Old Links

Atari’s new Ataribox console will be like an NES Classic. As much fun as it it to imagine an Atari revival this thing looks like it's going to be a huge failure. There are already a half dozen different Atari retro consoles on the market and it's not like anyone is dying to play Yar's Revenge again. Don't get me wrong, I loved my 2600 when I had it but Atari games aren't that fun to play these days. I'll play combat or boxing for a few minutes but that's about it. This thing has Ouya written all over it.

By the by, I know all these links are super old but I bookmarked them and never got around to using them last month. I'd like to say that this month I won't be just as busy and will have more time to blog but that's a total lie. I'll probably be lucky if I get to 10 posts this month.

Frank Darabont's Furious Emails to His Walking Dead Coworkers: 'Fuck You All'. The e-mails they have published here are pretty funny. It's obvious at the time Darabont was writing them he either thought he was getting fired or really wanted to get fired. It's amazing to think looking back on it now that Season 2 was pretty much DOA due to AMC's insistence on cutting the show's budget in half. Now a days its the biggest thing on TV. The showrunners could probably get an old space shuttle if they wanted to do a couple zombies in space episodes.

Star Wars' Firing Reveals a Disturbance in the Franchise. Lots of people wrote about this but the Hollywood Reporter probably had the best breakdown of the exact reasons Lord and Miller were fired from Han Solo. It's pretty interesting stuff and goes to show you Disney is not messing around with the Star Wars franchise. That's probably a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. We're probably never going to see a director go completely off the rails and turn in a crap movie but on the other hand there's no room for a real talented auteur to come in and carve out a piece of lore for him or herself.

Japan’s Most Ridiculous Wrestling Promotion Hits Somewhere Near The Big Time. DDT-Pro Wrestling is crazy pants. Like they have some ultra serious looking matches with some of the hottest young talent around and then they'll follow it up by putting a title on a table. Like literally a figuratively, the table's the champ now. I wish I could justify spending the cash on their subscription service but I'm already spending too much on other stuff every month. In the meantime I'll just have to keep following them on twitter, which is still pretty fun.

The Rebellious Origin of the Video Game Easter Egg

Warren Robinett, the programmer behind Adventure for the 2600, is credited with creating the Video Game Easter Egg. Here's the story behind it.

Big ups to the creators of this clip, Great Big Story. This video is entertaining and straight to the point. I like videos on old games, or the history of video games but often they can be really long and boring. Anything longer than 5 minutes and I start skipping ahead. This is the year 2016, no one has time to watch your 10 minute video. You know how many corgi gifs you can fit in 10 minutes? A THOUSAND!

Hollywood Links

5 Things I Learned Making The Biggest Flop In Game History. Everyone's heard this story, right? ET was the game so bad that it bankrupted Atari and nearly killed the entire home console market. Well, that's not quite the truth. Yeah the game isn't that great but the truth is Atari was a company so poorly run it was destined to fail. ET was actually a huge hit for them, they sold over a million and a half copies of the game but in their infinite wisdom they had printed over 5 million copies. A mistake they repeated when they printed over 12 million copies of Pac-Man completely ignoring the fact that they had only sold 10 million consoles. Long story short here is that Atari was run by coked up morons.

Rob Schneider And Jennifer Love Hewitt Are Officially The ‘Worst’ Actor And Actress In Hollywood. Clearly the people that put this study together never saw The Client List. Man that was a great show.

Another Day, Another White Guy at Marvel: Benedict Cumberbatch to play Dr. Strange. This is an old article but it relates to the mixed reaction the Doctor Strange trailer got last week. First things first, I have zero problems with Dr. Strange being played by a white guy. Yes the character might have originally been Asian (as a few interviews with the creator have suggested) but outside of those early issues 50 years ago he's never been identified as anything other than a plain old white dude. However, I do agree with the articles overall point. Marvel is quite literally going to have 8 movies staring blond white guys named Chris (3 Thor, 3 Cap, 2 GOTG) before one movie staring either a woman or a person of color. Throw all the white guys named Robert in there and you have 11 movies before they get around to the Black Panther or Ms Marvel (which was delayed again).

I could go on for a couple more paragraphs on the Might Whitey trope but eventually I need to get to work today.

I know this sounds all Social Justice Warriory but I don't care. I looked at my pull list the other day and right now books with a female lead dominate what I'm collecting. Squirrel Girl, Hellcat, Black Widow, Silk, Batgirl, Harley Quinn, Black Canary. I don't know, Marvel is the so called House of Ideas. I'm just looking for a bit more diversity when it comes to their movie ideas.

Controversy Links

Batgirl Variant Cover. If you follow me on twitter you know there's been this crazy hub-bub surrounding a Batgirl cover. I've read a lot of articles on the net about the cover but this one probably encapsulates the sound and the fury better than any of them. I've never read anything this guy has written before but he's so spot on it's crazy.

Atari devs dissect Yars’ Revenge, Adventure, Atari’s woes. Great article by ArsTechnica on the guy that developed Adventure. Even though I never understood that game when I was playing it as a 6 year old it's still worth a read.

Disney's Making A Brand New DuckTales Cartoon! This is old but the other article but who cares? HOORAY! Ducktales is one of the few cartoons from the 80s that still holds up really really well. I've watched a ton of it with my son. I'm glad they're doing a reboot, now I just have to hope DisneyXD gets moved over to the el-cheapo package on Dish. Come on Disney, flex some muscle.

Booth Babes And Sexy Cosplayers Are In Danger Of Being Completely Banned From Events. On second thought I'm going to go ahead and not put up a link to this article because it's complete horseshit from one of those gamergate douche-rockets. However, I've seen this damn thing pop up three times in my facebook feed so I thought I'd rant about it here anyway.

The basic conceit of the article is that PAX banning "booth babes" is the first step in banning cosplayers AND has an endgame of banning all forms of sexuality in everything. There's all kinds of handwringing over how attractive women are being oppressed and punished by fat chicks that can't handle all the sexy. It's so ridiculous I can't believe anyone would read it and take it seriously. BUT THEY HAVE.

On the Emerald City Comic Con facebook page there was this whole debate about it, never mind that ECCC banned booth babes YEARS ago and they do just fine cosplay-wise. Seriously, any convention that bans cosplayers might as well just pack up it's shit and head home.

Remember When

Video Game: The Movie is a thing I will tolerate

For better or worse, Video Game: The Movie is a thing that exists. A documentary about video games should be right in my wheel house but I don't know.. being produced by Zack Braff doesn't exactly get my gpu running. Of course Chris Hardwick and Wil Wheaton show up in the thing too.. I don't know. I mean I enjoy @midnight as much as the next guy but jeez, I don't need a movie full of D-list nerdlebrities telling me how full of "art" video games are. Give me 90 minutes of coked up Atari programmers and Sony execs sticking it to Nintendo with the PS1 after negotiations over the SuperFamicon CD drive fell apart. I'm just saying if they spend more time talking with Cliffy B about GOW than they do covering revolutionary failures of hardware like the Dreamcast or the Neo-Geo then this whole thing is a giant failure.

Pro-Tip for all game developers out there: When you describe video games as art and then release day 1 DLC you're kinda talking out both sides of your ass.

Last Week's Links

All 552 Simpsons Episodes to Air Consecutively on FXX. Mark the date August 21st on your calendar. That's the date fledgling Fox network FXX will start airing all 552 Simpsons episodes non-stop in order. I did some quick math and assuming they're all 30 minute episodes that's about 11 and a half days worth of the Simpsons, of course only 3 and half of those days are really worth watching. No joke there, 3 and a half days in is when you'll hit season 8 and everything starts to fall apart. Sure every once in a while you'll still get a modern classic like Tomacco but the longer the marathon goes the worse the show gets, until all you're left with are unfunny gimmick episodes and annoying guest stars.

I was promised they had shows for years. I can't believe they lied to me in song.

Awesome Photos from the Atari Landfill. The Urban myth goes that ET for the Atari 2600 was such a flop that Atari had to bury thousands of cartridges in a dump in New Mexico. The truth isn't that far off. ET was a best seller for the 2600 but it still didn't come close to meeting Atari's projections. Instead of sitting on the inventory (and paying taxes on it) Atari decided to destroy it along with a bunch of other cartridges and hardware they were sitting on. The move kept the lights on for a while but it didn't save them from falling into obscurity when the home console market crashed in the early 80s.

Last week a film crew making a documentary finally was able to get permission to excavate the infamous Atari dump site. Here are pictures of what they found. Sooo much Defender...

The Internet Is About to Become Worse Than Television. There's A LOT of handwringing going around on the internet right now in regards to the FCC and their stance on both the Comcast/Time Warner acquisition and the fed's recent stance on net neutrality. I would like to believe in the power of the free market the problem is that right now the market isn't free. There are large areas of the country where high speed (and I mean real high speed not 4G BS) internet access is limited to one MAYBE two providers. That's not a free market that's a monopoly/duopoly where price fixing and service abuses can run rampant.

BTW, that was the first picture that popped up when I google image searched "The internet". Never change internet. Never change.

DEADPOOL vs. X-FORCE Go Back to the 90s For Their First 'Extreme' Face-Off. As a comic book reading child of the late 80s to early 90s this is very much related to my interests. I'm bummed it's not actually drawn by Rob Liefeld but he gave it his seal of approval on Twitter so that's enough for me.

Forgotten Media: Cancelled Video Game Consoles

I'm just full of youtube videos lately, aren't I? This one is a little rough in presentation, the guy doing the voice over work uses some questionable pronunciation and is a bit dull. However, if you can get past that I think the list is really interesting. I kind of miss the days when some engineer at Atari would coke-dream up weird system and they'd actually try and build it. Wireless controllers with giant metal antennas? Awesome.

Also I love that there was a Sega system that was canceled because the Saturn was on the horizon. lolSega.

Unboxing the Atari 800xl

Ever wonder what it was like getting a brand new Atari in 1983? No, and you call yourself a nerd. Oh, you don't call yourself a nerd. Whatever man...

One of the things I find most interesting about this unboxing is the instruction booklet that comes with the Atari. It's a list of basic commands. Not like simple commands, but text commands for Atari Basic. You know, the programming language. How far removed are we from text commands? I'd have an easier time hunting for my dinner than I would using basic.