Just another nerd.
DC Unlimited is producing World of Warcraft Collectible Coin Sets — one each for the Alliance and Horde — that should hit in June 2010 for about $70.
The Alliance one is depicted below. Each set will feature a gold, silver and copper plated coin in a display box with a metal plaque featuring the faction emblem.
Post I.T. Shooter is a basic shooter game done on a 32 x 24 grid of Post-It Notes in stop-motion like effect. The gameplay itself is very basic and nothing to write home about, but the presentation and graphical styling is awesome. This was put together by Kloonigames which puts out an experimental game each month and is done by the developer behind Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Wired Science and Singularity Hub both covered the recent publication in Nature of a study demonstrating curing color blindness in monkeys using gene therapy that allowed two squirrel monkeys to produce a protein that allowed them to see reds and greens.
Wired’s Brandon Keim wrote,
At first, the two monkeys behaved no differently than before. Though quick to earn a grape juice reward by picking out blue and yellow dots from a background of gray dots on a computer screen, they banged the screen randomly when presented with green or red dots.
But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again. At the biological level, Neitz can’t say precisely what happened — the monkeys, named Sam and Dalton, are alive and healthy, their brains unscanned and undissected — but their actions left no doubt.
[Jay] Neitz thinks the monkeys’ brains didn’t grow new neural circuits. “That’s the way we were thinking about neural plasticity before,” he said. Instead, their brains may have reconfigured themselves, “learning how to use the same old circuits in a new way when the information coming over the lines changed.”
And, of course, once you start talking about curing genetic defects, the possibility of creating genetic enhancements is ultimately on the table as well.
[David] Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. “Ultimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,” he said. “Not only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.”
“This study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,” continued Williams.
No word on the possibility of x-ray or heat vision.
Beginning this month, Mattel begins releasing its series of Retro-Action DC Super Heroes based on the Mego line from the 1970s. These aren’t straight up copies of the Mego toys. For example, the initial Green Arrow toy available directly from Mattel on Dec. 15th is billed as a “a more accurate Green Arrow.”
Mattel currently has an initial three waves of four figures planned for sale at Toys R Us, with the initial set going on sale in early 2010 featuring Superman, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Sinestro and Lex Luthor.
No word on whether they plan to also produce any of the vehicles such as the Green Arrow Car or the awesome Justice League playset.
The Border House blog has an interesting look at the way sexual stereotypes are expressed in World of Warcraft gear. What is especially annoying in WoW are items that when equipped by a male toon results in rather bland and nondescript clothing but when equipped by a female toon becomes 1337 Victoria Secret gear (see, for example, the Lofty Leggards for an example of how ludicrous this often is).
The Border House article is a very thoughtful analysis of both the issue and, frankly, whether we should even care about it,
How much does the sexualization of female video game characters matter, anyway? Why does it matter? This is ultimately part of a much, much larger conversation about images of women in pop culture — advertisements, movies, sitcoms, music videos, and so on. In “Sexuality and/in Representation,” art historian Lisa Tickner writes “Representations enter our collective social understandings, constituting our sense of ourselves, the positions we take up in the world, and the possibilities we see for action in it.” Again and again, we see women represented one way: idealized into a narrow standard of beauty, bodies put on display, (un)dressed to highlight secondary sexual characteristics, photographed and painted and animated to be admired by straight men. Now that we’ve achieved near de jure equality in so much of the world, do these images still harm us and limit us? Or have we become so enlightened, so progressive, so media-savvy that we’re immune to their influence?
Since World of Warcraft is a game, after all, I think there’s another dimension as well — do these choices by the WoW developers affect the fun to be had in the game? I’d argue they do and negatively. WoW has a marked lack of ability to customize toons, and too often the approach seems to be “your character can have any look it wants as long as it conforms to some high fantasy trope.”
The result is a homogeneity in character appearances that is a bit maddening at times — here’s this huge world where all of the residents fit into a very small number of idealized forms with little ability to customize them.
Somehow I’ve managed to avoid learning the existence of these Justice League of America padlocks until today. This is awesome.
