Marvel comics goes digital, the internet retaliates

Marvel comics is known for many things, their patriotic super heroes and controversial crossovers (i.e. Civil War) amongst a lot of other things over the 50 or so years they’ve been called Marvel. They’ve made many series, released hundreds of issues, and brought about some of the most famous writers and artists the Comic book industries has to offer. Each week they release several issues of their series, ranging from some that have lasted for decades, to other series that remodel their old characters for a contemporary audience. All of this done on a safe, wood-grainy paper. However in our modern society, a world where everything from ordering pizza to taking a digital dump, the webcomic has become king. Despite the bad jokes and worse art the old school Comic book companies are jumping into the dumpster for some diving.

DC Comics has launched Zuda Comics, an online community where webcomic creators can pit their creations against others for a chance at internet popularity. It’s quite impressive, once you get over the fact most of the comics are attempting to mimic the ever popular Anime art style. Marvel, on the other hand, has seemed to run out of ideas after all of the time they’ve spent licensing their superheroes to film studios for sometimes good, but mostly bad movies. Instead of releasing new comics made by industry unknowns, they decided to take all of their old back issues that are collecting dust in the warehouses and toss them on the internet.

Personally, I’m tickled pink (as odd as the phrase maybe) to be able to read up on all of the years I’ve missed reading about some of my favorite heroes. The collectors on the other hand are pissed. Really pissed. Suicide bombing pissed…. well perhaps not that far. The Marvel’s online website has seemed to have been hacked, this happening less than a week after the new service’s announcement. While this could be attributed to Marvel’s servers crashing due to the overwhelming response, it’s exceptionally unlikely. The site is no longer available as any attempts to check the site are faced with the deus ex machina himself Doctor Strange plaguing your URL bar. The collector’s have retaliated with a bad hack job that would make /b/tards laugh. While this probably won’t last more than a few days, it’s very amusing to watch. The mighty comic icon brought down by it’s own fans.

My question is this. Where is Stan Lee to make a poorly produced reality TV series about it when you need him?

StuffWeLike.com’s very own David Rodriguez, being a player with Stan the Man

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[Via: USAToday, Marvel.com, Mashable]

Crysis patch in two weeks, Performance to be improved (Yes!)

[Update] – Crytek has updated the status of their latest patch. 

 

Crysis

inCrysis, a Crysis fansite recently hosted an IRC interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek and Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA. They’ve posted the transcript of the event at their site, which can be found here. While most of the stuff is technobabble, I did extract the following information from it:

  • Crytek is currently collecting feedback information and will have a patch ready in 7-14 standard, human days.
  • They are seeing improved performance with every driver and patch update, which is good thing. This also means that performance will be increased in upcoming patches and driver updates.

Some other things worth pointing out:

  • Crysis is designed as part of a trilogy, so the abrupt ending of the singleplayer was very deliberate. That’s right – why make a spectacular story for one game when you can stretch it to fit three and make more money at the same time?
  • Cevat says that if you want to get into the gaming industry, start making maps and mods and things. You’ll be noticed if you try hard enough. No guarantees here.
  • Roy’s response to whether GPUs should handle advanced physics:
    • Generally we believe that the GPU can stand by itself as a powerful processor more than capable of accelerating advanced physics for today’s and future games. The GPU lends itself well to scalable, violent or destructible physics. What we need is an industry standard API that developers and the community can get behind, that isn’t proprietary. Ideally the developer can then select the GPU or other processor as they see fit. We dont have one today, and this is something we are looking into.Specifically with regard to CryEngine 2 we are in discussions with the team about this but can’t add more right now.
  • You should use NVIDIA for playing Crysis.

Thanks, Crownest!

Check out the StuffWeLike.com review of Crysis.

Flickr’s Two Billionth Photo

Flickr’s 2 billionth photo

You might have an account on Flickr. Heck, you might have even posted a dozen photos of that geek party you held last year that nobody commented on. Well, you might be pleased to know that you just lost the race to get the 2 Billionth image on Flickr.

Over here at Flickr, you can see that lucky little yukesmooks posted image #2000000000 on Flickr. The photo, whose preview you can see above is of some sort of a tree (or something that looks like some sort of a tree) and was taken at Market City in Chinatown Haymarket in Sydney. Nothing spectacular, in my honest opinion.

I suppose the next thing to look out for will be who gets image #2500000000, or #3000000000. Here’s a challenge from StuffWeLike: post image no. 2185510267 on Flickr and we’ll give you a special hug.

Gmail may be killing YOUR e-mail, but it’ll be your fault.

Burning Gmail

I’ve been using Gmail for a couple of years now (maybe a bit more) and I haven’t encountered any such thing, but it is best to stay on your guard. Network World has run an interesting article on one complaint that Google is facing at an alarming frequency: Disappearing e-mails.

Even though Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail each have more users than Gmail, it appears that there are actually more Gmail users complaining of missing e-mail. Many clues point out towards this being a technical issue, such as the incident with Jessica Squazzo, who lost every single e-mail that she received precisely in 2007. Google denies this, claiming that the user is at fault (phishing attacks, passwords, you know what).

Even though this is something to be wary about, there are some points you need to think about. Even if this is Google’s fault for losing the e-mails, the users aren’t guilt-free – at least the ones mentioned in the article. From the article:

Moreover, both Sessum and Squazzo, interviewed separately via e-mail, question why a malicious hacker would go through the trouble of trying to access someone’s e-mail account in order to delete messages, instead of acting stealthily to harvest information they could exploit, like credit card numbers.

Well I can’t answer that, but it might be related to why some viruses delete all the data on your hard disk and/or corrupt it, as opposed to stealing your private information and your credit card numbers, which you oh-so-trustfully keep in a non-encrypted Notepad file in your My Documents folder with the name “CREDIT CARD NUMBERS.txt”

Sessum is actually “building a small company on Google’s back” and therefore trusts Google, a free internet service to not lose her data. I say bullshit – free internet services are not the first choice for building companies on. She complains about the Google support system like so:

“Google’s back-end support function is MIA. You can’t find a number to call. You have to tap our personal network of friends to find a name and a way in through the back door, do a dance and rub a stone for good luck, and hope that someone will help,” she said.

Well you didn’t pay for it , so you should expect the same treatment. I’d be grateful Google even has a support system (which I didn’t know till now).

And most importantly, for all of those complaining about how they lost all their important and/or professional data on Gmail: Gmail is in beta. Yes, it is in beta. No guarantees, no nothing. You lose something – all your fault. You build a business over a free e-mail service in beta stage and lose all your e-mail – your fault. Anything goes in beta. 😉

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High Quality YouTube Videos

I know that phrase is something that millions of people want. YouTube destroys video quality. It loads fast, but damn it looks nasty when compared to newer video sites.

The co-founder Steve Chen announced at NewTeeVee Live conference that YouTube is working on and will be rolling out higher quality videos very soon. The higher quality videos will be treated as an experiment, allowing the user to choose the higher or lower quality format. The higher the quality, the longer the load times. So it’s definitely a let down for some people.Thankfully YouTube will scan your internet speed before it even allows you to make the selection. So if you’ve got a slow connection, don’t even think about watching high quality videos.

Expect high quality videos on YouTube within 3 months.