawler guy, somebody with some menace. Isaiah Mustafa in my opinion has fantastic comedic timing, and while I'd love to see him do a superhero, I think it would have to be someone lighter in tone than Luke Cage. Isaiah Mustafa should be BLACK VULCAN!

Don't you want to see Mustafa along side Christian Bale as Batman and Henry Cavil as Superman, Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern! Sorry, Isaiah, you're not a Marvel, you're a DC!

(And just so we're cool, when they really do the Superfriends movie and cast you in it, I'm totally cool if they redesign your costume to have pants.)

Isaiah Mustafai is Luke Cage Trailer.

- Triple Decker Oreo Signals Man's Progress Toward Superhuman Destiny [Omg]
source: Gizmodo

3 Cookies, 2 types of stuff. Forget flying cars, the future is now.

- Fall 2011 Genre Shows
source: i09

Terra Nova is about the only show jumping off the list and interesting me. Once a upon a Time by it's description sounds like ABC is just ripping off Fables?

- Obol
source: Likecool

Defeat the Soggies!

- The World's Biggest Pac-Man game takes over the internet, your life
source: Engadget

Play Here. Kind of neat, when you go out a side door, you endup on on a completely different screen.

- Cartoon Illuminati
source: deviantART: gallery:AdamWithers/636708

Drawn by Adam Withers.

- Shopping Cart Lounger
source: Likecool

Neat.

- If this summer's movie posters told the truth, they'd look just like this... [This Is Awesome]
source: io9

- Reinventing Nature Escapes: Another Picnic Table
source: Furniture, Gadgets, Inspiration and More for a Better House

Nice Lean Back design for this picnic table.

- ImgToCSS: A Convenient Tool to CSS-ize Your Image Files
source: MakeUseOf.com

Interesting.

- Seagate's GoFlex Satellite portable hard drive streams content over WiFi (review)
source: Engadget

This is one nice thing about iPads' lack of USB or external storage, it creates a market for something like this. Probably would be the best pirating device ever conceived for college campuses if they get cheap enough. iPad will probably add some sort of external (or crazy cloud) storage before too long to undercut these reaching critical mass though.

- ASUS Eee Slate B121 Turns the EP121 Into a Business Tablet
source: Tablet News

Oh hello there flat screen tablet that looks like everyother flatscreen tablet. You have Windows and if you were dirt cheap sub-$300 I would want to buy you, but in tech articles they rarely have prices. So really without price, I have little to no interest in your identical bland but functional tablet self.

- Can we have hierarchy without oppression? [The Big Question]
source: io9

My main goal . . . is showing that deference and hierarchy need not be oppressive. The most important point to realize in this regard is that, on the basis of all that I have just said, relations of hierarchy and deference are properly understood as occurring between individuals, not groups. One person aptly defers to another on the basis of a fit between the latter's role, experiences, learning, or skills, and the particular circumstance in which the two find themselves. I defer to Elaine in the courtroom because she is the judge, but not in the grocery store-or at least, not for that reason . . . When people of one social group-identified by gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on-defer to members of another across situation-types, though, this smacks of oppression.

Interesting.

- Calvin with a side of Bacon
source: Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources - Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment

These are good... First Strip | Second Strip

Dinah passed away this weekend. She was a good bird. I'll miss her being in our office, chirping along with our youtube videos. She'd also perch on my hand and wrestle my thumb. She was a good bird.

Let's go Surfing

Saw a Youtube review of a cheap kirf Windows 7 tablet. (narrated by a very amusing British guy) that's on Dealextreme for $413. ($448 with extra ram) Almost worth it.

An End to Magic

Seth Godin's blog today has a great short post that very much sums up what I am feeling at the moment in regard to tech, the internet and computers. This is the back half of his post:

I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.

No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.

First off, bonus points for such a perfect use of the word: ennui. After the above post, I think I want to get that word printed on a tshirt or something.

It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.

I think this is really the crux of it for me. With as fast as things are changing, we can imagine things changing even faster. And for the things that are currently changing, there are rapid continual refinements rather than revolutions.

But more than that, and it's not captured in Godin's post, I think there is a lack of need. "Satisfied needs do not motivate". Current technology is doing such a great job of satisfying our needs for information and entertainment, that there isn't the need or desire to see what will be invented next to make information and entertainment even more relevant, prelevant and efficiently distributed.

I just watched the video on the Makerbot's home page. I've been following the Makerbot project from a distance for awhile. It's a facinating device for a not unobtainable price of $1,299. I also spent a little bit of time this morning on Thingiverse.com which is the Makerbot site for Makerbot users to display their constructs and plans. It's all very neat stuff, and if you squint at these two sites you can see a possible revolutionary future. Or maybe not.

As recent as June 2007 I posted a youtube video I saw of a One-Off Paperback book printer. At the time I thought such a thing could be revolutionary. Bookstores could be tiny little stores in the mall, you would print a book with as much concern as you would print digital photos at Meijer or Walgreens. And at that time it should have been revolutionary. But there was only a few year window for that opportunity. As it has turned out, the commercial market has passed on it, and now there will probably not be book stores at all in a few years because Kindle and Tablet devices have rendered printed paperbacks completely unnecessary. A possible future has been eliminated (or at the very least postponed to be resurrected later as a niche boutique device once ereader's so dominate that there is the potential for paperbacks to become retro in the same way vinyl records are today.)

There are all sorts of these ideas that could be revolutionary but will just miss their window for the masses. And there are just as many of these revolutions that at the moment, we think are settled that continue to evolve. Will we continue to buy iTunes music or will we just pay to listen to free Pandora type streaming? DVD ownership is already dying due to Netflix and Redbox. When was the last time other than Apple's iMac line that you really noticed any tech stories about desktop computers or laptop computers (larger than a netbook?) With no excitement in the platforms, the software stagnates as well.

Go iOS Apps, go HTML 5, and go Webward all the blogs say. Smartphones are such up and coming platforms (about 40% in the US at current), yet 90% of the people in the US with a computing device probably have a desktop or laptop already. The installed base is phenomenal, but nothing much is being done with it. Google spent their big developer conference touting the fact that they could do 3D graphics in the browser. Nice, but really, it's a major yawn. 3D on a laptop or a desktop has been settled tech for 2 decades. But yet, over the next few years, all the brightest minds will be working on figuring out how to do what we already know how to do in a program in a browser instead because at the moment buying apps over the web is shiny and Microsoft doesn't have a Windows App Store that works.

If Barnes and Noble would have put in and heavily promoted a one-off book printing machine, would ereaders have got such a foothold so fast? (Remember how much people protested the concept of reading on a screen, and protested black and white, so many anti-ereader posts by people who never saw eink and thought from pictures it was like their black and white casio watch LCDs.) If Microsoft would have developed a clean way of buying apps online and installing them without weaving incompatible drivers all throughout your Windows OS folder, and if Asus would have put out a $250 Touchscreen tablet with such an app store, would all the world be fawning over the iPad in quite the same way today?

The shorthand in science fiction alternate realities is to see blimps flying over major cities, because it's easy to imagine that without the Hindenburg disaster, blimps would have continued to be a fixture of our skylines. What are the future's blimps? What are the tech opportunities being stalled right now that will miss their windows of opportunities to take hold as fixtures of the future and instead be replaced by pale imitations that get just enough right at the right time to take advantage of the empty open path that the front runners stumble and don't tread down?

I'd speculate myself but... at the moment I'm full of ennui and satiated.

Starbuck and Starbuck in a Starbucks
This was the frakking neatest thing I saw on the internet last week. Source: Bleeding Cool.

Random Non-Sequiters

Douglas Adams 1999 article about the internet. Great article. Some quotes from it below.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Above is very good stuff. does 3 still hold? Are the 30s a lost decade? Or have the 20s spilled over into the 30s? What technology are people resisting now? I know what technologies people aren't taking full advantage of, but I'm not sure which ones they are resisting. Still I love the clear 1,2,3 thought in the above.

For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

A very interesting thought. Interactivity used to be the norm. true? Did we just lose it for the latter half of the 20th and early 21st century? Are we gaining it back now? Or are we just simulating it? Is it truly interactivity if the being on the other side is not a being or a real object at all? How real is a simulation? if your ipad falls in the forest and noone is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

Most of organized business is probably trying to do the above. Make the new thing behave like the old thing, just faster and cheaper. But if the new thing isn't really the old thing... at some point the new thing will probably start behaving like a new thing and not the old thing, at least i think it will.

It's the broadcast aspect I think is the most disturbing. So many voices want to broadcast at people. They're willing to pay anyone who can strap down an audience and make them listen too. But is the new thing really a broadcast medium? Opt in is a thing, I think. Broadcast is going to be much more challenging in an opt in/person chooses what/when world.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

The above is great. People do forget that chairs are technology. Your refrigerator is technology. Your microwave used to be a marvel of modern technology. Now they're just things, they're there, they just work and you don't think much about them, or replace them, or upgrade them much. I'm typing this post in Notepad on Windows XP. Windows XP is a very refined piece of software. It's 10 years old and most things still work in it (or at least when it has the higher service packs :). Windows 7 is nice, but if someone downgraded you to WinXP tomorrow, turned back your clock 10 years. I'm guessing most people wouldn't really notice, they wouldn't miss a beat. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing either. There's something neat about ubiquity, about technology fading into the fabric of everyday life.

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

This is an interesting point. Our technology is certainly catching up. I'm not sure our biology and our wetware is though. One can have very specialized niche interests now and pull from a global population and create their own village. Many real things can come out of that. Keys can be pressed, information transferred, and effects can be felt across the globe. Or keys can be pressed, information transferred and effects can only happen in one or two 8x10 ft rooms. Both are interesting.

- Mattel Shows Off Carded Samples of DCUC Wave 17
source: Action Figure Insider - Best Toy News on the Web!

Sadly this is a wave that I'm really not that interested in a single figure. Maybe, just maybe I'll go for a White Lantern. But even that, not so excited by. Wave says: Adult Collector. But most of these figures have already been available in DCD. Pegs will stay warm with this wave.

- Final Frame: IKEA Sci-Fi Instruction Manuals
source: Unplggd

Ha. Jurassic Park humor.

- Robot Bakery: Wonder Woman cookies!
source: Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources - Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment

Ha.

- E-Ink now works on cloth, t-shirts soon to be downloadable
source: DVICE

That would be neat.

- Unilever Mobile App Lets You Record & Share Your Night Out [VIDEO]
source: Mashable!

Interesting video. Novel app display, although for the most part, it's completely unnecessary since Facebook or Twitter already provide this documentation and sharing function in real time. Since this experience is focused on publishing a next day account, it's pretty much old news at that point. People are mostly interested in real time now.

Most disturbing though is this corporate lensed homogenized view of what constitutes a fun night out.

The second odd aspect is this is basically a corporate attempt to sponsor regular people's events. Marcus' Birthday party, brought to you by Axe Body Spray.

You know the documentary that lays out the case for Corporations being psychopaths? That's going to need to be revised to add in the case for Corporations being needy, attention craved, sycophants.

"Yes, Yes... I will buy your carbonated beverage, now can you just let me read my book in peace for an hour?"

Random Non-Sequiters

Like a D6. (2011)
The dancing goblin in this, should be a meme all his own.

The Guild - Do you wanna date my Avatar? (2009)

After you watch both the above see these: Cognitive Surplus (Wiki) and Video (TED talk)

Did some running around last night after work on Alpine. TGI Friday's, Michaels, Meijer, that sort of thing. Also stopped in Toys R Us and got a look at their Movie Green Lantern section. Ended up buying the Power Battery (Lantern Launcher) it transforms into a gun that shoots little GL logo discs. Cool enough, pic later.

- A Camera Smaller Than a Match-head [Guts]
source: Gizmodo

That's impressively small.

- Flattr – big change makes micropayments a real possibility for small site and service owners
source: The Red Ferret Journal - gadgets, cool sites, freeware and tech trivia

This is actually a really really slick idea. Basically there are flattr buttons anyone can put on their site. People set-up flattr accounts with how much money they want to donate per month. Then if they "like" something, they click a flattr button. At the end of the month flattr divides your "likes" by the amount per month you want to donate and divvys up your money to the services you based on the amount of flattr buttons you've clicked on those sites.

Really neat idea, now they just need to figure out how to sign people up.

More Green Lantern Toys

After some time in the park, Jenn and I swung by Kmart. They had a pallate of Green Lantern Toys right up front by the door. Mostly the 4" scale stuff. I'm passing on most of the 4" scale. But Green Man and Stel, are perfect 4" scale figures to rename and display with the 6" scale figures. So I've talked myself into those two so far. (I did pass on Isamot, which I plan to get in 6" form when it releases and the rock-like character, hey even a fan like I can't always remember the names.). the DC Direct Kilowog I have is so nice, I can't imagine any need to get the movie version of that figure either.

Sad note, while at Kmart, I did see a single F-Sharp Bell. It's a very nice looking figure, but sadly, I bought the figure earlier in the morning online, so I'll have to wait for it to be delivered in the mail.

(Oh and I did look at Meijer too, not sure if it's the remodel my store is undergoing or what, but no movie figs were out, even though they did have the pegs for them. But big ups for Meijer they are one of the few places I've seen the GL Classics figures, and I've gotten Waves 1 and 2 from them already.)


Stel and Movie "ProtoType" Stel
From the back of the movie box, it looks like they went with a fairly modern comic acurate version of Stel in the actual movie, but they must have had this toy tooled, because they have labeled it: Protoype Stel. Much like I did with Green Man, I'm renaming this figure. I'm going to call her: Car'a Päce of Hivee'n


Green Lantern Corps
I'm not going to attempt to say who all these are, because there's noway I'd be able to spell them all. Not all my Alien Green Lantern figs either. (Missing Tomar, Katma, Abin and Arisa from this shot at the very least. Probably others.)

Green Man

At the right is a picture of Green Man as he appears in the comics. As you notice, while he does have frog-like qualities he's much more a Star Trek style alien in that he is 6 foot tall and looks basically human except for a spotty forehead and some facial features that could be duplicated with some light make-up prosthetics.

At left is the Movie version of Green Man. A really neat figure, and perhaps he is really well represented in the movie (as yet unseen) but to me he's just a little too frog-like to be "Green Man".

But that's ok-- there are 3,600 Green Lantern's out there and this is a great looking figure, so rather than get hung up on him not looking like Green Man, I bought the 4" scale figure to pose with my 6" scale figures. and I have renamed him: J'er Miah of Ree'bit.



Here's J'er Miah with some other corps members.

- Mattel Green Lantern Line Details and Classics Press Pics
source: ActionFigurePics.com

Pictures in the post, plus hit the more pictures link halfway down.

- Mattels SDCC 2011 Exclusives Full Line-Up!
source: Action Figure Insider - Best Toy News on the Web!

Nice. Finally a Swamp Thing. This was a very early DCD figure and is quite rare and expensive. So to be able to buy a ComicCon one on Matty Collector.com later this summer after SDCC is pretty cool.

- A selection of random GL movie stuff I saw on Big Bad Toy Store. Some of it neat, some of it a little odd.

This Plush Ryan Reynolds doll is a little freaky

Lantern... this one is only $148 instead of the $298 that the DC Direct one is... such a bargain.

Ring Replica This actually looks pretty sweet

Is he yellow? does he have a beak? (Guess who game)

In Brightest Day in Blackest Night, don't let a nearly nude Ryan Reynolds escape your sight. (Standee)

Probably only charges your ring for 24 minutes instead of 24 hours (keychain lantern)

In Brightest Day in Blackest night, your papers will lay on your desk right. (paperweight)

Who's a cute widdle super villain? (Sinestro)

Board Game

Get caught in the Green Lantern CROSSFIRE

Ring trapped in a Lantern snowglobe

Colorforms board game (Colorforms- get it? cause Green Lantern makes forms out of a color.)