Hugeek

Happy Mother's Day

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Found here; from here

To all the moms out there (especially the geek ones like mine), Happy Mother's Day!

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Comics: Digital vs. Print

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Image found here, by illustrator R. Kikuo Johnson

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending C2E2 here in Chicago, which you can be sure you'll here plenty more about in the near future. Besides attending some great panels, I got to see some of my comic-loving friends, get title reccomendations, and browse back issues.

Right before the con I had finally picked up Swamp Thing, which a friend of mine has been raving to me about for quite some time. However, when I talked to said friend, he told me the issue I had acquired was the climax of a story arc, and I would be best off to read the story arc from the beginning. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to locate those back issues at the con - I was too busy completing my New 52 Wonder Woman set so I could get them signed by the fantastic Cliff Chiang and waiting in line to meet and buy prints from the awesome Amanda Connor.

So on Monday night, after finally reading every other title I'd acquired, I was left with Swamp Thing. Desperate comic cravings at an hour too late to run to the comic shop led me to consider other options - specifically, digital ones. I ended up downloading my missing issues and also picked up a few reccomended titles using the ComiXology app.

I must say that I think comics look quite good on my ASUS Transformer tablet, as I'm sure they do on the iPad, and for better or for worse, I am the type of reader who would prefer to collect my comics in trade form and don't seem to have a special attachment to the monthly issues, so having them digitally rather than physically doesn't make much of a difference to me. This is nice, I thought. Maybe I should start getting all of my comics digitally.

Wired wrote about the issue of print vs. digital comics, but the piece of writing I found the most insightful and thorough about the issue is from web comic writer Dustin Harbin's blog. Harbin brought up some very important issues. One is a problem shared by Amazon/Kindle users, which is that technically, when one pays for these issues, one is technically only buying the license to read the product, and doesn't technically own it - so if the digital distributor disappears, so will the content (I haven't fully wrapped my head around this part, so if you want to know more, I encourage you to read Harbin's post). The second point I latched on to was the idea that buying one's comics digitally cuts out the middle man - which, for many of us, is the beloved local comic book shop. Now I don't know about you, but I would much rather acquire comics while supporting a local business than directly from the distributor who often ignores my demographic and just generally tends to abuse its artists.

The final straw was something that I didn't need pointed out, but reading further about it really steeled my opinion: currently, the major distributors sell their digital comics for the same price as their print ones. This shows clear ignorance, fear and greed on the part of distributors, especially considering the fact that print and shipping costs are not a factor in the digital medium, and the issue mentioned earlier that when one purchases a digital comic one doesn't technically own it.

Considering that most series are eventually released as trades and that more and more people have devices like iPads well-suited for digital comics, I can definitely see a future where digital monthlies make the print version obsolete. But for now, I will still be getting most of my comics from my local shop. If I pick up a new series and need to catch up a little but can't get the back issues there, I'll probably get them digitally; I also think the digital format is great for things like free previews.

What do you think readers? Are you a die-hard print collector who loves your long white boxes full of boarded-and-bagged back issues, or are you an iPad owner who would just as soon read your favorite titles on your digital device rather than have one more thing to carry around? Tell us in the comments!

P.S. As alluded to earlier, I will be posting C2E2 content next week, including my thoughts from the Womanthology panel, so stay tuned for that!

 

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Manicure Monday: Batman Nails

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The ultimate Batman nails, as far as I'm concerned (though being a computer jockey I could never wear them), created by KayleighOC and found at Fashion Tips From Comic Strips.

 

Stay tuned this week to hear about my time at C2E2!

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Happy Birthday Amanda Conner!

I'd like to join DC Women Kicking Ass in wishing artist comic artist Amanda Conner a happy birthday!

First picture found here; the rest at the link above

Amanda is one of my favorite artits in the trade right now, and what I like about her work is that I think it toes the line of almost-cheescake and takes joy in the female figure, while still portraying those females as strong, empowered, and independent. 

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A Cake: For the Geek Hugeek Hugs

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This is the cake I made for my husband for his birthday this year. While he remembers trying to play Super Mario Brothers when he was 2 years old, I must confess I've only played NES once, maybe twice in my life. In fact, I didn't get a Sega Genesis until I bought a used one from a friend as the N64 was coming out. A few years after that, some of my friends started getting me into anime, and soon I attended my first convention.

Guess where I met my husband.

Guess.

Yeah, we're that geeky.

Thanks to my geeky friends of both sexes, I went from a casual Sonic 2 player to a rabid anime fan to the president of my college anime club who frequented the local comic book shop.

Of course, the seed was planted much earlier than that, as is often the case with these kinds of things. My mother is an avid Trekkie, and my first memory of television is seeing Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard. I remember when we would watch Star Trek II, she would cry every time Spock died, and I didn't get it - I mean, it's said, but not that said, right? And then...Star Trek Nemesis came out. And Data died. I bawled like a baby. My mom just put her hand on my shoulder and said "Now you understand." And I did.

My dad read to me before bed well into my adolescense. I fondly remember the year or so where we worked our way through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy - sort of. Even though I was 10 or so, way too old to be afraid of the dark, I must confess I spent about an entire year sleeping with my lights on, convinced Golum was hiding under my bed, crawl out and snatch me up. My father also frequently took me to the local comic book shops. He'd buy comics for himself and well as me, remembering fondly how Daredevil was one of his favorite super heroes growing up because he used his supernatural and mental faculties to overcome his obstacles.

I was a 90's kid, and my parents both love sci-fi, so The X-Files was a Sunday night family ritual. Every week, my dad would ask me, "Now this isn't going to give you nightmares, right?" "No, of course not!", I flat out lied - I spent years jumping over the air vents in our home so Eugene Tooms couldn't grab at my ankles from them. But I loved it. David Duchovney was my first crush.

So thank you to all of those people along the way who not only tolerated but encouraged my geeky pursuits, and helped make me the nerd I am today.

 

P.S. That was an awful lot about me for a post of someone else's birthday cake, huh? Well hopefully, I'll be able to convince my husband (and maybe even my mom and dad) to write guests posts about their geeky formative experiences. In the mean time, please share yours with us in the comments!

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Happy International Women's Day!

A happy Internation Women's Day to all the readers out there! While we have a ways to go in geek culture as well as society in general, today is a day to celebrate and inspire women and girls everywhere. While I could write about the problems us uteri are still facing in nerd culture specifically, DC Women Kicking Ass has already covered the topic pretty elegantly and thoroughly. She also posted this awesome illustration by Lucy Knisley, reminding us that "Every Woman is a Wonder Woman".

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Did another female do or say something to inspire you to take up and/or embrace your geekdom? If so, we'd love to hear your story in the comments!

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Friday Happy Hour: Catherine Cocktails

In honor of yesterday's review of Catherine, I would like to present you, dear readers, with a slew of cocktails, each themed after a character in the game. Thanks to The Drunken Moogle for tracking down the pictures and info. 

Vincent: white rum and cola with a slice of lime

Catherine: raspberry and peach liqueur with grenadine

Katherine: black sambuca, milk, cream

Orlando: beer, soda water, melon liqueur, yogurt, and a cucumber for garnish

Johnny: sake, lemon joice, tonic

Toby: grapefruit juice and tonic with a maraschino cherry

Erica: orange juice with mango and maraschino cherry 

Master: gin and vermouth with a black olive

Midnight Venus: champagne and amaretto with a maraschino cherry

Stray Sheep: yogurt and milk with strawberry garnish

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Catherine Review: No, It's Not Sexist

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Full disclosure:

I pretty much started this blog so that I would have an excuse to blow a portion of my meager finances on this game.

This highlights, for me, what is inevitably the focus of any review - is it worth the money?

In this case, my answer would have to be a resounding yes.

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Catherine's release; reviewers and fans alike all seemed to enjoy the funky combination of puzzle challenges and a kind-of sort-of dating game - many fans were already familiar with a similar formula from Atlas's (the creative team behind the game) popular Persona series.

Catherine is the story of Vincent, an underachieving average joe who happens to have a successful and attractive girlfriend named Katherine, but doesn't want to commit to their relationship—even though they've been dating for years. Then one night (after a few too many drinks) he meets a young, charming, and extremely attractive girl named...Catherine.

Low and behold, Vincent wakes up the next morning to find Catherine in bed with him - meanining he's cheated on his long-time girlfriend Katherine. This is where the game really starts to kick off, and Freudian imagery abounds as you spend your days trying to hide your cheating from Katherine and/or trying to keep Catherine off of your back (or not—it's your choice) and your nights racing through hyper-realistic and violent dream puzzles, trying to escape manifestations of your subconcious fears about relationships, commitment, and self-doubt.

So how is a female gamer supposed to sympathize with this philanderer? Pretty easily, actually. I really didn't take offence towards the character of Vincent, cheater though he may be, and here's why: the poor guy spends most of the game trying to decide on the best way to fix his mistake (cheating on Katherine with Catherine) without hurting either of the women's feelings. Basically, he knows he's a total asshat for doing the wrong thing, but doesn't know how to make it right. Just like, you know, happens to everyone in, like, real life. 

As for how the women are depicted in the game, they're framed by Vincent's perception of them, so it's hard to get a good read on the artistic intent in that respect. Catherine may look like a dumb blonde, but she doesn't come off as particularly stupid - though she does get rather crazy and posessive; but hey, plenty of people have had crazy girlfriends or boyfriends. As for Katherine, Vincent seems to feel cuckolded by her, but his inner monologue reveals that he feels she has been nothing but good to and for him, and that she deserves someone who will treat her right, even if it's not him. The female characters might not be perfectly well-rounded, but they're not cardboard cutouts either - they have their own motivations in their respective relationships with Vincent, and they are both, in different ways, portrayed as strong and independent women.

 Overall, the game is a fun and challenging balance of RPG-style social interaction and action puzzle solving. If you like David Chronenberg, Salvador Dali, and anime as much as I do, you'll probably get a kick out of Catherine.

P.S. By the way, not all chicks have the same opinion. 

P.P.S. Stay tuned tomorrow for a special post of Catherine-themed drinks!

 

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Warp Is As Warped As You Want It To Be

A shorter version of this post was commissioned by the lovely ladies over at Sugar Gamers.

Independent game developer Trapdoor, along with EA Partners, released a new game to XBOX Live Arcade called Warp last week. They like to call it a “sci-fi stealth action puzzler.”  I think that’s a pretty accurate description, but you’ll get a lot better feeling of what this game is like if you imagine it as the love child of de Blob and Metal Gear Solid, with just enough ethically questionable experiments and bloody explosions to make it a cousin of both Portal and Half Life

The protagonist of Warp is a globularly cute orange alien named Zero, who is captured and experimented on by human scientist. However, Zero is able to regain his abilities and use them to escape – and, if you wish, exact vengeance upon his human captors.

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Image found at HIP VARIETY

Zero possesses 5 abilities, the principal of which is to ‘warp,’ or teleport, allowing him to pass obstacles like closed doors or hide inside various containers. By the way, in this game, humans are one type of those containers, and if you so choose, you have the ability to use the second power you acquire, ‘frag,’ to blow anything you warp inside of – including people – to smithereens. How you use these and the three other abilities you acquire during the game is up to you – you can warp into humans without harming them, and simply leave them slightly dazed while you forge onward in the labyrinthine laboratory; or you could, you know…blow people up just to watch their insides spray everywhere and their limbs fly off and bounce around the room. You know, for funsies.

Reviewers all seem to agree that the gameplay is solid aside from an overly difficult final boss battle. Most of them clock the play time in at around 5 hours, but there are collectibles and achievements that do give the game decent replay value. I played the game trial and ended up buying the game; personally, for my 800 Microsoft funny money dollars (that's $9.99 U.S. American), this game is well worth it.

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Fans Disfunctional Over 'Faux' World War Z Movie

A slightly shorter version of this post was commissioned by the lovely ladies over at Sugar Gamers. If you're a lady who loves your video games, and especially if you are in the Chicago area and can make it out to their events, I would highly suggest you check them out.

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Image from here

If you’re like me, you may not have thought about World War Z in a while; but like so many others, I loved the novel, and was pretty excited when shooting finally started in July of last year after a long and troubled pre-production.  While the most coverage the project has gotten in mainstream media was about the set raid by a Hungarian SWAT team, there has been a lot more fervor on the internet over the official plot synopsis, which is a measly one sentence long. The seemingly harmless blurb reads:  

The story revolves around United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Pitt), who traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself.

So the only obvious change here seems to be that the story is being told in the present tense instead of in flashback – why all the internet backlash? From full-on rants to more level-headed responses, the internet’s beef with the movie is that changing how the story is told pretty much sets it up to be like any other zombie movie. Sean O’Neal at The A.V. Club summed up what made the book so unique – and how a change to the story structure could sap that uniqueness right out of the film – when he said the book “…strove to be unlike all other zombie apocalypse tales—seeking instead to understand who these zombies were and why they were apocalypsing, and examining its after-effects on society…”

To a certain extent, I agree – I think a mockumentary-style film made up of vignettes about survivors would have been harder to pull off but much more interesting and unique. I think it’s worth noting here that while the UN employee is a fairly silent narrator in the novel, in the movie he seems to be the center of the action – and, by the way, played by the movie’s producer, none other than Brad Pitt. However, I think another element that made the book interesting won’t be lost in this format – the narrator is still jetting around the world, giving a global perspective to the zombie apocalypse that we rarely, if ever, see. You can find out for yourself whether the movie is a dead-on adaptation or just deadly generic – World War Z will be opening in theaters on December 21st. 

 

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