Just another nerd.
Marvel has been collecting the run of its 1970s-ish Tomb of Dracula in relatively cheap softcover volumes. Groovy Age of Horror has the lowdown on how Marvel has been altering the comics as it reprints them.
The originals included a number of scenes featuring bare-breasted women, but in the “Essential” reprints, either new artwork has been added to cover the offending parts or the frame is cropped to eliminate the nudity.
Yet another reason to simply stick with downloading comics.
It was bad enough that Gene Roddenberry and his successors chose to neuter the Star Trek universe with monstrosities like Jean Luc Picard (see “Homeward” for all the proof you’ll ever need of Picard’s depravity), but now Paramount is finishing the job of stabbing the original series in the back with a “remastered” version featuring new special effects. Ugh.
According to a Wired story on the changes,
CBS Paramount says the make-over is intended to enhance the show’s visual appeal while staying true to the original look and feel of the series.
“Nothing really has changed except for the fact that it’s just prettier to look at,” said John Nogawski, president of CBS Paramount Domestic Television, in a recent conference call with reporters. “Right down to placement of stars, it is being resimulated to be exactly what was there in the first place.”
Hmmm…lets run that corporate-speak through the universal translator,
“Nothing has really changed,” said John Nogawski, “we’re still milking Star Trek for whatever we can get out of it, and we no enough fanboys will tune in to watch the remastered version and buy the DVD to keep us in the manner we’re accustomed until the next crappy Star Trek film is ready to go. After all, what really mattered about the original Star Trek was the special effects.”
Source:
Original Star Trek Gets Upgraded. Wired, September 15, 2006.
There’s an amusing hypocrisy on the part of some critics of the Iraq war since some of them overlap with the “terrorism isn’t really that big of a threat” group. Unfortunately for them, this tends to lead to some very incongruous complaints.
Take popular Internet weblog Boing! Boing!. On September 12, 2006, Boing! Boing!’s Mark Fraunfelder posted a copy of an e-mail noting that total American deaths in Iraq had finally equaled the total number of Americans killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
One implication of this is that the death rate of U.S. soldiers, especially combat-related deaths, is actually very low in Iraq in comparison to other American wars (a point I made earlier). Five times as many American soldiers were killed in Vietnam in 1968 alone as the Iraqi insurgency has managed in almost 3 and half years. Instead of confronting the Americans, Iraqi insurgency seems to focus most of its effort on killing and terrorizing civilians in hopes of igniting a sectarian civil war.
Back to Boing! Boing!, though, it is a little odd that Fraunfelder thought the 3,015 deaths as of September 9 was noteworthy. After all on August 7, 2006, Cory Doctorow lauded the Cato Institute for dismissing the relevance of the 9/11 terrorist attack,
The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
Of course, those folks who hijacked four planes and flew three of them into buildings a few years ago might have had a little something to do with “convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism.”
Ultimately, though, it would be nice if people would make up their minds. If 3,000 or so deaths in a single day from a terrorist attack means that “terrorism doesn’t kill many people,” then the logical conclusion is that neither do Iraqi insurgents.
American Scary is a documentary about local hosts of horror features that premiers in October 2006. Can’t wait to see this released one on DVD.
This Reuters article about a study of the effects of MMOs on sociability had me laughing out loud.
Constance Steinkhuehler, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dmitri Williams, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studied the effects of playing Asheron’s Call I and II on 750 subjects (half divided into a non-game playing control group). They also conducted a two-year study of people playing “Lineage.”
They concluded that MMOs themselves are not anti-social activities and do not lead to anti-social behaviors. According to Reuters (emphasis added),
Steinkuehler and Williams conclude that the games helped players gather a type of social capital known as “bridging,” which involves making informal connections with others, while they didn’t generally help people build stronger social bonds.
Such “weaker” social links are important, the researchers say, because they offer players the opportunity to be exposed to diverse worldviews that they may not encounter in the real world.
Players who did become more deeply involved in the games did run the risk of having virtual relationships replace real-life ones, however, the researchers note. However, to see these online communities as an entirely bad thing is short-sighted, they say.
I can think of quite a few real life relationships that I would like to replace with virtual relationships. After all, not all real life relationships are panaceas.
Source:
Some online games may enhance sociability. Reuters Health, September 6, 2006.
Like most student newspapers, the one at the university where I’m pursuing my Master’s degree in is pretty lousy, but this editorial to kick off the start of the semester was a new low in pathetic quotient.
Ever since I can remember (at least back to the mid-1980s), several times a year a number of gentlemen show up on campus and station themselves at heavily trafficked points on campus. They then hand out a small New Testament. Typically as you approach them, they’ll try to hand you the book.
A bit annoying, especially if you’re walking across campus and you get propositioned repeatedly, but the sort of thing that’s fairly common on a college campus (along with people handing out flyers for their bands, etc.)
If you believe the student newspaper, however, these men handing out half a Bible were disrupting the entire campus,
Many students encountered problems this week when non-students were handing out bibles or other literature in an aggressive manner. These people might in fact belong to an RSO, but their motives do not seem to be in the best interest of the student body.
When I walked into the student center and man offered me a New Testament, that was nowhere near aggressive. Everywhere I walked on campus, the Bible people were very polite and as unobtrusive as one can be when attempting to hand out unsolicited materials.
And the Western Herald putting itself in the position of judging which RSOs have the proper motives is downright absurd — I don’t remember anyone electing that rag as the diviner of proper motivation for student groups (if I missed it and someone did do so, perhaps the newspaper could publish a list of all of the student groups with a 1 to 5 ranking on the purity of each group’s
Some people hand out flyers without approval, such as the solicitors for credit cards and fast food chains. Of course, they are not adhering to the guidelines set forth by the SALP and the university, but those who do have approval from the university should be held to stricter guidelines.
God forbid any spontaneous acts of speech ever occur on campus.
And then the Western Herald goes from stupidity straight into insanity (emphasis added),
Freedom of speech is important, and should not be hindered, but freedoms should be restricted when they interfere with the rights of others. These solicitors are blurring the lines of free speech and posing potential harm to students.
Students walking from class to class often have very little time to spare. The last thing on their minds should be politics, religious beliefs, or whatever else these groups are trying to sell. In some cases, these people have been so aggressive that they have put bibles in people’s hands without permission, or even put them into backpacks.
Let the Christians hand out the New Testament on street corners and outside building entrances, and the next thing you know they’ll be doing drivebys and beating down students for their iPods.
Come on. The big question is how the moron who wrote the two paragraphs above was ever accepted into a university. Someone fell asleep when handling that application.
In January 2005, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released a survey on the First Amendment views of more than 100,000 high school students, nearly 8,000 teachers and more than 500 administrators. Disturbingly, more than 1/3rd of the students thought that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting free speech.
Apparently such attitudes become hardened and are carried with students to college, where even college newspapers tell the First Amendment to go to hell.
Source:
Editorial: On Campus Solicitors. Western Herald, September 7, 2006.