Holy shit. It has been a minute. Sorry about that - a long-term contract I was on ended a few weeks ago and for the first time in like 6 years I've had something of a summer vacation. The only things I've been writing for the past two and a half weeks has been some small work to improve my book with a friend and a sci-fi novel I've been kicking around in my head for a decade.
It's been fanfuckingtastic, but now it's time to get back to the grind and write everyday again. Get ready for comic deep dives, video game reviews, movie thoughts, and features because dammit I miss writing stuff.
Anyways - here's some cool shit I've seen since the last time I told you about the cool shit I've seen. A lot of these are going to be tweets because it's the only social media I've been using lately, so let's get to it.
Steve Ditko's Death
Steve Ditko helped design the Silver Age of comics, the second coming of the medium's popularity in the late 50's and early 60's. He's credited with co-creating Spider-Man with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (who did some pencilling during the character's concept phase and did the cover for the character's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy no. 1)5, but Steve Ditko was the man who wowed us - he's the dude who showed us what a goddamned Spider-Man looks like. He spawned one of the most iconic fictional characters of both the 20th and 21st century.
Here are some character pinups he did for Spider-Man's rogue gallery.
He passed away on June 29th and there's no two ways about it - the dude's an absolute fucking legend. Like, look at this shit.
Holy shit, right? For 1966, hell, for now - shit's incredible. You can tell it's incredible because they basically ripped these pages for Spider-Man: Homecoming. Rest well, Steve. Thanks for the stories.
Old Earth Must Have Sucked
Here's a photo from The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, showing 250 million year old fossils.
These are the remains of some of the Earth's earliest owners and holy fuck I can't believe that's what life had to look like to survive here 250 million years ago, jfc.
It's insane that we're on the same planet that sustained those things. Certifiably insane. The dude who posted the photos rightly pointed out how Giger-esque they were, and then I got to thinking about how radical HR Giger was.
HR Giger was a Swiss painter who's best known for the art direction he provided for Fox's Alien series. The dude fuses biology and mechanics (y'know, biomechanical) in an incredible way. Look at the shit below and try to not feel unsettled or uncomfortable.
Anyways. Look at what evolution can do over 250 million and once you're done, try to pick your jaw up off the floor. The fact that these organisms succeeded on this planet looking like that and we succeed on this planet looking like us - it's fucking insane. And when you compare that shit to Giger, you could almost say Earth wasn't Earth 250 million years ago, but that Giger's vision was simultaneously ahead of its time and firmly rooted in the past.
Jock rules, I drools
Jock is an extremely talented and prolific artist in the comic book industry. Below he's providing a look at a variant cover he's done for Batman: Year One, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's landmark story that you should absolutely read.
He doesn't just share his cover, but he shares some light behind the scenes work to show the process he went through to create it. Follow the link to see the process, and some contemporaries being all supportive and cute.
Mike Judge's 116 second Brilliance
So, there's not a lot for me to say on this one. I love Mike Judge. Beavis and Butthead was genius. Daria was somehow better. Office Space is an incredible relic that preserves pre 9/11 America forever. Idiocracy became prophetic. And King of the Hill was the best piece of fiction to depict daily life in South since Faulkner.
And here's one second from the first 116 episodes merged together in a supercut. As soon as I saw this I shopped for the series on amazon because I've been having an obsession with late 90's animation recently, and dammit why isn't there an incredibly cheap bundle with all the episodes yet? If I can get all of Coach or Wings for $30, why can't I get King of the Hill?
RIP EmuParadise 2000 - 2018
I can go on a pretty long piece about this so I'm just going to be upfront about it here and then get into why it's important below - A website renowned for its collection of game ROMS shut down after 18 years. It was a good site and provided a valuable service and I'm bummed about it. You'll see why I'm so bummed below, but the site left a heartfelt goodbye on its page, and here's a more... professional breakdown, if you read my blog but hate my writing (I only come here for the pictures too)
Ok, so, time for the mini-essay.
Oh man, where to start? Games emulation is kind of a taboo subject in the hobby. Think of it like the equivalent of what Napster did to music in the late 90's; it's providing digital versions to be shared freely and widely with ease. A problem that arises more with games than music, is that generally the rights and licensing is wayyyy more complicated than it is in the music industry, and because of that, a lot of games that are beloved are lost to legal limbo and that fucking sucks.
Sometimes it's dumber than that - PlayStation 1's, 2's, and 3's can all play original PlayStation games, simple, right? But the only thing you can buy in a big box store now is a PlayStation 4 - so if you want to play an old game like Legacy of Cain or Monster Rancher, or whatever - you'll have to track down an old system secondhand and then find the game.
Some games are digitally re-released but again, because of rights management, not all games are. That means all the copies of this game in the world are the only copies of the games in the world.
That's why sites like EmuParadise were such a big deal. I can see why they'd annoy publishers but it's important for the sake of games preservation that these games are archived and maintained. Also, I happen to have the old Sega Dreamcast that lets you play burned ROMs so yes, the story of EmuParadise finally shutting down is a heartbreaker.
This site kept old games alive and available and now it's just gone. The reason people are upset about this site removing its ROM selection is because this site was reliable, trustworthy, and safe in a way that other sites aren't. It's cool that other sites let you download Wrecking Crew but it's not cool that you'll also get
The Orlando Magic Throwback Jersey
For the 30th anniversary of the franchise, the Orlando Magic are bringing back the original jerseys they had from when they first started and rocked the fuck out of the NBA. I didn't really give a shit about Basketball when I was young, mostly because none of the games had Optimus Prime or Han Solo, and those were my two biggest interests then.
But look at this shit. This shit is coming back and that's rad as hell.
I was too young to follow basketball back then, but the older I get the more obscure rabbit holes I fall down, and there's an insanely good documentary covering the Magic from ESPN's 30 For 30 series called This Magic Moment and I can't recommend it enough. Here's a trailer for it.
Bill Sienkiewicz Isn't Human
Steve Ditko wasn't the only comic related person who left us since I last wrote. Margot Kidder, famous for her portrayal of Lois Lane in the 1978 Superman movie also passed away. It was sad in its own right, but once details of her passing surfaced we learned it was a suicide and that the way people talk, or rather don't talk, about Mental Health in this country just got another high profile example.
To commerate her, one of my favorite comic book artists, Bill Sienkiewicz, drew this beautiful portrait of her and shared it on Twitter with some nice words.
She was so goddamn good in Superman. Below is one of my favorite scenes, not just from the movie, or a superhero movie, but any movie.
It's just so damn charming and earnest.
Australia's Drought is Regrettably Beautiful
Drought is terrible, I'd never pretend it wasn't. But The Guardian provided aerial images of the current drought Australia is facing in, I believe, New South Wales, a state on the eastern coast of the country, and the photos are hauntingly gorgeous. The measurable death and decay is horrifying but visually fascinating.
You can find the full set of pictures here, at the Guardian's website.
Anything that can Explode, Probably Will
A man at an electronics store in China was checking to make sure his phone's battery was real. And then it exploded. Maybe technology was a mistake.
*remembers what comment sections looks like and realizes they're now the public square*
Technology was definitely a mistake. We peaked with indoor plumbing.
AR is the Fucking Future
To my best recollection, Microsoft debuted its augmented reality initiative, Hololens at E3, but the applications beyond gaming were what was genuinely exciting about the product. Our world exists on well-defined properties and rules; it's a physical world. AR takes those rules and throws them out the window. Here's some coverage on the Tour de France by a Dutch channel that doesn't just throw those rules out the window, it dropkicks them.
We can now edit the way we perceive our physical world and if you don't think that's bonkers, maybe you'll find the next thing bonkers.
Rogue Planet
The numbers on this are a bit staggering and, well, jaw dropping. Out there, is a planet roaming the universe without a star, and it's roughly 13 times the size of Jupiter, which as we know is fucking enormous. That's weird, because planets themselves are collections of gases, dust, and other space stuffs that coalesce because of gravity wells created by the largest nearby celestial bodies, and to my understanding 99% of the time, that's a fucking star.
So where did this guy come from? The only reasons scientists were able to detect it was because of a weird signal emitting from the planet's magnetic fields, strikingly similar to Earth's. Because of its size, there's contention about calling it a planet, so they want to call it a brown dwarf, or a failed star. But because of the signals, they want to call it a planet.
I don't entirely understand this stuff, I'm not an astronomer or a physicist, but if you don't think this shit is awesome, then I don't know what to tell you, because this shit is AWESOME. Here's a bigger breakdown on the story from CNN
Thanks for reading, champions. See ya soon <3