Guess what guys? Guess effing what? Astonishing X-Men #25 is coming out this week (7/2/2008), and guess who’s excited?
ME!
Seriously. And you want to know why I’m so excited? Well, let me answer just one more question for you: Because Joss Whedon is no long writing this series. Hell yes! Yea! Yea! Yea! I’m beyond excited and it’s because without Joss Whedon, this comic book will (probably) come out on a regular basis and with some sweet storylines because the one and only Warren Ellis taking over meaning that Armor, Beast, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Storm, and Wolverine (the line-up according to cover for this issue) are in for a friggin’ show for sure.
The amazing Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, Newuniversal/Newuniversal: Shockfront, and the Extremis arc of Iron Man, is going to be writing Astonishing X-Men and I can only hope for nothing less than an outstanding series with him backing it. The new series titled Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage. It’s supposed to be back in the continuity and I couldn’t be happier.
**spoilers after the break**Read the rest of this entry »
June 30th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in comics, rant |
It’s been a while and strangely I didn’t get through as many X-Treme X-Men comics as I wanted to since my last blog about this series, but nevertheless, I got to issue #12 and, again, I’m not really impressed. Effing Chris Claremont again turned the series from partially good to bad to pretty awesome to terrible within 6 issues.
Really, for a while I was digging the series (say issues #4-7) when all of a sudden, things started to just get blotchy with the story and I was constantly going back a page or two to see what the hell was going on. But what was different than from issues #1-6 than #7-12 is that starting with issue #8 the art was almost as confusing as the dialogue (which Claremont began to use to tell a portion of the story). Although stunning at times, a lot of the art had the characters in very weird angles and positions during fight scenes. A lot I could deal with, but for some parts I was just baffled as to where a character started and began.
As for the storytelling, Chris Claremont did exactly as I thought: started a great story and told it poorly. A lot of the plot points in these last 6 issues were mainly jumped right into with no warning. It was kind of confusing, given that I’m used to stories leading up to a plot point rather than just throwing one in.
In one issue, the X-team are walking along in a house when on the next page a monster breaks through the floor and Rogue and Gambit are being held up in the air… it’s way random and utterly confusing for a new reader. It really makes me wonder how this series kept selling…
Even still, Chris Claremont knows how to write an effing good storyline as a whole and I have to give it up to him for that… No spoilers this entry, sorry kids.
I’ll check back with my next 6 issues or so and let you know what’s what…
This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an Alkaline Trio concert, had the privilege of going to Wizard World Chicago and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (the whole reason for going to the ordeal) along with doing some other awesome stuff throughout the whole convention, and I saw Wall-E with Dallas.
Sweet right? Well, let me elaborate:
Friday:
I worked my normal schedule until 5pm and met a friend of mine to head to Yesterdog. One hot dog was all I needed from that landmark place in Grand Rapids to be ready to go see The Alkaline Trio. Come 7pm, we were let in the doors of the show and stood around for about a half an hour just goofing around until The Fashion made their way to the stage. They were a psudo-pop-punk band with a strange techno feel that was neither good nor bad, but still a listen. They played a 35-minute set and took off leading straight into the band Bayside. They too had an iffy sound, something along the lines of pop-punk, but a tad slower. My friend Tori was very into them, yet they didn’t really hit for me (like a lot of pop-punk bands usually do, if only for a moment). They finished their 45-minute set and after a very boring 35 minute wait, The Alkaline Trio made their way to the stage. Let me tell you, it was fucking incredible. Song after song of perfection and amazing Alkaline Trio-goodness ensued for a little over an hour. They played songs from their last two albums, Crimson, Good Mourning (more notably: “This Could Be Love”, “Mercy Me”, “Time To Waste” and “This Could Be Love”), a few new songs from their album and finished their encore with “Radio” from their album Maybe I’ll Catch Fire. For any Alkaline Trio, such as myself, it was seriously amazing (especially “This Could Be Love.” Boy do I love that song).
Despite being tired, I ended up staying up until 2:30am talking about comics with my buddy Jeff Lanning once I got back from the concert.
Fix your speakers buzzing from your iPhone by making a shield out of a red bull can [link]
(turns out this is bullshit — I believe it’s a fake at least)
iTunes 7.7 to come with a remote control application for the iPhone and iPod Touch [link]
Twitter replies being down is destroying the world [link]
And here on my comments on said 3 things:
I guess that’s cool. Or maybe just move your iPhone away from your computer… but really the idea is okay, but not ALL OVER THE NET blog-worthy.
A free app from Apple? Fuck yea bizzitches. I’d like to see a good app come out for free from Apple. I’m hoping come July 11 that Apple has a bunch of cool little apps to better your life like this iTunes remote.
Now, I know A LOT OF PEOPLE use twitter to communicate and especially through replies, but it’s not the end of the world. The twitter team is obviously working on improving the site overall and reworking the replies functionality is, as expected, a big part of the site that also needs to be rewritten/updated and such. It’ll be back soon, so don’t you worry.
Hopefully some cool stuff will show up tomorrow on the net… or maybe I’ll have to write something cool for once… and get on some blogs and shiiit…
Just yesterday I blogged about how I thought Marvel 1985 #2 was going to be straight up amazing and boy was I right. Mark Millar is basically taking the 1980s view on comics and printing it frame by frame and word by word in these comics. I seriously love this kind of stuff (see also: Kick-Ass), yet I can’t say anything until after the jump, but man-oh-man issue #2 was damn amazing. Read the rest of this entry »
This week, we lucky kids who read in the Marvel universe are going to graced with some sweet comics. I’m talking über awesome.
First, we have a bunch of X-titles (and some related) coming our way: Angel: Revelations #2, Uncanny X-Men #499,Wolverine: First Class #4, Wolverine: Origins #26, andX-Men Legacy #213. Really, I’m most excited for Uncanny X-Men #499 and X-Men Legacy #213.
Second, my new love of a comic mini-series, Marvel 1985 #2 is coming out and I can do nothing but be extremely excited. This series is what any little kid dreams about and it simply came out of nowhere.. but of course, it’s another title by the ever-so-awesome Mark Millar, so it’s nothing short of pure gold.
**Spoilers of last week’s issues after the break**Read the rest of this entry »
Hey guys, Mike Rapin here… I’m going to try and blog some cool stuff about comics every day and give some insight as to what’s what in my mind with what I read… Just a warning, any link I have in any of my blog posts may contain spoilers (<-that one doesn’t haha), so be aware of what you’re clicking! And here goes:
On top of my weekly 5-10 comics I read from Marvel (primarily), Image, Vertigo and the like, I decided to read some back issues of X-Treme X-Men given that it parallels Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men #410-443 all of which were very pivotal points in the X-Men world and both series’ I fucking loved–those two series’ got me hooked on comics. With that said, I know that the events of X-Treme X-Men are starting to come to light in the current X-titles (well, at least when New X-Men–not Grant Morrison’s stuff–was around and the whole Messiah Complex thing was kind of based around it–haha) and I figured I should dig into some of Chris Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men.
I got through the 5th issue today and here is where I’ll start–not so much with analysis of the issues, but with a sum up of story line as a whole and my opinions, the writing, and the art. Read the rest of this entry »
I had a long blog about how I hate TV and blah blah blah, but decided against publishing it… or saving it.
My reasoning being that I simply hate TV commercials… moreover I just hate commercials in general. They are truely dumb anyone watching down to a basic primitive state.
Case and point: G4. Fucking morons on that station, save Adam Sessler (and X-Play). My reasoning:
Attack Of The Show!:
A show that is supposed to appeal to the nerds of the world who actually have the channel (it’s not on basic cable where I’m from). As I have known for a long time, this show does nothing to inform me on anything new. The only advantages of said show are for interviews with Tech-celebs, Comic-Con coverage and for E3 coverage. That’s all. Fuck this show in it’s face. Just because you throw a former nerd turned metrosexual and a girl who is mildly attractive who both talk about news that is a day-and-a-half does not mean that I want to watch. If you’re going to promote a TV show about tech news, I would like some fucking tech news. I don’t want cheap cleavage and inside jokes at your fucking studio. I would much prefer to have this show only available for E3 and Comic-Con, that way all the bull shit that normally comes along with it.
On top of this bull shit called Attack Of The Show!, I have seen promotions for a new show called Hurl! and can you fucking guess what that’s about? You got it! Hurling. Vomiting. Throwing-up. How completely moronic are studio-heads that think that anyone, not just nerds but any living soul on earth, would want to watch an entire reality show about nothing but vomiting? Please, someone take a hammer and bash those who made this show possible in the head/knee/chest.
One more save from this station: Code Monkeys. This is probably the best show on G4 TV right now given that it has nothing to do with technology. I love the comedy of the show and the clever jokes on 1980s celebrities, pop-culture, and video games. I would LOVE to see a show like this moved to [adult swim] rather than have it weighed down by all the other horrendous shit on G4.
I am like all the other nerds I know out there who wish that G4 would move back to fucking TechTV and actually show GOOD TELEVISION again. I mean, honestly, who the hell watches G4 TV and is completely satisfied with a majority of their original programming (not Ninja Warrior–because that shit is awesome–or any other syndicated series).
Please, someone defend this channel for me and give me a view onto the other side of this spectrum.
I’m a total wallpaper whore. Seriously. I have nearly 1GB of wallpapers (766MB) and I need them to work with my MacBook completely. In order to scale a mass amount of wallpapers at a time, I was trying all sorts of methods to do so… Photoshop, Automator, Skitch, and a few other programs until I ran across some information almost a year and a half ago about the Image modifying tools built into Mac OS X. After some reading up on some AppleScript how-tos and browsing some forums I started to work on my original imageresize.scpt and for a while it worked for me.
The original concept was to just scale the images and move the original files to the trash then have me move the modified files to my wallpaper folder, and it did just that, plan and simple. But given my need to make things more and more complicated to make life easier and less complicated I decided to take my AppleScripting to the next level.
What my AppleScript now does is scales the images you drag onto it, moves them to a specific folder based on the month (I seriously have a ton of wallpapers and need to sort them by month…), then moves the original image to another folder. From how I see it, I may want the original image at some point…
To get things set up, download one of the two versions below (or copy the source, it’s up to you), and then drag your pictures you wish to resize to the .app version of the imageresize/imageresize-original script and it will do the rest (as I described above).
So, given how happy I am with my new AppleScript, I thought I’d offer it to everyone… hell, I’ll even offer my original AppleScript for those who just want to scale an image and delete the original.
My name is Mike Rapin. I am a Mac addict with a sweet tooth for web development (see also: StatusTweet.com). I'm a comedian (at times) and a comic book lover. more...
Guess what guys? Guess effing what? Astonishing X-Men #25 is coming out this week (7/2/2008), and guess who’s excited?
ME!
Seriously. And you want to know why I’m so excited? Well, let me answer just one more question for you: Because Joss Whedon is no long writing this series. Hell yes! Yea! Yea! Yea! I’m beyond excited and it’s because without Joss Whedon, this comic book will (probably) come out on a regular basis and with some sweet storylines because the one and only Warren Ellis taking over meaning that Armor, Beast, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Storm, and Wolverine (the line-up according to cover for this issue) are in for a friggin’ show for sure.
The amazing Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, Newuniversal/Newuniversal: Shockfront, and the Extremis arc of Iron Man, is going to be writing Astonishing X-Men and I can only hope for nothing less than an outstanding series with him backing it. The new series titled Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage. It’s supposed to be back in the continuity and I couldn’t be happier.
**spoilers after the break**
Read the rest of this entry »
This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an ![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
