Apple fanboys always love Jobs, however engineering fanboys will always love Woz. In this video Steve Wozniak recounts his creative process of bringing colors to personal computers. While I love the story what’s interesting to be as a videogame fanboy is hearing how he and Jobs were working on designing games at Atari. What’s fascinating is that Woz describes creating the games not as a software programming exercise but as a hardware project! Read more…
Having grown up watching science fiction shows you get the feeling that you’re not looking at a real spaceship crew unless there’s a lot of adrenaline being thrown about. However the reality is much different as real world astronauts are quite a cool quite group — more Spock than Kirk if you know what I mean. NASA produced these two short videos which give a nice glimpse at some of these unsung pioneers who deserve to be household names. Shown above is Eileen Marie Collins who was the first woman to pilot a space shuttle and below is Guion “Guy” Bluford, Jr. who was the the first African American in space back in 1983: Read more…
As every Evangelion fan knows Rei Ayanami, Asuka Langley and their friends all go to the Tokyo-3 First Municipal Middle School which requires blue and white school uniforms with a cute sassy red bow! Well now fangurls who want to take a cosplay shortcut can now sport the official Evangelion Trantrip School Uniform which also includes matching socks (I love those little details). Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 4, 2010 in Animation, Tech
It’s always the silly things that amuse me: In this case it’s an iPhone application that turns your icon set into a grinning Doraemon. Apparently this is a free set of applications from Yahoo! Japan — which include Doraemon manga as well! Here are screen shots and there are iTunes links on this Japanese page: Read more…
When everyone started talking about the cloud my first thought was “isn’t this a throw back to mainframe computers from a pre-PC era when dumb terminals always needed to dial in?” So I was blown away to watch this video of Vint Cerf (who has been credited as the father of the Internet) suddenly mention mainframe time-sharing in the middle of a chat on cloud-to-cloud operability. It’s also interesting to hear that Cerf feels that it will take about five years for real standards to occur that allow one cloud to share data with another. By the way it’s interesting to note that Google now employs Cerf which is quite a coup. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 4, 2010 in Animation
As an adult I appreciate Hanna-Barbera, but frankly it was my childhood dislike of limited animation that drove me to admire anime. So I was pretty amused to stumble across the above the above clip of Secret Squirrel from 2 Stupid Dogs with a Japanese soundtrack, and much to my amazement I realized that because I couldn’t understand what was being said that the entire clip seemed cooler somehow. Now the funny thing is that the Japanese voices are clearly being used to a comic effect, however they seem much more downplayed when put next to the original American voice acting which sounds much more over-the-top: Read more…
We always vilify poor Jabba the Hutt, but in doing so we overlook the amazing criminal genius that created the Slave Leia look which would infiltrate the minds of countless young impressionable Star Wars fanboys for several generations. However sadly this wanton space fantasy was endangered when anime maid collectables started being produced from Japan en masse — so George Lucas had to do something: And thus we have the Star Wars Slave Leia Animated Maquette shown above.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 3, 2010 in Comic Books
Thanks to the CB Radio craze of the 70s I have to admit that I had a cultural snottiness when it comes to any form of entertainment featuring truckers: So I have to admit that I was blown away by the sheer charm of the comic book Mesmo Delivery by Rafael Grampá and Marcus Penna. What I like about the look of this book is that the inking style has quite a bit of grit and texture, yet the character designs and poses almost have a charming if not slightly cute feeling to them. The result is that each page has the sort of warmth that you would see in folk art except that the draftsmanship is both exquisite and exhilarating to look at: Read more…
I’ve seen tons of iPod themed goodies on Etsy but as far as I can tell Google has beaten Apple to the punch in the urban toys market with this set of Android Mini Collectibles Series 01. Frankly the thing that find heart warming about the Android logo is that it’s so darn cute which makes it an ideal collectable, and mind you that this is something that Tux the penguin logo for Linux could never pull off (it was the far body and eyes that made it look so doofy). This set was designed by the artist Andrew Bell and there are a dozen different designs each of which stands at three inches tall and features a rotating head: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 2, 2010 in Comic Books
Being a manga fanboy the release of Devil #1 immediately caught my eye: “Manga artist Torajiro Kishi (Maka-Maka) and blockbuster anime studio Madhouse (Trigun, Paprika, Ninja Scroll) love comics. So much so that they’ve decided to publish an original, Western-style comic exclusively with Dark Horse! Enter Devil, a thrilling, sci-fi take on the vampire genre.” Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 2, 2010 in Japanese TV
It’s heartbreaking to watch the sad saga of Tommy Lee Jones in this 2006 Japanese commercial for boss coffee — I’m not even sure why he’s crying while watching the singer on TV, but it made me sad to think of an alternate universe where he exists as a Hollywood ex-pat collecting parking tickets in Tokyo. Of course I should feel sorry for myself: I love Boss coffee too, but at $2 for the small cans I’ve been cutting back due to the recession.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 1, 2010 in Comic Books
Up until this point I’ve been mostly looking at the licensed comic books that Boom! Studios has been producing and while for the most part they’re good, they’re always in the shadow of the television show or book that they’re based on. So I’ve been quite impressed looking at Kill Audio which is an original book that they’ve put out: Issue #5 comes out this week and the artwork of Sheldon Vella is quite entertaining! What I love about his book is that it has its own style and the limited pallet of red and black is quite charming: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 1, 2010 in Comic Books
The Jim Henson Company is starting to push Fraggle Rock a great deal — the first thing I spotted a while ago was an amazing remix of the music from the series and next they were releasing the entire original series on DVD. And now it seems that they’re also planning a limited edition comic book series which will come out in April (and available for pre-orders in February).
Everywhere you look everyone is talking about Apple iPads or Google Nexus phones, but sadly Microsoft seems to be off the radar with their mobile offerings of late. Well maybe just off the radar in the United States because as you can see in the video above in Korea they seem to be having fun getting their message out. I love how the Microsoft icons follow the couple on their date and aren’t afraid to shake it up on the dance floor. Read more…
So I started to think: What would it take to get Flash on the iPad? Seeing that it’s a political situation the clear answer is that the CEO of Adobe needs to make nice with Steve. And then it hit me: Who the hell is the CEO of Adobe? Back in the day THE guy at Adobe was Warnock but that was eons ago — so who is running Adobe today? And much to my shock after doing a Google search I came across the page below and it tells you everything that’s wrong with this picture: There is no strong CEO at Adobe — the company is still in the shadow of Warnock. Read more…
This collection of Phone cases were issued to celebrate the tenth anniversary of One Piece. The first set of three features Monkey D. Luffy Wanted, Chopper Pink, and a Chopper Black version: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 30, 2010 in Comic Books
Shōjo manga fans may feel jilted but here’s a sad preview of Marvel Heartbreakers. The lack of quality in this book kills me because once upon a time there was an American tradition of romantic comic books which could appeal to the ladies which lasted until about the 60s, but as the industry retreated to the boys treehouse of comic book shops in the 80s the genre had all but faded. While I’ve been impressed with Marvel’s ability to do great work in the kids market, this book shows that Marvel doesn’t see the potential of the audience. And while the ladies are reading comics these days they’re more likely to be Japanese manga than anything that Marvel might put out as seen below: Read more…
During the CD-ROM era of the 90s the only real game in town was Macromind Director. The program first started life out as an animation program bit with the boom in multimedia Director gained a programming language called Lingo and had a loyal following. Then the damn web came along and ruined it all: There was a web version of Director called Shockwave, but due to the overhead of bitmap graphics another program called Flash started to build rapid momentum. Macromedia would acquire Flash and rumor has it that Director is still around but the notion of getting a Lingo gig is history. And now that it’s the year 2010 I’m seeing the same thing slowly start to happen to Flash all over again.Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
This interesting video clip author Wade Davis attempts to answer the question of what would alien anthropologists think of humans? His answer is that they might be impressed with our technology but not with our social structures. Actually my guess is that they might also see us a technologically backwards as a species that could achieve interstellar space travel would be eons ahead of what we think of as cutting edge.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
I just came across this tribute video from NASA which to me underscores how much we owe to those who put their lives on the line to travel into space. With the advent of space tourism we tend to forget that sending up a spaceship into orbit is in fact going into harms way. It’s sad to me that we don’t honor these brave folks by investing in NASA.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
From what I’m reading the upcoming NASA budget will do three things: Give up the underfunded quest to return to the moon, keep the ISS flying until 2020 and push to outsource a shuttle replacement which would mean scrapping the Ares I rocket. This is all unconfirmed at this point, but the it looks like NASA funding will increase by $6 billion which sounds good on paper, but may not be enough to replace the shuttle soon enough. Read more…
This is such a strange bobble head: It’s suppose to be Ultraman however his head has been decapitated and replaced with an old school television set which is showing Ultraman on its screen. But making this toy even stranger is that the television head will shake and nod which is powered by solar power. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 28, 2010 in Animation, Fandom
This is the video for the Ichirou Mizuki song It Is Not This! Korejanai Robo! which tells the heartbreaking tale of a child otaku who years from a Gundam toy but whose clueless parents get him a cheap bootleg instead. Of course our little hero isn’t going to take this slight, so he takes his revenge on the wannabe Gundam. But this mecha knockoff has a few tricks up his sleeve. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 27, 2010 in Science
I think an octopus is about as different as you can get from being a human — eight legs, lives underwater and a hard beak at the center. Yet this video shows clear evidence that they’re quite bright creatures who are quite capable of using tools. This makes me realize that as humans we might have a bias towards thinking that only humanoid creatures have intelligence — and often the worst offenders I see are science fiction films. Read more…
