Red November is an amusing concept for a boardgame. The players are onboard an experimental gnomish submarine that has gone haywire and must find a way to stay alive until rescuers can arrive. Cooperative boardgames FTW.
Month: December 2008
Cloverfield Figure Review from Action-Figure.Com
Gollum over at Action-Figure.Com has a so-so review of the Cloverfield monster action figure,
So, bottom line..on the positive side: It’s a cool monster with lots of articulation and is loads of fun. On the negative: It’s a little more expensive than it should be, and is probably coming out a little late since the movie isn’t fresh on people’s minds anymore.
Yeah, and since the movie barely cleared $80 million domestic it wasn’t really on too many people’s minds to begin with. I assume all of the (unwarranted as it turned out) secrecy over the movie prevented doing toys in time for the movie’s release.
Pirates of the Amazon
Pirates of the Amazon is/was an interesting experiment that quickly got a cease-and-desist letter from Amazon.com. For a day, however, the site hosted a Firefox extension that assisted the user in pirating works for sale at Amazon. As TorrentFreak put it,
An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integreates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay.
. . .
When the add-on is installed, it integrates a new “download 4 free” button into the Amazon product page when the same article is also available via The Pirate Bay. It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and basically all products that can be converted to a digital format.
Now that is an interesting mashup. As TorrentFreak noted there are plenty of Greasemonky scripts out there that do much the same thing for Last.FM, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, etc. It’s not like it is rocket science to do this with Greasemonkey.
If you’re curious, TorrentFreak is maintaining a backup of the Firefox extension here.
Study Claims Caffeine Reduces Risk of Alzheimer’s
Back in September, the BBC reported on a study finding that daily caffeine consumption was linked to a risk reduction for Alzheimer’s. Of course the actual study was conducted on rabbits who were fed a fat-rich diet with an experimental group receiving caffeine. The study’s authors suggests that caffeine blocks cholesterol which otherwises tends to make the brain/blood barrier “leaky” over time.
“Caffeine appears to block several of the disruptive effects of cholesterol that make the blood-brain barrier leaky,” said Dr Jonathan Geiger, who led the study.
“High levels of cholesterol are a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps by compromising the protective nature of the blood brain barrier.
“Caffeine is a safe and readily available drug and its ability to stabilise the blood brain barrier means it could have an important part to play in therapies against neurological disorders.”
A spokesman for the Alzheimer’s Society said that the barrier seemed to work less efficiently in people who went on to develop Alzheimer’s or suffer strokes, and the cholesterol link might explain this.
Nice.
Yokai Attack! Book
The folks over at AltJapan have recently had their guide to traditional Japanese monsters, Yokai Attack!, published and it looks real good.
Yokai are Japan’s traditional creepy-crawlies. Almost always encountered in the dark of night, they were once feared throughout the land. But they’re more than just myth, more provocative than pop culture–references to yokai abound in Japanese idioms, and nearly every Japanese person has at least a passing knowledge of the most famous of these captivating creatures from times of old. Now, after collecting data and descriptions from a variety of sources, including first-hand accounts and microfilms of 18th-century publications stored in the National Diet Library in Tokyo, authors Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt have produced the first English-language guide to Japans yokai monsters. Original illustrations, created by the talented Tatsuya Morino, detail the potential visible appearance of each yokai. And alongside each and every one are data points allowing you to take in each yokai’s characteristics at a glance.
Forget Godzilla. Forget the giant beasties karate-chopped into oblivion by endless incarnations of Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and the Power Rangers. Forget the Pocket Monsters. Forget Sadako from The Ring and that creepy all-white kid from The Grudge. Forget everything you know about Japanese tales of terror. Their roots may extend back to days of yore, but Yokai Attack! will convince any reader that Japan’s bewitching tradition of yokai monsters is far from being history.
Marvel Legends Icons Waves 5 and 6
Images of Waves 5 and 6 of Hasbro’s Marvel Icons series have hit all the usual action figure websites. I dunno, these look okay in the promo pictures, but I gave up on this line a long time ago due to the absolutely awful sculpts on some of the figures (see, for example, the awful head sculpt on the Marvel Legends Icons Magneto –ugh).
