Hard Core Links

15 Fascinating Facts You May Not Know About ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’. None of these facts are really going to change your life but if you've played Arkham Asylum they're still pretty interesting. Thinking back on it I'm 99% sure I never did beat Arkham Asylum. The way the levels constantly criss-crossed over each other kinda killed my excitement for the game about 10 hours in. I should probably pick it back up and try to beat it.

Microsoft announces Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana, coming in April. As much as I begrudge buying a phone from a guy with that bad of a haircut I'm totes getting a new phone in April or May or June or whenever the AT&T version of the Nokia Icon goes on sale. I can't wait for my chance to have to repeat things to my phone multiple times just like my iPhone brethren.

Also I can't believe Microsoft actually named their virtual assistant after a character from Halo but at the same time OF COURSE they did.

Fire TV: Everything You Need to Know About Amazon's $100 Streaming Box. I already have a Roku and it works just fine but if I was in the market for a TV box the Fire TV would be pretty tempting. I like the idea of being able to play some casual games through it. I could get down with wasting 20 minutes playing Plants vs Zombies on my TV and not having to pay 19.99 for it through XBox Live Arcade.



There’s Probably Semen On That’: 3 Days At The AVNs. This report by Vince Mancini on the 31st annual AVN Awards is really really good. Like maybe I should have used three "reallys" and a bunch of caps locks good. It is a report on pornography so it gets a bit blue at times but I think it's well worth suffering through a couple cringe worthy paragraphs.

What I found most interesting is that an industry that when you look at it objectively helped build the modern day internet is getting destroyed by what it helped create. Also the people that are involved in pornography are always fun to read about in a "hey, lets watch this car accident" kind of way.

2014 Emerald City ComicCon Cosplay; Part 1

I've mentioned earlier that the way I've done cosplay round up posts in the past take FOREVER to put together and quite frankly I don't have time to spend a couple hours at work or at home to put one together for ECCC. So, I've changed the format a bit. No more commentary on each picture and you're going to need to click on them to embiggen. It's like I just stepped into 2009.



There you are. On a personal story side, the guy dressed up as Peter Parker with Spidey-Sense was really cool. I kept running into him everywhere and he said hi to my son. The group costumes like the Flash and the Aim scientists were hella rad. The guy dressed up as Patriot (ie African American Captain America) looked the part. I don't know where he got that costume or if he made it but it looked like it was ready to be on screen.

Look for Part 2 tomorrow!

Luc Besson made the Black Widow Movie before Marvel could get around to it.

If you've been on tumblr, or I don't know, somewhere else on the internet, you might have noticed a bit of a groundswell for Marvel to pull the trigger on a stand alone Black Widow movie. Makes sense to me. Marvel has been pretty aggressive with expanding it's movie universe. You already have an established female ass-kicker, why not pull the trigger? Yes I know Elektra and Catwoman were bombs but guess what those movies were terrible. If they had stared men they would have been just as terrible.

Do it Marvel... Do it.

Oh, yeah. This is a trailer for the new Luc Besson movie Lucy, staring Scarlett Johansson. It looks good but I hope the guys are Marvel aren't waiting to see how well it does or doesn't do before they decide to make a Black Widow movie.

Dancing Spider-Baby? Dancing Spider-Baby.

This dancing Spider-Baby add is a bit weird but that's not what I take away from it. The most important lesson here is that Ini Kamoze's Hotsteppa is so rad that even a terrible techno remix is still pretty enjoyable. NAH NAHNAH NAH NAH NANAH NAH NAH...

Emerald City Comicon 2014 Cosplay Showcase

Old fashioned cosplay posts with pictures take a long time to put together but posting YouTube clips takes like zero time. With that in mind allow me to present you KBLNoodles' Emerald City ComicCon 2014 Cosplay Showcase part one of three.

I would say I saw about half of these in person. I would also say I have no idea who about 3/4 of these are supposed to be. There were a lot of Anime and Video Game characters that I was completely clueless about. Also fun fact, Yaya Han (Power Girl at the 1:09 mark) is like 4 feet tall. She might be a Hobbit.

Dawn of the Links

The Death of the Television Rerun. I was thinking about this the other day when I noticed one of the local non-affiliate networks in town was running news at 9pm. It used to be depending on where you lived you had about 5 or 6 local TV stations and one or two of those channels were always playing reruns. Like all day long. Growing up there were a lot of really old shows I was exposed to simple because they were still on. Gilligan's Island, Star Trek the original series, The Bob Newhart show. Hell, during the summers I remember watching Batman reruns every day at 11am. Even shows that were just slightly before my time like the Dukes of Hazard or the A-Team were every day almost 10 years after they had been canceled.

These days with Netflix, Amazon Prime and roughly 10,000 cable channels, content has never been more readily available but how many younger people are going to sit down and really watch Cosby Show or Cheers reruns? It's too bad because I believe there's a lot to learn about quality story telling from some of those older shows. Also who's going to get all the Night Court references I use? Roz? Bull? Mac? No one, that's who.

The Massive Soviet Sub That Inspired 'Hunt For Red October'. It's basically two submarines welded side by side. The closest US sub in size weighs almost 1/3 less than this behemoth. It has a swimming pool in it for goodness sake. A swimming pool!

Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album. I'll tell you why, because everyone involved with the Wu-Tang Clan is pretty much bonkos. Also this idea is awesome.

Meet G. Willow Wilson, the Muslim Woman Revolutionizing Superhero Comics. Hey! I in fact did meet G Willow Wilson at Emerald City Comic Con this last weekend (maybe you've heard me talk about it?). Generally speaking when a comic book gets this much mainstream attention I'm a bit wary of it, especially when it's one that sort of checks all the boxes for what some would consider a publicity stunt. Ms Marvel is not a publicity stunt. It's a really good comic book and I would recommend anyone pick up a copy. I think you can get it digitally for like 99 cents on comixology. The conversation I had with Ms. Wilson was pretty short but she was so nice she left a lasting impression. Hopefully the book is a big success and she stays in the industry a nice long time.

A Tribute to Zack Snyder's 'Dawn of the Dead,' Which Turns 10 This Last Week. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead is still my favorite zombie movie. It really touches on all the best points of zombie fiction. Plus the zombie baby... oh man. Zombie baby is a thousand times scarier than any of those fast twitchy zombies in World War Z.

ECCC Story: Dolla Dolla Bills Y'all

This just in, there were a lot of things available for purchase at Emerald City Comic Con. This my friends is the quick story of how and where I spent my money and what I might do differently if given the opportunity again.

Thursday, the day before ECCC started I decided it might be nice to get my cash situation on lock down so I didn't have to scramble for an ATM Friday morning. I went to the nearest Coinstar machine and turned all my Scrooge McDuck swimming money into greenbacks and I cashed a reimbursement check I had from work that I'd been sitting on for a couple week. Combined with the few dollars I'd been squirreling away for the last few weeks, I had a grand total of $103 to spend at Comic Con.

Thursday night I had a soccer game where I found out one of our players dropped out of next season so we all owed a bit of extra money to cover their part of the registration fee. ECCC hasn't even opened and I'm down to $98.

Friday and Saturday morning I take the light rail to downtown. It's a bit slower but when you take into consideration gas and parking, a round trip ticket on the light rail is actually the cheaper option. $5.75 x 2 = $11.50. My ECCC budget is down to $86.50.

Friday I get lunch at a Jimmy Johns downtown with a friend. There was food inside the convention center but it was either crazy busy or typical cafeteria fare and I didn't want a bunch of greasy pizza sitting in my stomach the rest of the afternoon, or not sitting in my stomach if you know what I mean. My ECCC budget is down to $79.00.

My son was REALLY excited to go to Comic Con. He knew from my pictures of last years that they had Lego. He loves Lego. Saturday he was really upset that he couldn't come with me so I bought him a Lego minifigure, Where's my Pants Guy from the Lego Movie ($5). Sunday when he was there, he was really excited to get another minifigure. Like all good parents I caved and after what felt like an hour of deliberation he got Arctic Batman ($10). Oh yea, since we all went to Comic Con as a family on Sunday we took the car and had to pay for parking. That was $10. My ECCC budget is down to $54.



$54 was the absolute final amount I had to actually spend on all the cool stuff at ECCC. Don't get me wrong, it's still very much a privilege to be able to go to ECCC, much less have fifty some dollars to spend there. There are a lot of people a lot worse than I am. However once you're there, fifty dollars doesn't get you very far at a comic book convention. For example the Dark Horse booth was giving away a free tote with any purchase over 50 dollars. I barely had enough to get a free tote.

What I did get were smaller convention exclusive sketchbooks from a few of my favorite artists; Frank Cho, Aaron Lopresti and Terry Dodson. These seemed pretty reasonable at $15-20 a piece. Also I was able to get them signed and talk to the artists a bit. Terry Dodson even drew a quick sketch for me.




These three sketchbooks and about a dozen signed comics (ones I already owned of course) were the grand total of my ECCC haul. I'm not disappointed, I didn't go into the weekend expecting this huge haul. I wanted to pick up a couple new prints for my office at work but I never saw anything that really stood out and said buy me. Well, that's not completely true. After getting Amanda Conner to sign a comic on Saturday I had planned on going back to her table Sunday to pick up a print but when I got there Sunday her line was crazy long and I bailed.

So there you are. That's the story of how I blew through nearly $100 at ECCC and had very little to show for it come Monday morning. I certainly don't regret the purchases I made. I love the little sketch books I got and being able to just spend a couple minutes with the artists I love so much was really awesome. However, next year when I sit down and make my ECCC budget I'll probably take into better consideration things like transportation and food. I'll probably start saving a bit earlier too. Another $50 for a couple prints and maybe a t-shirt sounds reasonable enough to me.

This is why you don't buy your kid a grapple gun

Ok, I'll admit. There's a slight possibility that might be fake. Still kids and grapple guns don't mix. Best case scenario they shoot it right into your crotch.

Check out more of this cute kid and his dads penchant for video effects here.