firehose

There are a number of pressure sensitive capacitive stylus options available for the iPad, but their performance is almost always measured against that of far more powerful traditional drawing tablets. That’s why when tablet titan Wacom announced that it was at last applying its Z-axis tech to a professional-grade stylus of its own last month — and as part of its Intuos brand, no less — iPad users perked up. Could this be the capacitive pen that finally delivers a more Cintiq-like experience on the tablet? Wacom provided ComicsAlliance with a review sample of its new Intuos Creative Stylus, which I took for a spin over the course of week and a half. Click through to read the full review.

The Intuos Creative Stylus is a $99.95 capacitive pen works with the iPad Mini, iPad 3, iPad 4 and any future models Apple might have planned in the not-too-distant future. It comes in blue and black colorways, both of which are constructed from brushed aluminum.

Weighing in at 37 grams, the Intuous Creative Stylus is nicely balanced — if a little tip-heavy — which is fine. This weight distribution seems to allow gravity to do most of the work when drawing and keeps you from having to mash the nib against the screen as with many capacitive pens. Right away users will notice that its tip actually pivots and compresses slightly, which is indicative of the pressure and tilt sensitivity power it actually packs. Physically, the pen bears a resemblance to a standard Cintiq pen, with a similar ergonomic grip and buttons.

Size-wise, the Intuos Creative Stylus fits somewhere between a normal Wacom Cintiq pen and the original Wacom Bamboo iPad stylus. As a guy who never quite fell in love with the stubbier Bamboo stylus I bought a few years back, the pen’s 5.31 x 0.39 x 0.56″ dimensions feel good in the hand without compromising storage and portability.

Speaking of the Bamboo iPad stylus, the Intuos Creative Stylus apparently uses the same nibs as its quasi predecessor, which is great since I’ve stockpiled a bunch of them over the past few years and I suspect others may have as well. With the Bamboo I tended to wear out nibs a few times a month with heavy use. With the Intuos I generally haven’t needed to apply as much pressure, regardless of which app or which brush settings I use. For basic lines and coloring, this seems to be a boon to the lifespan of a given nib. The stylus performs with a minimal amount of mashing applied – the least of any stylus I’ve used. It makes it ideal for nib longevity and basic comfort, even in my heavy hands after more than a week of daily drawing.

The Intuos Creative Stylus is powered by a single AAAA battery, which tacks on minimal heft. A rechargable option might have been nice, but after more than a week of daily use, the use the pen is still going strong. It’s meant to last a full 150 hours, which means the majority of users won’t have to bother buying an economy pack of AAAA’s at Costco or anything. If you want to be sure you never run out of juice, however, the Intuos Creative Stylus is packed with a slim and sturdy carrying case that leaves room for an extra battery and up to five extra pen nibs.

Pairing the stylus with a given app is painless and only took me a few seconds in my apps of choice. Wacom’s Bamboo Paper app succinctly walks users through its setup. Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro and SketchBook Ink apps readily await the stylus in their respective lists of third-party pen options, too. Don’t bother trying to pair the stylus as a Bluetooth device with the iPad like you would a wireless keyboard, though. You’ll be staring at a spinning loading wheel in vain.

When it comes to line quality, the Intuos Creative Stylus’ power depends principally on the apps it gets paired with. I tested it out in Wacom’s Bamboo Paper app, plus SketchBook Pro and SketchBook Ink. Different brushes are designed to respond (or in some cases, not respond at all) to the pen’s 2048 pressure levels. That all said, the brushes that are meant to play nicely with the stylus work in a way I hadn’t experienced with other options such as the Pogo Connect.

The Intuos Creative Stylus just plain delivers on my favorite apps. It’s the closest you can get to the experience of using a higher-end Intuos or Cintiq tablet with a PC or Mac on the iPad. The stylus proved especially impressive in SketchBook Ink, which imitates traditional dip pens and more modern brush pen markers. Digital ink flowed responsively and comfortably from the Intuos Creative Stylus without jitter, hiccups or lag. In the Bamboo Paper and Skethbook Pro apps, brushes meant to mimic pencils, pens, paint brushes and other art tools are also very handily augmented by the instantly noticeable response to pressure.

Even if you aren’t seeking pressure sensitivity, the Intuos Creative Stylus shortcut keys are a VERY welcome addition to any drawing workflow on the iPad. The apps I use most often don’t currently allow users to custom program button functions, but the standard assigned functions on the SketchBook Pro, SketchBook Ink are “undo” and a brush toggle function. This is legit since these uses would be my top picks anyway, but I’d really like to see expanded customization options integrated in future software updates for these apps and others. That functionality would significantly improve the Intuos Creative Stylus experience — even in Bamboo Paper app, which only offers a few different customization options (including disabling the buttons outright).

The Intuos Creative Stylus supports palm rejection functionality when paired with certain apps, but I found it to be a bit of a moot feature for my workflow. Apps that utilize certain hand gestures (like, say, a three-finger tap) essentially need to register signals akin to the way my palm rests on the iPad to work, meaning apps that don’t kind of inherently reject palm interference anyway. If you’re primarily drawing with this stylus, you may not need to rest your palm on your iPad and therefore not care one way or another. If you’re considering this stylus for note-taking or writing a lot of text, you might want to make sure you’ve selected an app that prioritizes palm rejection before drawing any conclusions about the performance of the Intuos Creative Stylus. Wacom’s Bamboo Paper app seemed to handle it just fine, though, and the official Wacom site makes each integrated app’s capabilities clear.

The biggest downside of the Intuos Creative Stylus — and its competitors — is that you’ve got to reconnect the stylus to a given app pretty regularly. If you toggle between drawing apps and other apps on your iPad a lot, you’ll find yourself pairing the stylus up more than you feel like you should have to. It’s not THAT big of a hassle, but just enough of a headache to make you wonder what the deal is. I’m crossing my fingers for a more automated pairing process in the future.

All told, Wacom’s Intuos Creative Stylus is the best pressure-sensitive iPad drawing tool that I’ve used (I haven’t tried the Adonit Jot Touch 4 because drawing with a disk tip just isn’t my thing). Yes, it’s still got a bubbly silicone tip that’s not as fine as a regular graphic tablet stylus due to the capacitive limitations of the iPad screen, but if you’ve been using a conventional iPad stylus for any amount of time, you’ll find you’re already trained to make the most of the Intuos Creative Stylus right out of the box.

Is it worth the roughly $100 price tag? That depends on what kind of drawing you’ve got in mind. The iPad and its apps aren’t necessarily powerful enough to handle the demands of most professional grade illustration work, but if you’re a hobbyist or a casual comic book creator, the Intuos Creative Stylus coupled with a $500 (or less) iPad is one of the more affordable ways to draw with pressure sensitivity on a retina display. If money’s not as much of an object and you just want the best drawing tool currently on the market for your iPad, then you’ll definitely want to consider Intuos Creative Stylus when it arrives online and in Best Buy stores this October.

So, what family obligation will you be ignoring to watch Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tonight? Well, ComicsAlliance gives you permission to ignore the guilt: wedding anniversaries happen all the time; greatest moments in television history only happen once every fifteen years. To celebrate the newest greatest moment in television history, we hereby present our review of the original one: 1998′s television film Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., written by David S. Goyer and starring the greatest actor in television history, the one and only David Hasselhoff. Read on if you can handle all the greatness.

First, a word of warning. Three seconds after the movie started, I genuinely thought I had made some terrible mistake, and was actually watching a lost episode of Baywatch. Like many venerated shows in television’s eternal pantheon, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. begins with the camera zooming over a body of water, and because David Hasselhoff is apparently the Gene Hackman of syndication, he gets billed above the title. It creates a moment of cognitive dissonance that may throw you for a loop. No, it’s not that much like the opening sequence of Baywatch, but it’s exactly like the opening sequence of Baywatch from an alternate dimension. So if you happen to watch it, there may actually be a moment, as a Mikado yellow “David Hasselhoff” hovers above the rushing water while the soundtrack rages with gated drums, when you find yourself in the same strange situation, questioning all you’ve come to accept about space, time, and even life itself. Just hang on, man. It’ll pass.

When Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker’s cryogenically-frozen body is stolen from something called “Trinity Base,” Contessa Valentina — played by Lisa Rinna before her lips reached mythic proportions and she starred in commercials for adult diapers — implores an embittered Nick Fury to stop hitting concrete walls with pickaxes for no reason and come out of retirement to rejoin S.H.I.E.L.D. Of course, being the reluctant anti-hero, he doesn’t want to, but once he hears that his old friend Clay Quartermain was killed in the attack, he relents. Now, it would have been much more convincing for the audience if they saw Quartermain for more than ten seconds, and he wasn’t played by an actor who gave a performance that could be easily outdone by a reality star reading badly-scripted puns for a one-on-one with the camera. But hey, whatever gets you past the refusal of the call.

When Fury gets back to S.H.I.E.L.D., he discovers just how much things have changed in his absence: the bean-counters run the show; the new breed of Agent is some wobbly little half-man with clean fingernails, impeccable manners, and a funny accent; there’s an agent with a neural implant that allows her to read minds (which is actually the coolest thing about the movie); and of course, Life Model Decoys, android copies of important operatives like Fury himself that look and think and act exactly like the original. Fury is out of place, a misfit, a cold warrior trying to operate in a world he no longer understands.

Soon, the who and why behind the theft of Baron Von Strucker’s body becomes clear. The new leaders of Hydra, the sadistic twins Andrea and Werner Von Strucker, have taken their father’s body so that the Nazi scientist Arnim Zola can reconstitute the “Death’s Head” virus, a deadly contagion that lies dormant within Wolfgang’s blood. With the virus active again, they threaten to unleash it on New York, unless the United States reaches their demand of one billion dollars.

Okay, there’s a lot of wrong going on in Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., but let’s admit that the idea of Von Strucker’s body being a carrier for the “Death’s Head” virus is pretty cool. People were just beginning to understand how frightening biological warfare was back then, and the idea of a Nazi super-pathogen establishes sufficiently high stakes. The problem is pretty much everything before that, after that, around it and on top of it. You know, those little things like budget, director, actors, and young Goyer’s well-meaning script.

Though the Life Model Decoy is supposed to look and think and act exactly like real agents, when the audience is given a peek at Fury’s LMD in-development, it looks like a Madame Tussaud’s statue of Michael Knight accidentally left in the Arizona sun. It would be a minor issue if the LMD didn’t come to play such a major part — as you would expect, when introduced so prominently in the first act — and it would have been great if the producers had something that could actually pass for anything other than a robot; something else besides this blank, nightmare Fury whose eyes can see only murder. I understand, it was 1998, and most of the budget probably went to comically-bulky computer screens, but this thing looks like David Hasselhoff’s brain-dead brother after a bad fire and reconstructive surgery by someone with prosopagnosia.

There are occasionally some good lines, things that you could actually imagine that classic Nick Fury would have uttered in the pages of Jim Steranko’s run. When Fury is asked if the rules at S.H.I.E.L.D. got to be too much for him, he responds, “For me, Kate, there never were any rules”; when he’s informed that they need to obtain Andrea Von Strucker’s blood so they can synthesize an anti-venom to save his life (long story), he retorts with the classic “I’ll get that vampire’s blood if I have to suck it from her neck.” Those moment are rarities — the rest is hackneyed, cliche dialogue performed by actors with charisma so low, it wouldn’t even appear on the D&D scale.

If you can get past the “why is Knight Rider missing an eye?” disconnect, the Hoff actually does look like classic Nick Fury — he’s got the stubble, the build, skin so leathery, in India, to touch him would be forbidden. But he doesn’t sound at all like he should. He pretends to smoke cigars, and tries to be tough, but he doesn’t have the gruffness of voice or character that a man with a lifetime of war and dangerous sex should have. Classic Nick Fury should sound like Leonard Cohen with a throat full of hot glass; Hasselhoff sounds like Mitch Buchannon teaching Hobie how to pleasure a woman. As much as Hasselhoff really looks like a genuine Nick Fury, he doesn’t have the grit in his performance to pull it off, and comes across like, well, a bad actor trying to play a tough guy.

But in a movie full of bad comic-to-movie transitions, the worst one is reserved for Dum-Dum. Timothy Aloysius Dugan, portrayed by Gary Chalk without the trademark mustache, looks like a hapless, desk-riding hump with two ex-wives, a can of Dinty Moore beef stew for dinner every night, and three months to go until retirement; a jar of mayonnaise in a “disillusioned cop” costume. Nobody calls him “Dum-Dum” or even “Sir” — they all refer to him as just Timothy or Tim, and it’s literally the saddest thing in this depressingly bad film.

The basic premise isn’t bad at all — Nick Fury comes out of retirement, sees S.H.I.E.L.D. has changed, has to save the world from a Nazi super weapon — but it’s not the type of story you use to introduce a character to America, and Goyer’s dialogue is mostly awful, performed by mostly awful actors standing on awful sets. Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. is awful, the worst kind of low-budget, half-effort adaptations that all comics properties were once condemned to, just one notch above the seventies Captain America. The only way to enjoy it is ironically, but in this movie, even the quirkiest hipster would undoubtedly find an end to their capacity for ironic love, take a cold, hard look at themselves, and set their ALF t-shirts ablaze.

Even if Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is awful, it could never be this type of awful. Nick Fury is its own special breed of awful: Hasselhawful.

After apparently seeing his mother shot in the thigh, young Elliott Prior is said to have confronted the gunman shouting “you’re a bad man, let us leave”.

Incredibly the gunman in understood to have took pity on Elliott and his six-year-old sister Amelie, giving the pair a Mars bar each and allowing them and their mother to leave the chaotic shopping mall in the middle of the terror attack.

Manhattan has many great qualities, but trash isn't one of them. Since the island has no space for alleys, trash is piled onto the streets for early-morning pickups by loud garbage trucks making their rounds. But there might be a better way: what if trash was moved around the city using pneumatic tubes? It might sound like a crazy idea, but liquid waste has long been transported out of the city in sewers, and water and natural gas are pumped in through tubes. Why not trash?

A new feasibility study by the University Transportation Research Center at the City University of New York hopes to answer just that question. In the report, the team considers two specific sites that are particularly well-suited to a pneumatic trash system: the High Line in Chelsea and the Second Avenue subway. Both proposed systems would mimic one of the only operational pneumatic trash systems in the US, built in 1975 when Roosevelt Island (located in the middle of the East River) was turned into a residential development.

At the High Line, a park built atop an old elevated railway line, tubes affixed under the park would lead to a terminal where trash would be compressed and packaged for transport. At the Second Avenue subway, which is under construction, a system from 92nd to 99th streets would not only collect trash from stations, but also surrounding residential buildings, hospitals, street receptacles, and businesses.

The study finds that the two retrofits would cost about $10.5 million each. But in exchange there wouldn't only be less trash on the streets, but also less congestion and noise pollution thanks to the reduction of garbage trucks. It'd also produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions and use 60 percent less energy than the current method, the study concludes. It seems unlikely that either plan will become a reality however; the Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman tells Capital New York that it already "rejected the idea as infeasible." And even then, both proposals would only serve minuscule portions of the city.