“Before Watchmen” Prequels // Darwyn Cooke, Adam Hughes and more
Look at these creators. I was wondering what guys like Jae Lee were up to! DC’s really trying to make this legit.
RORSCHACH (4 issues) – Writer: Brian Azzarello. Artist: Lee Bermejo
MINUTEMEN (6 issues) – Writer/Artist: Darwyn Cooke
COMEDIAN (6 issues) – Writer: Brian Azzarello. Artist: J.G. Jones
DR. MANHATTAN (4 issues) – Writer: J. Michael Straczynski. Artist: Adam Hughes
NITE OWL (4 issues) – Writer: J. Michael Straczynski. Artists: Andy & Joe Kubert
OZYMANDIAS (6 issues) – Writer: Len Wein. Artist: Jae Lee
SILK SPECTRE (4 issues) – Writer: Darwyn Cooke. Artist: Amanda Conner
Amazon’s Lending Library Now Holds Over 66,000 Ebooks
When Amazon launched its lending library on November 3, the collection had only 5000 titles. But the collection has grown exponentially since then, as the Public Libraries blog points out, with 66,037 titles available the morning of December 28.
Some of this growth is undoubtedly because Amazon decided on December 8 to expand the collection beyond titles from established publishing houses and also to include works from self-published authors, but the size of the collection and the speed with which it has grown is, nevertheless, impressive. Amazon says on its website that the library also contains “more than 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers.”
» via The Digital Shift
(via emergentfutures)
Image from the Great Gastby.
This suit is sharp. It also further demonstrates that blue an orange together is very aesthetically pleasing.
If you don’t believe me about blue and orange take a look at movie posters next time you are in a theatre. I bet at least 1/3 of them use this color scheme.
New trailer for Pixar’s Brave!
It’s going to be a good summer for movies.
cwnl:
Life May Exist Within A Super Massive Black Hole
Despite being considered the most destructive force in space and absolutely uninhabitable, the conditions for life exist inside supermassive black holes, a Russian cosmologist has theorised.
Going out on a scientific limb somewhat, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev has even suggested that if life did exist inside the SBH, it would have evolved to become the most advanced civilisation in the galaxy. Supermassive black holes are such powerful gravitational forces that they suck in everything around them, including light, and nothing that crosses the black hole’s ‘event horizon’ is ever seen again.
But now Dokuchaev, of Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says existing evidence combined with new research throws up intriguing possibilities for certain types of black holes. Inside a charged, rotating black hole there are regions where photons can survive in stable periodic orbits. Dokuchaev specialises in studying those orbits and their dynamics.
He speculates, in a paper published in Cornell University’s online journal arXiv, that if there are stable orbits for photons, there is no reason why there could not be stable orbits for larger objects, such as planets. The problem is that these stable orbits would only exist once you have crossed the threshold of the event horizon, where time and space flow into one another. The event horizon, at the lip of the black hole, is known as the point of no return. However, beyond the event horizon is another domain, known as the Cauchy horizon, where time and space return to stable states.
It is inside the Cauchy horizon that life could exist, Dokuchaev argues in a paper published in Cornell University’s online journal arXiv, However, the type of life that could exist in those conditions - where they would be subject to massive fluctuating tidal forces - would have evolved beyond ours. The life that could exist there would likely be a civilisation ranked as Type III on the Kardashev Scale. There are three levels to the scale with one being the lowest and three the highest. Humanity is still looking to attain Level 1 status; mastery of its own planet.
‘Interiors of the supermassive black holes may be inhabited by advanced civilisations… invisible from the outside,’ he says. Though that is a spine-tingling thought, Dokuchaev’s proposition can only ever remain theoretical. Because nothing can ever escape from a black hole due to its enormous gravitational pull, we will never know if it is true.
(via darylelockhart)
Why Did Amazon Profits Take A Hit? It Is Investing In The Future
Amazon is ramping up investments in the backend infrastructure to support all the digital media it expects people will want to consume on their Kindles, especially their Kindle Fires. It is spending a lot of money on both technology and content. Amazon spent $769 million on “technology and content” in the quarter, up 74 percent from a year ago. And it invested nearly $1.6 billion on “fixed assets, including internal use software and website development,” which is double the amount it spent a year ago, according to one of its investor slides.
Paul Higgins: I think that the battle of the big innovative companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook is going to be fascinating over the next couple of years. Big bets are being made.
Full Story: TechCrunch
The Future of Entertainment
Entertainment as we know will be substantially different in the future. Everything from movies, TV, music, books, video games, new media, social media and anything else imaginable will be available the instant we want it in a universal digital library. We as audiences will interact with this library by creating our own personalized collections to enjoy and share. In addition, our personalized collections will be integrated into every aspect of our lives and will ultimately lead to the creation of a new form of entertainment.
How will this personalized collective work? Imagine this: Years from now you are outside of the Staples Center. You look out through your sunglasses at the new Kobe Bryant Statue. Your sunglasses recognize the statue’s tag and highlights of Kobe’s memorable career play before your eyes. Personal ads recommend Spike Lee’s film, Kobe Doin’ Work, which you add it to your queue.
A friend following your status sends you an image of Lebron James with the caption, “Lebron ruled Kobe!” Projecting the image before yourself you select a paintbrush tool, put a mustache on Lebron and write, “Kobe was King!” Then you send it off, creating a collective.
On your ride home, your car’s onboard computer is aware of your recent activity. It offers to read from Phil Jackson’s books, specifically the chapters on Kobe Bryant. You are also notified of recent activity on your Kobe versus Lebron collective. Several friends have posted highlight reels of the two players, others have compared stats, and one has made a video mashup of the highlights. At home, you voice-activate your holographic TV-Computer and the collective has invited you to a nostalgic game of NBA 2K12.
This example is just part of how the personalized collective will work. Aspects of it currently exist today. We see it in the social interaction and personalized ads on facebook. We have mobile location entertainment with apps like Four Square. Content from Netflix and Hulu can stream into our living rooms with just the click of a button. Cloud Computing allows us to have our entire digital libraries with us at all times. The personalized collective will be created when all of these different digital venues merge into one. We will get there with two tipping points and the integration of a term called “the internet of things.”
The first tipping point is the all-digital age. This will be driven by the collapse of the hard copy market. DVD’s, blue rays, CD’s, books, and everything else will eventually be sold almost entirely digitally. This will happen for two reasons. The first is that as more and more content becomes available online, there will be less of a demand for physical copies. If what we want is not online, there are still many other options to temporarily satisfy our needs.
This collapse could happen within three years according to Steven Krone, Director of the Biederman Entertainment and Media Law Institute at Southwestern Law School and former President and Chief Operating Officer of Village Roadshow Pictures Entertainment. He points to the fact that studios have no product in development to follow Blue Ray. In addition, he says the main driving force of this collapse will be Walmart, whose pulling VHS off their shelves made the format disappear almost over night.
The second reason for the all-digital age will be due to digital natives, the children who have grown up after the dawn of the digital age. Monica Basso, Vice President of Gartner Research, deals with digital natives in her advising report to companies, 2018: Digital Natives Grow Up and Rule the World. She states that as they become the main working force their online global reach and their ability to easily create and program media will drive change further away from today’s status quo. In addition, she says this group will entirely alter decisional and purchase power. The result on markets will be an extreme personalization in technology driven by content convenience.
The second tipping point will be when entertainment companies lose control of distribution. Some type of technology is going to be developed that enables the personalized collective. At first, there will be resistance but in the same way that Napster legitimized a service like iTunes, some type of service will legitimize the personalized collective. Entertainment companies will then be at the point where it will be more lucrative to contribute to the collective than to hold onto antiquated distribution models. Or it could lead them to create it themselves.
At E3 2011, Microsoft hinted at this type of technology. Xbox will soon integrate their voice operated Kinect product with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Their goal is to create an entertainment experience that gives you what you want simply by speaking. In addition, your friends on Xbox live will be able to join in on this experience with you. If you say “Xbox Bing Batman” you and several friends can enjoy all things Batman together even if you are on opposite ends of the world.
The third aspect of the personalized collective is the “Internet of things.” This term means that anything that is electronic can be discovered via the internet. In addition, anything that is not electronic can be made electronic. By the year 2025 things like food, clothes, and the Kobe Bryant statue will all be able to communicate to us and other things like our sunglasses, directly through the internet, further enhancing how we interact with new entertainment technology.
As this thing-to-person and thing-to-thing communication expands to every corner of our lives there will be no space our personalized collections do not touch.
Looking forward even further, nanotechnology could keep our personal collections, safe in our bodies, to entertain us with just a thought.
Published in the Commentator, Southwestern Law School’s student-run news magazine.
I guess both the Lamborghini and his other car were in use.
