I'm mostly posting this so that I don't forget about it myself when it's time to make my order at the end of the month, but you're welcome to read it if you'd like.



Tom DeFalco is co-writing a new series with Chuck Dixon called Airfighters through Moonstone publications. Airfighters is an old team of heroes from the 1940's who, surprisingly, fought evildoers in the air with their fighter jets. It's kind of a different concept for a comic book (at least in the modern comics market), but with DeFalco on board, I'm willing to give it a shot. Obviously, the cover posted above is from the old 1940's series.

Tom DeFalco, for those who may not know, has worked at Marvel for decades now, and at one time he was their Editor-in-Chief. He wrote Spider-girl for over 10 years without missing a single issue, until it was recently cancelled due to low sales. He is also currently rewriting the Clone Saga for Marvel, a Spider-man storyline that is nearly universally hated as one of the most drawn-out and pointless in the history of comics (in its original form). What I'm trying to say is, he is a good writer with plenty of experience.

I have written a fanfic. This will be entertaining for those of you who are in the D&D group and are familiar with all of our goings-on, and quite possibly undecipherable for anyone else. Enjoy!

( Epic Sasha )

Do you watch the Daily Show? If you do, then you may have seen the interview last night and thought that it was as interesting as I do. If not, then you should watch this:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/100943/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-william-kamkwamba

Sometimes he's a little hard to understand, but it's a cool story nonetheless. Watch it and then come back, I'll wait here.

What the guy did was cool and resourceful, there's no doubt about that. What really blows my mind though is the fact that he was in some random African village a couple of years ago and then last night he was in America and doing interviews for his new book. Just think about what that must be like for him. Man. Crazy.

Disney to buy Marvel for $4 billion.

Comments? Let's discuss.

Wednesday Comics? What's that? I posted about this awhile back before the series even came out because I was excited about it, and now four weeks into the series I'm even more excited. It's just as perfect as I imagined it would be.

Those of you who aren't obsessive comic geeks who hang around the comic book store waiting for the newest issues to come out may not know that comics arrive at the shops every week on Wednesday. Thus, Wednesday comics is a tricky way to say "weekly comics", which is what this series is. Every week a full newspaper-sized issue arrives at a comic book store near you, and for only $4 you can walk out of there with a nice hefty book full of the greatest artistic and literary talents DC could find.

( Click here to read more...you know you want to. )

So Windows 7 is coming out in October, and from what I've been able to gather by taking part in the beta is that it's going to be a major upgrade from Vista. It's quite a bit faster and user-friendly. But here's the important part: You can get it for free from Microsoft.

Microsoft is offering Windows 7 at a reduced price on the release date, only $50 for the upgrade version. This is actually a pretty good deal, less than half the price that it will be a couple of months later when the deal ends. But none of this matters to you unless you're reading this post on Wednesday.

Until tomorrow (Tuesday) night, you can download the "Windows 7 Release Candidate" from Microsoft, and it will not stop working until October of next year. So basically you get to "evaluate" Windows 7 for a year and a half while everybody else is shelling out money to buy it.

In the next two years you might buy a new computer with Windows 7 on it already, so why worry about the expiration date that comes with this. I just figured I would let you guys know about it and give you the link to where you can get it. Jamie and I just downloaded it this afternoon and it only takes about 15-30 minutes to set up, depending on how slow your computer is. So, no excuses now! Go get it!

So it's been awhile since I've posted, and I figured I would write something about the pretty new doll that I ordered last night, among other things.

( Click here to read about my exciting doll adventures! )

In other news, I've been reading a bunch of comics (what else is new?), and I want to make some recommendations! There are a couple of new books that I think are worth picking up if you're looking for something new to read. One of them is only on its fourth issue while the other doesn't even begin for another month, so they're definitely something that you can still pretty easily pick up from the very beginning.

"R.E.B.E.L.S." is an excellent story which follows the adventures of the biggest jerk in the universe, Vril Dox! I initially picked up this book because Supergirl is in the first few issues, but it's actually become one of my favorite ongoing titles. It's very entertaining with a lot of sarcastic humor and snippy dialog. If you like Cable and Deadpool you should consider picking this up. Even though it's in a different universe with different characters, I think that the two books have a similar target audience. The 4th issue just came out so you should have no trouble tracking down the whole series, or picking up the trade in a few months if you're so inclined.

The other series that is worth looking into is the new "Wednesday Comics" series from DC. It's going to be a weekly book printed at NEWSPAPER SIZE with writing and art from nearly every big name in the industry, such as Neil Gaiman(Sandman), Joe Kubert(Tor, Sgt Rock), Dave Gibbons(Watchmen), Amanda Conner(Power Girl), and a whole lot more. Nearly every major DC character is going to be featured in it at one time or another, so I can't really list it all here. You can read more at its homepage here.

That's about all I have for this post. Talk to you all later!

The Turtles are back! And I don't mean some kind of new movie or retelling of their story. I mean the original Turtles toys from Playmates!



( Click here for more pictures and info... )

I don't know what to say about this.

( Click here for great justice. )

Additionally:



!!

So today there's a concert going on to celebrate Obama's upcoming inauguration. Just about every famous person in the world is there to say a word or two, and there's music of every genre you can think of. I just thought I would point it out since it's live at this very moment if you'd like to listen while you do whatever you're doing.

Click here to listen!

edit: Ok, it's over now. Woo!

I'm kind of all over the map this morning. It's early and I shouldn't really be awake, but here I am making a huge post instead. Enjoy!

The Windows 7 open beta supposedly began yesterday, although I wasn't able to download it because the servers were overrun with people trying to do the same thing. The page is down right now but they say that they'll be back up later today when they get enough servers up to meet the demand. I'm kind of interested in the new version of Windows not only because it's supposed to be faster and more trimmed down than Vista, but also because there are a number of new web-integrated 'cloud' features that I'd like to at least get a look at. Hopefully later today I'll get my chance! For those of you who are interested, the site for the beta download is: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx. Keep checking back to see if/when it comes up.

Intel Atom/Via Nano processors are very interesting to me. These are low price and low wattage processors that have been created to power these extremely thin "Netbooks", basically pint sized laptops with flash hard drives, longer battery life, and wireless built in (although I guess all laptops have that these days). The best part is that these chips cost under $100 each, so the resulting laptops are in the sub-$300 range. They aren't fast, but they're kinda neat and could be nice just as a supplement to a normal PC or just something you can take with you wherever. I'm probably not going to be in the market for one of these anytime soon, but they're fun to look at.

I'm actually looking forward to classes starting again. I love spending this time off with Jamie, but I really don't have much to do around here other than read and play video games. Poor me, right? I just think that I've had enough sitting around for now, and a couple of my classes actually seem like they'll be interesting this semester. Only 2 more days! I'm going back to bed now.

We just finished watching Half Past Dead a few minutes ago, and I went to check out what project good ole Steven Seagal has been working on lately. He of course has several movies coming soon, but what really caught my eye was his NEW TV SHOW WHERE HE IS AN ACTUAL POLICE OFFICER. Apparently he's been working on and off as a cop for a number of years, but now (or at least in "late 2009") it's a TV show! I must watch this.

Additionally: Steven Seagal is Cock Puncher.

Busou Shinki is a new series of figures which was released in Japan February 2008. It's divided into several series, each of which were designed by different artists, although the basic bodies are pretty similar. All of the characters are female, and a majority of them turn into/attach to mechs.



( Come on and find out more about them! )

So we went to Oni-con this weekend, as I'm sure all of you already know from Jamie's post. Well here are a few of the toys I picked up there!

( Click to see the toys! )

Well, I just went through the new issue of Previews today, and there are a couple of books in there that I think deserve your attention. I'm definitely going to be getting them!

( Click here for pretty pictures and stuff! )

"Cloud computing" is the big new thing that's coming up in the next few years, or at least that's what all of the major companies keep telling us. For those of you who aren't aware, "cloud computing" refers to the idea that your applications and programs will no longer be running on your computer, but instead all/most of the important processes will take place on a server somewhere, and you will simply be displaying the graphics.

This may be difficult to understand at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. When you start up Microsoft Word, for example, right now it all runs right there on your PC. A couple of years from now you'll click the same shortcut on your desktop, but it will initiate the program on Microsoft's server somewhere, and even though it will look and act the same way (or at least Microsoft hopes that it will) it will take up little/no processing power on your machine, leaving it free to do other things in the background. Actually if we take this idea to its conclusion, eventually PCs may not even need hardly any processing power whatsoever, the servers will just take care of it all.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Obviously there are some privacy issues, but let's say that Microsoft/Google/Amazon (the three leaders in this battle so far, even though Microsoft has barely entered the fray, you can consider them a leader just because of their size) take care of this problem and everything is safe, secure, and encrypted so that some MS engineer can't sit there and read your personal documents. You lose ownership of the product, because for the most part most of these new applications are going to be subscription-based rather than purchased. So if you don't pay up that month, no more Excel for you (although Microsoft says that there may be a free ad-supported version of Office coming in a couple years). There are limitations in that your bandwidth may be taken up with all of this additional traffic, and eventually the servers themselves may get bogged down, but those are all infrastructure issues which could be repaired if the will is there.

Good things? Well, it definitely frees up your processing power for other things. Go play WoW while you process that 600,000 entry database in the background. Most businesses use "cloud computing" already in that the apps run on their own central servers, and it seems to work out fairly well for them. Not having to pay full price for your applications would be nice as well. Why pay $300 for Office and $400 for Windows when you can just rent them for $10-20 a month online? That seems like a good deal to me, although I know some people are wary of signing up for too many subscriptions, even if they seem reasonable at the time.

Those are just a few things. I know that there are many other pros and cons to consider, but this post is already way, way too long.

TL;DR: Cloud computing is coming soon, and taking our applications away from our computers and putting them on the internet for a cheaper price. Is this good or bad?

Awesome. That's the word for it. So there's a new mini-series which just began over at DC titled, "Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom". Normally, I wouldn't expect much from a little 5-issue mini like this, but I ordered it anyways because it's Supergirl and I don't want to miss some kind of important character development for her. It turns out that it's a good thing I bought it!

( This is how Superman should be written! )

Win get!

In the 1960's the American Batman TV show was just beginning to appear on Japanese TV, and there was of course a manga produced to appeal to fans of the new show! Thus, the Bat-Manga was born!



Entertainingly enough, the manga-ka felt that the American Batman stories weren't believable (He didn't think that Batman would actually attempt to solve a riddle while stuck in a trap with death only a moment away). So instead of putting Batman in "unbelievable" situations, he decided that it would be far more realistic if he fought against dinosaurs, skeletons, and robots.

Really, it's a pretty good read, even if some of the dialog is pretty stilted. To be fair, the same could be said for the TV show which was being produced at the time as well. If you have $20-30 burning a hole in your pocket and you're interested in Batman or the history of Japanese popular culture, this book is definitely worth checking out.