Iron Man preview from ComicCon

And you'd better hurry, as these have been getting yanked down pretty quickly.


I wonder if Stark becoming a total douche-bag in Civil War will hurt the movie?

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Kevin Smith + Heroes = win!

It was announced at ComicCon that Kevin Smith will be directing an episode of Heroes: Origins.

Check out the video here.


If you're a fan, be sure to check out the other videos.

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Illuminati talk about women

This won't make much sense unless you're a Marvel Comics fan. When I first saw some of these preview pages, I thought they were photoshopped parodies. Turns out they are the real deal... see here.


The last couple of panels seemed really appropriate if you read Civil War.

"Why not?"

Unsaid by Reed and Tony "Because that's what we do."

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Alphabet Evolution

Hopefully this works.

And yes, I'm a big nerd. If I ever bothered to get my Masters, I'd want to do it in Linguistics. Not that it would do me any good, but that's what would interest me.

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Dark Knight teaser trailer

The great thing about ComicCon is the booth babes that so many new things come out there.

One of those was the teaser trailer for the next Batman film, the Dark Knight. See it here.


At first I had trouble buying Heath Ledger as the Joker, but from what I've been reading folks have been please with what they've seen so far.

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Spock's Brain

This comic made me laugh, especially as a fan of both Heroes and Star Trek.

I've also read that Nimoy is going to make an appearance in the movie.


"YATAAAA!"
"Sulu!"

FTW :)

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Harry Potter 7.1

Harry Potter author went into greater detail regarding the epilogue to the Deathly Hallows in an interview. If you haven't finished, don't click the link after the jump. You've been warned, there be monsters spoilers here.


OK, since you're determined and/or curious, click.

If Wizards of the Coast had any brains, they'd make a Harry Potter RPG. Can you think of a better way to get new blood into the hobby?

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Quiz: How Indie are you?

You Are 50% Indie

You're pretty indie, but you don't make a fuss letting everyone know. You just do what you like. You enjoy many types of things - from trendy to bizarre.

How Indie Are You?

Got this one from Nicole. So I'm half "indie", half "normal".

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10,000 Hits

OK, so for some sites that's what they get in an hour. I think it's cool.

w00t me.

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Mood - relieved

Our number came back, and it was the closest to the pin I've seen out of all of the inventories I've worked. A lot of the credit for that goes to one of my team, Melissa, because she's the one that does the counts on the product week in and week out.


So now life gets back to normal, or at least as normal as it can at work until some jagg-off at corporate decides they have a money saving revolutionary idea (and 2/3 of these ideas are things we used to do 5 - 10 years ago until some other suit had a bright idea).

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Presidential Candidates on Issues

I found this chart and decided to throw up a link to it. I haven't had time to delve into it in detail, but given the complicated morass that the 08 elections look to be, I thought the info might be interesting if not useful to folks.


I haven't delved into the source site yet either, though it appears to be non-partisan based on the chart.

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Spider-cat, Spider-cat...

Yeah, 'Ogi isn't that talented. Of course, having no front claws wouldn't help him scale a wall, but scaling a couch is about his limit.

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The Picard Song

Sometimes I miss Star Trek. I wasn't a big fan of TNG until "Best of Both Worlds", where Picard gets captured by the Borg and Riker grows a pair to go with his beard. Because beard-less Riker was a wuss. And Worf rocked, too bad his kid sucked. I would say that Klingons traditionally feed whiny punk kids to a pack a feral targs, but we have Duras' punk kid as evidence to the contrary.

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The Last Legion

This movie might be interesting, or it might suck bad.

You can check out the trailer here.


I'll probably go see it because...
1) I'm a fan of the Arthur mythos, especially the Dark Ages take on the myth.
2) Aishwarya Rai.

Yeah, I'm shallow.

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Mood - stressed

Sunday is it. We take inventory piloting the new system without a safety net and going in with almost no margin of error. People in the store are pushing back or finding every excuse for things not to go to plan, reasons why so-and-so can't work work despite the fact that we need almost the entire roster to work that day or night for things to go well.

Oh, and we'll have "visitors" looking over our shoulders. Not peers that want to see the system in action (we'll have those but they don't stress me), but superiors who will be sure to point out anything we miss.


There are two people in the store who's annual review is affected by shrink. Mine and my boss'. Granted, it's a warm and fuzzy, but come time for annual reviews it will neither be warm nor fuzzy if we blow our inventory. And blame will come down squarely on us and only us.

Plus, I have my reputation at stake. I've never missed the mark on an inventory, even after we found out that a warehouse supervisor had been ripping us off blind for huge sums. I brought it in under budget, had my boss' boss go through my work looking for mistakes or cheating, and came through it fine. When it comes to inventory, I am the guru and I'm rather proud of that. Having someone refer to me as the "Godfather of Inventory" made me smile. And usually I can call it within a fairly narrow span.

This time feels different. I've seen too many things over the past two years at a dozen or so inventories to be comfortable with our narrow margin. The things we've counted I know we're solid on. But there are just too many variables and all it will take is one big surprise to throw us off track, one person deciding to bend the rules because they are inconvenient or one shipment we get billed for in a category we don't count.

Most of the time I can maintain my calm demeanor, probably because I go into autopilot. But I keep worrying that I've missed stuff, and go from being into my groove to fretting. It doesn't help that my boss has been denied most of his prep time for this. "That's what Oz is for." Except normally Oz would have a manager working alongside him so that we could do scrub counts and prep work and the new system condenses two and a half weeks worth of work into one. Add to that the fact that my team is short staffed (especially with me off the grid) and there are times I feel like this whole mess is balancing on my shoulders.

While I usually try to avoid it, I know cracks have appeared in my calm facade. I've been quicker to irritate, and today I almost blew a gasket when people kept pestering me. I think when I bared my fangs they got the message, and fortunately the most pestery one doesn't work with me anymore until after inventory is over.

I think having a heart attack would be less stressful than the next few days.

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Wal-Mart to sell Jesus

Wal-Mart is adding religious toys and action figures to over 400 stores. What Would Jesus Buy?

The actual article is here.

As much as I like to poke sticks at Wal-Mart and Fundies, this is nothing benevolent or malign. Wal-Mart will sell these toys at their top Bible selling stores because they expect to make money. Since it's a niche market with no real competition, this stuff will probably have a much better profit margin than conventional toys, where they have to go head to head with the likes of Target and Toys R Us.

And if Baby Jesus doesn't make any revenue for the Evil Empire, he'll be cleaned off the shelf for the next hot toy... like Hell Kitty!

I am kind of curious how Christians feel about toys based on their religious figures being sold. I know that if I saw a Gofannon's Smithy playset I would probably buy it in a heart-beat and claim it was for my cousin's nephew, but I'm pretty thick-skinned when it comes to my faith. I know some folks are more sensitive and might even consider it sacrilegious (though I doubt any of those folks are among my readers).

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Vital stats and Hell(o) Kitty

This is a two-for-one post... more after the jump.

I found the above pic at usemycomputer.com. My friend Lisa found a truly odd blog that I felt compelled to share...

Hello Kitty Hell.

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Movie review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Turning the 800 page behemoth that is J.K. Rowling's fifth Potter book into a non-Peter Jackson movie had to be a daunting task. How much can you cut out and still have a story that doesn't require an intermission? Well it turns out quite a bit.

Before you think I'm a book fan grousing because some obscure subplot was left out, Phoenix is in my opinion the best of the Potter movies so far. Probably just like the books it has taken on a darker tone than the previous Potter tales.


It probably helped that it has been quite a while since I've read the book, and I wasn't about to read it again. Not that I didn't like the book, but it was looong. The challenge for director David Yates was to distill it down without cutting too much. I think that he successfully walked that tightrope. Omissions I noted were because I had read the book, not because it left a big plot hole.

While the movie was enjoyable, it wasn't perfect. In a couple of places the effects didn't live up to the usual standard for Potter movies, and it wouldn't have hurt to have an extra 15 minutes to fully set up or tie up certain things.

As I mentioned, the story is darker, making this movie more of an Empire Strikes Back (though not literally, unlike Pirates 2)... a well crafted story but not very cheerful.

I also miss John William's score. I don't know why he stopped working on Potter movies, but it's a shame. Nothing against the current composer, he's just no John Williams and this is the kind of movie Williams would have done right.

Another PG13 movie full of kids. At least one child will probably be having nightmares from what I saw. I can understand thinking "oh, it's Harry Potter, it's for kids." But it's one thing to read it and another to see it on the screen. But I'll save the rest of my PG13 rant for when I get around to reviewing the last Die Hard movie.

Overall, 4.5 out of 5 wizarding flying monkeys.

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Not all of the Transformers got the call...

How many kids know what the hell a tape deck is nowadays?

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I think he needs a bigger boat...

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Transformers/Burger King commercial

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Awesome license plate

Check it out.

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How Costco became the Anti-Wal-Mart

I have to admit, I've never shopped at Costco. Being a lone wolf bachelor means that buying in bulk isn't really necessary or in many cases even prudent. But I found this article interesting.


Sad note... the average Costco employee makes more than the average supervisor where I work.

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Movie review: Transformers

A movie based on a cartoon about toys from the 80's. By all rights, Trasformers the Movie should suck, suck bad. Then again, so should have a movie based on a Disney world ride. But like Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers turned out to be a frikkin' awesome movie.


The biggest challenge of a movie like this is to make you forget that you are watching a bunch of CGI toons. And between great action pieces and superb special effects, this is accomplished. You don't sit there thinking that it's stupid for a Camaro and a semi-truck to turn into giant robots. You're a kid again, and this is the coolest thing you've ever seen.

There are lots of nice touches that both fans of the original Transformers and modern movie fans would appreciate. An example of the former is the incorporation of the original sound effect into the transformation sequence. An example of the latter is that a couple of Megatron's lines will be an inside joke to those who realize it is Hugo Weaving voicing him.

The flesh and blood actors do a good job as well. So in addition to great action, awesome effects, and fan service, we have this...


In my book that makes for the best movie of the summer.

For more Transformer the Movie goodness, look here.

Rating: 5 of 5 robots-that-transform-into-flying-monkeys.

On a side note... this movie is PG-13. While folks may remember the toys and the cartoon, I saw multiple small children being led out crying after a soldier got skewered by a Decepticon. PG-13 mom and dad.

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