The Informavore

As you may have guessed, I’m not at Comic-Con International this weekend.  Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, though, I don’t have to worry about missing out on updates, livestreams, photos, and video from the hundreds of panels taking place.  Seriously, people.  DC and Marvel have a panel going on in just about every time block of the Con.

Better yet, I don’t have to worry about being stabbed in the eye by some crazy guy because I’m sitting in Hall H with 4,000 other people hoping to see the cast of the Avengers movie.

I guess we’ll just call it a break even situation.  That is until I stumbled across this little bit of awesome-sauce this afternoon: the newest trailer for the Sony Entertainment/DC Comics massively multiplayer online (MMO) game DC Universe Online.  Jim Lee, Geoff Johns, Marv Wolfman, and other major creators have spent the last five years working on bringing the world’s greatest super-heroes to life for the PS3 and PCs.

Check out the trailer and join me for a little chat, okay?

You know what? Just go ahead and watch it again…or five more times. I’ll wait.

Back again? Good. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?  I’m not even sure where to begin.

Corey’s Top 10 Head ‘Sploding Things in the DC Universe Online Trailer

10.  Superman’s five-o’clock shadow.

9.  Cyborg looks awesome.  Please, DC. Realize this character has the potential to be a major player in the DC Universe and give him the respect he demands.

8.  Joker uses Harley Quinn as a human shield.

7.  Every hero in special armor means things are really, really bad.

6.  Wonder Woman with a delicious Kryptonite-filled interior.

5.  Deathstroke using Batman as a piñata thanks to Wonder Woman’s lasso.

4.  You can never go wrong with Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as Joker.  Seriously.  After twenty years of two fine actors playing the characters, you’d think audiences would want the producers to move on to someone else.  No…such…thing.

3.  Superman burns off Black Adam’s face with his heat vision!

2.  Black Adam calls down the lightning and destroys the entire city.  C’mon.  Why doesn’t the Shazam family get more love in the comics?

1.  A storyline that is good enough to be a movie.  Stop wasting time on these direct to DVD movies and simply make this happen.  Villains win.  Time travel.  The trinity.  Awesome animation.  Great voice acting.

At least I know what I’ll be doing at 3 a.m. this November when Elliott won’t sleep.

BoingBoing posted a link to the online game Pick the Perp. You’re posed a question, such as “Who was charged with Robbery?” then you pick from a series of 5 photographs who you think the perp is.

According to the site:

Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff’s web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person’s actual criminal record.

What’s interesting (that BoingBoing and Pick the Perp don’t point out) is how quickly this game goes from amusing to slightly stomach turning. Whenever you find yourself staring at five complete strangers and wondering, “Who looks like a heroin user? Which one of you look like you’d be involved in a domestic dispute?” only to guess wrong (or sadly, right) you can’t help but wonder if it’s an educated guess or a profile in socio-economic/racial/gender profiling. I secretly started to wonder if this was an elaborate ruse being conducted by psychology or communication scholars to test how people associated crimes with certain demographic factors in photographs…that would prove very interesting when discussing profiling and jury bias, perhaps?

In defense of educated guesses though, look for orange jumpsuits on serious offenses and wonky eyes for those who were charged with being under the influences.

…go the Whoppers.

Managing to sneak in a sacrifice before Facebook banned the app – the hubs snagged a free Whopper. For the win!

If you’re a big ole’ comic book geek or a raving Obamaniac – then there’s a good chance that you went freaking ape-shit crazy today over the Spiderman Obama variant cover that hit stores today. If you’re neither of the two – allow me to fill you in:

You know how sometimes TV Guide will put out a week’s issue with a series of 4 different covers with different cast-mates of [Current T.V. show]. On the inside – it’s the same T.V. Guide. Same times. Same shows. It’s just the cover that’s different. With a comic book variant – there will be something sparkly and super duper special about a cover that is different from the one that’s in mass production. So say – out of 10 issues of T.V. Guide – 9 of them have Hurley on them, and only one has Sawyer. Sawyer is the variant. Got it? Easy peasy. Comic book with an insert about Spiderman saving Obama at the inauguration. Easy. Right?

Wrong. SO wrong. Because the one variant is invariably worth more than the regular issues.

But the thing about this variant: it was an [Edit: Super special screwy] incentive plan for Marvel. Marvel tells the comic book shop, “Say you ordered x-number of Spiderman issues last time. For every, say, 20 extra issues you order, we’ll give you a variant.” Not a big deal for your gigantic comic book stores, they can easily order more, somewhat difficult for your lower sized chains. There’s the first print ultra-limited edition with a blue background, that’s the one that came out today. So folks were lining up all over the place today to get their hands on the Obama variant of Spiderman.  Here’s how I spent the most terrifying morning of 2009.

So – my resident comic book geek hubs – has been feverishly asking me to go pick up a copy of the variant for like, the past week. There’s only one comic book store in town and it opens at 10 a.m.

Hubs: “You have to get there early. Get there before 10.”

Moi: “Yeahyeahyeahwhatever.”

Hubs: “No. I’m being serious. You really need to get there early.”

Moi: “Mmmkay.”

So I get there at 9:55 and there are three middle aged men, god bless ‘em, standing in line outside the door. Part of me wanted to say, “If there are only three of you – you probably don’t need to be in a line.” But this was the Whopper Virgin in me coming out because, as I learned, fewer people does not mean less insanity.

(more…)

I figure that the universe must be nudging me toward this nugget if I found the article on the New Scientist while hearing about it on G4′s coverage of the CES. Apparently – not only was Tetris useful in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – but has also been shown to help treat head injuries. So – let this be a lesson to you – keep a Tetris app on your iPhone in the event you find yourself in a bar fight, spontaneous street hockey game or nasty Vespa accident.

Emily Holmes and colleagues at the University of Oxford theorised that Tetris would work like a “cognitive vaccine,” and immunise patients from future haunting memories of wars, crimes or accidents.

This isn’t the first time video games have been used to treat PTSD. Psychologists and computer scientists have successfully deployed virtual reality scenes to treat Iraq war veterans, months or years after their tours ended.

What’s different about Holmes’ approach is that patients play the game within minutes of a traumatic experience. Tetris is so engrossing and mentally taxing that geometric shapes replace images of exploding grenades, car crashes and human carnage, her team hypothesises.

This seemed to work, according to a preliminary study published today in the journal PLoS ONE. Forty volunteers, aged 18 to 47, watched graphic 12-minute clips of a surgery, fatal car crashes, and a drowning. A half-hour later, twenty of the participants played Tetris for just 10 minutes. The other half sat quietly for the same time period.

Volunteers kept a diary of their thoughts for a week and returned to the lab for a follow-up visit. Overall, the Tetris players experienced fewer traumatic flashbacks than the control group — three versus seven, on average.

It’s too bad ‘Bejeweled’ doesn’t have the same effect.

As a lover of all things internet, I just wanted to direct more attention to Boing Boing’s post about the Ada Lovelace Day pledge that’s going on for March 24th this year. Put yo’ bloggin’ pants on and git to goin’!

From the pledge via BoingBoing

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Over 300 people have already signed a pledge to publish a blog post, video blog or podcast episode about a woman they admire on 24th March 2009. We need 700 more people for the pledge to be successful.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. But in the tech world women’s contributions often go unacknowledged and role models are hard to find. Ada Lovelace Day is a chance for us to sing the praises of the women who make tech tick: entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants… The list of tech-related careers is almost endless and we want to see examples from all of them!

girltalk.blogs.com

Consider yourself global? Intercultural? Worldly? Think you could be plopped down at any international table for a meal and blend in with the locals? Or are you just struggling to not repulse your fellow diners each day?

If so – test your knowledge on this quick flash quiz on international dining customs and see how your manners stack up.

Don’t Gross Out the World

Sniff. Sniff. I smell a trend today, Young Mad Scientist Alphabet Blocks via Neatorama:

At Xylocopa, we know that the key to a successful education is to begin learning at a young age. Like many of you, we are concerned about the state of science education in the public school system, especially in the lower grades. Specifically, we have noticed that there is absolutely no training in the K-6 grades that prepares students to become mad scientists. In this competitive 21st-century world, the need for mad scientists will only increase, but the lack of basic education in primary school leaves us concerned that there will be no future students capable of leading in this illustrious field.

Fortunately, we have a solution – a first step, if you will, along the path to mad science proficiency. We are pleased to announce the release of our Young Mad Scientist’s First Alphabet Blocks. These lovely blocks contain many carefully engraved illustrations of the equipment, training, and activities that a budding mad scientist will require, combined with a clever alphabetic introduction to the concept depicted.

A complete list of the images represented by the letters is as follows:
A – Appendages
B – Bioengineering
C – Caffeine
D – Dirigible
E – Experiment
F – Freeze ray
G – Goggles
H – Henchmen
I – Invention
J – Jargon
K – Potassium
L – Laser
M – Maniacal
N – Nanotechnology
O – Organs
P – Peasants (with Pitchforks)
Q – Quantum physics
R – Robot
S – Self-experimentation
T – Tentacles
U – Underground Lair
V – Virus
W – Wrench
X – X-Ray
Y – You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow
Z – Zombies

ARGH! It’s so freaking cute – it makes me want to spawn a couple of kids and get them started on their path to career villainy. Given how much money gets invested into defense weaponry – I’m sure they’d make a ton of cash.

Speaking of fun holiday gifts, mental_floss has a post outlining the secret histories/backstories behind several famous toys. In honor of Robin Sherbatsky’s use of Trivial Pursuit in defense of Canada on last night’s How I Met Your Mother – here’s an excerpt from the article:

In 1979, Canadians Chris Haney and Scott Abbott (along with business partners Ed Werner and John Haney) decided to create a game that combined their love of all things trivia and their basic competitive nature. Their company, Horn-Abbott, funded the initial production run of 1,000 pieces and sold them to retailers for $15.00 in 1981. At the time, $15.00 was by far the most expensive wholesale price for a board game. But that was a downright bargain when you consider the first pieces cost $75.00 each to manufacture. To the retailer’s surprise the game was a hit even at the heady price of $30.00 at retail.

Realizing that they lacked the funding to bring the game to its full potential, Horn-Abbott licensed Trivial Pursuit to Canadian game manufacturer Chieftain Products. Chieftain had a major hit in Canada in 1981 and contacted their American partner, Selchow and Righter. Amazingly, Selchow and Righter analyzed the game and found that it was: a) too expensive to manufacture, b) it took over an hour to play, c) the best players had to have impressive knowledge of trivial subjects and d) they assumed adults didn’t play board games. Selchow and Righter passed, but Chieftain was persistent and in 1982 the game was introduced to America at the New York Toy Fair.

Initial sales were worrisome. However, through a solid PR campaign and great word of mouth, sales skyrocketed. Sales peaked in 1984 at 20,000,000 games in North America alone. It was the best of times and the worst of times for Selchow and Righter because in 1986, facing huge debt brought on by an abundance of inventory, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco. In 1989, Coleco filed for bankruptcy and the rights to Trivial Pursuit were acquired by Parker Brothers. Today Chris Haney and Scott Abbott’s little game has been made into over 30 “Editions.” It’s available in 26 countries, been translated into 17 different languages and has sold approximately 100,000,000 copies since its inception. Not bad for a game that almost wasn’t.

Here’s a nice little piece of flash animation by Dustball. (From cookiedoughrecords.com)

Check it out.