2017 SDCC Cosplay

Our friends at Sneaky Zebra (I say friends because one of them e-mailed me like 3 years ago) posted this cosplay video of last week's big ol San Diego Comic Con. It starts out with a guy firing up his Zune so you know it's going to be good.

Speaking of Zune's did you know Apple officially discontinued the iPod nano and shuffle today? It's tough finding a stand alone mp3 player these days. I know its because the market for them is pretty dried up but it still sucks. I actually prefer using one over just my phone but I know I'm in the super duper minority. The last one I bought was made by some Chinese company I'd never heard of. Maybe I should stock up on them in case they all disappear forever.

Overwatch League Players Will Get Paid

Quite a few months ago I passed along the info on this new Overwatch League thing Blizzard is trying to create. Essentially they're setting up their own Lingerie Football League but it's for video games and there are less wedgies (I assume). Since the official announcement details haven't exactly been flying from camp Blizz but today they had a big blog post that highlights some specifics of the new league. The big one is how much players will make.

The League minimum is 50K and they're requiring team owners to offer health insurance, some sort of 401K/retirement program and housing during the season. That's not bad. I mean it's weird/not weird that they expect you to move into a house with your team. That's pretty standard stuff for professional gaming I guess, but it's certainly not ideal if you want any sort of family life.... which I guess if you did you wouldn't be a professional video gamer, but whatever, I digress.

The minimum salary will be boosted by winnings earned in the league and tournaments. $3.5 million is supposedly up for grabs during the first season. On paper it sounds great, it will be interesting to see if Blizzard can make it all work in practice. One of the big obstacles I see stopping it is presentation. You need viewers for a league like this to work and there's a pretty big difference in watching streams on twitch and actually watching an entire 6v6 match up. Fighting games and strategy games lead themselves to showing all or most of the action on one screen. With an Overwatch tournament you have to be constantly switching first person points of view to tell what's actually happening in a match. The one tournament I watched was ok but it was less than ideal. The presentation leaned heavy on the announcers explaining what was happening.

I wish everyone involved luck, the more professional video gaming out there the better. My son is going to need a job eventually.

Thor: Ragnarok SDCC Trailer

One of the trailers that made a lot of hay at San Diego Comic Con last weekend was this new trailer for Thor: Ragnarok. It's not hard to understand why, it's funny there's some cool looking action and the character/art design is really interesting bad ass.

Almost no one claims the first two Thor movies as their favorites of the Marvel Universe, which is a shame, I think Thor is a much more interesting character than Iron Man or Captain America. Marvel just hasn't found the right mix of action, humor and drama to really connect with the audience. So far Ragnarok looks like it's on the right track. It's like the made a Guardians of the Galaxy movie with the Avengers and Jeff Goldblum.

This comerical for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is perfect

I did not enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 as much as I did the first one, however this commercial for GOTG2 is pretty much the most perfect thing ever. I want to live in this commercial or at the very least get a cool polo/sweater combo like this smooth dude here. If you look closely he has two collars popped. TWO!

Ah! Bear Attack!

ESPN: Not a Fan of Virtual Butts

Last Sunday ESPN broadcast the EVO 2017: Street Fighter V finals. Yeah, professional video games on ESPN. It's been happening for a while now so that's not the surprise here. The surprise here is that ESPN made a gamer change his fighter's skin because he was playing as Cammy and Cammy has been all about the thong since 1993. Specifically he had to change from Cammy's default outfit to her "formal-wear" DLC outfit.

It's kind of funny to me that ESPN would have an issue with this just a week after they shipped their body issue. That thing is full of butts. Just butts everywhere. Also ESPN shows a lot of Beach Volleyball and while those ladies aren't jumping around in thongs the typical beach volleyball outfit shows a lot of cheek. Maybe they were worried that since this was a video game tournament there would be more kids watching? I don't know, seems like a weird hair to split.

Abandoned Soviet Space Shuttles: Exploring The Unbeaten Path

I think I posted a link a while ago about the abandoned Russian Military base that still houses one of their space shuttles. If I didn't I apologize because this is kind of a cool history thing. Essentially the Soviet shuttle program was abandoned decades ago and the base was just shuttered but a lot of stuff was left in it, including an unfinished shuttle.

The base is pretty well knows but I guess it's not the easiest thing in the world to get to, there's still active Russian security keeping people out of the site. These guys from this YouTube channel I've never heard of made the trek out there and took a ton of cool footage of the base. Apparently they lost a lot of their footage but what they have is well worth taking a quick break from TPS reports.

Get Bent Komo 4

A couple weeks ago John Oliver did a segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group, highlighting how they're requiring stations they own to run conservative editorials and how they're trying to expand their footprint across the nation. Around the same time The Seattle Times also did a story about Sinclair focusing on how a lot of the staff at Komo 4 weren't very happy with the mandates from their new corporate overlords. This whole thing is gross and a pretty good example of how unfettered capitalism and the free market screws all of us.

Crosscut has more about that here.

It used to be that media companies like Sinclair were heavily regulated, it was something like they couldn't own more than 6 stations and never two stations in the same market. If they're allowed to acquire Tribune Media they'll own something like 220 stations including two in Seattle. The only people that's good for are the people that own Sinclair. It's certainly not good for the public, who are supposed to own and control the airwaves.

Anyway watch the John Oliver segment then watch the rebuttal from jackhole Boris Epshteyn. It's amazing that his takeaway is "um actually... terrorism is important". You can't even argue with people like this. They just immediately surround themselves with strawmen. No one is saying Terrorism isn't important Boris, we're saying your terrorism reporting is garbage and is politically motivated. It's a difference any rational person can see.



Gah, I need to stop writing about this and just get back to the salt mine. Thinking too much about this will just ruin my day.

Healthy Dinner

Beastie Boys | Sabotage | Sesame Street Mashup

You're welcome.

Microsoft's Xbox One X Benchmarks Revealed

Digital Foundry did some pretty thorough bench marking on the new X Box One X. Yeah, the video is a bit long but there's a lot to unpack with the new X Box One X, you can't just slap "4K gaming!!!" on the box and be done with it. These days with the millions of dollars companies spend on marketing it can be a bit hard wading through the ridiculous stuff like "enhanced pixels" to get to the actual important stuff like 10% lower rendering times.

Anyway, I'm still kind of on the One X bandwagon. I mean if I have to be dragged back to console because those jerk faces at Rockstar won't publish Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC then I might as well get the best and the shiniest.

Here's a Dollar...

Marvel's Inhumans - Official Trailer

It's a bird, It's a plane, no it's the trailer for Marvel's Inhumans and it doesn't look very good! There's a lot to unpack in this trailer and I don't really have time to write paragraph after paragraph on the Inhumans but yikes, this looks super boring and nothing like the Inhumans I grew up with. I guess the fact that Marvel demoted them from a feature length movie to a TV show that will premier in theaters says a lot about how confident they were in the property.

For those not in the know Marvel comics lore says that hundreds of thousands of years ago, giant space faring aliens called Celestials visited Earth and split the population into Humans and Inhumans. Humans were given the ability to evolve while Inhumans couldn't except through the introduction of a MacGuffin called the Terrigan Crystals. This somehow lead to Humans dominating the planet and Inhumans living in seclusion in a secret base on the moon.

Then 10 years ago Marvel movies started making huge bank and Marvel realized they gave away one of their best intellectual properties in the X-Men and Mutants to Fox for pennies on the dollar. Marvel needed a replacement for Mutants and turned to the Inhumans. The Terrigan Crystals were blown up and a cloud of mist roamed the earth randomly turning people with trace amounts of Inhuman DNA into super powered beings. Agents of SHIELD has done about 3 seasons of TV taking old mutant storylines and applying them to the concept of Inhumans. It's kinda trash and it's my least favorite thing at Marvel right now.

Back to the TV show, man this looks boring. It's like the decided to remake Game of Thrones but without all the violence and sex. Also what's the point of filming a TV show in Imax if all the scenery is going to be super dull? I'll probably check out a couple episodes of the show just because I'm a completist but I can't imagine going to a movie theater and paying 15 bucks to watch it. Good luck with this Marvel, hopefully you get those X-Men rights back soon so we can go back to the Inhumans being all freaky deaky like they should be.