Can't Stop Geeking

OH YES! This is what we’ve been waiting for! At the Star Wars Celebration V convention this past weekend, George Lucas finally announced that Star Wars is coming to HD for the first time. Now, before you get your hopes up too much, it’s only the new versions. So all you purists out there, you’ll have to stick to those DVDs they issued. Why? George Lucas said that to transfer the old versions would have been very very expensive because a lot of restoration would have to be done to bring them up to par. I suppose that could be true, but still…Regardless, the set will also contain new special features including some never before seen deleted scenes from the movies. One of these deleted scenes was shown at the Celebration. Look it up on Youtube because by the time this article goes live, chances are the video I put in this post will be removed for copyright infringement.

Why did it take so long for Star Wars to come out on Blu-ray? George Lucas was playing the same card he did when DVD came out: he waited until it caught on with consumers and more people were able to buy it. Makes sense since putting it out right away might not be a good idea since a lot of the early Blu-ray titles weren’t that great. But yeah, Star Wars, Blu-ray! EXCITEMENT!

Source: Blu-ray.com

Uh, what? I guess the RIAA still thinks it’s 1985 and just like LL Cool J, we can’t live without our radio. That or it’s the latest in many misguided attempts to keep profits up. As the Consumer Electronics Association said “Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.” However, the RIAA maintains that this move is one to give consumers more choice. Pfft, the only reason they want this is to prevent piracy. But that won’t work because nobody listens to the radio anymore because they all play the same music, save for some public and college radio stations that are awesome.

Source and obvious joke:

So, last week was pretty much Scott Pilgrim week for me since the movie and the game both came out and I reread all the books. For those of you not familiar, Scott Pilgrim is a graphic novel series penned by Bryan Lee O’Malley. It’s about a 23 year old guy named Scott Pilgrim who’s pretty much a slacker. He’s “in between” jobs, plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-Omb (obvious Mario reference), and is dating a high school girl. That changes when he meets Ramona Flowers, an Amazon.com delivery girl. They hook up and in order for Scott to continue dating her, he must defeat her seven evil ex boyfriends. Interesting concept, isn’t it?

That’s the basic premise of the story, but there’s so much more going on here too. What’s great about it is that it isn’t all about battling these evil exes, there’s many emotional layers too. The characters in the story all have flawed relationships and we not only experience what Scott and Ramona go through, but what all the others go through as well.

Now on to the main subject of this article, the movie. It’s directed by one of my favorite directors in the world, Edgar Wright, who previously worked on the TV series Spaced and most famously, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. If there was ever a perfect pairing of material and director, this is it. Edgar brings the world of Scott Pilgrim to life in an astonishingly stylish way that just leaps off the screen and grabs you by the throat. It isn’t all style though, there’s still all the emotional complexity of the novels. In fact, this is probably one of the better book to movie adaptations I’ve seen because Wright has such respect for the source material. It does start to veer off the storyline of the books about half way through the movie, but the plot points are mostly the same. The reason for that is because Edgar started writing Scott Pilgrim while he was working on Hot Fuzz, and not all of the books were out yet. So him and Bryan Lee O’Malley worked very closely on making sure the story was mostly the same.

And of course, the film retains much of the video game feel of the graphic novels and is littered with all sorts of pop culture and geeky references. There’s Zelda music (Koji Kondo is credited in the movie! ), Earthbound references, Final Fnatasy references, the 8-bit rendition of the Universal logo, and much more. There’s so much more I want to say about the movie, but I’d rather just leave you to go watch it yourself. If you’re a geek, and between ages 16-35 or so, this movie is tailor made for you. Be sure to check out the original graphics novels too. All 6 volumes are rather cheap on Amazon right now (like $7 per book). Here’s the trailer:

Well, not officially, but still You get the point. Comex, who recently caused Apple major headaches with his JailbreakMe site, has made a version of Flash for the iPhone called Frash. In order to get it on your device, you must have it jailbroken and it must be a somewhat new model (iPhone 3gs and up). Then what you do is SSH into it, and install the package. Then, Flash on your iPhone! Pretty neat, isn’t it?

Source: Redmond Pie

If you’ve played any games in the Fallout series before, you’ll know about the Pip-Boy. If you haven’t, it’s basically a computer that all characters in the game receive. It tell you your stats, helps you manage your character’s attributes, and houses a lot of the typical RPG game functions. But anyways General Dynamics has a new GPS unit developed for military that you can wear on your wrist that looks pretty much like the Pip Boy. Here’s a comparison of the two:

Pretty neat! Know what would make it even neater? If someone could figure out a way to run Fallout 1 or 2 on the Droid so you could play it on Pip-Boy. Or, if they somehow implemented VATS

Source: Engadget

One of the most annoying aspects about Facebook is that whenever it’s your birthday, people will always post on your wall, and it will become flooded with happy birthday comments. Well, Facebook is going to fix that problem. From now on, all your birthday comments will be grouped into a single collapsible thread. Much better if you ask me. That way I don’t have to see them all at once and can expand it if need be. Take a look at the source link for more info and a screenshot.

Source: Mashable

This is pretty cool, a group of researchers have figured out what God’s Number for a Rubik’s Cube is. For those unfamiliar with the concept of God’s Number, it’s the minimum amount of moves required to solve a puzzle. The concept originated with the Rubik’s Cube and years after its introduction, God’s Number for the Cube has been found to be 20. This is the absolute maximum of moves you need to solve the Rubik’s Cube. So, mere mortals, those 70 something moves you’ve made in an attempt to solve your Rubik’s Cube, not needed. Damn, all this news does is make me feel stupid.

Source: cube20.org

Netflix just got a good deal more awesome! They have just announced a deal with the new EPIX channel that would bring their library of movies to Netflix’s instant streaming service. If you don’t know, EPIX is a new premium movie channel that was created by Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate last year. The Netflix deal allows movies from those three studios to come to Netflix streaming 90 days after they premiere on EPIX. Hopefully Netflix doesn’t do it like they do Starz Play with horrible quality and wrong aspect ratios.

Source: Engadget

Anybody remember Google Wave? You don’t? Oh, well then, apparently you aren’t alone. Google announced that they are going to stop development on Wave. They are going to keep the service maintained until the end of the year and eventually release tools to get your content from Wave off the service. Kinda sad that Wave didn’t catch on because it was a pretty neat tool with some nice potential. If you don’t know, Wave is like a sort of mashup between a message board, a chat room, email, and Facebook. It was pretty ambitious and a lot of people didn’t really dig into it and look into all the neat extensions that were made for it. Oh well, hopefully they take some lessons learned from Wave and put it to use in the future.

Source: Engadget

Amazon’s hugely popular Kindle device just got a little better with the introduction of an app store. Like the iPad, the Kindle app store will feature many programs that will further the functionality of Amazon’s e-reader. The apps are made using Amazon’s KDK (Kindle Development Kit). So far, there’s only two apps, and both of them are word games. Pretty limited selection, but that should grow over time.

Source: Mashable