By the time this post is going up everyone has said pretty much what needs to be said about The Avengers. It’s well written, the action is amazing, and it’s surprisingly hilarious. I have come to the Marvel films as someone who knows nothing about Superhero comics and I came to Avengers without seeing Captain America, which is one of the five movies that build up to the climactic battle. Even without that piece of the story, I didn’t have a problem following the characters or what was going on, which is just as it should have been.

Not to say that Avengers is completely standalone. I think if the audience hadn’t seen at the very least Iron Man and Thor they wouldn’t have quite understood the plot. Other than that, the other films simply filled in color to what is an amazing ensemble cast of broken, super powerful individuals.

The highlights is definitely the dialogue. Joss Whedon’s trademark banter works well among the bickering Avengers as they try to work together. Especially Tony Stark, who is more hilarious than he has ever been with his quick comebacks and pop culture references being served at an amazing speed. Stark is characterized as someone who pretends not to care, and thus insults and belittles people, but Whedon shows that when he flips that switch Stark can be bitter and terrifying. The line from the trailer, “If we can’t protect the earth, you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it,” holds a sincere menace and fear that I didn’t feel in the two Iron Man films. 

The action was stunning. The final scene features The Avengers battling against a massive army supported by giant floating snakes that looked like they were designed by the Final Fantasy 13 team. The action was kept fresh by having The Avengers face different type of foes, in different situations, and combining their powers and skills for maximum effect. Whedon is able to show, amid the chaos of a crumbling New York City, why this team was brought together and what each of them brings to make them work as a more powerful unit. I look forward to seeing the movie again, if for nothing more than that final scene. 

How to pretend you're aboard the Starship Enterprise

Anyone who loves Star Trek has at one point wished they could be on the Starship Enterprise exploring the galaxy. Well, IO9 found the next best thing: filling your room with the Enterprise idling sound. This youtube clip loops for 24 hours and will simulate what it's like to sleep on the Enterprise.

Beginnings: Nobody dies on the first goomba

SephirothX writes about his experience with attempting to beat the original Super Mario Brothers and how the first Gooma, used as a symbol for the first dangerous obstacle in a game, effects the player. It's a fun and surprisingly profound read for anyone who played Video Games as a child.

Preview: Brain busting goodness in Quantum Conundrum

Kim Swift, who helped create Valve's Portal and Left 4 Dead games left the powerhouse company to join Airtight Games where she would have more freedom. The result is Quantum Conundrum, a 3D physics puzzle game where the player has the ability to alter states of matter in order to solve complex puzzles. The mechanics sound interesting and the art style is more cartoonish and friendly than the Valve games. If it comes close to her previous two projects Quantum Conundrum is sure to be a winner.

While I was distracted by the announcement of the iPad 3 and a massive box of board games that came in I still managed to do plenty of internet surfing over the past week. Here are the highlights:

Pictures of people scanning QR codes

QR codes have been popping up everywhere in the last two or so years but have you ever seen anyone actually use them? Finally, a tumblr blog which aggregates all know photos of people taking advantage of this wonderful invention.

You Look Nice Today: Razzledazzle

You Look Nice Today has been my favorite Podcast for a long time. It opened the door to the world of comedy Podcasts and I have listened to the archived episodes over and over again. Unfortunately the release of new episodes were always inconsistent and the last episode was released on November 3rd, 2010. Until this week! The cast of You Look Nice Today is back to discuss inserting a 20 sided sidekick into famous movies. Listen to it!

Fix your iCal

MacOS 10.7 users have dealt with Apple's decision to change iCal and Address Book to faux leather designs that do more to distract the user than make the application more attractive. Luckily at the MacNix blog they have an easy installer that will change iCal back to the 10.6 design. It's a little change that goes a long way.

Original Darth Vader voice

Although Lucas never intended to use David Prowse's voice as Dark Vader, the actor still preformed the entire scrip during filming of the original Star Wars. This video gives fans a taste of what the production staff and actors heard when making the film, before James Earl Jone's terrifying voice over was applied.

Click below to watch the video

Starting this week I'm going to be doing a weekly round up of the best things I've found on the web. These are things I've shared in other places, maybe even on the My Tubes Are Clogged tumble log, but I want to talk a little about them and gather them in a place with some permanence and to give people one more chance to see some awesome stuff. So here is the first edition of "What's clogging my tubes?"

Nostalgia Critic reviews all the "bad" Star Trek films

There is a belief among Star Trek fans that the odd numbered Trek films are the "bad" ones. Well, the Nostalgia Critic puts that theory to the test by reviewing all five of them (excluding the 2009 J.J. Abrams edition to the series). The reviews are hilarious, as are most of Nostalgia Critic's work, and really break down the problems these films suffer while contrasting them with the "good" entires in the series. The five episodes will take you over two hours to watch but they are well worth it for any Star Trek fan.

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture review
• Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock review
• Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier review
• Star Trek 7: Generations review
• Star Trek 9: Insurrection review

Jesse Thorn gives advice on being successful online

Jesse Thron, the head of the Maximum Fun podcasting network, write a piece on Transom titled "Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success." In the piece Jesse quickly goes over his rocky history and then gives twelve examples of creative people who made it big doing with they love on the Internet and what lesson is to be learned from their example. It becomes an inspirational blueprint from which one can begin building their own internet success story. I know I'm going to try and follow it.

Marc Maron interviews "Weird Al" Yankovic

Marc Maron's WTF Podcast has evolved from an outlet where the down-on-his-luck comedian vented about his problems into a highly successful interview show which featured some of the top comedians in the world, actors, musicians, and everything in between. His interview with the fantastic "Weird Al" Yankovic digs into Al's early start in music, his befuddlement at his sudden fame, and proves that Al is just an normal geek doing something he loves for the fun of it.

Check out the preview below

The Internet is perhaps the greatest creative force at has ever existed. Nothing proves that more than the energy behind fandom communities. People focus their dedication to a piece of art and use that energy to expand on the property in ways the original creators never dreamed.

Of course, this isn't new. Building on top of previous art has been a staple of the creative process for as long as humans have created art. Now, however, the process by which something is imitated, parodied, or built upon had been shrunk to almost zero.

So, of course, let's take a look at My Little Pony. As they have been doing since the show began they took an existing piece of art and parodied it for use on the show. This time they picked a famous song from the music man which had been famously parodied in the Simpsons. So while the source is the same for the secondary work created by two separate professional animation teams the Internet combined the parodies to create a third level of parody. A parody within a parody, if you will. Best yet this came out only hours after that episode of My Little Pony had aired.

"Ya Got Trouble" from "The Music Man" (Embed disabled)

"The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

"Monorail" from The Simpsons

The last few years I’ve been avoiding games “without an end,” such as games where the major focus is on multiplayer. The reason being that I like to beat a game and move on to a new gaming experience, II like variety. There are gamers in the world who have been playing nothing but Counter-Strike for the last twelve years and while I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, in fact those people are going to save a lot of money in the long run on new titles and hardware, I don’t think I could bring myself to actually spend more than a few months on any one game.

This year I’ve played some long games such as Dragon Age and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as games with no clear end like Shogun 2. Even though they were long the two RPGs had a clear end and while I didn’t get tired of Shogun 2 I just didn’t find myself returning to it after a certain point.

I’m a person who loves to beat games and move on. My goal is to get a complete narrative experience, then move on to the next one. Skyrim has completely halted that urge. I find myself going into Skyrim now, two months after its release, just to wander around and do little quests. After killing dozens of Dragons the encounters are still exciting and the variety and richness of the quests continue to absorb me. Even with all that more than the game continuing to compel me, the world of Skyrim has become a comfortable place to return.

The main reason that this happens is because the experience of Skyrim isn’t fixed, it isn’t directed by a writer and crafted so the player gets a specific narrative. It’s built as a choose your own adventure where the player is able to craft their own experience as they go along. If a quest doesn’t interest the player then they can simply ignore it and that part of the Skyrim narrative vanishes from their own personally crafted narrative. The most enjoyable aspect of this being quests which you stumble across almost accidentally. I hesitantly accept the responsibility and starting to run through them as a quick way to get some gold. It’s in these little pieces of the game, something that could have easily been skipped over, which best illustrates individually crafted experiences. There are some of these seemingly small side quests that develop into epic pieces of the Skyrim story. Once I experienced the first of these I couldn’t help but wonder what little secrets the game held that simply went passed over, unnoticed. Not from disinterest but simply from the fact that the game is too massive to ever be completed.

I’m expecting to get ready and move on from Skyrim soon, but each time I play find myself falling into the side quests rather than resuming the main quest. Before I can put the game away permanently I will finish the main story, something I didn’t come close to doing in Oblivion, and I will complete the Civil War quest line. Even after that my quest log is filled with unfinished quests on top of the thieves guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines that I haven’t even touched, but of which I’ve heard nothing but good things.

Skyrim has become more than just another game in my normal run of games. It has become a comfortable place to go when I feel stress, it has become a way to craft my own gaming experience where I can choose to fight monsters, settle arguments through diplomacy, or just go for a long walk. It’s a little scary how much I’ve fallen in love with Skyrim as a destination, more than a game. I’m looking forward to seeing how much longer I’m going to be playing it, even as my backlog becomes larger and larger.

I tend to make New Year’s Resolutions that I forget about by halfway through January and so to prevent that, I decided to put them down in writing and that way I can come back to it at the end of the year and see how I did. The main problem with vague resolutions is that they are hard to measure, so I will make them as specific as possible. My most successful New Year’s Resolution was in 2010 when I vowed to avoid “Any fast food with a dollar menu” and so I managed to avoid Burger King, McDonald's, and Wendy’s for an entire year. Having such a specific goal forced me to stick to it and hopefully putting my goals down in writing will have the same effect.

1. Lose sixty pounds

This year I started on a strict diet thanks to a weight loss contest that started at work. When it began I decided that this was the jumping off point I needed, and so I dove right in. Now, about eleven months later, I’ve lost seventy pounds; more than 20% of my body weight; and feel better than I have in my useful memory. But, unfortunately, there is a lot of work left to go and while a steady 266 is far better than where I was I still have a long way to go. So I think losing another sixty pounds in a year is a reasonable goal and will get me closer to being healthy and remaining healthy.

2. Write consistently

Yup, a vague goal. I hope to write at least one blog post per week here, even if it is a video with a bit of commentary, and a post up on Otaku in Review at the very least once every two weeks. I would also like to spend more time working on my fiction than I did in 2011, which honestly was almost nonexistent. In 2011 I thought more about what blogging format I wanted to use than actually writing content. Now that things are set up the way I want I’m going to just work on my craft.

3. Take as many photos as possible

I started to take photography seriously as a hobby in 2011 but I still don’t get out and take photos as much as I should. So in 2012 I want to not only just take photos with less abandon with my camera phone but make sure to have my DSLR on me more often so I can take it out and start taking photos if the urge comes over me. Also I want to make sure I take more photos on occasions I do take out my camera, because there is no reason to hold back. This is especially true at conventions more than anywhere else.

4. Time management

One serious flaw I have is my lack of time management. I go to sleep too late, wake up too late, and waste my idle time. So part of my goal for time management is to wake up early, go to bed early, stick to a set schedule and not waste idle time. Idle time is death and even a few minutes is time I could be reading, writing, watching something, or playing a game. The more I get done in a day the better!

So those are four goals that I think are attainable for the coming year. I’m getting older, and it’s about time I start getting some important things together before it’s too late. Hopefully, these goals will allow me to take some steps in the right direction.

Image source

Ponified form of an extended version of The Doctor’s message to Martha Jones in the two part “Human Nature/The Family of Blood”.

Ponified form of the climactic moment from “The End of Time Part 2” as The Doctor decides to turn around and face his greatest enemy yet.

The main attraction of New York Comic Con for me was the coming of visionary director Makoto Shinkai, known for 5 Centimeters Per Second and Voices of a Distant Star. So, I was understandably excited when I was approved for an interview. The original schedule was to be me with a a group of four other outlets for a half hour, then they decided to combine all the interviewers into one big block and have ten people speak with Shinkai for a full hour. However, many of the outlets didn’t show up. The few that did just took off when they learned that video wasn’t allowed. I understand those who only release video to be upset that they can’t record but…we’re talking about a chance to speak with Makoto Shinkai! Even if I wasn’t allowed to publish anything, if I was sworn to secrecy for the rest of my life…you get a chance to speak with one of the best animation directors currently working in Japan.

In the end only two of us sat down with Shinkai-san and my fellow interviewer asked only three questions in the half hour session. SoIbasically had a one-on-one with Makoto Shinkai for over twenty minutes. I wanted to prepare some questions that wouldn’t be wasting my opportunity. I figured everyone would be asking him questions about starting as an independent animator or his love of clouds. I wanted to ask him specific questions about his films. So I came up with as many specific questions as I could about the film I know best: 5 Centimeters Per Second. I didn’t expect to ask all of them. I couldn’t have been more lucky with the way things turned out.

When the interview wrapped and I asked to take a photo, the one at the start of this post. Shinkai agreed then offered to take one with me, which I eagerly accepted. Before we parted I told him I was looking forward to seeing his new film the next day, explaining that I missed the screening in Baltimore. He hoped that I would enjoy it. That evening I saw the excellent panel where Roland Kelts interviewed Shinkai in the official panel, which can be read about on ANN or seen here. After getting so close to Shinkai and asking him my specific questions it was good to get a well rounded view of the man. It backed up my impression of him, which I’ll cover at the end.

The next day I got to the con early so I could get a seat for Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below which was a beautiful film, to say the least. After the film Shinkai held an autograph session at the Bandai booth and another stroke of luck hit. I bought a copy of 5 Centimeters Per Second and said I’d like to get it signed. The cashier asked if I had a ticket which I did not, they had been given out early in the morning. A guy standing next to me said he had an extra, he grabbed one but had never seen a Shinkai film! I was so grateful and wanted to give him something so I handed him $5 and got in line. When I reached Shinkai he seemed excited to see me and thanked me for coming out. I told him I saw the film and that it was beautiful. He asked if I enjoyed it. I said, “Very much.” He shook my hand and said, “Yesterday when we spoke I had fun.” To which I returned a humbled thank you and told him that the honor was completely mine.

My impression of the man was complete in that moment. Throughout the weekend I got the feeling that he was truly humbled when people enjoy his work. During his introduction of “Lost Voices” he told the audience, “If you like the movie it’d make me really happy!” (which he said in English) and I get the sense that was a completely sincere statement. Shinkai loves making animation and even more he loves when people enjoy his work. I hope the crowd that came out to see him at New York Comic Con gave him reason to continue creating exceptional works of art.

You can read my interview with Makoto Shinkai over at Otaku in Review.

Over the last few years I’ve perhaps been more transfixed by Apple’s products. Their design and functionality attracted me more than the competitive products, especially in 2006 when I bought my Macbook. The beautiful, white, wonderful example of industrial design was years ahead of the bulky laptops that Dell and HP were tossing onto the market. Due to the success of those white Macbooks the entire landscape of design in the PC industry has changed. Now every company produces beautiful machines. That is what Steve Jobs did more than anything else. He could see trends before they happened and he knew what the customer wanted.

The Apple of 1983 was happy building Apple IIs and if John Scully had his way they would have never moved forward from making variants to the popular computer. Steve Jobs took a team of engineers and designers, removed from the rest of the Apple campus and built the first consumer computer that featured a Graphical User Interface. Without that bold step forward it might have been years before a company decided to take a chance on a GUI, setting the development of consumer operating systems back years.

The modern introductions of iPod, iPhone, and iPad share the same pattern. Jobs didn’t invent the categories but he gave consumers what they wanted out of the products and by Apple developing the products the world of digital music, multi-touch smartphones, and multitouch tablets exploded.

Even if you’ve never used an Apple product, or would never think of using an Apple product, the technology you’re using today has been effected in some way by Steve Jobs. The world is a better place because of Steve Jobs.

An Apple without Steve Jobs and a Microsoft without Bill Gates. The personalities responsible for transforming our society have taken their leave. The next generation of innovators will build on their work and continue to change the world for the better. The march of progress continues on.

As everyone else on the internet has already discovered, the commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stamford is among his greatest legacies. In it he three stories from his life and his philosophy in approaching it. The first is connecting the dots, trusting that "the dots will connect" if you follow your heart. The second is love and loss, how he always tired to do what he loved to do and never worked for anyone but himself. The third is death, his relationship to death before and after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The speech is inspiring, to say the least, and is one of the few moments that Steve Jobs shows a personal side of himself. One of the few times he relates to an audience on a human level. It’s a shame he didn’t try to do it more often.

Here are some of the best excepts from the speech, along with link to the full speech and the video.

"I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." - Steve Jobs

Words to live by. Words I want to live by, at least. Makes me rethink a lot of things. Perhaps it's time to stop standing still. It's time to move forward. Not slowly, not safely. I've been trying to live safely, but no one ever made something of themselves by taking the safest road. No one exciting, at least.