Yep, now you can carry around all your comic books in true geek fashion with your very own batpack! Even comes with a hood for when you get chilly…or if you just want to go the full geek mile and feel like a member of a batman squad. I would join.
[$34.50 at Hot Topic | Via GeekAlerts]
An academic team project, spanning 12 weeks, representing approx 1000 hours work. This project represented approx 120-160 hours per person, and one quarter of their final semester workload.
All content originated by BA(Hons) VFX : Visual Effects + Concept Design students, Pedrom DADGOSTAR, Hollie PRICE, Jack MILTON, Simon STIRRUP, Sam SERRIDGE, Jack BOSWORTH and Sidney THIBAULT.
A great project people, especially given the challenges the film posed. Fantastic team work, great technical solutions and professional approach throughout.
Rendered on Workstation Specialist’s great WS2610 systems… Including dynamic / particle effects simulations…
[VFX]
So geeks, are you going to go and see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter when it comes out on June 19th, or do you think the movie looks like a total farce?
[Via]
In the following video, Bill Hammack, the engineer guy, shows how the three key characteristics of laser light – single wavelength, narrow beam, and high intensity – are made. He explains the operation of a ruby laser – the first laser ever made – showing how electronic transitions create stimulated emission to give coherent light, and then how the ends of the ruby cavity create a narrow wavelength highly collimated beam.
It seems forever ago, but it was only a few short weeks since Diablo 3 invaded the computer world and proved that even Blizzard couldn’t be ready for day launch problems.
Instantly, Code 37 jokes (a common login error related to server connection issues) were the norm and the internet was pretty mad about it. However, despite fixing those problems and most people now enjoying the game without errors, not everyone is over that initial sting.
It seems a giant class action lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment is looming and the plaintiff is the entire nation of South Korea. Ok, not all of South Korea. Not even all of its extraordinary mass of gamers. In fact, it is an organization calling themselves IPCA – Internet PC Culture Association. Acronyms within acronyms confuse me.
Anyways, this group is mostly made up of internet gaming cafe businesses known there as PC Bangs (bang means room in Korean) and they have created a website called Diablo III Damage Lawsuit hoping to rally other gamers that can show that they suffered from monetary loss due to the buggy servers at the game’s launch time.
The argument is that these PC Bang businesses are claiming a loss of income because their patrons who arrived anticipating playing Diablo 3 were faced with login errors and the inability to play. Those who were able to log in were often booted when servers required maintenance to fix other problems Blizzard was attempting to resolve, and again PC Bangs were full of unsatisfied customers. Refunds were issued and they allegedly lost a lot of money.
Now I don’t profess to be a lawyer or even play one on TV, and I know even less about international law, but I am pretty certain that these businesses can’t hold Blizzard liable for a game that isn’t working properly on launch day.
Without going into a long rant about how Blizzard should have been prepared for this (they are very familiar with hosting games that require server side access, etc.) I really don’t see how it is Blizzard’s responsibility to these game rooms.
If anything, these gaming cafes are benefiting financially from the availabilty of Blizzard property that they likely are not paying any special licensing for, even though they charge hourly for people to use the computers to play the company’s various titles on.
Consider how making and selling a Diablo 3 t-shirt would be considered copyright infringement, but would charging for time to play the game be any less? They could argue that they are renting time on the computers and not specifically paying for time on Diablo 3, but by that argument, they cannot blame Blizzard for the stumbling start this game faced.
Blizzard is pretty fair about compensation for services lost, but guaranteeing up time on a server you didn’t pay a monthly fee for is not likely one of them. Where they DO have monthly fees for a game (World of Warcraft) and unexpected server issues cause inconvenient down time, your account gets credited for a full day, even if the server goes only down for a few hours.
Again, I don’t see where they have a legal leg to stand on here, but laws may be different in South Korea.
It seems that the Game of Thrones creators managed to slip in a rather amusing little prop into some of the gory scenes of season 1 of the show: namely George W. Bush’s head on a stake!
His head appears alongside the heads of Ned Stark and Septa Mordane, as one of the ‘traitors’. Of course, you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it.
The creators claim that it was not a political statement, and simply about using what props they had “lying around”.
Obviously, the Republican Party chairman, Craig Eaton, doesn’t see any humour in the situation and decries the use of such a prop as disrespecting the office of presidency that George Bush once held. He says that whether it was intended or not, it has become a political issue and he calls for the nation of America to take a stand against such things and boycott the HBO show.
Well, American readers, what say ye? Does this smack of a disrespect of your nation’s leader’s position, or is it a non-issue to you?
In any case, I’m off to fetch a magnifying glass and a copy of the season 1 DVDs to watch them all again and find out what else I have missed!
Editor’s note: Apparently, the head we’re talking about here is the one on the left, not the center one.
[Via E! Online]
Unfortunately (for me), these won’t be available in Canada, but starting tomorrow, people in the U.S. will have the immense privilege of having this delicious-looking bacon sundae on the menu in all Burger King outlets nationwide.
I guess I’ll have to resort on making my own. This will be the perfect desert to go along with one of my favorite recipes ever: The Original Bacon Explosion.
Om nom nom nom.
[Via]
