Happy Halloween!

Confidence

Tiny Links

Super Nt is a $190 FPGA, HDMI SNES. Woo Doggie, this here is a sexy product I don't think anyone is going to buy. It's a SNES Clone, not an emulator it uses actual hardware reverse engineered from Nintendo to replicate the SNES experience. Even the SNES or NES Classics Nintendo is releasing are microcomputers running emulation software. The big difference between the NT and the SNES though is that it has native 1080p output via HDMI. Again, it all sounds very cool but who is this for? People with a large SNES cartridge library but a broken SNES? Or people too lazy to buy an HDMI adapter?

SNES Classic: The Kotaku Review.Speaking of Retro gaming, Kotaku did a pretty nice review of the SNES Classic. Seeing pictures of it in action you really get a sense of just how small it really is. It's only about twice the size of my Raspberry Pi, which is tiny. It definitely sounds like a fun toy, but at almost $100 it's a hard pass for me. My entire RetroPi set up cost me about $30. If this thing was closer to $50 I'd say it would be a must buy if for nothing else than Star Fox 2.

The 11 Best Tiny Houses You Can Buy on Amazon. I'd buy a tiny house on Amazon. I think putting one int he backyard would be super cool. Instead of a man cave I could have a man house. A place away from the family to do all my man things. Or maybe we put the kids in there and just check on them once a week or so. What could go wrong?

Nostalgia Overload: Oldschool Video Game Magazine Ads LOL, look at this dork. Who plays a game like that? Does he think it's one of those keyboard guitars?

New Black Panther Trailer

Holy Mackerel, this movie looks super cool. I mean it looks so cool that I'm wondering why it took Marvel 3 Iron Man movies, 2 Avengers movies, 3 Captain America movies, 3 Thor movies, 2 freaking Guardians of the Galaxy movies to get here. This movie is going to be huge and Marvel and DC are going to look stupid for not pulling the trigger on a POC Superhero movie sooner.

And no as much as I love Blade it doesn't count, that movie came out well before the golden age of superhero movies we've been living in since 2006.

Neither does Catwoman or Hancock.

I'm a pretty big fan of the Black Panther (I have a pretty cool print of him by Larry Stroman on my wall at work), not so much the current run by Ta-Nehisi Coates, more the Christopher Priest run from the 2000s. Just based off the trailer its hard to say exactly where they're pulling the story from, looks like it might be sort of a Greatest Hits of BP stories, which I'm fine with. Marvel Studios has shown they're very good at distilling complex stories into 2 hour popcorn fare.

If if superhero movies aren't your thing, it'll be fun when Fox News tries to report on how well the movie does at the box office. 2 to 1 odds at least one of their anchors thinks this movie is about the political Black Panthers.

America's Giant Fighting Robot

A couple years ago a group of American nerds challenged a group of Japanese nerds to a good old fashioned Giant Robot Fight and well... here we are. Tuesday, October 17th at 7PM PT, the fight will be streamed on Twitch. Because why not put it on twitch? I think in October Discovery Science channel is wall to wall pumpkin chunking coverage.

I guess the fight has already taken place. In a very cricket like pace, the whole thing took like a week. They had days between rounds to get the robots back into fighting shape (which doesn't say a whole lot about the robots). Sounds like we're still pretty far away from our inevitable Robot Jox future. Thanks Obama.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Trailer

Guess what? Star Wars: The Last Jedi still looks pretty cool. Shocking right?

Get that Sauce

Every once in a while you run across a story, neigh, an event that's just so craptacular you become obsessed with it for way longer than necessary. This last weekend Sauce-Gate was that story.

In case you were blissfully out of the loop let me fill you in: A couple weeks ago (maybe months, I don't care) Rick, from the adult swim cartoon Rick and Morty, went on some screed about McDonald's Szechuan Sauce, a limited run dipping sauce available WHEN THE MOVIE MULAN PREMIERED. For whatever reasons this really hit a nerve with all the Pickle Rick's out there watching at home and a groundswell of demand for Szechuan Sauce started to... well, swell. Someone in the McDonald's promotions department thought they were being clever and were like "f-yeah" let's give the nerds what they want. They ran some posters and announced that for one day, October 7th, a few participating stores would be getting the cartoon sauce, so have at it nerds. It did not go well.

Several stores had no idea they were on this promotional list, a few stores got posters but no sauce, some got sauce but only like 20 packets. Demand was so great that at some locations, and oh I wish I was making this up, the POLICE HAD TO BE CALLED. The pictures on twitter were amazing. A few McDonald's locations had hundreds of fans, line up for hours only to get turned away. The outrage on the net was so strong, it trended on twitter all day, it was really amazing. I still can't stop thinking about it, hence this post.

By Sunday most of the sane people on the internet were endlessly dunking on those complaining they didn't get their cartoon sauce. McDonald's gave one of those really half-hearted corporate apologies and said later this winter they would make a boatload more sauce and come to your house and pour it down your throat until you choked. At least that's what I assume it said, I didn't read it that close.

On a related note I tried a couple episodes of Rick and Morty this weekend after hearing about all the hub-bub. It was pretty funny. Not drive around all day looking for a McDonald's with a couple packets of special sauce funny, but pretty funny. On a cartoon comedy scale of The Cleveland Show to Archer, it's like Season 11 of the Simpsons, where you're still laughing but you're also wondering why the show isn't as good as it was anymore. I'll probably watch a few more episodes but not until I catch up with Lucha Underground (only 10 episodes behind!)

Pacific Rim: Uprising Trailer #1

Hey kids, this looks really cool. I know some people were disappointed with how shallow the first Pacific Rim was but jebus, a robot hit a kaiju in the face with a cargo ship. What more are you looking for? I'm a bit disappointed they played switcharoo with the main character BUT John Bedoya is awesome so in the end it'll probably end up an upgrade. I'm definitely looking forward to canceling the apocalypse again.

2017 Dragon Con Cosplay Showcase

It looks like Rose City Comic Con isn't a big enough comic book conventions to have some videographer come in and do one of these slick cosplay showcases, so here's one from Dragon Con which took place the weekend before ECCC. Dragon Con is still pretty much THE place to Cosplay. San Diego gets the most mainstream media attention and technically New York is the biggest convention but for whatever reason Dragon Con is the one where like every serious cosplayer goes to flex their creativity. If I was a single dude it's also the convention I'd probably most want to go to as I've heard it's like the convention for hooking up. Again, who knows why. The heat? Good BBQ? Adequate mass transit? We'll probably never know why....