C'thulhu's forms are many, varied, and occasionally made of yarn...
While at the Emerald City Comicon a few weeks ago, I ordered a "custom" knitted C'thulhu from Eli, wife of Hugo Award-Winning colorist Cheyenne Wright. For a mere $35, I received a kid-sized bundle of ultimate evil with "child safe" eyes (normally, they're buttons). As you can see, Josh has taken to it quite well, laughing more maniacally than ever before. Eli's got a proto-website up and running, and she'll take inquiries about ordering your own C'thulhu or her other items (I'm told she knits a mean beholder) at her G-Mail address at the bottom of the site.
This week "V" gets the "obscure reference award" for mentioning the Kree Omni-Wave Projector in casual conversation. I'm also presuming the super-secret Visitor Alert Gizmo under a countertop had huge flashing lights as an homage to the 80's where all technology required at leat three flashing lights, especially if it was covert. Or maybe the Visitors figure they'd never need to signal help covertly if it was dark. :) And "Lost" taught us that if someone does something mean to you out of the blue, it could be due to you being a jerk in an alternate universe.
Can enough negatives yield a positive? Film director (and we use that term very loosely) Uwe Boll is helming another 'Bloodrayne' movie, where she fights Nazis bent on giving Hitler vampiric immortality. If he could somehow work zombies into the film, it might be some kind of underground epic, though surely completely by accident. I think I'll wait for the Rifftrax on this one.
But another director is rumored to be at work soon: Joss Whedon may be directing "The Avengers." If he gets the job, I'll be interested to see how he'll put his mark on the film. I, for one, wouldn't mind a little Captain Mal in my Captain America, so I hope he'll have tweaking rights on the dialogue.
And finally, reboots are spreading to books. I'm of two minds on this, as I am on science fiction movie remakes: Some of these stories are very, very dated and don't hold up well over time. Of course, that's the nature of the beast, as the writers of the 50's often didn't have actual portals into the future with which to craft their visions of tomorrow. Also, quite a few of the authors were scientists and engineers, and they wrote like, well, scientists and engineers. They'd go on for pages describing orbital mechanics or have characters go on about binary code until you felt you should be taking notes for an exam. As I've said before, they also saw a world where every third grader knew calculus (unless it was a dystopian future) or, for the most part, the people in government and industry would all be science whizzes. So while I'll just smile and put aside classic SF's adherence to tapes, the vacuum tube, and a lack of internet (computing cycles are expensive, you know), a lot of readers might find such elements as difficult to gloss over as old English is in The Canterbury Tales. So... I dunno how to feel, exactly, about this updating. In a few stories, making them more realistic would alter large parts of the plot (I'm thinking of Clifford D. Simak's tale, "Outpost," which had a U.S. Government that was incredibly cooperative when it came to returning alien remains). But in an era where (hopefully) just about any book will be available in one form or another, maybe having an updated version will encourage new readers to go back and look at the "old stuff" out of curiosity. One can hope, anyway.
While we step into a rewrite of "Brave New World," here's some things to take the edge off:
- The upcoming project, "Star Wars: Uncut," which strings together 15-second clips created by fans via any method they choose has a teaser called 'The Escape.' I've got a good feeling about this...
- Now THIS is a DIY for summer: Make your own cotton candy machine. A friend of mine who worked in an arcade almost felt evil about how much they charged for the stuff versus how much actual material (sugar) was being sold.
- Kill Me is a macabre game where a perpetually respawning superhero wants to off himself. Use his ability to generate corpses of himself to solve each puzzling level.
- In the future, bottles will resemble old theater marquees.
- What does one do with 40 pounds of bacon? Wrap an AT-AT with it, naturally.
- Then there's the latest accessory for your car, the Carstache. What I find amusing isn't the product so much as Gandalf being referred to in their slideshow as "an American Legend." :)
- It's amazing how prevalent some movie dialogue cliches are. Today, we take a look at 'We've Got Company.'
- Speaking of company, how about another top-down zombie shooter? Zombies in the Shadow is a pretty extensive survival game where you do what one usually does to zombies, with the added mechanic of them being sensitive to your flashlight.