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You probably don’t know this since he keeps it pretty quiet, but Kieron Gillen, the writer of Young Avengers, Iron Man and The Wicked + The Divine, is a pretty big fan of pop music. I know, I was surprised too, since it almost never comes up. But, back when he and artist Jamie McKelvie were working on the first volume of Phonogram, the word got out and Gillen was apparently asked to pitch a story starring Marvel’s very own mutant pop star superhero, Dazzler!

The story was never picked up, likely owing to it being a Dazzler story about the Inhumans and the Celestials, but today, Gillen posted his full pitch on his Tumblr, and, as you might expect if you’re familiar with Gillen’s comics, it’s actually pretty awesome.

Here’s the basic idea behind Gillen’s pitch for Dazzler: Big In Attilan:

DAZZLER: BIG IN ATTILAN
(In a paragraph, as you’re busy, like.)

Her career in the doldrums and critically savaged, Alison Blaire gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She’s invited to be the first outsider to perform in the Inhumans’ home city. She arrives to find it in strife, between traditionalists outraged at her presence and her fans who – due to Attilan’s East-European Iron-curtain-esque Isolation – only really liked her old-Disco material anyway. After a disastrous, conflict-ruptured gig, the situation takes a bizarre and dangerous turn when a Celestial appears outside the city. Doing nothing. At least until, during an official ball, the classical inhuman music act is disintegrated. Others follow. Dazzler realizes that it’s here, somehow, to judge art. Her band – with Black Bolt guesting on backing vocals – don’t have to just play the gig of their lives – they have to play the gig to save everyone’s lives.

Listen: I realize that I am in a pretty narrow segment of the market here, but if you put out a comic where Arishem the Judge, a Jack Kirby Creation who has The Formula For World Destruction Inscribed On His Thumb, has to be rocked to save the lives of a race of superhumans who live on the moon, you can literally charge whatever you want for that and I will buy it.

For the whole pitch, check out Gillen’s tumblr!

50 Comics and Characters That Resonate with LGBT Readers

After spending months climbing the ranks of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation, on April 18th, 2005, Istvaan Shogaatsu's moment had finally arrived. He had gained the trust of the corporation's CEO, Mirial, and while the two were alone on her ship he issued a command that led to the ransacking of nearly every Ubiqua Seraph office and hangar in the galaxy. He then proceeded to destroy her ship and escape pod. At the time, it was one of the biggest hijacks to ever occur in the virtual world of Eve Online, with the total damages incurred by Ubiqua Seraph reportedly totaling close to $16,500. "This was one of the stories that really set the tone," says reporter Andrew Groen, "that changed the community in a lot of ways."

It also helped inspire Groen's latest project, A History of the Great Empires of Eve Online, a book that aims to document the complicated and exhilarating history of one of gaming's most notorious virtual worlds.

Preserving video game history is difficult even for the simplest of games, but complex, sprawling worlds like Eve Online present their own set of challenges. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York set out to create a time capsule of Eve, for instance, the curators realized just how dull the game would be without its players. They settled on creating a series of videos that let viewers experience a day in the Eve universe. While that may give future generations an idea of what the game was like on a moment-to-moment basis, it still leaves a huge gap in understanding just what Eve is all about, and how it has changed over time.

Unlike other online worlds — World of Warcraft, for instance — Eve is essentially shaped by the players, who form alliances, engage is incredible, large-scale space battles, and dedicate themselves to time-consuming endeavors like the Mirial assassination. In the more than 10 years that the game has been around, players have created their own history inside the game. "In Eve the players control their own destinies in a lot of ways," says Groen, "and that's really the heart of where history begins to be made."

"The heart of where history begins to be made."

There have been attempts to document Eve's history before. Developer CCP and comic publisher Dark Horse released the book Eve: Source earlier this year, for instance, but it primarily served as a compendium of the in-game fiction and a collection of fantastic art. Player-created wikis, meanwhile, are often written by people who have invested a lot of time and energy into the game, making them far from ideal historians. "The problem with wikis is that people want to write about themselves, not about other people," Groen explains. "So you end up with these horribly biased wiki entries where people are actually mocking their enemies."

Groen, on the other hand, describes himself as a casual player without any in-game allegiances. In fact, he hadn't even touched the game before he started writing about it for the now-defunct gaming site Penny Arcade Report. But that experience made him realize just how interesting the player-created events in the game can be. "I got a little bit addicted to Eve reporting," he says. When the Penny Arcade Report shut down, he found himself with extra time on his hands, and used that freedom to work on the book as a personal project. He has since raised more than $40,000 on Kickstarter to turn that personal project into a self-published book.

Given the unreliability of much of the current documentation on the game, Groen is relying primarily on the first-hand accounts of players to tell the story of the game's history, which has created some challenges. For one thing, given the player base's penchant for deception, there's always the chance of people lying in order to get across the story they want to tell, as opposed to what really happened. "Occasionally I get a little concerned that I'm going to get trolled by one of the higher-level alliances," says Groen. He's hoping to get around this by talking to as many sources as possible.

And for a game that's been around for more than a decade, there are also many people who were once heavily invested in the game but no longer play. Luckily that hasn't created a problem so far — it turns out that Eve can really burn itself into your memory. "If you're running a high-level alliance and there are 500 or 1,000 people under your command, you remember that stuff," Groen says. "That's really important, it's really significant, it's really stressful at the time."

"This should have happened so long ago."

For some people, Eve is a game that's far more interesting to read about than to play — it's an intimidating experience that requires a great deal of time and focus to enjoy. But every so often a story comes out of the game that captures the imagination of the larger gaming community. When more than 2,000 people square off in a virtual space battle, it's interesting even if you don't really know what Eve is. So perhaps it's a bit surprising that it's taken 10 years for a project like this to come about. "This should have happened so long ago," says Groen. "The stories that players tell from those events, that's a longstanding tradition. People have always loved to tell the story of what happened after these battles. It's just part of the culture of Eve Online."

The book is expected to be completed by next May. And while the goal is to make it a fascinating read for both players and non-players alike, for Groen it's also a chance to be a part of something special. Eve may be one of the first large-scale online games of its kind, but it's unlikely it will be the last. And recording its history could very well help shape the next great virtual world.

"I feel like I'm a reporter in 1850 covering the first professional baseball games, or getting the chance to be a photographer back in 1910 photographing the first Model Ts coming off the assembly line," says Groen. "It's not just about what this is now, it's about what I believe this is going to be in the future."

The hand controller that was used by the Apollo 15 crew to land on the moon's surface will be sold off this month in an Aviation and Space auction, according to a media release from RR Auction.

The spring-loaded hand controller was used to control pitch, roll and yaw while maneuvering to and from the lunar surface. The controller is described as tight and returns to neutral position, and still has its communications trigger switch. Bidding is expected to reach as high as $300,000.

The joystick was used by Commander Dave Scott to manually guide the Lunar Module Falcon to the moon's surface in 1971 after tracking data indicated they were going to land 3,000 feet south of the targeted landing site.

"While risking their lives during the most critical and historic phases of their mission, these are the items that the astronauts personally selected to retain as mementos from arguably the greatest technological and engineering achievement of the 20th Century," said VP at RR Auction Bobby Livingston.

Other items that will be featured in the auction include Buzz Aldrin's NASA-issued "comfort" glove worn at the Tranquility Base during the first lunar landing, and a Jerusalem tile flown in lunar orbit.

By Nathan Grayson on May 7th, 2014 at 12:00 pm.

What started as an outer space scare worthy of its own Event Horizon movie ended up being a big misunderstanding. It all began with a Star Citizen community member, “Lauresh,” attempting to organize a women’s-only group in the wake of some especially, er, uncomfortable forum threads, a place to go hang out on days when the wider universe left her cold. Since this is the Internet, her plan was immediately met with a barrage of ugliness and vitriol. To top it all off, she was then banned from Star Citizen’s forums, an unceremonious opening of the airlock that rightfully left many eyebrows raised and confused. Apparently, however, that part was a huge mistake, and Roberts Space Industries not only wants to allow players of any sort to form their own groups, but plans to give them the tools to do so.

The was apparently handed out because Lauresh was from a group associated with Something Awful that had recently been doing a lot of trolling. RSI’s moderators assumed this was just another instance of rowdy attention-grabbing and decided to send all involved packing. A pretty gross assumption given the subject matter? Absolutely. But it was the exact opposite of what RSI is hoping to achieve in the long run. Developer Ben Lesnik explained:

“On the greater subject of women in the Star Citizen universe, the answer is that yes we should go out of our way to create a safe space for them. Women online, and especially women in gaming, have it very, very tough in ways that men absolutely do not understand. This isn’t an argument for the community to have, it’s a fact. Our moderators (and game designers and programmers and everyone else involved in Star Citizen) should do everything possible to create a safe environment, not encourage typical internet knife-fighting in this regard.”

“Men don’t have to deal with this sort of thing, and it’s so systemic. For years I was part of a community that simply didn’t have women. At first I thought it was because space sims didn’t appeal to women… but I came to understand it was because of how immature the average forum user was towards them. It broke my heart hearing from women who loved fighting aliens but who had to pretend to be men in order to even talk to anyone about it, lest their PM inboxes fill up with come-ons and their social networking get invaded with awful dudes.”

“As if it even needed to be said, there is more than enough room for a female-only group in the ‘verse. Making connections like that is what our Organizations system is for, and there’s absolutely no additional room to argue with that.”

That’s very good news, obviously. A very, very inauspicious beginning, but RSI at least seems to be plotting a course to something much better. That said, it doesn’t really solve the community organization issues that spawned this issue in the first place, nor does it necessarily make the overall community a more hospitable place in the short term. These problems could be solved in time, but it’s going to require a lot more hands-on effort from RSI – not just assumptions and bans.

We shall see. For now, though, I at least applaud the no-nonsense stance they’ve taken. It’s needed. But statement of intent is just a start. Now it’s time to see if RSI will follow through.

Submitted by: (via Dump a Day)