Realistic Pok?mon ReVamp

 

Artist Gavin Mackey created this wicked series of fan art revamping what various Pok?mon might look like if they were more realistic! They look awesome and actually quite terrifying! Here are our favs and you can see his ongoing gallery here...









































Artist: Gavin Mackey - (Source)

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July 22 2014

Marvel Announces All-New Captain America

 

On the heels of the female Thor announcement Marvel just revealed another big change in their upcoming comics! Sam Wilson aka Falcon will assume his new role as Captain America n ALL-NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA #1 by Rick Remender and Stuart Immonen.

Read comments from Rick Remender and Tom Brevoort on Marvel.com here.

And here is the All-New Captain America #1 cover by Stuart Immonen which shows Sam?s specially designed suit, incorporating the wings of the Falcon persona while still bearing the unmistakable stars and stripes of the Captain America role...



And this image from Entertainment Weekly shows Marvel's 'Avengers NOW!' new line up...


Source: Marvel.com

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July 16 2014

Two picnic baskets packed with 67 live giant African snails were seized by federal authorities at Los Angeles International Airport, authorities said Monday.

The snails, which weighed a total of more than 35 pounds and reportedly were intended for human consumption, was apparently the largest seizure at LAX of the mollusks, which are sometimes fried and served as a snack.

The snails were discovered July 1 in two picnic baskets, which weighed more than 35 pounds, said Lee Harty of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The snails arrived from Lagos, Nigeria, and were headed to San Dimas, she said.

In the past, federal inspectors have discovered one or two of the large snails hidden in luggage, but this marked "the first time this pest has been encountered in such large quantity and as a consumption entry" in Los Angeles, said Todd C. Owen, director of field operations for the customs agency.

Giant African snails, also known as land snails, can live as long as 10 years and grow up to eight inches long. The snails can carry parasites harmful to humans.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture deems the large snails as a damaging species, consuming more than 500 types of plants, according to federal authorities.

But when the snails can't find fruits and vegetables to eat, they will "eat paint and stucco off of houses," the customs agency said in a statement.

The incident remains under investigation.

For breaking news in Los Angeles and California, follow @VeronicaRochaLA. She can be reached at veronica.rocha@latimes.com.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

In an announcement made on ABC's The View this morning and confirmed to The Verge, Thor, Marvel's God of Thunder, will henceforth be a woman in the comics. The news is a major shift in Marvel's continuity, since Thor is one of the oldest superheroes in the Marvel universe. Details are forthcoming.

Developing...

Internet access is free of government taxes—and it now looks like it might stay that way for a long time.

The House passed a bill on voice vote Tuesday that would for the first time make permanent a ban on federal, state, and local taxation of Internet access. The measure now heads to the Senate, where a similar bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden has racked up more than 50 cosponsors.

The Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act is an attempt by Congress to definitively bar government from taxing users for Internet access or levying discriminatory Internet-specific taxes on things like email or bandwidth. It is separate from a controversial effort brewing in Washington to create a tax on Internet sales, which has drawn sizable opposition from online retailers like eBay.

In a historically unproductive Congress, the bill represents one of the only pieces of substantive legislation that stands a chance of landing on the president's desk and signed into law this year.

A ban on taxing Internet access has been in place since President Clinton signed a bill into law in 1998, enacted in part to protect the growth of the then-nascent technology. The measure has been renewed three times, most recently in 2007, and is set to expire Nov. 1.

But the legislation endorsed by the House on Tuesday would do more than simply make that tax ban permanent. It also would also end taxes in seven states—Hawaii, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin—that were already on the books before the 1998 law and allowed to continue.

"This legislation prevents a surprise tax hike on Americans' critical services this fall," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the bill's chief sponsor. "It also maintains unfettered access to one of the most unique gateways to knowledge and engine of self-improvement in all of human history."

Although backed by a wide swath of Internet freedom and antitax coalitions, the bill is not without its detractors. Last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report harshly indicting the "harmful" legislation, which it calculated would cost states up to $7 billion in potential annual revenue. The seven states that currently have taxes on Internet access would collectively lose an estimated $500 million in annual revenue, the report added.

Some Democrats have urged for an adoption of another temporary extension of the tax moratorium. During debate last month in the Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, the panel's top Democrat, said the Internet no longer needs tax protections to grow, as it is "now a prosperous sector of the global economy."

"Studies show that there is no difference in the rates of household Internet access between states that tax Internet access and those states that do not tax Internet access," Conyers added. "In other words, there is no evidence that making [this bill] permanent will encourage people who do not currently subscribed to high-speed Internet access services to begin doing so."

Other Democrats have argued that a permanent tax moratorium infringes on states' rights. Yet despite a number of lawmakers rising to the floor in opposition, the bill passed on a voice vote Tuesday.

Above is eight solid minutes of empathic pain. It is a recording of a calm, polite caller, Ryan Block, attempting to cancel his Comcast service. The representative, by the time the recording starts, already sounds angry: He demands, again and again and again, to know why Block is leaving Comcast for a smaller provider, to know what it is that he—that Comcast—can't supply that this other company, this obviously objectively inferior company, this loser company, can. Just tell him what he did wrong, he says. Just explain to him. Just make him understand this stupid mistake.

The rep sounds, when he demands to be convinced of something that is both his company's fault and none of his company's business, like an abusive partner; that is how I interpreted this call, anyway, the first time I heard it. Judging by Twitter, where people are sharing similar experiences, many others did too. (One of the last times I dealt with a cable company, Time Warner, it was to try to reinstate an account and associated email address that had been removed for days because a young rep insisted there was "no other way" to transfer the decades-old account from my deceased father to his spouse, my mother; a few weeks later, moving apartments in New York, I realized that here, as at my family home, as at my last apartment, I had no other option but Time Warner, who I then called and have been paying ever since. That's why people hate monopolies.)

But overnight my sympathies shifted: If you understand this call as a desperate interaction between two people, rather than a business transaction between a customer and a company, the pain is mutual. The customer service rep is trapped in an impossible position, in which any cancellation, even one he can't control, will reflect poorly on his performance. By the time news of this lost customer reaches his supervisor, it will be data—it will be the wrong data, and it will likely be factored into a score, or a record, that is either directly or indirectly tied to his compensation or continued employment. It's bad, very bad, for this rep to record a cancellation with no reason, or with a reason the script should be able to answer. There are only a few boxes he can tick to start with, and even fewer that let him off the hook as a salesman living at the foot of a towering org chart. The rep had no choice but to try his hardest, to not give up, to make it so irritating and seemingly impossible to leave that Block might just give up and stay. The only thing he didn't account for was the possibility the call would be recorded. Now he's an internet sensation. The rep always loses.

What the rep really wanted, and what Block could have provided, was an excuse. Lie! Mention something about leaving town. That would have saved everyone time and energy, and given the rep the escape he needed from this particular circle of service industry hell. Two people trapped in a shitty situation, acknowledging how shitty it is and escaping in the least costly, least painful way possible.

Of course, it's absurd that a company like Comcast is able to force two humans into combat like this in the first place. If you don't take the existence of a near-monopoly company like Comcast for granted—and why should we?—the situation is as clear as can be: The rep didn't abuse Block, and Block didn't torture the rep. Comcast, the organization, is tormenting them both.

Comcast and Time Warner are in the process of merging in a paper-swap worth somewhere north of $40 billion. They are doing this to consolidate power, to consolidate assets, and to make the relationships like the one they once had with Block not just deep, but permanent. Comcast's call script could not account for the possibility that a customer might choose to switch to another company that isn't "number one," as the rep repeated, out of distaste. A merger might fix that: It brings these companies one step closer to making sure there's no number two.

I hope this tape gets played in front of Congress.