kate

Some might wonder why I haven't been doing my Conan manga reviews anymore. It's not because I'm not reading it anymore. But with volume 80 released a while back, I figured it would be easier to just do a ten volumes summary review post in the near future. But I need to reread some volumes, so that might take a while.

Detective Conan manga & movies:
Part 1: 『平成のホームズ』: The Heisei Holmes (volumes 1 ~ 10)
Part 2: 『奇妙な集まり』: A Strange Gathering (volumes 11~20; The Timebombed Skysraper/The Fourteenth Target)
Part 3: 『心強き名探偵達』: The Brave Detectives (volumes 21~30; The Last Wizard of the Century/Captured in Her Eyes) 
Part 4: 『白い影・・・黒い影・・・』: White Shadow... Black Shadow... (volumes 31~40; Countdown to Heaven/The Phantom of Baker Street)
Part 5: 『満月の夜と黒い宴の罠』: A Full Moon's Night and Trap at a Black Banquet (volumes 41~50; Crossroad in the Ancient Capital/Magician of the Silver Sky/Strategy Above the Depths)
Part 6: 『探偵甲子園』: Detective Koushien (volumes 51~60; Private Eyes' Requiem/Jolly Roger in the Deep Azure)
Part 7: 『よくあるパターン』: A Common Pattern (volumes 61~70; Full Score of Fear/The Raven Chaser/Lost Ship in the Sky)
(You will find the links to the reviews of volume 70, 72~76, 78, and the films Quarter of Silence and The Eleventh Striker in the library)

Unlike last year, I wasn't able to see this year's Detective Conan film in the theater, so I had to wait for the home release of the 17th movie, Detective Conan -Private Eye in the Distant Sea. The film starts with Conan and the gang boarding an Aegis vessel for a tour. The vessel makes a small trip across the sea while the visitors have a look around the gigantic ship and at its state of the art technology. During the sea tour however, the severed arm of a member of the Self Defense Force is discovered, and strange objects placed on the sea route of the Aegis vessel leads the ship's crew, the police and of course Conan to suspect the presence of a spy X on board of the ship. The Aegis is one of the most important weapons in Japan's military line of defense and it would be disastrous for the country to have information stolen. Can Conan figure out who X is before it's too late?

You might guess from the summary, but Private Eye in the Distant Sea is a bit different from most Conan films. Which is probably because the script was penned by Sakurai Takeharu, who is best known for his contributions to the TV drama Aibou (he also happened to have penned the script for the Gyakuten Saiban film). One can definitely feel the influence of police procedural Aibou on Private Eye in the Distant Sea: Conan might have done a series of heroic things in the past, but catching a spy to protect Japan's international relations is a whole different scale from his exploits in the past, and feels a bit strange. The story of the police working together with the Self Defense Force (Japan can't have an 'army' formally), i.e. government organizations working together, is what you'll see in every other Aibou episode, and gives Private Eye in the Distant Sea its own distinct face despite being the seventeenth movie in the series.

It reminds of the sixth Conan film, The Phantom of Baker Street, which was penned by the late Nozawa Hisashi. That movie might be best remembered for Ninja Jack the Ripper (TM), but it also functioned as a critique on Japanese society, which gave the film a very heavy atmosphere. The atmosphere in Private Eye in the Distant Sea never becomes that heavy though and I liked it better as a Conan film than Baker Street actually.

As a spy-movie, it's okay, I guess. It is actually very easy to figure out who X is, and the film seems more focused on presenting a police procedural (again, like Aibou) and the workings of an Aegis vessel. The film was made with cooperation of the maritime SDF, and that results in a lot of (not very good) promotion shots of a CG-built Aegis, as if you're taking a tour on the Aegis yourself too. But instances where Conan has to be careful in using his satellite phone as the crew is detecting his signals and stuff do make it feel like a real spy thriller and there are actually one or two real surprises hidden in the story. Oh, and like the previous couple of movies, Private Eye in the Distant Sea features guest voice-acting, but Shibasaki Kou is actually an actress, so she did a great job. Then again, nothing can be as bad as the guest voice acting in Quarter of Silence and The Eleventh Striker. 

I have also seldom laughed this much because of a Conan film, though probably for the wrong reasons (though the fact that Conan has to go the toilet every ten minutes (to make phone calls) was probably meant to evoke laughter). When the film first started, I was kinda worried. Every Conan film starts with a short introduction for those who don't know the basic story, but one could easily they reused everything from previous movies. So I was wondering where the budget went. Well, it went into 1) an awesome(ly ridiculous) fight scene where Ran stops being a mere human and defies all laws of gravity, 2) a scene where Conan's soccer ball kicking should have deadly results and 3) a fantastic scene where Conan figures everything out with evidence and memories flying past him. All these scenes were ridiculously exaggerated, but so awesome (note: people who have seen Quarter of Silence and The Eleventh Striker might know that you have to get pretty crazy to get an action scene dubbed 'ridiculous' in comparison).

Overall, I did like Private Eye in the Distant Sea, probably because it was quite different from the other Conan films. I mean, you have to do something different when you're the seventeenth movie in the series. It might not really feel Conan-esque, but Ran's action scene alone makes it worthwhile a watch for fans.

Original Japanese title(s): 『名探偵コナン　絶海の探偵』

Update (11/16/13): The office of the Limestone County district attorney has filed a motion seeking prison time for Austin Smith Clem.

Update (11/15/13): Brian Jones, the Limestone County district attorney, tells Mother Jones that he is "reviewing available options to set aside this sentence and to achieve a sentence that gives justice to our victim."

An Alabama man convicted of raping a teenage girl will serve no prison time. On Wednesday, a judge in Athens, Alabama, ruled that the rapist will be punished by serving two years in a program aimed at nonviolent criminals and three years of probation.

In September, a jury in Limestone County, in north central Alabama, found Austin Smith Clem, 25, guilty of raping Courtney Andrews, a teenage acquaintance and his then-neighbor, three times—twice when she was 14, and again when was she was 18.

Clem's defense attorney did not call any witnesses at trial, according to AL.com. After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts against Clem on one count of first-degree rape and two counts of second-degree rape.

According to Clem's sentencing order, which Brian Jones, the Limestone County district attorney, provided to Mother Jones, Clem will serve the first half of his sentence under the supervision of the Limestone County community corrections program. The program is aimed at "redirecting the lives" of nonviolent, low-level offenders who are "likely to maintain a productive and law-abiding life as a result of accountability, guidance and direction to services they need," according to the program's website.

Andrews recalled Clem's crimes to AL.com on Thursday. When he abused her at age 14, she said, "He kept saying, 'This is okay,' and 'Don't say anything or you're going to get me in trouble,'" she said. Clem threatened her parents lives' if she told anyone, Andrews said. After he raped her in 2011, she had a family friend inform her parents. She couldn't bear to, she said, because "I knew it would break their hearts." That night, her parents reported Clem to the police.

Dan Totten, Clem's defense attorney, confirms that Clem is free to live at home during this time period. Jones adds that the program requires Clem to report to his corrections officer on a weekly basis.

Continue Reading »

Ryuko may have found her Senketsu in the rubble of her home's basement in Kill la Kill, but you don't have to even bother with that mess because COSPA is offering a new Senketsu hoodie for the rest of us! Pre-orders for a hoodie with Senketsu's design are now open on COSPA's website, with the hoodie to be shipped in mid-January.

 

 

 

 

Kill la Kill Kamui Senketsu Hoodie  5900 yen before tax

The hoodie may not talk or transform, but you don't have to shed any blood and no cops will be called because you will still be nicely covered up.

 

 

©TRIGGER・中島かずき／キルラキル製作委員会

Fantagraphics Books hit its $150,000 Kickstarter funding goal Tuesday, only one week into its campaign to keep the company afloat after the death of co-Publisher Kim Thompson dealt it a serious financial blow earlier this year.

That's great news. Without that support, Fantagraphics would at the very least have had to drastically reduce its publishing schedule for 2014, and that would have left a big, gaping hole in the world of graphic novels and independent comics. But I do have to wonder if Fantagraphics set a precedent with its campaign, and whether it's a workable one.

Continue reading…

The Wall Street Journal goes behind the scenes today at a very stressful job interview for the coolest job in the world: Designer at Lego world headquarters in Billund, Denmark.

Read more...

A crowd-funding campaign has been launched for an interesting puzzle game called So Many Me. So Many Me is described by developer Extend Studios as a 2D puzzle-platformer inspired by the best games in the genre and its own games like A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda (Steam and XBLA) and Jigsaw Mansion (iPad).

read more

The sweet fun continues with two more designer cupcakes at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. First up, a yummy pumpkin cupcake with maple icing, a flourish of chopped pecans and topped with a tiny pumpkin with mouse ears is the seasonal sweet through November 30.

Starting December 2 through January 5, look for a gingerbread cupcake with cream cheese frosting, red and green sprinkles, a little red bow and “elf cap” to celebrate the winter holidays.

Both are $5.19 and available at ABC Commissary, Pizza Planet, Backlot Express, Studio Catering Co., Starring Rolls Cafe, Rosie’s All-American Café and Fairfax Fare. Cupcakes are on the Disney Dining Plan.

More Holiday Cupcake Mania at Disney’s Hollywood Studios by Pam Brandon: Originally posted on the Disney Parks Blog

Shockingly, it took this long for the internet to do this mash-up this well. Fresh off the premiere of a rather explicit Eren x Levi yaoi doujinshi at last month's Fall of Wall 4 Attack on Titan fan event, Shea of the Hummel circle has collected her sketches of the AoT heroes in Jedi outfits.

 

 

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

Not too long ago we reported on Oscar winner Octavia Spencer taking on the lead role for NBC’s Murder, She Wrote reboot. Now, original star Angela Lansbury has given her professional opinion. And well, let’s just say she has the same opinion on reboots as most of us. 

The reboot has been described as “a light, contemporary procedural in the vein of Bones or Fargo,” in which Spencer’s character works at a hospital but has self-published a mystery novel. A location for the series wasn’t revealed but it seemed as if the basic premise of the show would stay the same and Spencer would be getting in on investigations.

Lots of folks were wondering what Lansbury thought of the project and Entertainment Weekly spoke with her to find out all the gritty details.

“I think it’s a mistake to call it Murder, She Wrote, because Murder, She Wrote will always be about a Cabot Cove and this wonderful little group of people who told those lovely stories and enjoyed a piece of that place, and also enjoyed Jessica Fletcher, who is a rare and very individual kind of person,” she told them. “So I’m sorry that they have to use the title Murder, She Wrote, even though they have access to it and it’s their right.”

Lansbury touches on what many of us think when reboot projects surface of our fan favorites. Why do they have to call it that? Can’t they just make something new entirely? The answer is of course, yes, but then they wouldn’t be able to capitalize on the name, which is what they’re banking on for success. But while Lansbury may be disappointed with the project as a whole, she doesn’t appear to hold any ill-will against Spencer.

“I saw her in `The Help’ and thought she was absolutely wonderful, a lovely actress,” she said. “So I wish her well, but I wish it wasn’t in Murder, She Wrote.”

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

In the second half of this video, Brosh answers the vital question: how are Simple Dog and Helper Dog doing?

(via Pajiba.)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Occupy Wall Street activists have canceled nearly $15 million in consumer debt in the first year of a program called Rolling Jubilee that uses crowd funding to buy up and then void consumers’ debt. The program spent just $400,000 of the roughly $620,000 it has raised to date to buy up medical debts that were far enough past due that they were being resold for pennies on the dollar, marking a first-ever incursion by populist activists into an industry dominated by unscrupulous private debt collectors.

The program works by taking advantage of the same business dynamics that fuel debt collection companies. When the firm that originally sought to collect a debt — a hospital, a bank, or a private education lending firm, for example — decides to cut its losses by selling debt on which the borrower has defaulted to a collector, it usually does so at alarmingly low rates. A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study published in January found that consumer debt sells for about four cents on the dollar in this secondary market. While debt collectors pay that price and then try to force at least partial repayment by the borrower in order to turn a profit, Rolling Jubilee simply cancels the debt and hopes the beneficiaries might pay the kindness forward by helping to fund the program — that’s the “rolling” part of Rolling Jubilee.

The Occupy program, which kicked off in November of 2012, is paying an even lower rate than what the FTC report found to be typical. A spokesman told Reuters it was paying about two cents on the dollar for debt.

The group defines its success not in terms of the topline dollar figure of debt it has eliminated — $15 million is a very small amount compared to the total secondary debt market, which measures in the tens of billions of dollars each year — but in terms of public awareness of how debt works in the modern economy. “Our purpose in doing this, aside from helping some people along the way…was to spread information about the workings of this secondary debt market,” spokesman Andrew Ross told the Guardian. “Very few people know how cheaply their debts have been bought by collectors. It changes the psychology of the debtor,” he added. “And that gives you moral ammunition to have a different conversation with the debt collector.”

On top of that moral ammunition, distressed borrowers may finally see regulators come to their aid. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced last week that it is writing rules for how private debt collectors can pursue repayment from individuals. The move continues a push the agency began late last winter to give borrowers tools for dealing with aggressive debt collection efforts. The agency fields consumer complaints and provides template letters to help borrowers assert their legal rights in debt disputes. Complaints against collection agencies tripled from 2002 to 2010, and one out of every seven Americans now faces third-party debt collection efforts.

The post Here’s How Occupy Wall Street Freed Americans From Millions In Debt appeared first on ThinkProgress.

uncannybrettwhite:

NYCC COMMISSION CAVALCADE 2013

Blanche Devereaux (“Golden Girls”) by Russell Dauterman

Right? Come on! How great is this? Look at that BLOUSE. I mean, that detail! Russell’s a phenomenal artist and he’s about to become your new favorite artist, so get ready. 

Thank you for being a friend, Brett. ;)

amyreeder:

I’ll show you how I colored my RG #2 cover!

I colored this cover similarly to how I did the Red Sonja one.  Click the link if you’d like an in-depth explanation, but basically, I create color versions of the main colors, and use layer masks to create shades and highlights.

The first image was what I started with—the standard colors I use.  I added some pink on her face and highlighted a couple areas before copying the layer three times.  In this case, the layer doesn’t show up in the final version.

Instead, I created dark blue, light green and light pink versions because I felt it would create a nighttime urban 80’s vibe.  The dark layer was on the bottom and I used the green and pink as highlights above it.

This isn’t how I normally color, but it’s great when you want to use dramatic lighting, rather than use color to delineate objects from one another.

Make sure you pick up Rocket Girl #2 this Wednesday!!  Last time it sold out on the first day, so GET IN THERE!

secondlina:

strangelykt:

blindsprings:

Since it’s almost been two weeks since I started posting Blindsprings, I thought I’d post all the current pages!  It’s still a brand new baby comic, and I update at midnight on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week!!!!

Please reblog if you like giant haired witch babies!!!!!

New page up tomorrow (Thursday!) Who is this mysterious stranger?  What will happen next!!!!  Please come and enjoy my new full coloured comic, featuring magic and intrigue and mysteriousness!

I can’t even deal with how gorgeous this comic is uwu

Breaking news - Kadi is awesome.

This is so beautiful. It’s everything I want from a graphic novel.

Dammit Tony stop being so good at art

For the last few weeks, a story has been going around, recounted by artist Tess Fowler, about how a comics pro seemed to be interested in her work, but when he asked her to come to his room, she declined, and he then said he had never been interested in her work, and disparaged her cosplay and did other shitty things. Fowler tweeted the story, it was written up and she added,

The behavior of the man in question is considered normal in this business. And the few people who know about it consider it to be my fault for “falling for it” when he feigned interest in my work. In my pursuit of doing this work professionally I ran a gauntlet of this sort of thing. I came in with stars in my eyes and were it not for the handful of really good people who stepped in to keep me safe, I might not have made it through without being completely jaded by it. I am older now, with young impressionable followers of my own. And I do my best to help them over these kinds of hurdles when they arise. I wish more people were brave enough to speak out. But for every voice raised in protest, there are a thousand to defend the person in question. It’s daunting.

While it was pretty easy to figure out who she was talking about—and the matter was discussed with me several times over the last few weeks of conventions—today she came out and named a name: Brian Wood. The Outhouse has most of Fowler’s twitter statements from yesterday archived but one they didn’t is this one:

I've been nice. REALLY nice. But when I have 3 women in my inbox in TEARS as they're typing over the same guy? Yeah, screw being nice.

— TessFowler (@TessFowler) November 13, 2013

Since this story broke, I’ve felt uncomfortable reporting on one side of the story, so I reached out to Wood for comment, and he responded with a “no comment.”

As one might expect Twitter and FB lit up like a pinball machine. In one way it’s good to have things out in the open, because what Fowler has been writing about all along is how internalizing these things is bad and how a culture of silence punishes the victim. Other women have since spoken out (without naming names) about harassment and unwanted attention.

I think it’s important to note that what Wood has been accused of is skeevy and sketchy and shouldn’t be tolerated—but it isn’t illegal. Sadly, I have in my inbox allegations of an actual crime committed by a different comics pro, one where legal action has been sought, and I’m investigating it before writing about it. But these incidents aren’t isolated or unique.

They are also, sad to say, typical of just about all industries where this is male/female interaction. None of what I’ve just written about is comics behavior. It’s HUMAN behavior. There are jerks and assholes in every industry. In all the vast body of writing about the increasing tensions of men and women — many attractive, most sexually active—interacting in the comics sphere there is bad stuff that is singular to our corner of the world, but most of it is everywhere. And as women enter the field in ever greater capacities—as readers, as creators, as fans—these problems have become more common.

More good stuff happens, too. But we’re not here to talk about that right now.

Rachel Edidin, a former editor at Dark Horse has an excellent piece here calledComics Guys, Harassment, and Missing Stairs which points out that while women usually rely on the “girls network” to point out which guys are pervs and gropers and worse, it’s still putting all the pressure on women not to get into these situations, when maybe it should be men who don’t do bad shit in the first place:

I’m putting this firmly on the men in comics, because, you know what? Men are the overwhelming majority of the people in the industry with institutional and hiring power. Even most of the most senior women in editorial departments answer to one or more male boss, usually a dude who has been in the industry long enough and played its games effectively enough to be pretty solidly entrenched in the existing power structure; and, even if he is basically a decent human being, to have capitulated to and internalized and regurgitated and privileged appeals to tradition and status quo over things like personal dignity and safety and minimal motherfucking professionalism.

Men in comics, especially men in positions of institutional power and popular visibility, you need to step the fuck up. It has been going on for so, so, so goddamn long. And the women who speak up get written off as squeaky wheels and malcontents and difficult, and patronized and blacklisted and quietly driven off, and everyone is fucking terrified to go public because the worst perpetrators are the most entrenched and protected.

We’ve come a long way since there were only five women in comics and we all sat in the corner with our arms crossed. When I first got into comics there were all sorts of awkward horrible stories because guys in comics were in such a man’s world they really had no idea how to DEAL with women as colleagues. There’s the woman I know who went to show a male editor her portfolio and after he told her she wasn’t ready yet asked her on a date. Awkward. And demoralizing if you just want to get in the door and get work and make a living doing what you dream of doing. Everyone wants to be taken seriously. Colleen Doran has written extensively about the sexual harassment she underwent as a very young woman trying to break into the industry. I never went through anything that severe but I had my share of weird moments in my youth…most of it I just shrugged off. But that’s me. I try to be a hard-nosed football player. I’ve also seen the constant unwanted attention erode women’s confidence and make them question everything about their chosen career.

Fowler writes very convincingly, I think, about how this can’t be tolerated. We need to create a space where ANYONE feels they have a chance at their chosen career and unpleasant or illegal actions by others aren’t going to kill their chances.

Now, to be fair, I’ve seen every other iteration of human behavior in the comics arena, as well. I’ve seen women—and men—use their sexuality to get attention for their work. One female cartoonist long ago told me that if she had to sleep with a certain publisher to get her book published…well, she just shrugged, but I got her message. There are now comics groupies and stage door johnnies. And I’m not even going to get into cosplay which brings a whole new level of gaze and exhibitionism and fantasy role playing.

As convention culture spreads, it’s almost like a never end rock band on tour, with all the attendant drunken passes, successful and unsuccessful. Like I said, human behavior. Men and women are always going to want to have sex with each other, and it’s often going to get fucked up somehow.

Anyway, I’m sort of sitting here wondering if any of this will ever improve. I will say, indie comics seem to have escaped most of these levels of power tripping and “I want to look at your portfolio in my hotel room.” For one thing, most indie cartoonists are poor and stay on someone’s couch. BA DOM CHING. For another, they are mostly at the age that hooking up is just something that happens and not the way to a contract with Drawn & Second. There are tears and regrets and angry break-ups, but its mostly what would happen if they all worked at Trader Joe’s, and not comics-specific.

Of course there are creepy dudes and inappropriate behavior in indies, too, just less of it.

I do know that some skeevy guys in comics have been informally banned from various companies. And freelancers who do too many shitty things occasionally get lectured by editors. It doesn’t happen NEARLY often enough, but it does happen. But sadly—there’s that word again—it’s also widely known that at one super mega comics publisher, many of the top execs have had huge human resources files and nothing has been done about it. That’s pretty fucking fucked up.

But far, far more often, women feel helpless and victimized and nothing is done. Like Edidin, I’d like to see more PREVENTION than cure. I’d like to see the status of the women in comics ELEVATED and RESPECTED to the level where this is not tolerated or condoned or laughed at or whatever. To be honest, that’s why at this site I tend to talk mostly about the matters which I feel are specific to the comics industry, including the lingering, persistent belief that female creators are inferior or non-serious about their work.

There are always going to be skeevy, sketchy dudes. But there are also going to be many many people who know the workplace is a place where you respect your co-workers. It’s why women need to be on panels that aren’t about gender, and need to be written about in history books, and their work needs to be judged on is own merits. It’s why phrases like “one of the best female _____s” need to be banished.

I think the most feminist show I’ve watched in recent months has been The Ultimate Fighter: Team Rousey vs. Team Tate, where for the first time men and women fighters have been in the same house. I wrote a bit about it here, but the way the mixed-gender house has been handled in editing and presentation should be studied for a long time. TUF has never had any shortage of hot people in their underwear, and the female fighters have been shown in hot tub scenes and are constantly lounging around in ugly biker shorts—just like the guys. But UFC president Dana White’s goal is to build UP the women’s division, and to do that they must be taken seriously. The women are presented as equals and as athletes, not sex objects who wandered into the sport. The women have given and received brutal beatdowns. They’ve rolled and they’ve banged. They sit around with the men talking about fighting, and the men listen. The men and women comment equally on all the fights, and once again, the women are presented seriously. They are worthy of respect.

It’s telling that the incredibly macho world of cage fighting has caught on to something that the wimpy world of comics hasn’t.

At the end of the day, Brian Wood is a talented writer who seems to have done some very questionable, jerky things as a human being. I sincerely hope he gets his shit together in whatever capacity he needs to and learns from mistakes in the past.

At the end of the day, Tess Fowler is a talented artist. She seems like a very determined person, and she seems to have risen above these early setbacks to find her own way. All this talk of fear and blacklisting depresses me, but I hope we as an industry can work on a teeny tiny way to prevent or remove that. And sometimes you need to shine the light into the dark place to find out the safe path forward.

EDITED TO ADD: I wrote this piece late at night and kind of thought through it as I did, and I see I did leave out the most important part: While it’s nice to leave on the image of Tess Fowler getting on with her life, that is not the call to action here: the call to action is to not let there be MORE Tess Fowlers who NEED to get on with things. As Rachel wrote above, to the power structure of comics—the mostly male power structure—it’s up to YOU to be Dana White, and create both a more diverse atmosphere and, perhaps more importantly, one were being skeevy and sketchy is NOT condoned and NOT business as usual.

princess-soda:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nintendo is kicking off a series of eShop sales that run between now and December, each one featuring fan-favorite characters and discounts on their respective adventures. From today through next week the spotlight is on Link, who is gearing up for the trials that await in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. 

 

The first sale starts this morning at 9:00am Pacific, and ends at 9:00am Pacific on November 21. Here are the Zelda games that are getting prices slashed across both Nintendo platforms:

 

 

After Link, it'll be Mega Man's turn from 11/21 - 11/28. Then it's Mario from 11/28 - 12/5 and Donkey Kong from 12/5 - 12/12. 

 

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Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. His blog can be found at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter at @Moldilox.

Welcome back, time travelers! Last week, we took a look at some common methods of time travel in books, movies, and TV shows—including the “history can be changed” model of Back to the Future, the “time travel without consequence” model of Midnight in Paris, and the “self-fulfilling prophecy” model of The Terminator. This week, we explore some less-conventional theories of time travel, including temporal causality loops, the Multiverse theory, and a look at Einstein’s Theory of Relativity...

[Read More]

4. Sideways Through The Looking Glass: Exploring the Multiverse

The Multiverse is one of the newer and more interesting theories of time travel floating in the cosmic jetsam. The premise is this: there are infinite parallel universes all around us, and anything that can exist, does exist. This idea was explored in the 1990s TV show Sliders, in which the main characters “slid” between parallel universes; the multiverse has also showed up in Star Trek episodes, including a Next Generation episode in which Worf finds himself slipping into fractured parallel realities in which, amongst other things, he is married to the petite Counsellor Deanna Troi.

Mainstream movies and TV have explored the “alternate reality” idea to various degrees. The recent NBC series Awake followed a detective who found himself living two parallel realities after a car crash: one in which his wife survived, one in which his son survived. (The show was canceled due to low ratings, but only in this universe.) The romantic comedy Sliding Doors starred Gwyneth Paltrow as two versions of herself in branching timelines: one in which she caught a train, one in which she missed it. That movie brought back memories of Mr. Destiny, in which Jim Belushi learned how his life would have changed if he’d swung his bat a half second earlier at a high school baseball game.

But the multiverse really came into its own with Fringe, the J.J. Abrams show that explored two parallel universes bent on destroying one another. Complete with doppelgangers and government conspiracies and a rich alternate history, the show explored the twin universe idea from many bizarre angles. (The show’s opening credits even changed colors depedning on which universe took center stage that week.) Of course, Fringe was a jumping off point for a lot of great high concept sci-fi, including one episode involving our next kind of time travel: the infinite repeating loop.

 

5. Time Is A Loop: It’s Groundhog Day!

Many time travel stories feature characters caught in a “loop” where events repeat until they somehow find a way out. Groundhog Day did this so brilliantly that the movie’s title has come to be synonymous with déjà vu. In the movie, Bill Murray finds himself living through February 2^nd over and over and over in a small rural town. At first he selfishly takes advantage of this (it takes him several loops to figure out how to bed Andie MacDowell); then he repeatedly commits suicide; and finally he learns that only kindness will get him to February 3^rd. If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t lived.

A year before that movie was released, Star Trek: The Next Generation used a similar idea in one of its most brilliant episodes, “Cause and Effect.” The episode opens with the Enterprise exploding, and from there the hour is a series of loops in which the same events repeat themselves four times over, each with subtle differences, always ending with the ship’s destruction. Only after realizing they’re caught in a loop does Data work out how to send his future self a message (via a poker game) and avert the catastrophe.

A similar technique formed the basis of Source Code, a movie which Jake Gyllenhall repeats an eight-minute loop on a doomed train as he tries to find and stop the bomber. He succeeds, but discovers he’s doing this while on life support in a kind of digital time machine... the rest was forgettable, but the setup was pretty interesting.

 

6. Closing the Loop: The Special Case of Looper

Despite its name, Looper is closer to a changing-the-past story than a time-loop story, but it’s unique enough that it deservers a category of its own. The premise: in the late 21^st century, the mafia eliminates people by sending them back in time to be killed by contract hit men. The catch: when a killer’s contract is up, they themselves get sent back in time to be killed by their younger selves, a process called “closing the loop.”

When Joseph Gordon Levitt fails to close the loop on his own future self (Bruce Willis), a cat and mouse chase ensues with strange repercussions. Willis, though fighting for his life, can’t kill or even maim Levitt, since whatever he does to his younger self affects him. When Levitt takes an injury, Willis gets the scar; then again, when Willis wants to know where Levitt is, all he has to do is remember. Looper conjures up some pretty unique time travel ideas, including its dark but poetic ending.

 

7. Time Travel as Hard Science: Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity

Believe it or not, time travel is not just fiction: it’s a mathematical fact. Albert Einstein theorized nearly a century ago that objects traveling close to the speed of light experience something called “time dilation”—essentially, time passes more slowly for a fast-moving object than for the world around it. So in theory, if you take a quick flight across the galaxy and back, hundreds or thousands or millions of years will have passed on Earth. Flying extremely fast is actually a form of time travel.

Most science fiction ignores time dilation. But one movie took Einstein’s theory and ran with it: The Planet of the Apes. After an eighteen-month journey at near-light speed, the main characters crash land on what they think is a distant planet inhabited by talking apes—only to discover it’s actually Earth, thousands of years in the future. Unfortunately for the crew, time dilation only works in one direction....

Speaking of which: Superman flying around the Earth so fast that the planet spins in reverse and time flows backwards has nothing to do with Einstein. Even assuming Superman has enough magnetic power to change a planet’s angular velocity, Special Relativity only allows for backwards time travel if an object moves faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. Next time, Superman, try a wormhole...

 

8. Time Travel is Strange and Complex: Temporal Outliers

Time travel can be truly mind-bending. While a movie like Midnight in Paris might offer no real explanation for its termporal antics, Looper can tie your brain in painful knots. But if you really want a headache, check out the 2004 movie Primer, which takes time travel logic to a whole new level of complex. The movie’s timelines twist and diverge and intersect with each other to such a degree that you’ll need a chart to understand how it all fits together. Fortunately, several such diagrams are available online.

Another mind-bending outlier is Donnie Darko. This dark yet melodious film is essentially a multiverse story, but it plays as something more. The story is about a “Tangent Universe” that briefly comes into being, but grows unstable and unravels, leading a young, psychotic Jake Gyllehnall to experience memories in reverse (among other bizarre phenomena). The genius of the movie is that you can get all the way to the end and have no idea what just happened—not unless you watch the Director’s Cut, or read excerpts from the film’s fictional book, The Philosophy of Time Travel.

And then there’s Doctor Who. With eleven actors having played “The Doctor” over the show’s fifty year, 800+ episode run, Britain’s epic TV series is astonishingly unclassifiable. Not having seen enough Doctor Who to summarize it, I won’t embarrass myself by trying. Suffice it to say that no discussion of time travel would be completely without tipping one’s hat (and one’s police box) to the Time Lord. (Feel free to discuss in the comments.)

 

So what have we learned here, time travelers? The big lesson is this: before you embark on a trip through time, know thy universe. There are many ways to travel through time, and it’s essential to know whether you risk changing the future or simply getting lost in an infinitute of parallel realities.

When it comes to what type of time machine to select, there are tons of options available, from sleek silver cars to bubbling hot tubs. If anything goes wrong on your journey, just jump back in time and fix it—unless your time machine breaks, in which case you’re shit out of luck I’m afraid.

Just one request: try not to destroy the universe. Because then not only would we all cease to exist, we’d never get to see what other time travel stories the future has in store—and a future without time travel is no future at all.

---

Brad Kane writes for and about the entertainment industry, focusing on storytelling in movies, TV, games, and more. If you enjoyed this article, you can follow him on Twitter, like his page on Facebook, or check out his website.

Even though I haven't played with LEGO bricks in years, I'm always happy to see new sets pop up. I'm even happier when they come up with themes that are targeting different audiences who will hopefully keep on with the building blocks. The recently-revealed 2014 Disney Princesses line looks to be a winner. Including characters like Ariel, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Merida, these look great plus introduce younglings into the world of LEGO. After that, their parents can go broke buying them more.

As these are aimed at a younger age group, they're rather simple. Ariel has her treasure grotto and her iconic kiss scene, Cinderella has her carriage and a smaller version of her castle, Rapunzel has a portion of her tower and Merida has a tiny part of her abode. It'd be cool if they could create larger dioramas for an older audience featuring the princesses in the future. A user mentioned a Sleeping Beauty/Maleficent set, which could work in larger scale.

Are there any other scenes that ya'll would like to see along this vein? Me, I'd like to see Jasmine and Aladdin.

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I recently had a chance to speak with Hal Hickel, the animation supervisor for Pacific Rim, on the occasion of the film’s DVD and Blu-ray release.

We started by discussing an often-held misconception about 3D conversions, then pretty quickly hopped over to Hickel’s area of expertise: the animation of digital characters.

And finally, there’s a nice, simple anecdote about how a little narrative hole in the film was sewn shut.

So, here we go. Here’s some of what Hal had to tell me:

I think there’s still a perception that native 3D yields a better result. That said, everyone who has spent any time doing a converted film knows that if you spend the time and have the taste you can get an excellent result that way as well. It’s still just seen as “If you can do it for real, do it as real” and there’s a lot of subjective calls you have to make when converting but if it’s done for real you know that what you’re getting, even if you want to fudge it for a different visual result, you know that what you’re starting out with is what the real scene would look like. People do think, generally, that the best result is gotten natively so where they could on this film, they went that way.

I don’t think we’ve had a show here yet where the animators worked viewing the monitors in 3D. The only exception might be some ride filmwork, such as the Transformers ride. On Pacific Rim, no, the animators worked on a normal 2D monitor and artists didn’t see anything in 3D until… well, to be honest, the decision to go 3D was made after we were well into post production. A 3D supervisor was brought on and they went through the camerawork retroactively, did new camera layouts and reviewed the work that way.

I would occasionally peek in to see what they were doing. [Our visual FX supervior] John Knoll had been involved over the previous year or two on the 3D conversion work on [Star Wars] Episode One and Episode Two, and I know that he had steeped himself in 3D and was really into it. He and Guillermo had a lot of conversations about how to do this film in 3D.

The big risk was that people might say “I’m not seeing enough depth, push the depth more” but the problem with a film like Pacific Rim is, if you can imagine, we have these great big wide shots of Kaiju and Jaegers, essentially buildings fighting one another, and it shouldn’t look depthy unless somebody wanted to push the depth and that would end up miniaturising them. The results were, at the end, good for both native and converted work.

As the animation supervisor I looked at any character work in the film as well as machines – CG helicopters and things like that. All of the Kaiju stuff and Jaeger stuff fell in my department – at least, the performances of those characters.

There were three big challenges with the Jaegers. The first one, obviously, is the scale. To make them feel huge, the first you’d do is slow them down but with these guys, most of the sequences they’re in are action sequences. It was a matter of how fast we can go but still have them feel huge, and we needed to use some editing tricks. Scale was challenge one.

Then the second thing was differentiating the Jaegers from the Kaiju. The Kaiju had to feel organic and the Jaegers had to feel mechanical. Ordinarily you’d think of a robot and how you’d make it feel robotic, maybe, would be with a lurching start-stop, start-stop kind of feel to it but the problem with that here is that you’d need these guys to get up to speed and stay at speed not start and stop at every step. We had to look at smaller ways, the ways the arms swing or the way the torso rotates, a mechanical feel with hard stops and recoils. We ruled out motion capture for this very reason early one. Even though they’re controlled by humans on the inside we realised.

The third thing was differentiating the Jaegers from one another, giving them different personalities. Gipsy is kind of the gun slinger, Eureka is the captain of the football team, Crimson Typhoon is a nimble martial arts expert, Cherno is the big brawler. The designs helped differentiate them but it was also how they carry themselves and act. And we tied it in to the crews inside them too. Raleigh has a kind of swagger and we put a little bit of that in Gipsy, then the Australian crew, Chuck and Herc, have bravado and ego and all of that is apparent in Striker Eureka.

There was a lot of though upfront about tying the humans and Jaegers together. Raleigh had a couple of fight scenes in the original plans for the film – it’s down to one now because the film was whittled down. He used to have another fight, with his foreman at the construction site, and between that one and the one you can still see, with Chuck, there were some moves that he does, kind of signature fights. Guillermo intended to echo these when Gipsy is fighting later. That went, a little bit, by the wayside for editorial reasons and story reasons, some of that got pared down.

We thought a lot about how we’d carry the way the actors moved inside the Conn Pods to the movements we see outside, syncing them up, but when it came down to it, it really got down to making things slow not “We have to have the same walk, the same cadence, the same gait.” We thought about it a lot up front but we were able to strip things away until we got to the things that we needed to tie them together. It wasn’t about “Here’s a really particular pose that Chuck keeps hitting so we’re going to echo that with Striker” it was more about an attitude. One exception is that there’s a signature move when the Australian guys open the chest where they step back and throw their arms out and that we match very closely. There’s just a few places where we had to echo exactly what an actor had done.

We didn’t build every Kaiju all the way from the inside out, with organs and bones. Sometimes we do – it depends on the creature – so, for instance, the baby Kaiju had really translucent skin so we had to build a lot of internal stuff there. Then Leatherback, the one who’s like a Gorilla, he gets blown apart rather gruesomely so we had to build quite a bit of his skeleton and some organs inside.

That said, even with the characters that don’t have their insides built specifically, we do think a lot about it. The modelling lead for the Kaiju, Paul Giacoppo, he was OCD about anatomy. He can transpose real human anatomy onto a creature and say “The tricep needs to go here, these quadraceps aren’t quite right” and he’ll think a lot about what the skeleton is doing underneath and what will make it look like it’s moving correctly. It comes down to the visual, and the artist using their eye to see what looks right.

But we do occasionally have a creature where it’s important to show flesh sliding over bone – the Thestrals in Harry Potter, for example – in which case we’d definitely build all of the layers. Pacific Rim didn’t require all of this. We did do a lot of flesh simulation on them after the animation, to jiggle the flesh and jiggle the muscle groups. One neat thing was that the animators had some shapes they could dial in to make, for instance, the forearm muscles flex, let’s say. They might be dialling those in and out as, for instance, Leatherback is running forwards. The fist might land on the ground and the animator would dial in this flexing shape, and then when the flesh simulation artists go in to take over after the animation is final, to do all of the jiggle, the trouble they have is that it might override the shapes and just make all of the skin look jiggly. We did something pretty neat here where it would know where the shapes were activating and it would tighten up the skin around those areas. The flesh sim and the shapes worked well together to give this really great sense of the skin being lose where it was meant to be lose and then tightening up around these muscles as they flex.

There’s a bit at the end of the film, after the nuke has gone off, where Gipsy Danger is still heading towards the breach. We though there were originally some issues of clarity there with the audience as we’d already been told that they’d have to take a Kaiju through the breach with them or they won’t be able to pass through. But now we’re at a moment where we believe that all of the Kaiju have been killed and Gipsy is heading towards the breach anyways. I remember having quite a few conversations with Guillermo about “How do we make sense of that to the audience?” This was one of the great examples of Guillermo being really open. We weren’t speaking to him specifically about visual effects, we were saying to him, “Hey, this story point isn’t as clear as maybe it can be. Is there any way we can help with that?”

And that’s how we ended up contributing the idea of Gipsy grabbing hold of a half of a Kaiju and dragging that to the breach. It’s a nice example that goes to showing how collaborative he is and how open he is to conversations of that kind. And in the end, we did provide a kind of visual effects solution to this one thing.

Thanks again to Hal for speaking to me. Pacific Rim is out on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download in the UK next Monday, November 11th. I love it.

In the meantime, you can explore more of the Pacific Rim world with this specially built archive of interesting materials.

Pacific Rim Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel On The Secrets Of The Kaiju, Jaegers And Guillermo Del Toro’s Spirit Of Collaboration

As news spread of Typhoon Haiyan, which has displaced 800,000 people, left 2 million without food, and caused at least 1,700 deaths in the Philippines, comics creators began to organize to help. Actually, some were already poised to send aid to the devastated nation, as Haiyan is its second catastrophe in the past couple of [...]

sugarpoppins:

murphmanfa:

acatnamedhercules:

anaaesthetic:

mamajules1975:

thecakebar:

Oreo Cookie Butter Tutorial

Wtf…

Hold the phone. Stop the presses. I’m making this right now!

Seriously. I just sent my roomie to the grocery store.

it’s made out of fuCKIN COOKIES

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

at first I thought that the thing in the middle of that mixer was a big stack of oreo cookie filling.

I really don’t think that this animated GIF needs any more setup than it’s the Superman pose and these are various pop culture characters making it. So let’s run through this seventeen framed image to to see all the versions displayed. Enjoy the show…

Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marty McFly from the Back to the Future trilogy, Hamburglar from McDonaldland, Jubilee of the X-Men, Edward Scisssorhands from his self-titled movie, Steve Zissou from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Good Luck Bear from the Care Bears, Velma Dinkley from various incarnations of Scooby-Doo, Bizarro from Superman, Toad a.k.a. mushroom retainer from the Super Mario Bros. franchise, Russell, the young Wilderness Explorer, from Up, Robocop from his self-titled movie, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, Prince from Katamari Damacy, Predator from various films in the Predator franchise, Pinocchio from his self-titled movie from Walt Disney, and lastly Mega Man from the Mega Man franchise.

There! Now I did all the hard work cataloging it so your don’t have to.

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1. 1.Beardahontas
2. 2.Alice in Beardland
3. 3.The Lion Beard
4. 4.Sleeping Beardy
5. 5.The Princess and the Beard
6. 6.More Princess and the Beard
7. 7.Mu-long-beard
8. 8.Mustacherella
9. 9.Beauty and the Beard
10. 10.Beardlantis: The Lost Empire
11. 11.Beardladdin, featuring Princess Jazzbeard
12. 12.The Bearded Mermaid

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Adam Ellis (you may remember him from his adorable Tiny Hats on Cats project) created a Buzzfeed post (perhaps in celebration of Movember) called “17 Reasons You Should Grow a Beard This Instant.” It included an image of Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast sporting a full beard as a formal wear accessory. The response was so overwhelming, Ellis decided to go ahead and put facial hair on a bunch of other Disney ladies. The results are spectacular.

(via Buzzfeed)

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nicholasgurewitch:

THOR SPOILER: Kate Beaton and I collaborated on this Marvel parody piece in 2011, for their Strange Tales series.

I’m not as good at doing Nick Gurewitch comics as Nick Gurewitch is, but it was fun to try!  Marvel was always great with this series, they just wanted artists to have a laugh with their characters.  Hope it comes back sometime.

Jemma Salume composes fanciful and nature-inspired illustrations with a strong sense of the mythological. Majestic tigers stretch and snarl in glowing scenes while mystical lovers steal kisses amongst brilliant fields of butterflies. Zebras and hyenas dance a deadly dance in the natural world's veldt, while in otherworldly forests, sirens and avian geishas wait to feed.

Continue reading…

The former NASA scientist who invented the Super Soaker and Nerf toy lines scored what may be described as an astronomical payday following a lawsuit with Hasbro over the Nerf toy line, reportedly forcing the popular toymaker to sputter out US$72,900,000 in royalties.

The lawsuit alleged that Hasbro underpaid royalties associated with the sales of Nerf products (specifically the N-Strike and Dart Tag brands) from 2007 to 2012. Judges apparently agreed, awarding Lonnie Johnson and his company (the Atlanta-based Johnson Research and Development Co.) nearly seventy-three million dollars. “In the arbitration we got everything we asked for,” said Atlanta attorney Leigh Baier. “The arbitrator ruled totally in Lonnie’s favor.”

Personally I'm amazed by Johnson's background and flabbergasted that companies will market cold medicine as being "invented by a teacher" yet Hasbro fails to market Nerf guns and Super Soakers as having been invented by a former NASA scientist because that is some serious street cred. Johnson seems like something of a savant, having eighty patents to his name in addition to an impressive educational background. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail sales two years later, the company said. The toy was licensed to Larami Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro."

Johnson's career as an inventor apparently started early, when "as an Alabama high school senior, Johnson finished building a remote-controlled robot with a reel-to-reel tape player for a brain and jukebox solenoids controlling its pneumatic limbs". After graduating from Tuskegee University in Alabama, Johnson "joined the Air Force, worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Sandia, worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Mars Observer project, among others. He also helped design the Cassini robot probe that flew 740 million miles to Saturn".

I suppose it just goes to show that if you buckle down, get a good education, work hard, and put a little time in NASA (doing incredible things in the process) -- you know, just paying your dues and working your way up (we all have to start somewhere, right?) -- then you can make it big by inventing a wildly successful bunch of toy brands and become a multimillionaire. But seriously, this story is mind-boggling awesome and gives me a greater appreciation for these toy brands as a result.

The story doesn't end here either. Apparently Johnson has also sued Hasbro over Super Soaker royalties. According to the AJC: "In a separate breach of contract suit filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta in February, Johnson accuses Hasbro of violating a 1996 agreement to pay him Super Soaker royalties of 2 percent for 'three-dimensional products' based on the appearance of the toy and 1 percent for 'two-dimensional visual representations.'" When that ends, I may be able to run a story entitled, "Lawsuit leaves Hasbro drenched".

[ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Yahoo! Finance ]

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Not pictured: Sweet Potato Pecan Pancakes, because honey cake French Toast wasn’t bad enough already.

Don’t ask me what I mean by “bad” in this instance. I might mean “good.” I haven’t decided yet.

(via That’s Nerdalicious!)

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8. 8.

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It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, you desperately cry as I continue to put up these snowflakes, which are by Anthony Herrera and available as free printable PDFs. I have a come-back ready: I find your lack of holiday cheer disturbing.

Previously in Star Wars Snowflakes

• Things We Saw Today: Star Wars Snowflakes
• Star Wars Paper Snowflakes: 2011

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