Posts Tagged ‘sites to know’

First I must send out a HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to my wonderful geek husband of two years now. I love him more each day, and that’s not just me saying that. Geeks in love stay in love.

You make every day better.

I dabbled in amateur film making when I was in college. Of course then I had resources that I no longer have outside the classroom. I was spending a semester in England where I took a class that allowed me and my teammates to create two short films. The experience really showed me how much work goes in to even just a minute’s worth of screen time.

Difficulty for anyone can change depending on a number of factors—experience, cooperation among participants, equipment, and time.

Time will always be the first one that gets you. For the 3-5 minute films I made for my class in England we were given a week to film and two to edit. You would think that would be more than enough for such a short movie.

But then remember you have to have an idea, actors, locations, props, and equipment to get everything done.
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Since 2004 friends and I had attended Anime Detour in Bloomington, MN. It was small but still fun, and conveniently located. However, the awful girl that ran the Masquerade for cosplay competition ruined it for us and we decided to hit Chicago this year instead.

Rising far earlier than I would normally consider civil, six of us (with one other waiting for us in Chicago) left Minneapolis and arrived for the three day weekend with plenty of time to get into our costumes and start a new Con experience for the first time in years.

To compare, Anime Detour has just over 3000 attendees. Anime Central had around 17000.

For me the highlight of any Con is cosplaying. Halloween is my favorite holiday for a reason. I love dressing up.

This year I was an original design of Emeralda from the classic video game Xenogears, and one of the more seldom seen costumes for Sheryl Nome from the anime Macross Frontier.

We had a whole Macross Frontier Group the second day, which is always the most fun, and were stopped frequently for photos.
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They do, by the way. Suck. A lot. There are exceptions, and I will mention those as well, but for the most part the cartoons that kids watch today are just plain awful.

Cartoons of the 80s and 90s, when I was growing up, and…okay when I was a teenager who still watched cartoons (I still watch them now) that was the golden age. Maybe I’m biased. I’m sure older generations would say that Looney Toons, Tom & Jerry, etc., was the golden age, but I would come back with the same point I am going to make today and say nay.
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I think most people underestimate just how many films in existence have been based off of comics. The list is rather extensive, even just for the English language ones.

I am not talking about the good ones either. This blog is for the ones that sucked. The ones that were either all around bad or just didn’t capture their parent source correctly.

This is for the ones that FAILED.

If I tried to discuss all of them, or went into TV movies, God forbid, we’d be here all day (and I really don’t want to review the Hoff as Nick Fury). So here is my short list.
 
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Forgive me if my heart is not quite in this blog entry as I had already completed it to my great satisfaction last week only to have it wiped when a virus attacked my computer at work. But as one of my faithful readers said,

This just goes to show that these new-fangled transistors are unreliable. We need to learn about steam technology as quickly as possible!

And so I return.
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Welcome to the gateway to strange and wonderful new places! These are the sites I go to most regularly to keep up to date on geek topics. I have mentioned all of them at some point in the blog entries and doubt I could survive without each and every one.

Be sure and check them out!

Anime DataBase

– Sort a like a Wikipedia for anime, a database of information users can edit and add to. Great anime resource!

AnimeNfo

– Search for anime titled, reviews, rankings, even with the occasional poll thrown in too.

CtrlAltDel

– One of the web comics I frequent, a classic and highly popular one mostly featuring its geek main characters in their natural environments.

DarkHorse Comics

– The official site for one of my favorite comic publishers, known best for titles like Buffy and Hellboy.

DC Comics

– The official site for DC Comics, home of Batman, Green Lantern, and so much more.

Digg

– A site for people to discover and post content from anywhere on the web, like pictures, articles, and video.

Facebook

– I think everyone knows the social media site Facebook by now and probably has an account. Spend too much time on it and you’re wasting hours away, but it can be a great place to network, stay connected with friends, and plan events.

FanFiction.net

– My fanfiction site of choice for almost 10 years now (that makes me feel old) where anyone can post and read fanfiction from every conceivable category, as well as give and receive feedback.

G4 TV

– The official site for the G4 network, home of X-Play and one of my favorite news podcasts, “The MMO Report”, all about the many MMOs active today.

Hulu

– If you don’t know about this amazing site for watching new and classic television episodes for free with minimal web commercials, you are missing OUT. Missed a new premier? No problem. Look for it on Hulu.

IGN

– One of the best multimedia news and reviews website out there, focusing mainly on video games.

IMDB

– Arguably the site I use most often, ideal for searching information on movies old and new, actors, directors, you name it. The Internet Movie DataBase.

Kotaku

– The gamer’s guide. No, really. THE guide. For all platforms, news, reviews, everything you want to know.

Least I Could Do

– Another webcomic, one my husband introduced me to, this one a little dirtier, following some older geek characters, one in particular with quite the libido.

LiveJournal

– This is one of those sites I am sure you all already know well, a gathering spot for all walks of life, for blogging and like-minded communities, sharing information (like fanfiction) and much more.

Marvel Comics

– The official site for Marvel comics. Find out what is going on in the universe, purchase or read excerpts from the newest issues, and more!

Penny Arcade

– Probably the most successful and well-known webcomic of all time, following the misadventures of Gabriel and Tycho in their geek filled world with commentary on everything from the newest MMO to D&D.

That Guy With The Glasses

– A nicely varied site best known for the Nostalgia Critic podcast about movies, television, etc. of the past. As he puts it “I remember it so you don’t have to.”

The Escapist

– Another video gaming site for the active gamer. I frequent the site mostly for the sarcastic podcast game reviews of Zero Punctuation.

Twitter

– Not everyone tweets, and if you don’t, and don’t even know what tweeting IS, check out Twitter, the up and coming social media site for communicating 140 characters at a time. There are many interesting people to follow, including me, MissSuperCube.

Wikipedia

– The online dictionary written for and by all who might frequent the site. Some entries have been locked, no longer allowing additions to keep people from offending one another, and all information should be taken with a grain of salt, but it can be a great quick resource.

The first question, of course, is what is WoW? With over 11 million players worldwide, most people already know that answer, at least enough to say that it is an online video game also known as World of Warcraft.

More specifically, WoW is an MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game. This means that not only are you playing online as your own character, but you are playing with everyone else’s character too, almost like an interactive chat room with depictions of yourself that can go off and kill things after you’ve had that meaningful conversation.

Created by Blizzard Entertainment, WoW was not a new idea in scope or setting, following the Warcraft series of games that first began in 1994 with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

Going the MMO route, however, was new as the previous Warcraft games were all RTS format or real time strategy.
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If you don’t know what fanfiction is…

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Just kidding. I have to explain the definition of fanfiction to a lot of people whenever I discuss my hobbies, so I know that it is not quite the household name that I often think it is.

Fanfiction is really for a specific group of people, and while some others outside the practice of writing it know of its existence, many still do not.

Fanfiction is stories about characters or settings written by fans of an already existing fictional work, rather than by the true creator.

This can be of a book, movie, TV series, anything, really, as long as it is written by a fan, not the author, and normally would never be published as it would not have the permission or backing of the original work.

The usual example I give is this. Say you like Harry Potter. You decide you want to write a story for fun, or maybe for some friends to read, involving Harry’s parents when they were younger, because the actual books don’t cover much of that. The story you write would be fanfiction. Read the rest of this entry »

The Movie

It all began in 1994 when James Spader was still hot and especially cute playing a good boy geek for the first time in his life, and Kurt Russell was still one of the go-to men for action flicks (other than being absolutely amazing in Tarantino’s Death Proof not too long ago). It was the first look we had at the universe of possibilities that would be Stargate. The movie was phenomenal, a unique sci fi story with enough possibilities to create over a decade of follow-ups.
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Halloween is my favorite holiday. You can dress up as whatever you want, become something or someone else, and look completely different than how you look otherwise. It is a very liberating holiday, more so sometimes for adults than for the kids trick-or-treating. It’s why we have costume parties all year long, because we don’t want to have to wait for a holiday to get dressed up.

In college it was tradition that the students trick-or-treated on the street that led down the hill from our campus toward town, and we did so proudly. These days, when I want to dress up, and there isn’t anything planned for Halloween and no costume parties in the works, I have cosplay to get me through the year.

Cosplay is short for ‘costume roleplay’ and is much more than just slipping into a character’s literal shoes but becoming that character to the best of your ability. You are transforming yourself into someone else, usually for performance or competition, and there is a lot of work that can go into every detail of your persona.
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