iPad with Wings

To the delight of Mac geeks and fan­boys every­where,  Apple unveiled its hotly antic­i­pated tablet today.  Its unfor­tu­nate name? The iPad.

Almost imme­di­ately, the Twit­ter­verse was rife with men­strual humor.  Here are a few of my favorite jabs:

@ThirtyTwoTwelve :  #iTa­m­pon there’s an app for twat.

@matthewathome :  Will Apple release a (Red) edi­tion of the iPad once a month? #iTampon

@Nickdstm :  #iTa­m­pon for only $499, no strings attached!

@stoogyruby :   iPads are for 8th graders. I’m wait­ing for the iTa­m­pon , because I pre­fer to do all my inter­net­ing from inside my vagina.

And of course, because we’re all just a bunch of imma­ture ass­holes, #iTa­m­pon became a top trend­ing topic.

Update:  It was inevitable .

Tim Burton’s Gallery of the Weird and Wonderful

Check out the awe­some new gallery over at www.TimBurton.com , which is a teaser to pro­mote upcom­ing limited-edition book The Art of Tim Bur­ton .  The book will con­tain over 400 pages fea­tur­ing 1,000 illus­tra­tions from the imag­i­na­tive (and lov­ably twisted) mind of Tim Bur­ton.  The gallery is com­pletely flash ani­mated, and is one of the coolest and most cre­ative uses of Flash I’ve seen.

Vis­i­tors are invited to user their mouse or key­board to nav­i­gate Stain Boy, the on-screen char­ac­ter who guides you through the gallery.  Kinda like play­ing a video game, you can move Stain Boy through doors, get close-up views of art­work hang­ing on the “walls”, and occa­sion­ally he’ll do some kooky things.  Oh, and be sure to turn your sound up to catch the whim­si­cal Sugar Plum Fairy music.

If you sign up with an email address, you’ll get access to the Pri­vate Gallery, which fea­tures addi­tional Burton-esque good­ness.  Sign­ing up will also get you on the mail­ing list to receive news and updates about The Art of Tim Bur­ton. I imag­ine there’s going to be huge demand for this book, so bet­ter keep your beady lit­tle eyes on this one.

With the first trailer for Burton’s Alice in Won­der­land released ear­lier this week and the announce­ment that both Bur­ton and Depp will begin work on a Dark Shad­ows movie , this is shap­ing up to be one hell of a good week for Tim Bur­ton fans.  Thanks to @simplyburton for shar­ing the gallery news!

Nintendo at E3: Epic Yawn, for the Most Part

Fol­low­ing along with Nintendo’s E3 press con­fer­ence on Twit­ter, the live reac­tions were less than enthu­si­as­tic.  Well, it’s no won­der with a pre­sen­ter like this:

Does she look excited about Nin­tendo to you?

For the most part, Nintendo’s pre­sen­ta­tion ambled along like an old woman with a bad hip.  The over­all expe­ri­ence was so blah, #nin­tend­o­fail was in dan­ger of becom­ing a trend­ing topic for a while there.

These were the lowlights:

• Wii Fit Plus — Some minor improve­ments to Wii Fit, such as omit­ting wait-times between exer­cises and the abil­ity to tar­get spe­cific areas.  Riveting!
• Wii Motion­Plus — Add-on hard­ware to make the Wiimote sen­sors more pre­cise.  Will run you about $20 for some­thing that makes the Wii func­tion the way it’s sup­posed to.  Oh and by the way, some new games will require it, like Red Steel 2.
  (notic­ing a trend here with the tack­ing “Plus” onto every­thing?)
• Ter­ri­ble scripted jokes between Bill and Reggie.
• Final Fan­tasy Crys­tal Chron­i­cles: Crys­tal Bear­ers — Yet another Final Fan­tasy title…
• Women’s Mur­der Club: Games of Pas­sion — New “inter­ac­tive fic­tion” game series for DS, adding another nail to the cof­fin of real adven­ture games.
• Style Savvy — Yet another brain­less pink-packaged game aimed at tweenaged girls.
• DSi cir­cle jerk: over 1M units sold in less than 2 months, and DSi gamers will soon be able to share pho­tos on Facebook.
• Wii Vital­ity Sen­sor — Periph­eral that mon­i­tors pulse rate, ner­vous­ness, etc. I don’t even know what the fuck to say about this…

I’m on the fence about:

• Leg­end of Zelda: Spirit Tracks — Demo playable at E3 this week, but didn’t like the few screen­shots we saw.
• Mario vs. Don­key Kong — Play­ers will be able to design their own lev­els, game­play looked kinda fun.
• Golden Sun DS
• War­i­or­Ware DIY — Gamers can design their own minigames from scratch & share with friends; kinda neat, I guess.
• Res­i­dent Evil: The Dark­side Chron­i­cals — Another on-rails shooter from the RE franchise.

But there were a few sprin­kles of cool:

• Wii Sports Resort — Bas­ket­ball, archery, sky­div­ing & more.
• Super Mario Galaxy sequel — yes, yes, yes!  The demo looked awe­some, the graph­ics bright and beautiful.

And then, sav­ing the best for last, Nin­tendo made up for much of its E3 snorefest with the announce­ment of…

Metroid: Other M

Okay, seri­ously, I want this game NOW!

Update: Penny Arcade sums up my feel­ings exactly.

LOTR Fan Film: $3,000 of Awesome

What can you do with $3,000 and a group of ded­i­cated LOTR fans?  Make a kick-ass fan movie, that’s what.   The Hunt for Gol­lum  is a 40-minute fan-made film based on the Lord of the Rings books and movies.  And more impor­tantly, it’s good.   Sur­pris­ingly so.

Based on Tolkien’s appen­dices,  The Hunt for Gol­lum  remains true to its source mate­r­ial and fits in nicely with the three offi­cial Peter Jack­son films.  The story is a pre­quel of sorts that fol­lows Aragorn on his quest from Gan­dalf to track down and cap­ture the crea­ture Gol­lum, who knows the where­abouts of the One Ring.  It takes place before Gan­dalf returns to The Shire, to warn Frodo of the dan­gers of his burden.

Every­thing from the cos­tumes and make-up to the film’s score and act­ing is well done, and closely mim­ics Jackson’s style of direc­tion and visual effects.  The fight scenes were epic and well choreographed.  

Even Gol­lum looks and sounds great:

It’s an impres­sive accom­plish­ment for such a lim­ited bud­get (the entire cast and crew worked for free).  Huge props to the film­mak­ers, who are as tal­ented as they are ded­i­cated.  The film was released today, May 3rd, and is avail­able to watch free online.  You can also check out the mak­ing of this epic under­tak­ing here.  Visit www.TheHuntForGollum.com , or click  the ban­ner below.  If you’re a LOTR fan, I highly rec­om­mend you go watch it—NOW!

Live-Action Ninja Turtles Return for 2011

In geeky movie news this month that makes me feel like a fifth-grader again, TMNT co-creater Peter Laird con­firmed in Vari­ety rumors of another live-action  Tur­tles  movie planned for 2011.  The announce­ment comes on the heels of  TMNT’s 25th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion.  Other than mak­ing me feel old, I’m also damn excited.  Because in Hol­ly­wood, every­thing I loved grow­ing up in the 1980s is sud­denly cool again.  The new Tur­tles  film will be pro­duced by Scott Med­nick of Leg­endary Pic­tures, who is cur­rently pro­duc­ing the soon to be released Where The Wild Things Are,  another live-action fan­tasy film (which hap­pens to be based on yet another com­pletely awe­some thing from my child­hood).  And if these screen­shots are any indi­ca­tion of what’s in store for the next TMNT , then color me green with excitement.

After the orig­i­nal live-action movie, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles  films went from bad to worse, though 2007’s ani­mated  TMNT  was OK.  Then again, I’m of the opin­ion that the first Tur­tles movie is one of the great­est if under­rated comic book movies of all time—but I may be a lit­tle biased.  I was obsessed with all things Ninja Tur­tles as a kid.  Like  really  obsessed.  If it had a TMNT logo on it, I owned it.  I could quote the movies word for word (prob­a­bly still can).

My wish­list for the new live-action Tur­tles movie:

• Darker, grit­tier, edgier Tur­tles truer to the orig­i­nal Mirage comic books.
• Curse words.  Most TMNT fans have grown up, and so should the movies.
• Sex (if only to sat­isfy my mor­bid curiosity). 
• Real­stic CGI that doesn’t look like CGI.
• Back to basics origins/roots sto­ry­line. (Think Bat­man Begins .)
• April O’Neil, and any­one other than Paige Turco to play her.
• Blood, weapons, and graphic violence.
• Moar Raphael.*

Things I could live with­out:

• Shell-tastic tur­tle puns.
• Any char­ac­ter who exists solely in the Archie comics series.
• No Venus.
• Ran­dom kid-who-meets-the-Turtles char­ac­ter (a’la Keno in Turltes II, and later Yoshi in Tur­tles III).
• Any sto­ry­line involv­ing time travel.
• A Turtles-themed rap song.
• A PG rating.
• Cowabunga.

The sucky part about all this?  Wait­ing two years.

*Raphael is still the coolest tur­tle, and if you don’t agree with me, I’m not shar­ing my Ninja Tur­tles fruit snacks with you.