Play Champions Online for free!

In honor of its 1st year anniversary, Cryptic studios, the makers of CO, are offering 1 week free subscription to the game. More info here.

I will be writing my final review of the game soon, but in the meantime, why not try it out!

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The Doctor visits MIT

Either that, or its an MIT hack just in time for freshman orientation

I would have made a Dalek…

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New podcast widget

I’m considering a different podcast widget.  What does everyone think of this one?

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Coming Next Summer

First, there was Avatar. Now…

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Happy Birthday, Luann!

Congrats to Greg Evans on his strip’s hitting the quarter-century mark!

http://comics.com/luann/2010-03-17/

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Cactus wins the Nuovo!

Hey, game-related post, sooner than I thought. One of my favourite game creators, whose work I’ve even reviewed here at Monitor Duty, is Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom. His latest game, Tuning, just took home the Nuovo Award for abstract/experimental games at the Independent Games Festival.

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A Geek In Need…

Hey gang! Been awhile since I posted in these parts. I’ve got a few comics- and video game-related posts coming soon. I’ve just been crazy-busy as of late with a whole number of things, one of which is the new feature film I’m making with my wife, Olivia Forever!

As a matter of fact, that very same film is in need of some geek assistance. We have found ourselves in need of a Sasquatch. If anyone has a Sasquatch costume, or (more likely) an adult-sized Chewbacca costume that they don’t mind us modifying, please shoot me an e-mail at milos_parker at yahoo dot com. Again, if you have a Chewbacca costume, we’re going to be modifying it beyond recognition– so no collector’s items.

We have $0, but will cover S+H.

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Holy Web Meme Batman!

It’s a website with every exclamation by Robin, the Boy Wonder! From Holy Agility! to Holy Zorro!

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Merry Christmas

Let’s test out the new WordPress:

Yeah! It works! All I did was paste in the URL for the video on a new line.

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How NOT to fire someone in Gotham City

These handy tips courtesy of the GCPD will show you how…

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Everything is better with lightsabers

Read the rest of this entry »

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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He drives you Bats!

Or Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible) meets Batman!
Click here

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FIXED! Alan Kistler’s Guide to Doctor Who

I have corrected all of the broken links in Alan Kistler’s Guide to Doctor Who. I’m sure the individual profiles will have broken links, but at least the master guide works!

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New tag added

I have gone through the archives and added the tag “Alan Kistler Profiles” to every Guide and Profile that Alan ever did for us.

I figured I owed it to Alan because when I moved the blogs around I broke all of the links that Alan had painstakingly added to his articles and to WikiPedia, and I have been fixing them up bit by bit but it’s a herculean task.

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Disney to acquire Marvel Entertainment

More Here:
Here’s what we MIGHT be seeing:

Or, God forbid:

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Geoff Johns revisits some old favorites

Over at Dixonverse, they’re discussing a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while:  Geoff Johns seeming to go overboard with the material from a number of Alan Moore stories.  While I like much of what has been happening…indeed, Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps are the ONLY DC Comic books I still buy… this does bug me somewhat.

Mogo, and the F-Sharp Bell, and Qull of the Five Inversions: they’re from short stories.  Moore managed to tell very intriguing stories in far less than 22 pages (let alone multi-issue story arcs taking half a year)  and they were one-off throwaway bits not intended to be the launching point for epic sagas.  “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” was an uneven back-up series that would occasionally produce a gem such as “Quarzz Terranh Knows Joy” (or whatever it was called) and sometimes introduce a Corps member interesting enough to revisit later (such as Ch’p, Stel and the Green Man).  The point was to take the Green Lantern mythos and do something you couldn’t just do with Hal Jordan, such as ending with the GL’s death (or a credible possibility of death on the last page, which isn’t the case with Hal) or showing an alien approach to using the ring.

“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” is a wonderful story that loses most of its ending’s power if you’re going to use Mogo again and again in other comics.  It’s like having Rosebud the Sled, Verbal Kint and Tyler Durden as a recurring superteam in the DCU.

The bounty hunter from that same story showed up in GL Corps.  Know what bugged me?  I guess I always thought that story was ancient history, not a current event.  The Book of Oa contains tales of things that happened to Green Lanterns throughout history… and we’re talking an organization with 3600 members that has been active for a BILLION years!

Qull of the Five Inversions?  I was pretty sure he was just a liar.  After all, not long after that story was published, the entire GL Corps was destroyed after their execution of Sinestro caused the Great Battery to lose power.  (Remember, how only Hal, John, Guy, G’nort and a few others had rings, and it was a while before the Corps was restored?)  Then in 1994, Hal Jordan causes the deaths of all the Guardians…so Qull’s prediction of drums with blue skin couldn’t be true.  The whole point of the story is that Qull manages to produce fear in Abin Sur, and he dies because of the starship he is flying in instead of using his ring.

By the by, Johns’ interpretation of that story is very literal: there are aliens called the Inversions, and there are five of them.  Huh.  I always thought that was just Qull’s name, that there were five things “inverted” about him.  If there are only five creatures on that whole cordoned off planet, that’s way less scary.

As has been pointed out about the Black Mercy, it’s taking one cool story element (a McGuffin excuse for telling some cool imaginary stories) and running it into the ground.  The Black Mercy shouldn’t be packaged with the Mongul action figure as though it’s his primary weapon.  It was a plot device, pure and simple, and next time Mongul appears he will resort to something else.

All of these little elements that Alan Moore rattled off as throwaways… Ranx the Sentient City, the Children of the White Lobe, Sodam Yat, etc. … they were cute references to a mythology we haven’t heard yet.  That was neat-o.  Spending several years setting all of them up as canon seems like it’s missing the point.

If I wrote a story where Batman encounters Rip Hunter and Rip says, “Last time I met you was fighting alongside your daughter during the Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City war… oh wait, that hasn’t happened yet!”, do I need to worry that some kid who loves that issue will, fifteen years down the line, spend three years building up to a Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City War mega-event as a glorious in-joke where that disposable humorous line comes true?

Look, Blackest Night seems like a great storyline and I’m looking forward to reading it.  And I like Johns a lot, really!  But Johns should be a writer who tells his own stories instead of “What happened to those characters at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths?”or “Let’s start integrating as much Kingdom Come future into the DCU as possible!” or “What if Blackest Night really did happen?”  He should be creating the characters and telling the stories that cause future fanboy-cum-writers to want to revisit HIS work.  And hopefully, they’ll have editors that tell them to just do their own damn stories.

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For your loved ones…

Arkham care
Because even the most diseased minds can be cured. We hope.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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One of the great sci-fi dramas is now online!

Several years ago, I posted about one of my favorite TV shows, “Century City”. A legal drama set about 30 years in the future, the show boasted a tremendous cast (including Ioan Gruffud of Fantastic Four and Amazing Grace and Nestor Carbonell of The Tick and Dark Knight), a fine SFX budget, and terrific writing. It was true science fiction, using inventive ideas for future technologies as a springboard for telling compelling human dramas.

Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on and it left the air without even broadcasting all 9 episodes. I’ve since lamented that it wasn’t even available on DVD. Not that I’m expecting some kind of Family Guy-esque resurrection, but at least like Firefly I’d be able to spread the word about an un-appreciated show.

And NOW I CAN! It’s not on DVD, but it is on HULU! That’s the link for the show page where you can view all nine episodes, but for you doubters out there, let me start with this powerful episode: “To Know Her” – A woman claims that a man raped her by having nanites implanted in her fiance and using them to record and receive, and then experience, their lovemaking. The drama is a fine courtroom thriller just like the ones welcome all over our TV channels, except that it mentions nanotechnology. And if that isn’t enough to make you watch, how about for the ability to see Donny Most and Robert Guillaume on TV again!?

All nine episodes! I haven’t even watched them all yet, but I had to share this with you. And you want to hear something even weirder? One of the other TV shows I mentioned in that “I wish it was on DVD” post, Quark, a Star Trek parody from Buck Henry? Turns out that’s also on DVD now, and it just arrived from Amazon this morning! So, on the same day, I now have two of those TV shows to watch. Weird, huh?

I’ll give you a Quark review soon, okay?

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Wednesday Zingers #3

Well, it’s still Wednesday in Hawaii, right? Sorry, computer glitches on my end.

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Wednesday Zingers #2

Here we go with the second of four. I had three different joke ideas for this image, but went with the least overt. Because I think you’re all that smart. That’s it.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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