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If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a lifetime of reading, selling, making and writing about comics, it’s that people who like comic books also tend to have a pretty healthy interest in breakfast foods. That, I assume, is why the people at General Mills decided to spice up their annual revival of the Monster Cereals — Boo Berry, Franken Berry and the immortal Count Chocula — with a set of redesigns for their principal characters, courtesy of artists Jim Lee, Dave Johnson and Terry and Rachel Dodson. In other words, your breakfast just got a New 52 reboot.

The whole thing is even marketed as a co-production between General Mills and DC, with the former presumably handling the cereal while the latter concentrated on art. Obviously, this means that these cereals are technically an edible DC Comics title, so with Halloween creeping up on us like a restless spirit, I have taken it upon myself to examine the new look for the spoooookiest of breakfast cereals to find out just how these new designs hold up to the originals.

Before we get to the actual cereals, though, I want to talk about the box these things arrived in. General Mills was kind enough to send over a box of each cereal for me to try, and this is how it arrived on my doorstep:

Now, far be it from me to criticize a veteran like General Mills, who fought so valiantly against Captain Crunch in the breakfast wars, but if I wanted to market something as being not just edible, but delicious, I would probably not want to cover the box in skulls and crossbones. Maybe this is just what I’ve learned from a lifetime of of watching cartoons, but skulls tend to be the universal sign for “DO NOT EAT THIS,” especially when my usual breakfast involves Basic 4, a cereal that I believe is only consumed by me and the world’s oldest living grandparents. I’m already worried about this stuff putting me into a diabetic coma (or, in a better scenario, combining with my morning coffee to give me actual super-powers), and then I have to contend with grim reminders of my own mortality staring at me from the box?

Right away, we’re off to a bad start.

COUNT CHOCULA BY TERRY AND RACHEL DODSON

I’m surprised that DC assigned the Count Chocula reboot to the Dodsons instead of Jim Lee. I mean, I’m not saying they should be relegated to Fruit Brute or anything — who, incidentally, did not make the cut, in a shocking example of General Mills leaving money on the breakfast table with regards to the lucrative Team Jacob market — but in the world of breakfast foods, Chocula is basically Wolverine meets Batman. Say what you will about Lee’s art, but if he should be redesigning anyone, the New 52 has taught us that it should probably be the guy who already has a high collar.

That said, they do a solid job here. The new Chocula is definitely an improvement over his predecessor, largely because they took the time to give him a nose that does not look like a floppy ol’ ding-dang, something that most of us do not want to be confronted with first thing in the morning.

Nasal flaccidity aside, there are a number of positive changes here. I’m particularly fond of the subtle bat shape of the eyebrows and the sharpened sideburns, since the Count’s original mutton chops tend to look less like a hairstyle choice and more like an olde timey leather football helmet. What’s especially notable is that it keeps what works: The bat-ear hair and the “fangs” that make the Count seem less like he’s going to suck your blood and more like a bunny rabbit who may or may not crave the precious vitae of the living. The more dramatic posture is a nice touch, too, although like all the boxes, it removes the element of Chocula actually enjoying his own cereal.

Overall, it’s a positive change. 4 out a possible 5 coffins.

BOO BERRY BY JIM LEE

As much as I would’ve enjoyed seeing him take on Count Chocula, I do have to applaud Jim Lee for playing against type by going for Boo Berry instead. Unfortunately, I don’t think the redesign actually works that well. There’s nothing wrong with it, you understand. I even like that facet that the longer you look at it, the more the eyes appear to be disturbingly off-center, angling to focus directly on you even though Boo Berry’s head is tilted slightly away, which helps to add a little Lovecraftian geomtery to a form that would otherwise just look like one of the ghosts from that live-action Casper movie. Even so, I don’t think it measures up to the original.

The original Boo Berry design, while flawed, definitely looks like a soul that has been denied paradise, doomed to forever walk the Earth hawking cereal to children. His eyes have a weariness that speaks of years trapped between worlds, while the redesign’s suggestive waggle replaces the tragedy with a dose of hucksterism. The shift of the porkpie hat and tie to shades of blue, while representing a muted color palette that works from a design standpoint, takes away from the mismatched ensemble of Boo Berry Prime, which I’ve always seen as ties to his mortal life. Also, that weird, jagged outline has an unsettling ectoplasmic feel to it that smoothing it out really misses.

On the other hand, people would probably rather see a smiling face on their cereal box than a dead soul so worn down by the toil of his afterlife that he can barely open his eyes and mouth to speak. I’d still say this is the weakest of the bunch: 2 out of a possible 5 coffins.

FRANKEN BERRY BY DAVE JOHNSON

First, neither one of these designs has successfully made it look like Franken Berry does not have a butt growing out of his forehead. Second, I have never noticed that Franken Berry’s fingernails are strawberries, and I’m severely weirded out by that for reasons that I can’t quite explain. I just… I just do not like it one bit. Third, spelling it as “Franken Berry” instead of “Frankenberry” makes it seem less like it’s based on Frankenstein and more like it’s a particularly unflattering portrayal of Senator Al Franken (D – MN), especially with those glasses.

That said, this is far and away my favorite redesign of the bunch, mainly because of how much Dave Johnson has added to it. Roughing the edges on the riveted eye pieces and steam gauge gives everything a slightly more steampunkish look, which I appreciate, but the main things here are the two most metal things you can add to a cereal mascot: Scars and chains. The scars play up the Frankenstein connection, serving as a reminder that this dude is definitely a monstrous creature formed from corpses in a mockery of God’s creation, which is pretty fantastic. On the other hand, it also opens up pedantic corrections of “um, actually, Franken Berry was the scientist?” so that one goes either way.

It’s the chains that really sell it. Who has tried to keep Franken Berry chained, and what happened when he broke free, raining damnation and destruction (and strawberry-flavored frosted cereal with spooky marshmallows) on all who would bind him? That is a story I would like to see. Seriously, if DC really wants to capture fan interest, they can forget about this whole Justice League movie nonsense and give us a nine-movie franchise about these guys.

And Yummy Mummy. He deserves his time in the spotlight.

4 out of a possible 5 coffins.

Brytenwalda, DLC, Mount & Blade: Warband, TaleWorlds, v-v-v-vikings!.

These days, most patent lawsuits are filed by so-called "patent trolls," which can't be counter-sued because they have no business other than litigation.

When a company files a patent lawsuit against a competitor, it can expect to be met with a counter-suit. That's exactly what happened when Sprint used 12 VoIP patents to sue Comcast in 2011. Yesterday, Comcast's counter-punch landed, hard.

Sprint got slapped with a $7.5 million jury verdict (PDF) for infringing three Comcast patents, after a Delaware trial ended. That's less than the $16.5 million Comcast lawyers had asked for, but simply by sticking it out through trial and winning, Comcast's point has surely been made: we're not an easy target, and we will hit back.

Apple's new iMac with Retina display is very pretty and useful, but in the same places where it's made leaps and bounds, it's also made one of Apple's other pieces of Mac hardware look like a relic, and an increasingly obvious mistake if you were to buy it.

I'm talking about Apple's Thunderbolt Display, a product that's languished nearly as long as the iPod Classic (which was finally laid to rest last month), but that's actually still a really good idea. The last time Apple updated the $999 screen, the iPhone had a 3.5-inch display, and the company was just beginning to figure out how to make its mobile and desktop operating systems actually work together. Fast forward to today, and you can answer phone calls from your 5.5-inch screened iPhone on any Mac running Apple's latest OS. And perhaps just as dramatic of a change is what the iMac used to look like and what it does now, with a high-end Retina display model that doubles the number of vertical and horizontal pixels in a much smaller computer.

Once the "world's first," now it's the last in many areas

By comparison the Thunderbolt Display remains big, bulky, and with none of the anti-reflective or color accuracy technologies that have been in Apple's iMac for the past two years. Once the world's first Thunderbolt display, it's become close to the world's last in everything else. It's got USB 2.0, and the first version of Thunderbolt, which was replaced by faster Thunderbolt 2 roughly a year ago — now a requirement for hooking up to 4K displays. Moreover, Apple still ships it with an old version of its MagSafe charging cord, which requires you use a kludgy adapter in case you want to use it with any MacBook the company's sold since mid-2012.

Is the languishing of this product a sign that Apple's ignoring pros? Last year's Mac Pro revamp and now this $2,499 iMac for pixel peepers strongly suggests that's not the case. But it does highlight a peculiar gap in Apple's product line, and how it expects people to use one of its two computers that you can't use without hooking it up to a display. Look at the Mac Pro, for instance, and Apple is still advertising it as something you use with a display made by someone else:

Is the new iMac a consumer product? Maybe that's the better question. At a starting price of $2,499, you could buy two of its smaller, entry-level iMacs, and still have some money leftover to buy a year's worth of Adobe PhotoShop. But what you get instead is not being able to see individual pixels, and edit 4K (and higher) quality videos and enormous photos on a screen that was built for those tasks. Not even people who bought Apple's $2,999 Mac Pro have been able to do anything close to that on Apple hardware, unless they're on the 15-inch version of Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina display.

The Retina display will trickle down to the cheap iMacs, eventually

The important thing is that its screen is destined to end up as the one you buy in Apple's eventual entry-level machine a few years from now. That's what happened with the MacBook Pro, on Apple's portables like the iPad and iPod, and likely whatever display ends up replacing this one. The big question is if Apple wants to do another one, or if this will experience a similar fate as the iPod.

There's still no denying that the Thunderbolt Display was, and still is an exciting idea, something that is close to the vision of replacing a rat's nest of cables with just a plug or two. While the idea of what we do on desktop computers versus tablets and our phones is still being formed, it's very easy to look at this now languishing product as a taste of things to come.

In August, Eron Gjoni published a 9,000 word screed on his personal Wordpress, detailing the private relationship he shared with game designer Zoe Quinn. The post catalyzed a movement that would become known as Gamergate, an ongoing internet protest that claims to be about journalistic ethics, but is fixated on suppressing progressive voices, particularly those of minorities and women. The group strategizes on the internet, but members have made threats in the real world, including doxxing Quinn and other designers and requesting advertisers pull campaigns from publications that publish coverage the group does not agree with. This week, critic Anita Sarkessian was forced to cancel a lecture at a Utah University after receiving threats of a "massacre" of her and other feminists.

Buzzfeed News spoke with Gjoni about the movement he inspired. The profile is enigmatic. The 24-year-old man seems to be both disgusted by and proud of the Gamergate movement. Ironically, Gjoni claims "I don't like, have a passion for games or anything."

But perhaps most interesting are the details about the conversation Gjoni had before publishing the original post, which made revealing claims about Quinn's sex life, with his mother, a human resources manager. From the piece on Buzzfeed:

Gjoni also consulted his mother, a human resources manager who asked that her name not be used. Gjoni's mother, who trains workers in harassment avoidance, preached caution. "I advised him to cool off and not make a decision based on emotions," she told BuzzFeed News. "I was not very happy that he made the decision to publish. As a parent my feeling is that what you put on the internet is for eternity."

That final sentence rings especially true this week, which marks two months since the beginning of Gamergate. The story has only grown since August. Today, the group's threats on women were documented on the front page of the New York Times in a piece called "'GamerGate' Campaign Targets Critics of Women."

Putting the computer back in Apple Inc

It took about six hours for me to mostly forget that I was using Yosemite. That’s not to say it doesn’t look different — it does. It’s just that the new look feels familiar, only slightly more refined, like the finished version of what came before. After downloading and installing the update (which took about 25 minutes and a little over 5GB of disk space), I had a new wallpaper, the mountain face against pink and purple sky. All the fonts were suddenly a little smaller and a lot more Helvetica Neue (and also pretty pixelated unless I was on a Retina screen). All the icons were a little flatter. I’d love to say I have feelings about the translucency in the sidebars and menu bars of Apple’s apps, which shows a bit of the app behind whatever you’re looking at, but I don’t. I stopped noticing it almost immediately. (Of course, that’s partly because a lot of apps haven’t even updated to support translucency yet. You can also turn it off really easily.)

It’s a cleaner, calmer, more balanced look that I like a lot, even if I did change my background immediately. But there’s still a dock at the bottom of my screen, still a menu bar at the top, still the same settings and options and gestures and keyboard shortcuts. Yosemite is a new look — but it’s not a new idea.

Yosemite only changed a few things about the way I use my Mac. Some are small: there’s no "full-screen" button in the top right corner of the window, you just press the green button in the stoplight menu. Spotlight doesn’t pop up in the corner of your screen, but in the center, in a gray window like Alfred. I have a fraught relationship with the new Spotlight, by the way: it’s much more powerful, showing movie times and map results and topical Wikipedia pages, but it can’t do a simple Google search, and it would rather show me emails that reference Taylor Swift than actually help me play "Out Of The Woods." Spotlight is so close to right, but I still use Alfred every time.

The biggest change was that I started using Safari again. A lot. Safari is so incredibly fast to load pages that I almost think it’s cheating. The list of frequently visited sites that appears every time you click on the address bar is incredibly handy, as is the visual tab switcher. I’m a habitual opener of hundreds of tabs, and I’ve never found an easier way to wade through the morass and find what I’m looking for. If you’re not forever married to another browser, Safari is very much worth a shot.

It looks different… and yet the same

For all the talk of convergence and of the ever-shrinking gap between PC and smartphone and tablet, Yosemite almost makes a statement in its lack of fundamental change. It’s not Windows 10, with big ideas about how our devices are just different sizes of the same thing, how the interface and settings and apps should be consistent everywhere. Microsoft believes in a single experience for all devices; Apple believes every device ought to have its own. This is still a PC operating system, made for devices with mice and keyboards and trackpads. It feels outdated in places – the whole idea of the "desktop" just feels pointless, and saving and organizing files is still more complex than it should be in the age of limitless searchable cloud storage — but it’s true to what Apple believes in.

Plus, there’s a lot more to Yosemite than the desktop. The best features, the most important and innovative features, do affect every device you own — as long as you own Apple devices. They don’t all look or work the same, but they work together better than ever.

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad running iOS 8.1 and a Mac running Yosemite, have Bluetooth on, and are logged into the same iCloud account and Wi-Fi network on both devices, your devices will suddenly begin to constantly talk to each other. After a surprisingly convoluted setup process (you need to change settings in three different apps on two different platforms, and enter a passcode), when your phone rings, so does your Mac.

You can actually even make and receive calls from your computer, which has more than once saved me from missing calls while digging for my phone in my bag. AirDrop finally works between Mac and iOS, meaning you can easily send photos and files between phone and computer. (FINALLY.) You can remotely activate the personal hotspot feature on the iPhone and use it to connect your Mac to the internet, which I’ve already needed a few times because Time Warner Cable is a nightmare.

My favorite feature of the Continuity group, and probably the thing about Yosemite that most changed how I go about my day, is that Messages now lets you send SMS text messages from your computer. That means I can finally text my Moto X-toting girlfriend without having to constantly pick up and put down my phone. It’s already made me more likely to quickly (or ever) respond to someone’s texts. Messages do still occasionally sit in the iMessage hell of existing on one device but not others, but I can’t overstate how much I like texting from my laptop.

Sharing data between devices is automatic, once you get the setup right, and surprisingly pervasive. Whenever you open a new tab on your Mac, or start composing an email or text, an icon appears in the bottom left corner of the iPhone’s lock screen; swipe it up and you’ll go right to where you were on your PC. It works the opposite way, too, the icon showing up to the left of your dock on the Mac. It doesn’t always work the way I expected, though; there’s no rhyme or reason to when in the message-composition process the icon will appear on my phone, and sometimes the icon on my Mac opens Chrome but not a new page. Everything works most of the time, but it’s not quite seamless yet.

When Continuity works, it’s amazing

As long as they work, all these features together make the case for buying a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad better than Apple ever has before. iTunes wasn’t compelling enough; neither were any previous iterations of iCloud. Now, the three devices feel synced and aligned in a totally automatic, uncomplicated way. I can do anything from anywhere, each device suited best to certain things. (This is the idea Windows had long ago, and I hope Microsoft is taking a few notes on execution.) Next, I hope more apps start to take advantage, letting me move image edits and my spot in videos and the like between devices. This is a killer feature with huge possibilities, and I hope Apple and its developers all make real use of it.

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Star Wars: Episode VII doesn't have a subtitle yet, but maybe it should be called Return of the Ewok. Today Warwick Davis, the actor who played the charismatic Ewok warrior Wicket W. Warrick in Return of the Jedi, popped up in a new video to gleefully announce he had received a call to return to a galaxy far, far, away. The 44-year-old Davis comically shows off his enthusiasm with a false beard, but doesn't specify exactly what role he will be playing, or whether Ewoks will appear in Star Wars: Episode VII at all. In fact, Davis could easily be playing another character entirely, or even several new characters, as he did in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (he played young Anakin Skywalker's Rodian friend Wald and two other aliens). Nonetheless, Davis's shows that director JJ Abrams is clearly set on bringing back even more iconic actors from the original trilogy. Star Wars: Episode VII is set to hit theaters on December 18th, 2015.

CUPERTINO, CA—Apple’s media event today was light on surprises. Apple really didn’t show anything that hadn’t already been leaked by the rumor mill (or by Apple itself), but that doesn’t mean that the upgrades to the iPad and Mac lineups are unwelcome.

We spent some quality time with the hardware after the announcement, and our impressions are below. As for the software, you can already grab OS X Yosemite for yourself now, and iOS 8.1 and Apple Pay will follow on Monday (at least for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners).

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There were immediately questions when, earlier this month, it was announced that a "Twin Peaks" miniseries is coming to Showtime. Namely, what had the characters been doing for the past quarter-century? How had the iconic mystery affected the town? Had Dale Cooper's caffeine problem spun out of control?

We'll be getting some answers before the new series airs in 2016. A novel, from "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost, is coming next year, and promises to catch us up on what "happened to the people of that iconic fictional town since we last saw them 25 years ago," according to a statement form the book's publisher, Flatiron Books. The story will also delve deeper into the central mystery of the series, the death of Laura Palmer.

As the new "Twin Peaks" will pick up in the present day, there will certainly be other fertile ground for the book to explore, such as Log Lady's reactions to Nirvana's In Utero.