So I was all excited to download the free Spore Creature Creator, until I was coldly informed by the installer that my Powerbook isn't up to scratch. I'm humiliated. All I can do is longingly cruise the Sporepedia, looking for Spores That Look Like Stuff. Geeky stuff, mostly, like the Trogspore above. That looks really good.
Spore Trek, Spore Wars, and of course Pokespore, after the jump...
STAR WARS
This Mon Calamari is right on, but the nudity upsets me. I don't want to see Admiral Ackbar naked. As a 18th Century Dandy, yes. Naked, that's too far.
This X-Wing is from Fark's Spore thread, though I couldn't find it on the Sporepedia. There were lots of imitators, if you search "x-wing", nothing quite as good as this.
Great looking TIE fighter, elegant in it's simplicity.
Shockingly accurate Watto.
Painful looking AT-ST, giving new meaning to the term "Chicken Walker".
And now, my two favorite characters from the Prequels...
General Grievous, with particularly good attention to coloring.
This could be Selbulba's ILM character model.
POKEMON
All of the original three starter Pokemon are really popular. There are tons of them, here are the most accurate ones. Charmeleon. My main man BulbasaurIvysaur Venusaur. Never mind, he's nobody's main man. In retrospect, I got this wrong because every other entry for Bulbasaur is just painful to look at.
A sickly Blastoise.Some sort of horrible bird Pikachu...I'll be seeing that in my nightmares, thank you internet.
I'm a Team Rocket fan 4 life, so I had to look for Koffing. What I found was...wow. Just wow. So close, and yet so far.
An XBox 360 controller! Pretty terrifying. What are those joysticks supposed to be? Suckers? Nipples? Crazy.
Our old friend Purple Tentacle back from the LucasArts adventure gaming dead. Mario Mario of the Mario Brothers. This looks like some crazy junkie muppet.Boo! Literally. Not really as cute as the real character, but good nonetheless.
A bomb, possibly a bob-omb.
Wierd old Mr. Saturn, quite well captured.
Goomba! This is deeply upsetting to me. They went way too far in making him look like a real mushroom, with that gross fungal texturing on the underside of his head. Pretty great Yoshi. Wobbly legged Mega Man.
An amazingly accurate Master Chief.
Pretty good Sonic, albeit with webbed hands.
OTHER NERDY STUFF
Now ZOIDBERG is the spore! In full mating season glory. There are lots of other Futurama creatures on the Sporepedia, including many many Nibblers. I couldn't find one that actually looked like him though, if someone wants to make one.
There were quite a few hulks, but this was my fave.
This is the best Batman so far. Humanoids are apparently hard to get right. Why the bare pecks, I wonder? Even better than this design is creator insertinear's species description: "THE BATMAN SPECIES HE IS THE DARKEST OF KNIGHTS WHO SOLVE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES."
The earth with a little mouth and eyes and one foot. Thaaats good. Now we're talkin! The USS Enterprise. I don't even want to try to figure out how this is a organism. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is the best one I saw, but there are some really shockingly bad ones in the Sporepedia.
Here's a car. Little over complicated, but pretty neat nonetheless. WHERE MY PEEPS AT. This is great. Even the texture is right.
A scary candy cane. A plane - found this one on the Fark thread too. Cool motorcycle.
Albert Einstein's head. This is like something you'd see on the ground in Dante's inferno. I think we've had enough.
I was waiting for someone to put this clip online, and here it is. In last week's episode of 30 Rock, Tracey decides his legacy will be to give the world the first great porn video game. Judah Friedlander explains why this is impossible, because of what he dubs (and what will forever be known as) The Uncanny Valley. All CG-happy filmmakers need to watch this clip before the movie-going public has to deal with another freaky, gold version of Angelina Jolie that doesn't have nipples but does have a tail. Uch.
Coincidentally, Sam of Sam and Max: Freelance Police (as channeled through comic genius Steve Purcell) recently had this to say about his computer-generated counterpart currently starring in Telltale's episodic adventure games ;
"We're depicted by patented, computer-generated simulacrums called "sythespians". They act up a storm for just pennies and except for the dead, soulless looks on their pasty, inhuman mugs I actually prefer them to our real selves!"
That is exactly why I can't get into those games, as big a Sam and Max fan as I am. That and I don't own a PC.
Just to drive the point home, some classic examples of the Uncanny Valley in action, after the jump...
Here's that horrible Final Fantasy movie from 2001. I actually saw this in theaters for some reason, and spent the whole time trying to put my finger on what was wrong with the way the characters move. Every gesture and change in facial expression is agonizingly slow, and weirdly fluid. This is back when people thought all you had to do to for realistic motion-capture was to tape a bunch of ping pong balls to a green screen suit. Shudder.
Since his lecture was framed around Star Wars, it seems like Jonah would have wanted to mention the public relations disaster that was Jar-Jar. Maybe they just didn't want to go there. I didn't even want to put a picture up. Cartoonish yet disturbingly bound to selective laws of real world physics, horribly ugly (he's got seg-ment-ed eyes!), and with a loping gait that would have flunked him out of clown college, he is genuinely upsetting to watch. It's upsetting to even talk about him, really. Let's move on.
Just look at this nightmare of soulless devil children and floppy, way-too-slow CG physics. What circuit is Robert Zemeckis missing from his brain that makes him think this is a good way to make a movie?
It's worth noting that the Uncanny Valley principal can be used in a filmmaker's favor when creating a CG character that is meant to be disturbing. Some successes in this vein include General Grevious, Davey Jones from Pirates II and III (and then at least they kept Bill Nighy's actual eyes), and of course the most well regarded CG performance to date, Andy Serkis's turn as Gollum. Gollum was actually TOO uncanny for me to be captivated by, I never believed his shiny skin texture and cartoonishly bulging eyes actually existed in that rough, tactile world of New Zealand, or wherever those books take place. Here's that scene that made people want to give Serkis a hundred Oscars for, but I still find too silly and unrefined to take seriously as any kind of brave-new-world indicator of how CG can blend with acting. But I can't deny, it's creepy as hell.
In last week's issue of Countdown To Mystery, aka The One Good Countdown Book, artist Stephen Jorge Segovia had a little too much fun drawing Huntress.
Typical to many of the superhero comics I read every week, this little tableau throws sex and violence together in a blender and hits "puree", but that's not what caught my attention. I knew I had seen that movie before. But where?
THE SIMPSONS ARCADE GAME!
Those who had this game at their local arcade know it is pretty much the best four-player game for the preteen set ever invented, and although Marge was not my character of choice (that'd be El Barto...Let's go for it, man!), her questionable flying attack is forever ingrained in my mind. So can we agree Huntress totally copped her style? This calls for a side by side comparison:
Has SantaBot snuck up on you this year? Have you found yourself empty handed with visions of crying geeks dancing in your head? Well don't let it come to that, get your ass on the internet and get some genuine geek shit shipped to you ASAP. Mii Figurine - $50-100 Take a picture of your Mii of choice, send it out to these guys and you or someone you love will soon be the proud owner of a 3 or 5-inch replica of yourself/him/herself. And if my overzealous forward slashing isn't enough to make your head spin, these prices ($50 for the 3in., $100 for the 5in.) will. Custom World of Warcraft Figurine - $100 If the Wii isn't your giftee's thing, and he or she is more into, say, World of Warcraft, boy have we got a figurine with his or her fake name on it! FigurePrints is offering great-looking replicas of Warcraft avatars for 100 bones. These things are extremely accurate, down to the low polygon count you see every time you log on. So accurate, in fact, that they'll only construct you with armor and weapons you actually possess in game. Emoticon Magnets - $15 For either the chat addict or Welcome To Tranquility fan in your life. The designers have made the controversial decision to include the "nose" punctuation for maximum anthropomorphization, but at least they didn't include any of those bullshit ones like :# or :$..... I mean, what the hell is that?
GlaDOS Litograph - $35 ($90 Signed) Of course, the more obvious item would be the Weighted Companion Cube toys ($30 fuzzy dice versions available, or $100 bucks for the standard plushie), but I'm holding out for the inevitable solid versions. I mean, plush isn't weighted. Nor particularly cubic. So if you have a crazed Portal fan in your life (and who doesn't), why not class it up and get them some expensive art that says, "I'm obsessed with a four hour video game"?
Original Lettering Overlays - $10 Wanna give the gift of original comic art but don't have hundreds to blow on eBay? Hot shot letterer Todd Klein is offering his original handwritten overlays for books ranging from Batman to Tom Strong. $10 will get you FIVE of these suckers. He actually has a ton of cool affordable stuff available at his store, so check it out.
Threadless.com T-Shirts - $10 T-shirts from Threadless are great gifts for dorks, because internet-cool people will approach the wearer and be like, "Oh, is that from Threadless? I love that site!". Instant cred. Plus there are plenty of geek-oriented shirts, from this saccharine moment of nerd nostalgia to typical nerd refrains.
PacMan Belt Buckle - $13 If you can't get laid wearing this, you're hanging out with the wrong crowd.
Albo and I took in the sights and sounds of Digital Life yesterday, most of which were distinctly robotic in nature. Turns out that the "digital life" they speak of is not so much a commentary the high tech aspects of our daily lives, but refers to actual free-will evolving digital life forms. This is a robo-world, folks, we just live in it. We'll have video of our Digital Life highlights soon (Update:here and here it is), but for now enjoy some of the stranger moments of the expo. At the iRobot keynote address, typical human opinions on robots were projected onscreen...
Roomba is not impressed by our illogical natterings.
Roomba eradicates dissent with the same ruthless efficiently it applies when ridding the world of fluff and dander.
But Roombas are old news. The real excitement came when Colin Angle of iRobot introduced a new member of their pizza-shaped robot family, the ConnectR. The ConnectR may look like a bedpan... ...but is in fact a stay-at-home proxy of you. That's right, you yourself, dear reader. It's a set of remote controlled eyes and ears within your home, for when you're away on business but would still like to get some quality time in with the childrens. Gaze on this photo, workaholics of America, and witness your future! This little guy can move, tilt it's single unblinking electronic eye 360 degrees, and transmit your voice to your only slightly unsettled family. It's called controlled with your personal computer via a private network. But what the above photo doesn't show is the mess your robot surrogate makes when it sails across the Monopoly board to try to push it's piece to Marvin's Gardens. "Daaaad!" Not that I don't see the appeal of this "Virtual Visiting Robot". I've got a baby half-sister in California, and here I am on the other side of the country in New York. It would be great to have a real, concrete presence in her every day life, even if that presence had to be slightly scary and electronic. But the idea that the baby would grow up believing that a talking plastic hubcap was her actual sister gives me pause. Still, it's kidna cute, right?
Hewlett Packard's Keynote address lacked robots and was therefore pretty dull, despite the fact that VP Phil McKinney was rocking the dressed down Steve Jobs look. The part that got my attention was when Phil screened this old highly speculative game demo for HP's Mscape technology, and mentioned that some cynics on Digg thought the video's proposed application of technology was a tad unbelievable.
Then, as if to silence those doubting Thomases once and for all, Phil whipped out what he said was the actual magical gadget that will at last allow us to see through the matrix of the real world, and will make us all heroes in a never-ending video game as big as the entire earth. Or maybe it was just a little rectangular piece of plastic the boys in marketing whipped up. Either way, McKinney did not go so far as to claim the thing worked like in the video, or would be produced as an HP product, or was not a PSP with a orange sticker over the screen.
Finally, Gateway introduced their new line of computers that look like giant iPods, but not before serving a basketful of these alarming muffins... For more in-depth coverage of the coolest tech at Digital Life, check out our video features on the Novint Falcon (an awesome "force feedback" game controller) and our old friend the ConnectR.
Consisting of "flailing arms and quick foot movements", a new FranceDance known as Tecktonik is said to be a mix of "hip-hop and techno", and is discussed at length in this Brietbart article. But a TV geekanerd will recognize that these styles belong to none other than the two most renowned bad dancers in television history...hit the jump for video comparisons. Exhibit A: Elaine Benes
Geekanerd's regular look at the week in comic book scans will be up on Monday, but there was so much going on in The Green Arrow and Black Canary Wedding Special it deserved it's own examination. Amanda Connor fills up the background of her panels with sweet details and visual gags, so here's a guide to some of the hidden delights of the book...
Medium Spoiler Alert For Those Who Haven't Read the Book Yet!
As seen in the JLA Wedding Special, Hal has the unfortunate duty of sending Ollie's strippers home. And it looks like they really went all out, even springing for Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn themed strippers (and as Newsarama points out, Manitou Dawn!). Also please note the Power Girl stripper in the left-hand foreground who's costume DOES NOT include the boob window. When a stripper has to tone down the sleaze to replicate your outfit...maybe time for a makeover. My real concern , however, is that donkey...I mean, a donkey show? Really? What is this, The Boys? What is going on with Plastic Man? Seriously, I'm asking. I'm sure I'll feel stupid once someone explains it. Why is there a hand protruding from his crotch?
Judd Winick's dialogue here is great (ah Snapper Carr...you're an embarrassment to your friends and family), and the detail in this stately kitchen is awesome. Check out the open bag of cookies and milk in the lower right hand corner...buncha slobs. They're clearly Oreos, or Chocos as the DC universe now call them, but the bag seems to spell Chkrok. That doesn't sound like a delicious sandwich cookie. Unless you like buying cookies in HELL.
Alright, Monsieur Mallah and the Brain! Famously "outted" in Grant Morrison's brilliant run on Doom Patrol, is it mere coincidence the duo are being fought here by another Morrison recreation, Animal Man?
Lots of hero villain fighting going on here, but I prefer to look past Starfire and Hawkman's flashy fights in favor for the action going on towards the bottom of the frame....
LOIS LANE FOR THE WIN
Lois Lane, ladies and gentlemen, taking down New Gods with nothing more than brass knuckles, mace, and pearls. She's too good for Clark, really.
Stupid Deathstroke has to bust in and ruin everyone's good time. My favorite thing about this panel is at the far right - Buddy Baker's wife Ellen, one of the more understanding superhero spouses, seems to be thinking "God, these people are exhausting."
Attention New Yorkers- there is a ninja on the loose. I repeat, a ninja on the loose.
Last seen in Staten Island, this home invading thief is described as 6 feet tall, light skinned, medium build, dressed in black with a ski-mask, and is armed with pepper spray and nunchaku. Would you believe this story gets even more insane? Details on how the hunter is now the hunted after the jump. Before going on, I would like to stress that this so called ninja is entirely without honor, having used crude pepper spray on one of his burglary victims. He is suspected of perpetrating as many as 14 home invasion robberies over the last several months in the Staten Island area. Who can defend us from such an elemental force of evil?
The answer, citizens, is homeowner Phil Chiolo. When the masked thief targeted Phil Chiolo's Long Island home, he made a near fatal mistake. Chiclo was home during the robbery, and the ninja attacked with blows to the chest and head. Luckily, Chiolo managed to grab a steak knife from his kitchen, and stab it into the ninja's chest "up to the handle".
Good lord! I think we all know there is only one type of person that can pull that kind of move on a ninja and live to tell the tale...the gold chain is a hint...
PIRATE FOR THE WIN.
Still, ninjas are not always so easily disposed of, and the masked man fled the scene with the knife still in his chest. I certainly hope we're not dealing with some sort of zombie-ninja hybrid here. He was last spotted in the backyard of another Staten Island resident, but hopefully having been stabbed in the chest will eventually cause him to give himself up.
Get your hands on the first piece of Will Wright's new masterpiece, and make some creatures that'll put Jim Henson to shame. Well, not really. But you can dream.
This Mon Calamari is right on, but the nudity upsets me. I don't want to see Admiral Ackbar naked. As a 18th Century Dandy, yes. Naked, that's too far.
This X-Wing is from Fark's Spore thread, though I couldn't find it on the Sporepedia. There were lots of imitators, if you search "x-wing", nothing quite as good as this.
Great looking TIE fighter, elegant in it's simplicity.
Shockingly accurate Watto.
Painful looking AT-ST, giving new meaning to the term "Chicken Walker".
General Grievous, with particularly good attention to coloring.
This could be Selbulba's ILM character model.
Charmeleon.
My main man 
Some sort of horrible bird Pikachu...I'll be seeing that in my nightmares, thank you internet.
An XBox 360 controller! Pretty terrifying. What are those joysticks supposed to be? Suckers? Nipples? Crazy.
Our old friend Purple Tentacle back from the LucasArts adventure gaming dead.
Mario Mario of the Mario Brothers. This looks like some crazy junkie muppet.
Boo! Literally. Not really as cute as the real character, but good nonetheless.
Wierd old Mr. Saturn, quite well captured.
Goomba! This is deeply upsetting to me. They went way too far in making him look like a real mushroom, with that gross fungal texturing on the underside of his head.
Pretty great Yoshi.
Wobbly legged Mega Man.
An amazingly accurate Master Chief.
Pretty good Sonic, albeit with webbed hands.
Now ZOIDBERG is the spore! In full mating season glory. There are lots of other Futurama creatures on the Sporepedia, including many many Nibblers. I couldn't find one that actually looked like him though, if someone wants to make one.
There were quite a few hulks, but this was my fave.
This is the best Batman so far. Humanoids are apparently hard to get right. Why the bare pecks, I wonder? Even better than this design is creator insertinear's species description: "THE BATMAN SPECIES HE IS THE DARKEST OF KNIGHTS WHO SOLVE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES."
The earth with a little mouth and eyes and one foot. Thaaats good.
Now we're talkin! The USS Enterprise. I don't even want to try to figure out how this is a organism. 
The Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is the best one I saw, but there are some really shockingly bad ones in the Sporepedia.
Here's a car. Little over complicated, but pretty neat nonetheless.
WHERE MY PEEPS AT. This is great. Even the texture is right.
A scary candy cane.
Cool motorcycle.
Albert Einstein's head. This is like something you'd see on the ground in Dante's inferno. I think we've had enough.
