“A pair of Harvard researchers say violent video games don’t turn children into killers. According to a newly published book, ‘Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do’, psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson dispel common myths about violent games. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.
Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 10, 2008 in Videogames
I still have high hopes for this film based on other things that I’ve seen and have heard, but frankly the above video game trailer doesn’t get me too excited. I wish that Disney and Pixar would get more directly involved with their games ala LucasArts.
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 9, 2008 in Animation
Shown above is the animated film Kings of Power 4 Billion by Paul Robertson. It’s hard to see all of the detail in the YouTube video (I’d suggest downloading a torrent) but Robertson’s animation technique is drawn pixel by pixel like an old school video game. In addition to video games he also draws quite a bit from anime and pop cultural references. Here’s part two:
In August of this year Buck Rogers will be 80 years old! The franchise which takes place in the year 2419 first started life as a short story in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories has has spawned comic books, novels, toys, serialized movies and two TV series (first in 1950 on ABC and then the disco version in 1979). Now it looks like Nu Image/Millennium Films has acquired film rights to the property and will create a live action film:
“Nu Image/Millennium’s Avi Lerner got the rights from the Dille Trust, which is run by the surviving family of series originator Frank Dille. Those rights had once been with Disney, but the Dille family was attracted to moving them to a small movie and gaining more control over the direction of the film. Despite web reports that Frank Miller had boarded the project, sources at Millennium disputed than any creatives had yet aligned to the project.”
“The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet – deadly quiet. It didn’t seem the climate had changed much since.
Now scientists think Mars’ climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed. After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars’ mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago.
In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years – akin to the day before yesterday in Mars’ geological timeline. This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 9, 2008 in Videogames
I dare you to knock this battery off my shoulder! This Canadian fanboy took a bear suit and modified it for futuristic combat situations ala Halo. I have no idea if this invention would work, but man would he clean up with the cosplay awards at any convention!
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 8, 2008 in Star Trek
Yes I know that there were quite a few talented folks who made Star Trek great, and I’ll grant you that he has a huge ego — but I feel like William Shatner is being treated like crap by not including him in this upcoming Star Trek film. Don’t tell me that they can bring back Nimoy for a leading role but they can’t work a 5 minute future flashback into the damn script?
Adding insult to injury is the Star Trek Ultimate Captain Kirk 1:4 Scale Figure which looks like a bad cartoon sculpture of Shatner. Of course I’ll grant you that Paramount has never had the same approach to quality merchandise that say Lucasfilm has had with Star Wars, but I think that they could do a little bit better on the small and big things that count to us fanboys.
I have to admit that I had my doubts about Disney-Pixar’s upcoming movie WALL-E, although slowly my mind is being changed on the subject. For starters a friend who saw a few clips at the recent New York Comic Con told me that he was blown away with the quality of the work that he viewed. And today I could sense the buzz building up as I spotted a poster for the film on a bus shelter here in NYC.
Shown above is the Ultimate WALL-E which will sell for $190 this summer. This interactive robot comes with a remote controller and sensors that’ll allow him to respond to his environment in numerous ways, including obstacle, sound, and touch detection. This fanboy thinks that this looks like a fun toy and makes me look forward to finding out more about the film.
Meow! Japanese horror punk rock band Balzac has adopted Hello Kitty into their act. Shown above is the result of this collaboration which includes a line of t-shirts to show off your claws of cuteness.
Countless science fiction films from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Alien (my favorite was Planet of the Apes) have used the idea of suspended animation as a technique to allow for prolonged missions in outer space. Well now it looks like that concept may become reality:
“Dr Warren Zapol and colleagues report in the latest issue of the journal Anesthesiology how hydrogen sulfide slows mouse metabolism without cutting blood flow to the brain. There are many questions and years of research before healthy people like astronauts would be put into hibernated states. But the procedure could find an earlier application in cases of traumatic injury when life itself is at risk. Zapol plans additional experiments on larger mammals, probably sheep. “Before you use it on astronauts, you want to make sure it’s very, very safe,” he says.”
“I personally saw the film at last month’s screening here in NYC at NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS and loved the film! I think the movie is hot and consider the hybrid movie to be a “Mexican Matrix.” Hybrid in the sense that it is both in English and in Spanish, something the trades forgot to mention. The futuristic film creates an environment where Mexican immigrant labor is outsourced from Tijuana via cyber network, with remote-controlled robots working in the United States.”
“The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth’s skies for tens of millions of years. A new model suggests moonlets may have once occupied the two Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, regions in space where the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Moon exactly cancel each other out. Objects trapped in these points are called Trojans and can remain stationary forever if left undisturbed.
Scientists think the Moon was created when Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object some 4.5 billion years ago. “The giant impact that likely led to the formation of the Moon launched a lot of material into Earth orbit, and some could well have been caught in the Lagrangian points,” says study team member Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center in California, US.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 6, 2008 in Animation
The Animation Show is a showcase for independent animated short films which is put together by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head fame) and Academy Award nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt. If the film isn’t coming to your local town don’t worry too much as they play to release a DVD as well.
What’s funny about this Western Electric ad from 1968 is that it reminds me a great deal of the webcams of today. I suspect as the technology for those webcams becomes cheaper we’ll see those as stand alone objects disappear over time, but that signature lens will continue to be found everywhere from cell phones to TV sets.
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 6, 2008 in Comic Books
Methinks Italiano Spidy likes his pasta just a wee too much! Although the bad guys seem out of shape too so maybe that’s not so critical to his crime fighting skills…
To me one of the best parts of being a fanboy is accidentally discovering the traditions of other societies after getting to know their pop culture (as I sit here writing this I’m enjoying a chilled bottle of Tea’s Tea Golden Oolong). Shown above is an amazing photograph I came across by Chizuru Ohmae. You should check out her blog, it’s like traveling to Japan without needing a passport.
Yeah you aint goin’ to mess with us! I got my friend here in the MS-09R Rick Dom which features a large clip-fed beam cannon (often referred to as a “Beam Bazooka”)…
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 5, 2008 in Comic Books
El Estratografico collects cropped Spanish comic book images and posts them to Flickr, I just love the Roy Lichtenstein quality of his picks. What I love about the above image is how poor Bugs Bunny seems to have had his head cut off!
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 5, 2008 in Star Trek
It’s funny but in the last few years I’ve found Google translation tools pretty handy for looking at various websites, but the the thought of being able to turn a cell phone into a Star Trek Universal Translator would change the world:
“Progress being made by European researchers on automatic speech-to-speech translation technology could help the EU tackle one of the biggest remaining boundaries to internal trade, mobility and the free exchange of information – language. Though the system still cannot match the accuracy of a human translator or interpreter, they’re is convinced that, with further research a commercially viable automatic speech-to-speech translator will be feasible within a few years, at least for some simpler language pairs.”
