Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel

I just love the retro styling of this Batman Alarm Clock Radio with Bat-Signal. The killer feature of this alarm clock is the ability to flash a bat signal — although I can’t figure out what sort of dark knight fanboy would require a snooze time (lazy slackers not worthy of Batman I tell ya!).

Found via geekalerts.com.

Star Wars The Force Unleashed Demo

I have to say that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is looking quite good, as shown in the above preview from Mahalo.com. As a Star Wars fanboy what’s neat about this game is that LucasArts is also putting together a tie-in novel, action figures and a comic book to compliment the game. Even cooler yet is that in addition to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii — the game will also be available on the iPhone! The game is suppose to come out on September 16th.

Hello Kitty Exhibit in NYC

If you’re lucky enough to be in New York City this show runs until November 1st at the Felissimo Design House which is located at 10 West 56th Street:

Gallery Exhibit Looks At Japan’s “Culture Of Cute”

“Hello Kitty products never before seen in the United States are some of the many products on view at Felissimo Design Gallery in Midtown as part of an exhibit called Japan C. Director Haruko Smith says it’s a showcase of contemporary Japanese culture, specifically Japan’s “4 Cs”: cute, clever, creative, and cool! “Japanese are really into little things. We call them zaka,” Smith explained. ”

Edgar Allen Poe Goes Moe

On sure anyone can churn out a Lovecraft comic book! But revisiting Edgar Allen Poe takes it to the next level — and what I like about Edgar Allen Poo is that the team behind the book does it with a sense of wit. The second book in the Edgar Allen Poo series is due out this week and you can pre-order the tomb – err tome – from Amazon:

The Surreal Adventures Of Edgar Allan Poo: Book 2
Story by Dwight L. MacPherson
Art by Avery Butterworth

“It’s a clash of the titans as the forces of the Nightmare King collide with the armies of Terra Somnium in a battle to decide the fate of the Dream Child! In the end, Edgar Allan Poo must stand alone to rescue his mother and prevent the dark lord from trapping him in the realm of dreams… forever.”

Opening the Door to Time Travel?

This is an interesting although some what fuzzy article which claims that some Russian scientists think that the work being done at CERN could allow visitors from the future to see what life was like back in 2008:

Time travellers from the future ‘could be here in weeks’

“Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC – the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.

Prof Irina Aref’eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world’s first time machine, reports New Scientist. The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible – if it is possible at all – as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine. That means 2008 could become “Year Zero” for temporal travel, they argue.”

Why did HAL sing Daisy in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

This is pretty amazing: It turns out that the song Daisy Bell which HAL sings in 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on one of the first songs that a computer was programmed to sing with a synthetic voice. It seems that Arthur C. Clarke was visiting Bell Labs back in the early 60s when he came across a demonstration of the new technology!

The Lost Art of Animated Campaign Commercials

Thanks to Metafilter I came across a post on historical campaign videos and I was pretty surprised to find a few that were animated! The trend for animated campaign commercials seemed to die out at the very end of the 50s, but it looks like there was a mini-golden age when a civic minded animator could throw his or her hat into the ring. Shown above is a spot for Ike from 1952, what funny is that the elephant reminds me a great deal of Dr. Seuss who was a life long Democrat. Below is a 1956 spot for Adlai Stevenson which is a bit negative. But you know when a negative campaign ad is a cartoon there’s something a bit more lovable about it:

I found this next spot for Adlai Stevenson (also from 1956) interesting because it seems that Barack Obama wasn’t he first candidate to have a “funny sounding name”:

Holly Hobbie Meets the Thing

I was looking through the Marvel offerings for August 27th and come across the above detail from the cover of Fantastic Four: True Story. The first thing that hit me about this cover that I liked is that the coloring technique looks so much different than everything else out there. It looks like illustrator Horacio Dominguez is using some combo of water colors and colored pencils which really allow the drawing to pop out in a way at a saturated Photoshop glob job would hide. The other thing I like is the subject matter: There’s the stark contrast of the Victorian ladies standing in front of the Thing beating up creepy looking monsters:

Read more…

A Killer Kill Bill Illustration by Sarah Mensinga

I’m such a Quentin Tarantino fanboy that I immediately fell in love with this cartoony illustration by Sarah Mensinga which was done for the website drawergeeks.com on the theme of Samurai.

Liquid City Looks Lavish

Liquid City looks pretty interesting: It’s a collection of comics by artists from South-east Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. This book will be out in November (published by Image) and it looks like a nice collection for those of fanboys who like our comics to be a bit off the beaten path:

Liquid City
By Mike Carey, Sonny Liew, Gerry Alanguilan, Lat, Jon Foster & Others
Cover Shelly Wan

“The full-color Liquid City anthology brings together creators based mainly in South-east Asia: From Leong Wan Kok’s distinct post apocalyptic landscapes and alien creatures to Lat’s unique and charming take on Malaysian life, from Mike Carey’s meditation on colonialism to Ken Foo’s dark tales of regurgitations and bodily transformations, Liquid City presents an edgy vision of lives in cities past, present and future.”

The Fantastic Journey: My Favorite Show of 1977

Most fanboys tend to associate the 70s with space opera titles like Star Wars or Space: 1999 but many people tend to forget that a big craze at the time was anything inspired by “the unknown”. The show that kicked off this trend was In Search of… which covered all sorts on odd phenomena from the Loch Ness monster to Big Foot and was hosted by Mr. Spock, errr Leonard Nimoy. Also part of this trend was a best selling book The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz.

The Fantastic Journey was built upon all of this interest in the Bermuda Triangle, and in many ways one suspects the show also owed a great deal in some way to Land of the Lost from 1974. But unlike Land of the Lost what made this show cool was that the characters weren’t from one background — the lead character was Varian (played by Jared Martin) who was from the 23rd Century and the rest of the cast included “daughter of an Atlantean father and an extraterrestrial mother”, a “rebel scientist from the 1960s” and of course a 13 year old kid who was “the son of a famous scientist”. Oh and by the way did I mention that Roddy McDowall was the rebel scientist?

The one thing I remember the most about The Fantastic Journey was that it was in my personal category of “must watch TV” from that year — looking back at the episodes I can see why: Every episode featured themes like time travel and telepathy. Also reading up on the show it seems that some A+ writing talent was involved, most notably D.C. Fontana who made the original Star Trek one of my favorite TV shows.

As much as I’d hate to see Hollywood ruin this series by remaking it, looking at the above titles I’d love to see someone like a Quentin Tarantino take a stab at it. I’d also wouldn’t mind seeing a Japanese film studio turn it into an anime series — in fact the 80s series The Super Dimension Century Orguss serves as a good proof of concept that it can be done right.

On a last note I wish there was a legit release of the series out on DVD. I did find a copy of it here, but it looks a tad “gray market” to me.

EyePet Preview

It looks like Sony is trying to play catch up with nintendo in terms of going after the family market: EyePet allows you town interact with a virtual monkey of sorts. The title is set to come out in 2009, but no word when or if it will be out in the US.

Death Note vs. Family Guy

I always preferred South Park over Family Guy which feels more like an animated sitcom than an animated show, although adding visual from Death Note does make it much more humorous.

Gurihiru Charms Wolverine

The one thing I’ve always loved about manga over American comics is that in Japan comic books are for everyone and cover every damn subject — from baseball to sex. American comics on the other hand have been stuck in a super hero rut for about 30 years. Now of curse I’m excluding all the great indie work, but I’m talking about the big boys: Marvel and DC.

But I’m happy to say that I’m starting to see the trend reverse. Believe it or not the above detail is from a cover published by Marvel — the first thing you notice is that “damn that’s soooo cute!” The issue is Wolverine and Power Pack #1 (whichis due out in November) and the illustration is by Gurihiru and it’s an example of Marvel getting it right:

Read more…

Star Trek Warp Drive is a Possibility

I just want to put the entire world on notice that my feelings as a fanboy won’t be the slightest bit hurt if warp drive technology become real! Of course if I can get a free pass on the next mission that would be cool too:

Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists

“Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.

Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.”

New Minor Planet Discovered Near Neptune

Could it be that there are quite a few minor planets wandering around out there on the far edge of our solar system? Astronomers haven’t come up with a real name yet, but this new minor planet called 2006 SQ372 is mostly made of rock and ice. Shown above is a chart of the orbit of 2006 SQ372 which almost seems to just barely dip into our solar system (click on the image to view it at full size). Here’s the full story:

Astronomers Find a New “Minor Planet” near Neptune

“Astronomers announced today that a new “minor planet” with an unusual orbit has been found just two billion miles from Earth, closer than Neptune. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers detected a small, comet-like object called 2006 SQ372, which is likely made of rock and ice. However, its orbit never brings it close enough to the sun for it to develop a tail. Its unusual orbit is an ellipse that is four times longer than it is wide, said University of Washington astronomer Andrew Becker, who led the discovery team. The only known object with a comparable orbit is Sedna — the distant, Pluto-like dwarf planet discovered in 2003. But 2006 SQ372’s orbit takes it more than one-and-a-half times further from the Sun, and its orbital period is nearly twice as long.

2006 SQ372 is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Scientists believe the object is only 50-100 kilometers (30-60 miles) across.”

Luck Star vs. Death Note

I just can’t get enough of the second season opening titles of Death Note, it’s one of the best opening titles I’ve seen in a long time! But some people can’t leave good enough alone — and thus i’ve collected a few anime fan videos that are kit bashing Luck Star with Death Note because you can never get enough of a good thing:

Read more…

Star Wars TIE Fighter Webcam

Sadly I’m afraid for now you can only buy this little goodie in the UK, but it does look rather cool! Produced by Wesco Limited this Star Wars Tie Fighter Webcam can attach to the top of your computer screen and features a built in microphone.

Found via technabob.com.

Retro Computing: 1960 Promotional Film for UNIVAC

This 1960 promotional film for the UNIVAC computer is amazing to watch — it’s amazing to think how much computing has changed in just a few decades: Computers have gone from being these large exotic machines to a disposable device that can fit in your pocket.

Researchers Regurgitate Disney Insights

Thanks to computer graphics it’s interesting to me that serious researchers are covering ground that traditional animation has been focused on for almost 100 years now. In the above video scientists reach the conclusion that having different body types makes for a more convincing scene — well the truth of the matter is that Disney already used this technique with great success in the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. If you looks at the seven dwarfs you’ll notice that they all have different body types:

Just think about it: Over 70 years ago Disney animators knew how to create a convincing crowd with just seven characters who were all the same height and sex — yet computer scientists are just wrapping their heads around this now…

Follow Fanboy on Twitter

You can follow me on Twitter!

I’ve always hated the fact that I had to turn off the comments on this blog due to spam so this should open up the conversation a little bit…

Strange Love: Illustrated by Gray Sapphire

The charming illustration above is by Gray Sapphire. The main draw of this illustration is the contrast of the alienesque monster with the cute little girl offering a flower — although in addition to the subject matter I like what the artist has done with her color and lighting which furthers the content.

Retro Space: Sleek Retro Game System

Inspired by computer arcade systems of the past like Pong, Retro Space is a arcade cabinet with a minimal footprint. It features an HD screen and has controls for many classic games in addition to offering a hi-fi audio system. Right now the Dutch made system isn’t available but you can sign up for info on their website.

Special thanks to Chris Liendo for finding this site.

The Jedi Gym

I hate to admit it — but when I first watched this video I thought it was for a real gym! As a young fanboy I hated gym (jocks aren’t always so nice to nerds) and sadly I’ve carried that dislike with me till this day. So if anyone wants to open up a real life Jedi Gym I’ll buy a membership (or at least a few day passes).

Found via Zaeega.