nerdbutts

Well, maybe it’s not the end of the world, but it certainly seems that way, judging by the reaction of some people. If you’re not in the know, allow me to give you some backstory: Michael Bay is producing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (if you don’t know who either of those two entities are, might I suggest that you’re reading the wrong blog?). It was revealed by Bay the other day that the origin of the Turtles is going to be changed; they are now aliens, and no longer will they be mutated turtles (from earth; that’s now a necessary qualifier).

Fan reaction has been decidedly negative, which is understandable. The Turtles have, improbably, mutated from their beginnings as a superhero spoof to a fairly recognizable tale of American pop mythology. Their origin tale is considered sacred to fans; messing with it is sacrilege in the same way that making Batman a demon or Spider-Man a pig would be. What makes the Turtles different than either of those characters is that they’re second-tier characters. Batman and Spider-Man have decades and decades of continuity and are rooted much deeper in our cultural mythology than the Turtles (it also doesn’t hurt that both of them have the backing of ultra-powerful media empires that need to keep the franchise viable). The Turtles are a creation of the late 80s, and don’t have the same backing to keep them afloat no matter what. Thus, the interest of Michael Bay is a big win for the owners of the characters.

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Splitsider’s got a pretty comprehensive article about the origins of the 90s Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Pete and Pete was always one of my favorites, and it’s indicative of a time in Nick’s history where anything was possible, and being the anti-Disney was the order of the day. Though the show flew under the radar (especially compared to shows like Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy), it is one of the most fondly remembered, as it was a progenitor of many of the indie subcultures that its viewers became a part of as they grew older. Apart from the lack of any interviews with Toby Huss, the article is a a good look at what exactly formed that indefinable “it” that Pete and Pete captured so well.

So, things have been pretty quiet around here on nerdbutts for a bit. I took a little beginning-of-year breather to work on my health. Now that I’ve given up on that idea, I can get back to work on the site.

Really, though, I’ve been focusing my efforts on a project that I’m working on with a few friends. It’s called Unbroken Skies, and our aim is to make an animated series out of it. We’re plotting and scheming and selling ourselves to get the project off the ground, and it’s taken up a good chunk of my time.

But writing the post yesterday about Senator Blunt made me realize how much I enjoy doing this type of thing. I’ll be back here regularly, trying post regular updates. In the meantime, why not check out Unbroken Skies. Eventually the site unbrokenskies.com will be up and running, but for now the blogspot site is the place to go.

Dear Senator Blunt,

Recently I received an email from a political organization concerning the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011 that you introduced as an amendment to a Surface Transportation bill. I agreed to send a form letter in my name condemning the act as unreasonable and an attack on women. In return, I received this morning a form letter from you, nicely explaining that golly gee it sure is important that the federal government not interfere with a doctor’s conscience.

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If you didn’t grow up with Atari boxes, instruction booklets and cartridges strewn about your living room, this may not affect you the way it did me, but I was just the right age for the sometimes incredibly conceptual artwork to make an indelible impression upon my mind, so Mighty God King’s reworking of old Atari boxes so that they’re a little more honest touched some magic nostalgia spot in my brain.

The art was always so incredibly detailed and conceptual, which I suppose was necessary for us to understand what the blocks and dots on the screen were supposed to be. But how exciting those dots and blocks were! No longer, of course. Anytime I revisit them, I get the gnawing feeling that I’ve been had. On the other hand, though, the technological restrictions of the time made for some pretty amazing abstract representation. The pixel images were abstract enough that my mind made up stories for them instead of accepting them as they were. For example, here’s a screen shot from Imagic’s Cosmic Ark:

See, that’s a meteor (?) coming toward a ship. You’re supposed to blow it out of the sky. They come from up, down, left and right, and you push the proper direction on the joysick to shoot a laser (?) toward it and destroy it. But what look again at that meteor; what is that?

I always thought they were maybe space shrimp, but as an adult I think they look more like fetuses. As you can see, the abstraction makes it easy to come up with your own story about a race of abortion protestors throwing dead fetuses at this cosmic ark of liberals that’s flying through space.

Anyway.

So here’s the second part of the game, where you’re rescuing liberals. Aliens. I meant aliens.

See, you fly the little ship (?) out of the big ship and use a beam (?) to pull up two of each alien (?). Meanwhile, there’s a laser cannon (?) on each side of the screen, moving up and down and shooting lasers (?) at you. It’s all very definite. I always thought these aliens were corkscrews with legs. Why not?

But here’s the box art for the game:

Infinitely more concrete and less fun, but it sold the hell out of that game for me. Once the games were home, though, the box art meant next to nothing. The game took on its own life in my mind, sometimes good, and as Mighty God King’s gallery reminds, sometimes bad.

Mighty God King (via BoingBoing)

I haven’t read Steig Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, nor have I seen the recently released American film adaptation. I do work at a bookstore, and I do know many people who have read the book and/or seen the Swedish films, and so I am familiar enough with the character of Lisbeth Salander and her background that I could understand fully the article “We Are All Lisbeth Salander”, written by Katie Roiphe and published by Slate a couple of days ago. 

It’s a clumsy article that appeared to me at first to be trying to reconcile the state of female characters in popular media with the state of women in the real world. Real analyses of this type on sites not explicitly labelled as feminist are pretty rare, and so I was excited at the prospect of an article that connected the dots between women and their fictional counterparts. Unfortunately the article failed to really explicitly say anything except that we like “damaged” female heroines these days. Its title claims that we are all Lisbeth Salander, but its word choice and tone said something much different.

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Remember how I was gonna write up a list of holiday movies to watch, but instead posted a list of (mostly) non-holiday related films to watch? Probably not, but I did. Since then, I intended to write up an actual list of actual holiday films that are worth your time, but io9’s article on the best unsung animated holiday specials of all time is a much better list than anything I could have come up with. Also, I’m busy working on a much different article, so this will have to do.

But not only is their list fantastic, but articles like this are guaranteed to attract a lot of commenters’ own suggestions, and that’s the case here. If none of the animated specials on io9’s list floats your boat, check the comments and see what everybody else thinks.

So. We’ve got all these pink products whose sale benefits the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research and prevention. Let’s ignore for the moment that you could just give money to the foundation instead. It’s a good idea, right? You get a hideously colored product, and some (very, very small) amount of money has gone to a good cause. There’s pink everything anymore, including a pink-covered “Here’s Hope Breast Cancer Bible,” $1 from the sale of which goes to the Komen Foundation. But it turns out that one of the ways in which Komen helps prevent breast cancer is by giving money to Planned Parenthood, which performs mammograms and breast exams.

DISASTER BOMB!

So of course Christian right-wingers are all up in arms about it, because $1 from the sale of each bible could conceivably go to an organization that performs abortions!!! Except that it doesn’t, and the money PP receives from Komen is used exclusively for breast cancer screening and prevention.

LifeWay Christian Stores is pulling the pink bible from its shelves, claiming that “it is not in keeping with LifeWay’s core values to have even an indirect relationship with Planned Parenthood.”

manicchill:

OWS Invests In Unmanned Surveillance Drone Dubbed The ‘Occucopter’

For years we’ve seen images of the military’s unmanned aerial vehicles aiding soldiers in combat zones, and their evolution from surveillance tools to the heavily weaponized Predator drones. Now, the Guardian reports, Occupy Wall Street livestreamer Tim Pool hopes to use that technology as an additional set of eyes on the police department.

Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”. It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds.

The Occucopter comes in response to police departments, across the country, stepping up efforts to prevent their actions from being recorded. Some have started covering up their names and badge numbers. Others attempt to stand in the way of recording devices, or declare “frozen zones” that are off limits to even the most credentialed reporters. Tim hopes that the Occucopter will allow protesters to monitor the police, and record any cases of brutality that may have otherwise remained undocumented.

In addition to modifying the Parrot’s software for internet livestreaming, Pool is also currently working on modifying the software for multiple controllers. He even hopes to add 3G functionality, so that even protesters and supporters outside of New York could aid in the monitoring process. When asked about his plans by the Guardian, he explained:

We are trying to get a stable live feed so you can have 50 people controlling it in series. If the cops see you controlling it from a computer they can shut you down, but then control could automatically switch to someone else.

Now you, much like myself, might find yourself wondering, “Isn’t he concerned that some officer(s) will just shoot it down?”

No…They can’t just fire a weapon in the air because it could seriously hurt someone. They would have no excuse because the occucopter is strictly not illegal. Their only recourse would be to make it illegal, but it is only a toy

So it would appear that we finally have an answer to a twenty five year old question. Tim Pool is watching the watchmen.

And doing a damn good job of it.

(images courtesy of Time/iPhoneZA/GeekAlerts)

(via npr)

Source:

We haven’t talked much about SOPA here. Honestly, I think I’ve been avoiding it. What a hideous, terrible monster of a corporate-forced legislation. It’s difficult to wrap my head around it sometimes. There’s been a fair amount of pushback from non-corporate entities, but that guarantees nothing. It’s terribly sad that the interests of these behemoths is more important than the will of the people to not be censored. That seems pretty obviously in direct opposition to what this country is supposed to be.

And that obvious aspect of it is probably what pushes me away from talking about it. I consider myself fairly lucky to have been born in this country, and despite all my political anger and rhetoric, I’m proud to live in a country where I can voice these things without fear of retribution or death.

But there are things that occur, occasionally, that shake my belief in this system, that make me feel that all our talking, all our anger and argument, all our pushing and prodding and shaping of policy means absolutely nothing, because the very core of the thing is rotten, and that rot is creeping ever outward, showing itself here and there on the very ground we stand on. I am quick to avoid this type of despondency, because it leads to inaction, and I don’t want to find myself on the losing end of a battle, wishing I had done more.

The pressure from these corporations, the willful ignorance on the part of politicians, the relative deafness to the pleas of the people, the very discarding of the idea that we should not be censored; these are all combining to give me that sinking feeling. Lawyers have weighed in on the bill, explaining both its unconstitutionality and the effect it could have on everyday U.S. citizens. The proponents of the bill have resorted to straight-up lying to make their argument. There’s no real reason for us to be debating this thing except that it’s what the corporations want. It will not stop piracy; it will censor our people.

As you can tell by my links, boingboing.net has been one of my biggest sources of information about this legislation. But NPR has done a good job of covering it as well, and Lifehacker has a very comprehensive article on what SOPA is, what it would do, and what you can do to make our collective voice a little bit louder.

Minor victories have been won, but the fight is not over yet. I urge all of you who read this to take action, or at the very least educate yourself on what this bill is about, because if it passes, it will affect you.